he humans followed Kyle into the little brick
building that housed the stairwell and, while Warren had had his share of
unusual experiences since this whole adventure began, he experienced nothing
more unusual than he did in the few moments it took to walk down the stairwell
from Outer Nuldoid, up into Downtown Nuldoid.
When he looked down at
the first of three flights of stairs, he did not find it particularly unusual,
didn’t think it looked any different than the countless stairwells he’d seen
in, say, parking garages all over San Francisco. The second flight of stairs,
however, twisted away from the landing and appeared to continue downward
to the next landing. But the peculiar thing was this: As Warren descended the
second flight of stairs, at some point, he found that he was no longer walking downstairs,
but up. He felt only a brief moment of weightlessness, an odd sensation
like his weight had shifted slightly, but he felt nothing profound—it was not a
significant sensation. And though he never stopped moving from one step to the
next, his downward steps, away from Outer Nuldoid, became upward steps,
toward Downtown Nuldoid. But he couldn’t tell how, or when exactly, this had
happened. He realized then, as he stepped onto the second landing, that he was
looking up at the third flight of stairs. He felt as though he had
walked into an Escher drawing, where one absolute perception had shifted
seamlessly into its exact opposite. (M. C. Escher made the trip to Nuldoid in
1923 and was greatly influenced by the stairwells into downtown.)
A moment later, he found himself emerging from a
similar brick building inside Downtown Nuldoid. And though he was now
upside down, relative to where he’d just been, he was, in fact, right side up
and standing in one of the city’s small and rather pleasant parks. As the
others stepped out of the brick building, the Harvesters quickly scuttled over
to retrieve their shopping carts from the opening in the lawn beside the
building. And there they were.
In Downtown Nuldoid.
Warren, Lily and Leo were flabbergasted as they
stood and looked up and around themselves and saw the magnificent city that
surrounded them… because that’s exactly what it did—it surrounded them. While Outer Nuldoid rested on the outside
of an enormous sphere, Downtown Nuldoid rested inside the sphere on its
concave wall—like a colony of ants blanketing the inner skin of a basketball.
And while gravity pulled Outer Nuldoid down onto the outside of the
“basketball,” inside the basketball, gravity pushed out in all
directions, so that one could look right straight up overhead and see—perhaps a
couple of miles away—the exact opposite side of the city. From where they
stood, they could see an “aerial view” of Downtown Nuldoid’s opposite side: its
streets weaving throughout business and residential areas in a circuitous and
often circular route, connecting to nearly every other street and forever
ending back at their own beginnings. It was absolutely stunning.
Map 
