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And metal people living on it; people as glossy and smooth as chrome, who melted together in lovemaking. Smooth shiny skin on skin; blurring together in sex.Tighe’s wick stirred, but he was too sleepy to do much about it. Instead he dozed.
    He woke with a horrible start, with the certainty in his belly that he was falling. He hated that sensation. It was happening more frequently than before. The world would tilt and he would have the certainty in his clenching stomach that he had been rolled off the world and was falling. It always woke him and he always woke up desperately clutching at the ground beneath him. It took him a long time to calm himself down.
    He sat up straighter, pressed his back against the comforting bulk of the wall. Looking out at the sky again, the balance of colour had shifted. If it were another wall, then was there another wall behind it? And another behind that? Wall after wall, like the pages of a book, with just enough space in between to allow the sun to thread its way through, lighting one side then the other.
    It was an unwieldy vision, but there was something about it that Tighe liked.
    Like the pages in a book. His pahe had two books. Some people in the village had more than a dozen. They called it wealth, but Tighe’s pashe was always contemptuous of that. She would say, ‘Can you eat books?’
    Tighe scratched prickles away from the back of his head. Everything was touched by the aftertaste of his daydream now, that dreadful sensation of tumbling into nothingness. It was frightening to consider that he had lived through eight full years, all through his childhood and into his adolescence, and for every minute of that time he had never been further than a few yards from the edge of the world.
    It was all so precarious. That was it, yes. Some bitter truth at the core of living, precariousness. Maybe even the goat, even something as dim as the goat, was granted a glimmering epiphany as it stumbled over the edge of things – an understanding of the delicate balance of things. Life is a balancing act and death a sort of falling. He thought of the goat, falling. He thought of his pashe, living on the emotional edge of things, always tipping. He thought of the ancient hierarchy of the Princedom, of the villages together: Prince and Priest and Doge in balance, ruling the law and the religion and the trade, and all the people in their place underneath the ruling order as his pahe had explained it to him. Life involved so many things fitting together: take any one of them away and the structure started to topple.
    Was there a brick (he thought) somewhere at the very base of the wall itself that could be picked out, a single brick that could lead to the collapse of the whole worldwall itself? The whole thousand-league structure tumbling down? The thought brought an edge of panic to his mind and he tried to block it out. Concentrate on something else.
    Look at the birds flying rings in the air.
    Look at the sheen of the clouds running striations up the cool blue of the sky behind.
    Look at the dismal brightness of the sun, hot and yellow.

3
    From Tighe’s house the village was largely a series of stepped ledges, each one a little further west and further downwall from the one before, that led away from the main-street shelf.
    Boy-boys would play in the smaller crags at the edge of the village. Games came and went. When Tighe had been a boy-boy, the craze had been to weave kite-planes out of stalkgrass and throw them over the edge. Sometimes these constructions would merely dip away and be lost, but from time to time the breeze would catch them and spin them through the clear air, and the boy-boys would whoop and halloo. But Tighe was a boy now, a Princeling, with a boy’s sensitivity not to be mistaken for a boy-boy, so he no longer loitered about this playground. On the day after his birthday he wandered down there, bored, and saw four boy-boys playing a new game, which involved running up and