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Smelt away downwall and Cragcouthie, Meat and the rest. At Smelt they dug ore out of the wall and fixed it up as metal. There were smelters in Cragcouthie too, of course, but ore was harder to come by up here. So metal was traded downwall and it went through Heartshelf, which took a percentage.
    Up beyond Meat were some other villages, and it was said that the wall became more wrinkled in that direction, more prolific with crags and ledges, easier to find a living on. But Tighe thought the stretch directly above him now was the best; the flatness of it, the
purity
of it. The wall blued away into the distance, where it got hazy and vanished in a blur. If only his eyes were good enough and the day uncloudy, Tighe thought, maybe I could see all the way to the top of the wall.
All the way to the top of the wall
. The words gave him exquisite little chills on his scalp and neck. But there was a haze in the mid-morning air that muddled vision after a few thousand yards. Away to the Left big bustling clouds were nudging up against the wall, like great animals nosing some huge breast. Perhaps that was what happened to the far-off walltop, Tighe thought to himself, barely voicing the words. Perhaps it was transformed into clouds.
Clouds. Transformed
. Words could distil such intensity. Words were as high as the wall.
    There was a noise at his feet and Tighe looked to see a monkey. He launched a kick at the brute, but it danced out of his way with a screech. Scrambling to his feet, Tighe chased the thing, but it swung upwards on handfuls of stiffgrass and was gone where there was no crag for Tighe to follow.
    Laughing, Tighe settled down with his back against the wall again. He munched on some more stalkgrass and stared out at the sky. The colours changed the further up the sky he looked, from the flusher tongue-colours of the lower sky, where the sun was, to the darker, more plastic-blue tints of the upper, but Tighe could not mark the place where the one set of colour shifted into the other. What gave the sky colour? Was it just the sun? But the air was invisible (he flapped his hand in front of his face) so there couldn’t
he
any colour.
    The sun must be shining on something to make the colour.
    With a jolt, as if the idea were so charged it sparked jerkily in his mind, Tighe wondered if what he was seeing was
another
wall – one so distant that he could see no details on it at all, and yet one so huge that it filled the sky from horizon to horizon, from Right to Left. The thought possessed him with wonder.
    Another wall?
    Inside Tighe’s head there was a peculiar sensation of dislocation. Senses swimming. It felt as if there was simultaneous shrinkage, a freezing down, and a sudden expansion, an outrushing of something from the point at the centre of his skull. Another wall. The idea grabbed hold of his mind.
    And perhaps people living on it. People like him? Or maybe quite unlike him. He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine what
his
wall would look like from that impossible vantage point. What colour would it be? Blonds and greens from the grasses; browns and blacks from the exposed dirt. Maybe stretches of grey from the exposed rock and concrete. He tried to push his brain out, to swoop outwards on impossible wings, to see the worldwall from even further away. What would the mash of colours end up as? But he could only imagine it dirty and stained-looking, an ugly patchwork of blobs and dabs. That wasn’t how the sky looked. He opened his eyes again and tried to map precisely the grain of what he was looking at.
    Maybe it was a completely different sort of wall; maybe it wasn’t made of rock and dirt and vegetation, as his wall was. Instead it could have been built by God wholly out of grey plastic, say (why not? God could do anything). Or even metal. The thought of it! A wall as big as the worldwall itself, but a wall smooth and pure and perfect, every surface glittering metal that sent back the sunlight touched with blue.