As the party viewed the memorial, another, larger snowmobile ferried over a crowd of young human tourists. After disembarking, the tourists bent their legs and jumped straight into the air, flying high along the Lagrangian axis, turning themselves into satellites. From here, one could see many small, black specks in the air, marking out the position of the axis: tourists and vehicles drifting in zero gravity. They would have been able to fly directly to the North Pole if it weren’t for the sun, placed at the midpoint of the Lagrangian axis. In the past, some tourists flying along the axis had discovered their handheld miniature air-jet thrusters broken, been unable to decelerate, and flown straight into the sun. Well, in truth, they vaporized a considerable distance from it.

In the hollow Earth, entering space was also easy. One only needed to jump into one of the five deep wells on the equator (called Earthgates) and fall (fly?) a hundred kilometers through the shell, then be flung by the centrifugal forces of the hollow Earth’s rotation into space.

Yi Yi and company also needed to pass through the shell to see the Cloud of Poems, but they were heading through the Antarctic Earthgate. Here, there were no centrifugal forces, so instead of being flung into space, they would only reach the outer surface of the hollow Earth. Once they’d put on lightweight space suits at the Antarctic control station, they entered the one-hundred-kilometer well—although, without gravity, it was better termed a tunnel. Being weightless here, they used the thrusters on their space suits to move forward. This was much slower than the free fall on the equator; it took them half an hour to arrive on the outside.

The outer surface of the hollow Earth was completely barren. There were only the crisscrossing reinforcing hoops of neutronium, which divided the outside by latitude and longitude into a grid. The South Pole was indeed where all the longitudinal hoops met. When Yi Yi and company walked out of the Earthgate, they saw that they were located on a modestly sized plateau. The hoops that reinforced Earth resembled many long mountain ranges, radiating in every direction from the plateau.

Looking up, they saw the Cloud of Poems.

In place of the solar system was the Cloud of Poems, a spiral galaxy a hundred astronomical units across, shaped much like the Milky Way. The hollow Earth was situated at the edge of the Cloud, much as the sun had been in the actual Milky Way. The difference was that Earth’s position was not coplanar with the Cloud of Poems, which allowed one to see one face of the Cloud head-on, instead of only edge-on as with the Milky Way. But Earth wasn’t nearly far enough from the plane to allow people here to observe the full form of the Cloud of Poems. Instead, the Cloud blanketed the entire sky of the southern hemisphere.