Desk Nine was bolted to the white marble floor flags by massive stirrups of dark, cold-hammered forged iron, each bracket held by four eight-sided nuts the size of a man’s clenched fist. When Qiao Ming approached the station, he noticed that the desk’s whale-bone bench was not set on the floor. It was suspended from the vaulted ceiling by four heavy iron chains, fitted with leather lap-straps and copper thigh-rubber rings designed to secure a scribe who weighed nothing at all.
On the inverted desk rested a heavy bronze chest whose latch was held under nonstop tension by two massive coil-springs. The metal of the chest was pitted with tiny impact craters, where loose gravel had hammered the casing at end-post speed before the seals were set.
“Gravity inversion,” Qiao Ming murmured, his bare toes gripping the marble flags with deliberate, sense pressure. He could feel the cold mass of the dark rock bedrock below, an unmoving anchor beneath forty deep-water lengths of vault stone. “In the Ninth Epoch, the gravity constant did not simply decay. It flipped its sign. Matter ceased to attract matter. It repelled it with the force of an exploding fire.”
Yan Zhiqiu looked up at the ceiling chains, her breath catching in her throat as she imagined the physical reality of that cataclysm. “A world without gravity... Where the earth beneath your feet suddenly hurls you into the sky.”
