fading as he discovered his leg injury, but he did not ask about it. Percival turned to the Rhyan sitting in the pedicab and turned back to Rafael for an introduction or for an excuse not to look at Daidaunkh.
"That is Daidaunkh," Rafael said to Percival with a knowing expression. "He's a bit banged up and doesn't speak Twenglish very well. He does speak Standard. Do you?"
"Standard?" Percival queried. "Oh, yes, we all speak Standard here. And old English." The young man glanced back at Daidaunkh and the strange conveyance in which he sat. "You are not from here, are you?" he said to Rafael and Fidelity.
"Someone asked you to help us?" Fidelity prompted Percival.
"Yes," he replied, becoming uncomfortable in Fidelity's gaze. She was studying him and the clothing he wore. His face was not only handsome and expressive but also seemed to have some stage makeup applied to it to emphasize eyebrows and perhaps lighten the skin, as his hands and neck were darker. He wore a shirt, jacket, and pants that were either normal for this unknown world, or normal for a period of history in the distant past on Earth - perhaps the 20th century.
"Who asked you to help us?" Fidelity asked.
Percival hesitated to answer but finally yielded to Fidelity's stare. "The Quiet One," he said.
Fidelity thought Percival might be an actor and someone who normally liked to talk, but he was clearly afraid of her group and not talkative. "No, we are not from here," Fidelity said. "Can you tell us where we are?"
Percival took a step backward and Fidelity thought he was about to run away, but he stopped and took in their entire group while struggling to calm his composure. "This is the Red Building Highway at the Tangle Intersection. This is the Big Ball and we are in the lower half of the Big Ball. You may also hear it referred to as Oz. Why are you here? Where did you come from?"
"We came from Earth," Fidelity answered, seeing Percival's dismayed reaction to her reply. "We don't know why. Who is this Quiet One?"
"She is like a god to many of us but I never believed in her! Until today." Fidelity kept her gaze on Percival, prompting him to continue. "She speaks to people," he said, "but they never see her. She gives warnings, saves lives, even makes us laugh. And weeps when we are hurt. We don't know who she is! I had never heard her and I thought she was just someone playing with the public sound system. But until you hear her yourself...! How could she know you were here?"
"This is the voice of a woman?" Fidelity prompted, getting a nod from Percival. "I think she spoke to me more than once on Earth. I think she sent us here. Through a gate. The gate artifact is just a few meters back that way." She pointed. Percival did not look where she pointed and now seemed too enrapt with his experience of her. He stared at Fidelity in worried wonder.
Rafael noticed Percival's fixation on Fidelity and pushed his shoulder to get his attention. "How do you think you can help us, Percival?"
"I'm hungry," Samson complained.
"Food," Percival said. "Food! I have credit enough for food for all of you. Follow me."
The walkway lanes pulled at them as they crossed to the center. They had to watch closely to keep the pedicab wheels within the center lane markings. The other lanes suddenly peeled away at the Tangle Intersection and one of the wheels dropped off the edge. Daidaunkh wrapped his good arm over the opposite side of his pedicab seat to keep from sliding down. Fidelity and Rafael had to hold tightly to the handlebars, and hold onto Samson, as the walkway tried to pull them away from the pedicab, its wheel scraping and dragging on the edge of the narrow path.
"Get the wheel up before the turn-lanes merge with us!" Percival warned. "The wheel could get wedged between lanes."
In a few more seconds, Fidelity heaved on her side of the cab as they merged onto the other side of the intersection. Another gravity-free landscape opened on both sides of the walkway. The center lane accelerated them, even though there was no obvious motion of the material beneath their feet.
"Where is the Big Ball located?" Fidelity asked Percival.
"In relation to Earth? I don't know."
They glided swiftly down the center of the walkway, the still air breezing past them. Fidelity waited until they had crossed another intersection, then pulled on one of Percival's elbows to make him turn and face her. "Why are you afraid, Percival?"
"She spoke to me! No, I am happy I finally got to hear her voice! But I missed the dress rehearsal!"
"Will she hurt you?" she asked.
"No! She isn't supposed to hurt anyone. She is the Kind One, the Quiet One."
"But you had to obey her? Why?"
"Because she is real! And I didn't believe in her!"
"You are an actor, and you missed a dress rehearsal? Is that bad?"
"It could be. It could be. The... the audience can be... difficult. I hope they can go on without me. It wasn't that important a part. I think it will be alright."
"I'm sorry we ruined your day, Percival."
"Ruined my day?" Percival said. "The days are long here. And life is short. It was fun being an actor. But also dangerous. There is so little fun here. Unless you just give up trying to live safely. So now the real fun begins!"
"Is something wrong, Percival?"
"Everything is wrong here! Why did she send you here?"
"I think to keep us away from someone else," Fidelity replied. "If you feel uncomfortable with us then leave us."
Percival shook his head slowly. "No."
"There aren't any people here," Fidelity remarked, disliking Percival's silence. She needed all the information she could coax from him, feeling helpless in her ignorance of this now-worrisome place.
Percival pointed to a converging walkway in the distance and Fidelity could see people traveling it, some of them on the floor of it and some on the ceiling of it, moving in opposite directions. Another river of translucent water meandered nakedly above a distant bridge where people walked upside down. A transparent pipe emerged from a streak of turbulence in the river and paralleled the walkway away from the bridge, perhaps siphoning off the river's water to distribute to some green, two-sided - or perhaps six-sided - floating island of crops or trees. Fidelity continued to study the design and function of this world without natural gravity, as the motion of the journey brought too many new sights into view and obscured other details before she could explain them to herself. Her military data acquisition augments continued to absorb, quantify, and qualify everything. Most perplexing was the partial analysis of the gate transfers, which appeared to contradict very basic scientific principles for how the universe operated.
Fidelity could now detect the moisture of localized rain showers in the distance and complex floral scents from the floating islands of lawns and shrubbery. She hadn't paid attention to the smells of the place until now, as the visuals dominated her attention. Her sense of smell began to detect the unmistakable scents of humanity as they approached the next intersection. She was surprised at the range of odors and their pungency, which hinted at a lower standard of living than such a glorious habitat should have meant.
The first intersection of concourses, with its wildly complicated loops and twists of single transfer lanes had not been repeated, as subsequent intersections had simply weaved the three pairs of powered walkways around each other, providing static connecting edges from which a turn could be made onto another concourse.
The approaching intersection was obviously different, seen from the distance. Through the open sides of the concourse they could see people and buildings spread across a glowing surface like that of the powered walkways. From their perspective the concourse was plunging downward into this busy landscape, and as they watched, the place was moving slowly upward on their left side and downward on their right side. It made it seem like the walkway was rotating counterclockwise. Since other distant parallel walkways remained stationary to theirs, it meant the plane of buildings and people they were moving toward was rotating clockwise, with the walkway as the axis of rotation. In a few moments the struts of a hub for
the rotation came into view, attached to the upper and lower walkway.
The middle three lanes of the walkway passed through the great hole of the hub. The remaining lanes curved at the struts and terminated at the rim of the hub ring, thus providing a route to the surface of the great rotating neighborhood of commerce. Slowing down on one of the remaining three lanes of the walkway, they could gaze upward and downward at twisting lanes where people circulated between a variety of small buildings. Before they could take in much of the details, Percival led them off the center lane and onto the right-hand lane. It slowed as it entered the hole of the hub, then curved away from the center lane. Before they entered the hub they saw another hub in the distance, and another rotating village. They saw the remaining center lanes (the opposite-direction lane remained above them) almost intersect two other pairs of walkway lanes. As they made a wide turn the full panorama of the place swept into view.
Six great discs, covered with industry, commerce, art, music, and humanity flooded their vision, each of the discs rotating slowly. It would take several more moments before they realized that each disc had two sides, for a total of twelve, each serving the same commercial functions.
The propelling walk lane curved around to the floor of the interior disc and the pedicab squeaked when they pulled it off the walkway. After many moments of letting them stare and