By this time everybody seemed friendly. A lot of children who weren’t fetching things at that moment came scampering along the edge of the cliff and balanced by the top of the stairs to stare at me. “Where are you from?” a girl asked me.
“Earth,” I said.
They all laughed. “Silly!” said the girl. “This is Earth, and you’re not from here!”
“Yes, but,” I said, “there are a lot of Earths. I think I’ve been on at least three lately.”
“Ooh!” said a little one right behind me. “You mean, like Romanov?”
That made me jump. I came out in gooseflesh with excitement. “Romanov?” I said. “Has Romanov been here?”
“Yes, indeed,” said the old man beside my leg. “He was he
re earlier today. He comes through quite often, you know—to gain altitude, he says. In the other worlds he goes to, the ground is higher than Level Eleven, so he comes in at Eleven and leaves from here.”
“Romanov’s been very good to us,” said the woman with the growth on her arm.
“Surely has,” the old man agreed. “He brings a new sunshield spell for us every time he comes by. My grandchildren can grow up without getting something like this.” He left off sewing for an instant and tapped at the growth on his face. It sounded like someone patting a crusty loaf. “A good man, Romanov. Do you know him well?”
“I only met him this morning,” I said. “At least—I think it was morning, but it may have been yesterday. I’m trying to find him again. Do you know where he went?”
The old man shrugged as he sewed. “Back home by now, I’d think. You want to go back down to Eleven and go from there.”
“You should go back down anyway, dear,” the woman with the bad arm said. “The sun’s doing you no good, even low as it is.”
“You can do ten minutes!” the girl balancing beside me asserted. “Romanov told me.”
Ten minutes, I thought. I want to find out everything I can in those ten minutes. I pointed up at the wire fence. “How do they manage up in the airfield, if the radiation’s that bad?”
A chuckle ran round everyone near. “They come up through trapdoors in fat white suits!” someone called out, three embroideries over.
“They do most of the flying by night,” someone else said. “Loggia people do a lot by night. It’s safest.”
I looked over at the bright speck of the plane in the distance. It was coming down to land near the shiny things. “Brave pilot,” I said.
“Oh, no. The planes are all protected,” the old man said. “Prayermasters put spells on them.”
“Oh,” I said. “And what’s that shiny place over there where the plane went?”
“Those are called xanadus,” a kid behind me said.
“Though don’t ask us why,” the old man added. “They’re the domes where they grow all the vegetables and suchlike.”
“Nipling?” I asked.
Everyone laughed and groaned. “That stuff!”
While we were laughing, the sun went down. Just like that, it was blue dark. Lights came on the next second, fixed to the houses. To my surprise, everyone bent over the embroidery and went on sewing as if nothing had happened, including the old man, who was laughing so hard that the growth on his face jiggled. It looked like a rat clinging to him.
A second or so later hooters sounded from below, all over the city, lots of loud, howling noises like a herd of unhappy cows. That’s it! I thought. I’m illegal now.
“That nipling!” the old man said, speaking through the howling. I could tell he was so used to the hooters that he hardly noticed them. “I tell you, they have a hard job stopping nipling growing! Comes up all over in their flower pots, whatever they do. They keep trying to give it away. But we won’t have it, workers won’t touch it. I heard they feed it to the prisoners these days.”
I shuddered. I could still taste the stuff. I thought of jail under the railways and a diet of nipling, and I suddenly felt very anxious indeed. “What do you think I should do?” I said. “You said I’d need to go down to Level Eleven, but I’ll be arrested now the hooters have gone.”
“They give you half an hour’s grace,” the woman with the bad arm said.
The old man chuckled again. “Didn’t tell you that, did they? They like to keep you frightened in Public Works. But you’d be surprised how many curfew people seem to get held up on the stairs, getting back to their workhouses. I’ve known some who get delayed for whole nights.” He raised his head for a moment. I think he was winking, but he did it with the eye that was mixed up with the growth and I wasn’t sure.