As the car veered around the City — Toba, braying incoherently into his Speaker tube, was evidently looking for a port to enter — Dura caught tantalizing glimpses through the many wide shafts of complex structures, layers of buildings within the bulk of the City itself. A complex set of buildings perched on the crown of the City, grand and elegant even to Dura's half-baffled eyes. There were even small Crust-trees arcing into the Air from among those upper buildings. When she pointed this out to Toba he grinned and shrugged. "That's the Committee Palace," he said. "Expense is little object if you live that far Upside..."

Light filled the City, shining from its many ports and casting beams across the dusty Air surrounding it, so that Parz was surrounded by a rich, complex mesh of green-yellow illumination. The City was immense — almost beyond Dura's imagination — but it seemed to her bright, Air-filled, full of light and motion. People swarmed around the buildings, and streams of Air-cars laced around the spires of the Palace. Even the "arm" below the City-fist, the Spine (as Toba called it) that grew down toward the Pole, bore tiny cars which clambered constantly up and down ropes threaded along the Spine's length.

The City grew as they approached — growing so huge, at last, that it more than filled the small window of the car. Dura began to find the whole assemblage overwhelming in detail and complexity. She recalled — with a strange feeling of nostalgia — her feelings of panic on first encountering Toba's car. She'd soon learned to master her panic then, and had come to feel almost in control of this strange, weak person, Toba Mixxax. But now she was confronted by strangeness on an unimaginably huger scale. Could she ever come to terms with all this — ever again take control over her own destiny, let alone influence events around her?

Her discomfiture must have shown in her expression. Toba grinned at her, not unsympathetically. "It must be pretty overwhelming," he said. "Do you know how big the City is? Ten thousand mansheights, from side to side. And that's not counting the Spine." The little car continued to edge its way, cautiously, around the City, like a timid Air-piglet looking for a place to suckle. Toba shook his head. "Even the Ur-humans would have been impressed by ten thousand mansheights, I'll bet. Why, that's almost a centimeter..."

—