By now the fly-through had reached the far end, and she could see space opening up around her as the povv exited from the Kulak’s maw. The familiar sight of the habitat ring became visible, sweeping around in both directions to enclose the blue Earth in its jeweled embrace. From the system of rigging woven around the iron fist, a cable descended straight to the equator. Slowly at first, then building speed, the povv descended, achieving in a few seconds what would have taken several days in any kind of realistic elevator. Even through a screen of bright clouds Kathree could pick out the complex landforms of Southeast Asia to the north and, to the south, the huge dun slab of Australia, now joined to New Guinea by a lumpy gray-green tendril. The povv chose to zoom down on that first, coming close enough that it became possible to see a road traversing the land bridge. Then it veered and banked onto a northwesterly course, following the green, steaming spine of New Guinea to the cape at its end, where it nearly touched the equator. There, construction was visible: cleared land, buildings, excavations, a hazy web of infrastructure, glimpsed but not lingered on. The povv soared out over a turquoise sea cluttered with landforms she recognized vaguely from having seen them on maps. But after a few moments her eye was drawn to something that was flagrantly unnatural, looking as if it had been drawn in with a ruler and a pencil: the tether from the Kulak, plunging vertically into the ocean between two big islands. These, she realized, had to be Borneo and Sulawesi, and the water between them the Makassar Strait. The povv’s movement slowed, then stopped. The symphony and the choir were laboring through a slow crescendo. A change, more felt than seen, came over the display: the programmed camera movement was finished and the varp was now responding once again to Kathree’s movements. Like a giantess bestriding the strait, she could move around and look at it from different angles. For a moment nothing really happened. Then her eye picked up turbulence in the sea, around where the tether stabbed into it. The surface was welling up and foaming. The tiny wrinkles of normal surface waves were erased, replaced by vast green whorls and galactic arms of swirling foam. Bending forward she saw angry gulls wheeling about. That detail convinced her that what she was seeing was real—not a rendering. The disturbed region grew north and south, spreading away from the cable—which she knew to be on the equator—without growing east-west. The cable forked, then forked again, becoming a fan that broadened north and south to support the full length of whatever was roiling the strait.