THE ORDINARY (Chapter 1) Jedda arrived at the Twil Gate by hoverboat and waited in a private lounge for the rest of the delegation to join her. She had received a mentext message to meet the party only a few hours before, an assignment from the ministerial offices in Béyoton; she was to set her stat for an unheard-of level of security and was to speak to no one at all about her trip. At Arnos Platform, which rose over the waves like a cluster of mushrooms on stilts, she met officials of the Planetary Ministry who conducted her to a lounge where she sipped purified water, alone. She looked at the vast, open ocean, a sight that always confounded her, especially after the months she''d spent underground in her apartment in the second tier of Nadi. On a wall near her, a flatscreen filled with pictures from the distant war, the colors washed out by the bright sunlight streaming in from the windows. The footage came from a battle with a pod armada from several light-years away, the latest news to reach Home Star; she had limned the report in her morning abstract. Near Tret, the interstellar navy had intercepted the pod, on a heading toward the Hormling core systems at near the speed of light. The footage had a wonderful freshness to it, though it was at least fifteen years old, the distance from Tret to Home Star.

Here was proof the war was still alive. The rest of the delegates arrived by helijet, having set out by air from Béyoton early that morning, crossing the Inokit continent to Davidon in an hour, refueling in Davidon for the trip to the staging platform at the Twil Gate. The journey across the gate would be made by hoverboat, though for the actual crossing the boat must run on water and not on air. Ironic, she thought. The closer we come to the world on the other side, the slower we must go, and the nearer to the surface. That country pulls you to itself. She examined the part of the gate she could see, a simple, high, elongated arch of stone, the graceful narrow end of a parabola soaring into the air, impossible to believe but present, nevertheless, for twenty years now. Rising out of the waves and soaring into the clouds.

From this distance the stone appeared smooth as glass, but in fact every part of the arch was covered with a kind of lettering, words in a language that had never been identified. Once the delegation arrived on the platform, there was no time for any sort of ceremony in the rush from one craft to the next. Jedda was shocked when she saw there were only six in the party. She had expected a hundred at least; it was rare for the government to be so restrained. One of the six was Orminy; Jedda had been warned about that by her agent. She was the first of the ruling caste to cross the gate. Tarma Jurartelate was her name, direct-daughter of the mother of her house. The presence of an Orminy gave everybody extra pep in the step, as it were.

When she finally appeared, she was without any visible personal defenses, since these were not allowed beyond the gate under the treaty, and so she didn''t look much like Jedda expected. Tarma, a thin woman dressed in severe black coveralls, several shades of silver-to-black hair, and an oddly shaped stat at her belt, watched the ministrations of the crew and the efforts of everybody to please her with a cool that could only be envied. She was accompanied by one of the high-ranking officers of the Enforcement Division, though everyone affected to ignore his presence altogether. Along the platform stood the research huts, and in the water around the platform sailed the fleet of boats from the Planetary Ministry stationed here to study the gate, all sizes and makes, bristling with antennae and satellite dishes, and the fleet of military boats assigned to watch it, vaguer shapes near the horizon. Right away she could tell her colleagues were going to have a hard trip. Two of the women pulled on dark glasses and wrapped their heads in long scarves, looking uncomfortably up at the sky and gripping their seats as soon as they boarded the boat, speaking nervously to each other. A large man with a handsome, friendly face was mopping his face with a handkerchief and smiled in a strained way at Jedda. "I haven''t been near this much open air in a long time," he said.

Another fellow was reaching for his stat. These were Hormling, after all, used to the cramped spaces of Béyoton. As soon as Tarma, Jedda, and the delegates were aboard the hovercraft, it set out across the water, dropping into the waves close to the gate, an unpleasant rocking, and the science fleet began to track it, same as every ship, every crossing, to try to learn what happened when a ship passed under the arch. One of the essential mysteries of our time, it was called, since in twenty years of study the scientists had learned essentially nothing. Jedda was prepared for the lurch in the stomach that accompanied the crossing, but some of the others appeared to be fighting nausea. Tarma appeared placid and unaffected during the ride. The sight of her made Jedda apprehensive; was it a good omen to be in such a small group of people with one of the Orminy, or was it a bad one; what could be the purpose of this journey? Many other translators were available for the southern language of Irion, but Jedda was one of the few Hormling who had learned any of the northern language. Which meant that the delegation must be intending to treat with the northerners.

The crossing: a moment in which her stomach twisted, a wash of cold over her skin, followed by nothing, blue water exactly as before, only the platform had disappeared. Instead, surrounding them and soaring high above them, the Twil arch, so thin and light it was almost gossamer, reaching nearly five-tenths into the sky, though it was made of ordinary stone, according to all evidence, including the testimony of the Anin, who claimed a wizard built it. A stone arch as high as the highest building in Béyoton, rising out of the ocean and sweeping up into the air, a delicate curve. Stone fitted on stone so exactly not a seam could be seen in the whole height. Not a sign of an energy source, no matter where or how the Hormling looked. Through it rushing wind and ocean. The hoverboat signaled the standard greeting to the ships of the Ironian navy that patrolled the ocean near the gate, steamships with hulls of wood and iron, a few wind-driven vessels, crewed by members of whatever these people called their marine forces, but more important, by members of the Prin. On the Irion side the wind was in a lull, and the ships clung to the heaving surface of the water in a way that appeared forlorn.

The lead ship raised a flag that indicated permission for safe passage into the Bay of Anin, and the hovercraft acknowledged and carried the delegates past the huge rock island that commanded the center of the bay, the one with the huge fortress dug into the rock on the ocean side, which Jedda saw every time she came here and every time she left. The hoverboat skimmed across the waves to Evess, to the capital of Irion, a city unlike anything the Hormling knew, with dwelling places for families in separate structures and access to the buildings through the open air, along streets that were no more than layers of pavement over the ground, or, in Evess, along natural waterways or trenches dug in the earth called canals, though these were nothing like the canals of the Hormling, which all had roofs and mostly ran underground. The delegates, green from travel across the raw surface of the water, were dumbstruck at the nature of the city. Their stats were, no doubt, adjusting the level of sedative chemicals in their bodies to help them cope with the open space, and Jedda could feel the change in herself, the mild haze of disinterest and detachment. She fingered the input handle of her own stat. Many of the first Hormling to visit Irion had required mental adjustments, due to the shock of seeing so much air, sky, earth, all around, so many people out in the open, with only an occasional roof over their heads. In Evess, the delegation was received at the Hormling consulate, a large stone complex on a busy canal, the buildings built mostly in the Anin fashion, including some roundhouses with conical roofs and walls covered in some kind of white plasterish substance. There were a few Hormling-style buildings in the complex, too.

The consulate was surrounded by a high stone wall that had been built for defense and not for show, crenellated, with squat towers spaced along the walls. Inside was a green, tree-strewn estate that had belonged to a family of the Anin who had a distant kinship to King Kirith; Jedda had heard the story on a visit here. She had visited the administrative center and wondered about the other buildings; now she would see some of them. Most of the people who worked here had grown accustomed to the open space, to the sky above their heads, so that the group of delegates looked even more conspicuous, moving hurriedly from the canal across the long expanse of lawn and plaza. Melda''s face pinched into a frown and she stared fixedly at the ground as she walked; Himmer was struggling to keep up with her, talking to her, while Vitter, short and bony, glided along the ground, looking rather drugged. They were surrounded by an escort of staff, twenty or thirty dressed in coveralls, a few of the upper-level staff in frock coats, who brought them into a formal reception hall, high ceilinged, elaborately paneled and decorated, with heavy curtains drawn over the windows that lined two long walls. The sight of the closed curtains relaxed the delegates visibly, enclosing them in a comfortable interior while they waited for Tarma to receive her private briefing from the Consul. Jedda was expecting to be settled into a room or a hotel in the city but instead, a few minutes later, the party was.