NORTHWORLD

Promenade around the building's roof. Behind Hansen was the quarter-sphere
sheltering the audience section of a 3,000-seat odeum? Two men and a woman
came from a door in the back of the much smaller quarter-sphere intended to
cover theperformiers. Apart from miniature figures in the fields below, these were
the first living beings Hansen had seen since a trio of androids strapped him into
the intrusion capsule. "Can we help you, sir?" called the older man in the center of
the group. Hansen stepped out of the collapsing ruin of his capsule. The fallen hull
plates had a porous look, and the monomolecular carbon frame members were
beginning to sag under their own weight. He'd envisioned a lot of possibilities for
what would happen on this mission, but not this one. Not anything as survivable
as this one, fit came to that. He bent his mouth into pleasant smile to match
that of his questioner and said, "Ah, my names Hansen. Ah, this is going to sound
silly, but is this Northworld?" Hansen wore what looked like standard exploration
unit coveralls until you checked at the level of the weave and found the battery of
hidden weapons and sensors. Besides the coveralls, he had a satchel holding three
separate changes of clothes, each one a direct copy—in appearance— of an outfit
that one of the later colonists was known to have carried to Northworld. His
options didn't include sandals and loose, flowing robes cinched at the waist with a
belt of soft fabric— which was what the three locals greeting him wore. "Well, that
isn't our name for it, Mr. Hansen," said the other man—still older than Hansen by
a decade, if appearance was anything to judge by. "We call it Diamond, but since
we believe we're in a spacetime bubble of our own, we may well be a minority in
our opinion." "We're so glad to see you," said the young woman who touched
Hansen's arm in a gesture of welcome and perhaps reassurance—for one or both of
them. "We'd been afraid that it was, you know... something to do with the
Passages." Her fingertips felt warm even through the cloth, She had long brown
hair and was very attractive, primarily because of her lively expression. This place