He hesitated. "Well, I think so. How should I know? And between the Crust and the Quantum Sea is the Mantle — the Air we breathe — about six hundred meters deep." He looked into her face, a disconcerting mixture of suspicion and pity evident there. "That's the shape of the Star. The world. Any kid in Parz City could have told you all that."

She shrugged. "Or any Human Being. Maybe there was no difference once."

She wished Adda were awake, so she could learn more of the secret history of her people. She turned her face to the window.

—

In the last hours of the journey the inverted Crust landscape changed again.

Dura, with Farr now awake and at her side, stared up, fascinated, watching the slow evolution of the racing Crustscape. There was very little left of the native forest here, although a few trees still straggled from small copses. The clean, orderly regularity of the fields they'd passed under to the North — further upflux, as she was learning to call it — was breaking up into a jumble of forms and textures.

Farr pointed excitedly, his eyes round. Dura followed his gaze.

They weren't alone in the sky, she realized: in the far, misted distance something moved — not a car; it was long, dark, like a blackened vortex line. And like Mixxax's car it was heading for the Pole, threading along the Magfield.

She said, "That must be thousands of mansheights long."

Toba glanced dismissively. "Lumber convoy," he said. "Coming in from upflux. Nothing special. Damn slow, actually, if you get stuck behind one."

Soon there were many more cars in the Air. Mixxax, grumbling, often had to slow as they joined streams of traffic sliding smoothly along the Magfield flux lines. The cars came in all shapes and sizes, from small one-person buggies to grand chariots drawn by teams of a dozen or more pigs. These huge cars, covered in ornate carvings, quite dwarfed poor Mixxax's; Toba's car, thought Dura, which had seemed so grand and terrifying out in the forest upflux, now appeared small, shabby and insignificant.

Much, she was coming to realize, like its owner.

The colors of the Crust fields were changing: deepening and becoming more vivid. Farr asked Mixxax, "Different types of wheat?"

Mixxax showed little interest in these rich regions from which he was excluded. "Maybe. Flowers, too."

"Flowers?"

"Plants bred for their beauty — their shape, or color; or the scent of the photons they give off." He smiled. "Actually, Ito grows some blooms which..."

"Who's Ito?"

"My wife. Nothing as grand as this, of course; after all, we're flying over the estates of Hork's court now."

Farr had his face pressed to a window of the car. "You mean people grow plants just for the way they look?"

"Yes."

"But how do they live? Don't they have to hunt for food, as we do?"