But somehow Toba Mixxax was managing not only to avoid collisions but also to drive them forward — slowly, but forward — to the staggering bulk of the City itself.

"Of course it's not the cheapest. The Common Good, I mean." Toba laughed hollowly. "But then, frankly, you're not going to be able to afford even the cheapest. So you may as well not be able to afford the best."

"Your talk means little, Toba Mixxax," Dura said. "Perhaps you should concentrate on the cars."

Toba shook his head. "Just my luck to come into town with three upfluxers on the day of the Grand Tribute. Today of all days. And..."

Dura gave up listening. She tried to ignore the cloud of hurtling cars in the foreground of her vision, to see beyond them to Parz itself.

The South Magnetic Pole itself was spectacular enough — like a huge artifact, an immense sculpting of Magfield and spin lines. Vortex lines followed — almost — the shape of the Magfield, so it was easy to trace the spectacular curvature of the magnetic flux. It was nothing like the gentle, easy, Star-girdling curvature of her home region, far upflux; here, at the furthest downflux, the vortex lines converged from all over the Mantle and plunged into the bulk of the Star around the Pole itself, forming a funnel of Magfield delineated by sparkling, wavering vortex lines.

And, suspended right over the mouth of that immense funnel, as if challenging the Pole's very right to exist, the City of Parz hung in the Air.

The City was shaped like a slender, upraised arm, with a fist clenched at its top. The "arm" was a spine of wood which thrust upward, out of the Pole's plunging vortex funnel, and the "fist" was a complex mass of wooden constructions which sprawled across many thousands of mansheights. Four great hoops of some glittering substance — "anchor-bands," Toba called them, two aligned vertically and two horizontally — surrounded the fist-mass; Dura could see struts and spars attaching the hoops to the mass of the "fist."

The "fist," the City itself, was a perforated wooden box, suspended within the hoops. Ports — circular, elliptical and rectangular — punctured the box's surface, and cars streamed in and out of many of the ports like small creatures feeding off some greater beast. Toward the base of the City the ports were much wider: they gaped like mouths, dark and rather forbidding, evidently intended for bulk deliveries. Into one of these Dura could see tree-stalks being hauled from a great lumber-jacking convoy.

Sparkling streams, hundreds of them, flowed endlessly from the base of the City and into the Air, quite beautiful: they were sewer streams, Toba told her, rivers of waste from Parz's thousands of inhabitants.