As they traveled out from the core of the City the street-corridors became barer, free of doors and buildings, and the Air more dusty. At last they reached the Skin. It was dark, deserted here, almost disquietingly so, and the City hull stretched above and below them. Adda surveyed the workmanship critically: curving sheets of crudely cut wooden planks, hammered onto a thick framework. It was like being in the interior of a huge mask. From without, the City was imposing, even to a worldly-wise upfluxer like himself; but seen from within, its primitive design and construction were easy to discern. These City folk really weren't so advanced, despite their facility with Corestuff; the Ur-humans would surely have laughed at this wooden box.

They Waved slowly along the Skin, not speaking, until Cris brought them to a small doorway, set into the Skin and locked by a wheel. With Bzya's help Cris turned the stiff wheel — it creaked as it rotated, releasing small puffs of dust — and shoved the door open.

Adda hauled himself through the doorframe and into the open Air. He Waved a few mansheights away from the City and hovered in the Air, breathing in the fresh stuff with a surge of relief. The party had emerged about halfway up the rectangular bulk of the City — in the Midside, Adda reminded himself — and the skin of Parz, like the face of a giant, cut off half the sky behind him. The imposing curve of a Longitude anchor-band swept over the rough surface a few dozen mansheights off; electron gas fizzed around the band's Corestuff flanks, a visible reminder of the awesome currents flowing through its superconductor structure.

Adda's lungs seemed to expand. The vortex lines crossed the shining sky all around him, plunging into the crimson-purple pool that was the Pole beneath the City. The Air here was thick and clammy — they were right over the Pole, after all — but inside the City he always had the feeling he was breathing in someone else's farts.

The two boys tumbled away into the Air, hauling the Surfboard; Adda was pleased to see Farr's natural, youthful vigor coming to the surface as he Waved energetically through the Air, responding to the refreshing openness. Bzya joined Adda; the two older men hung in the Magfield like leaves.

"That door was a little stiff," Adda said drily.

Bzya nodded. "Not many City folk use the pedestrian exits."

Pedestrian. Another antique, meaningless word.

"Most of 'em never leave the City walls at all. And those that do — because they have to, like your ceiling-farmer friend — take their cars."

"Is that a good thing, do you think?"

Bzya shrugged. He was wearing a scuffed, ill-fitting coverall, and under its coarse fabric his shoulder muscles bunched like independent animals. "Neither one nor the other. It's just the way things are. And always have been."