![[lethologica]](http://midorigin.home.comcast.net/fragments/moth.gif)
[We're on the other side]
"It's impossible."
Atrus stepped out of the air into a huge, conical bowl of darkness. And in the middle of that bowl, at the precise center of the massive, mile-wide hole that pierced it, a powerful column of water - as broad as a river - thundered straight up into the darkness until it was lost from sight, a great spike of brilliant, crystalline light glowing like a fierce flame at its center where it emerged from the glowing depths.
Atrus stared, dumbstruck. He shivered then looked up, pointing out toward the great chute of water that cascaded endlessly into the night sky.
"Where does it go?"
Catherine laughed. "Did you ever wonder what it would be like to go swimming out among the stars?"
Ihe tunnel through which they walked was small- just big enough for them to walk upright-and perfectly round, like a wormhole through a giant apple, the passage unevenly lit by some property within the rock itself. It led down, continually curving, until it seemed as though they must be walking on the ceiling. And then they came out. Out into brilliant daylight. Out into a landscape as amazing as the one they had left at the far end of the tunnel.
They stood at the top of a great slope-a large rocky hill in the midst of an ocean, one of several set in a rough circle-each hill carpeted with bright, gorgeously scented flowers over which a million butterflies danced and fluttered.
And at the very center of that circle of rocklike hills, a great ring-shaped waterfall rushed inward at an angle, toward a single central point far below. Directly over that huge vortex, flickering in and out of visibility, were twisting, vertical ribbons of fast-moving cloud that appeared high up in the air then vanished quickly into the mouth of that great circular falls. With a shock of recognition, Atrus understood. "Were on the other side! It's the source of the great torrent ... it falls through .. ."
And even as he said it, his mouth fell open with wonder.
Huge thunderclouds massed at the horizon, rising up into the sky like steam from a boiling pot. Incredible thunderstorms, their noise muted by distance, filled the air out there, the whole of the horizon, as far as he could see to left and right, filled with flickering lightning.
It completely surrounds the torus, he realized, turning, looking back at the great hole in the ocean, remembering the great jet of water on the far side of that massive hole. There seemed to two separate forces at work here-one a jet stream force and the other a ring force to which the water was attracted.
Atrus blinked, then looked to Catherine. "You put most of the mass of the torus at its outer edge, didn't you?"
She simply smiled at him.
"So the gravity..." Atrus paused, his right fist clenched intently, frown lines etched deep in his brow. "That circle of gravity... forces the water through the central hole... then some other force sucks it up into the sky, where it fans out... still captured by the gravitational field of the torus, and falls down the outer edges of that field ... right?
She simply smiled at him.
"And as it slowly falls, it forms clouds and the clouds cause the storms and .. ."
It was impressive. In fact, now that he partly understood it, it was even more impressive than he'd first thought.
~RM
fragments:
[timeless] ["what appears to be a growing trend"] [Provocation? By the fanciful lie of a vagrant foo... [I fill my house with antiques;] [as a corkscrew] [come what may] [FoV] [2113:itdwlod] [z-axis @ 75 Hz] [input]
