She leaned close to Ito and whispered, "Muub. That Administrator at the Hospital. He shaved his head. Does he belong here too?"

Ito smiled. "I've never met the man; he sounds a little too grand for the likes of us. But, no, if he works at the Hospital he has no connection now with the University. But he may once have studied here, and he wears the bald fashion as a reminder to the rest of us that once he was a scholar." Her smile was thin, Dura thought, and tired-looking. "People do that sort of thing, you know."

"Did you — study — at the University? Or Toba?"

"Me?" Ito laughed, gently. "Do I look as if I could ever have afforded it?... It would be wonderful if Cris could make it here, though. If only we could find the fees — it would give him something higher, something better to aim for. Maybe he wouldn't waste so much time on that damn Surfboard."

The Museum was a large cube-shaped structure at the heart of the University complex. It was riddled with passageways and illumination shafts, so that light seeped through the whole of its porous bulk. As they moved slowly through the maze of passageways, the multitude of ports and doorways seemed to conceal a hundred caches of treasure.

One corridor held rows of pigs, rays and Crust-spiders. At first the creatures, looming out of the darkness, made Dura recoil; but she soon realized that these animals were no threat to her — and never would be to anyone else. They were dead, preserved somehow, fixed to the walls of this place in grim parodies of their living postures: gazing at the magnificent, outstretched wings of a ray, pinned against a frame of wood, Dura felt unaccountably sad. A little further along a display showed an Air-pig — dead like the others, but cut open and splayed out with its organs — small masses of tissue fixed to the inner wall of the body — now glistening, exposed for her inspection. Dura shuddered. She had killed dozens of Air-pigs, but she could never have brought herself to touch this cold, clean display.

Oddly, there was no smell in these corridors, either of life or death.

They came to an area containing human artifacts. Much of it was from the City itself, Dura gathered, but from ages past; Ito laughed as she pointed to clothes and hats mounted on the walls. Dura smiled politely, not really seeing the joke. There was a model of the City, finely carved of wood and about a mansheight tall. There was even a lamp inside so that the model was filled with light. Dura spent some time peering at this in delight, with Ito pointing out the features of the City. Here was a toy lumber train entering one of the great ports Downside, and here was the Spine leading down into the underMantle; tiny cars carrying model Fishermen descended along the Spine, seeking lodes of precious Corestuff. And the Palace at the very crown of the City — at the farthest Upside of all — was a rich tapestry glowing with life and color.