The construction of the Eye had, in effect, cut Cradle and its immediate surroundings loose from Cleft, and it had drifted in a boneyard for a while until the decision had been made to give it a new purpose. The original greenhouse, which was a wreck by that point, had been replaced by a new, bigger, retractable cover. The underside had been planed flat. The canyon walls had been terraced back, making them less steep, and not incidentally creating valuable, buildable real estate. A nickel-iron yoke had been arched over the whole thing so that it could be attached to the bottom end of the thirty-six-thousand-kilometer tether that dangled from the Eye.
The icon in the transit station—two hills enclosed in a bubble—was a simplified depiction of what Cradle actually looked like. Its total inhabitable footprint was a circular zone about two thousand meters in diameter, which put it on about the same scale as downtown Boston or the City of London. This was cleaved by the Vale of the Eves, whose walls had once been nearly vertical. Now this was true only of the bottom-most ten meters or so: a slot that snaked through the bottom of the town like a gully. It became a rust-brown river when there was heavy rain, and so they had maintained an island in the middle of the stream, exactly on the site where Endurance had touched down. Once, it had been possible to go there and touch the little nubs of steel where Eve Dinah had welded the ship into place. These, however, had since been protected under glass domes so that they would not rust, or get worn away by tourists’ fingers. The ship itself was long gone, of course; the survivors had begun dismantling it almost as soon as they had arrived, and what little they hadn’t used was radioactive waste, long since shipped away to carefully tended locations in boneyards.
It was therefore a city constructed on two dizzyingly steep hills that faced each other across a crevasse. A kilometer-long bridge, celebrated for its grace, arched across the gulf between the hills, a plunging wedge of air flocculent with grizzled crows.
It was a city of compounds. Some of these dated back to the early days of its construction, when the bubble had not yet been completed and there had been a need to make smaller inflatable domes over certain areas. Others had been built in imitation of those first ones. Neither the compounds—which, for structural reasons, tended to be circular—nor the overall topography lent themselves to a grid street pattern. Consequently the map was a chaos of switchbacks and meanders and streets that turned suddenly into stairways or tunnels. Limitations on building height led people to dig down into the underlying metal, rather than building upward, and so most of the city’s square footage was hidden. The buildings were like icebergs, larger below than above.
Above grade, stone was a popular building material. Older and less prestigious buildings used the synthetic rock known as moonstone, made from pieces of Earth’s former satellite. Newer and nicer buildings were made from marble, granite, or other rock quarried from the surface of the Earth itself. For the one resource that the shattered surface of Earth had been able to produce in abundance, even before it had an atmosphere, had been rocks. The city thus presented a hard face to pedestrians in its narrow streets. Those granted access to compounds would, however, find themselves in fragrant gardens under the shade of trees. Since Cradle was confined to the equator, green things grew there so luxuriantly that they had to be kept in check by hordes of little grabbs with pruning bill hands.
Atop each of the hills was a park. Rising above one of those parks was a roundish, domed building called the Capitol. Rising above the other was a squarish, pillared colonnade called the Change, short for Exchange.
At the time Kath Two and the other passengers arrived, Cradle was dangling two thousand meters above the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, being dragged due west toward where the equator cut across the reshaped coastline of South America. This movement reflected the fact that, thirty-six thousand kilometers above it, the Eye was traversing the habitat ring westward, or CASFON (Clockwise As Seen From Over the North pole). Being nothing more than a weight on the end of a long string, Cradle always followed the movements of the Eye. The city’s dome was open, with its baffles raised to reduce the windblast.
It was balmy and humid. This was almost always true on the equator, but altitude and the brisk movement of the air made it pleasant enough. The smell of that air, redolent of salt and iodine and marine life, was proof irrefutable that Kath Two was back in the atmosphere of New Earth.