The farther they went, the more the pressure increased on their shoulders, their weight growing in proportion to the intensity of gravity. By changing direction, the descent had turned into an ascent. After tasting the joys of weightlessness, the strain was beginning to make itself felt in their legs. Each new step seemed higher, even though they were all perfectly identical. Melio jumped into Hichy's arms so he could be carried like a little sack of fur.
"Do you think it's still far?" Inata asked her brother.
"I don't think so. We'll know we've arrived when we've got our normal weight back. Even though we haven't slimmed down or put on any belly," he added, rubbing his stomach.
"That's because our mass hasn't changed, you triple idiot. You know everyone confuses those two notions. I feel like we're twice as heavy as before, and that we've climbed a lot more steps than we went down."
"That's because of the fatigue."
The light announced the end of their long ascent a few turns later. It intensified exponentially as they approached the surface. The twins finally emerged from a narrow stone corridor fitted with a tiny door. They pushed it open and found themselves on a grassy space the size of a football field. That sort of slab of earth floated in the middle of the sky, surrounded on all sides by empty space.
Other mineral plots of land, of various shapes and sizes, were moving around them horizontally. Some were covered in trees, others in sand, and still others were completely devoid of life. Their bases were made of rock in varied forms and textures, from granite to sandstone, passing through slate and even bituminous coal. Lakes had formed here and there, and those miniature worlds crossed past one another freely without ever touching.
That playground being perfectly suited to their powers, they joyfully leapt from block to block. Using the air as a cushion, they glided for hundreds of metres and landed without a jolt on a slab larger than the others. A wild kite took off the moment they set foot on it and rose above them. It performed several spirals, turned one way and then the other, so that it was difficult to tell whether it was climbing or descending relative to the twins. It was all a matter of frame of reference and point of view.
Exhausted by their gruelling ascent, they stuffed themselves with ripe peaches growing in abundance. Melio, who was starving too, threw himself without delay onto the field mice he had no trouble digging up. The weather was mild and springlike, and the twins' awful clothes had become too warm. They kept only the bare essentials and used their power to rid themselves of the dirt. Their appearance was still that of wildlings, but they were now perfectly clean. Not sufficiently filled for lack of protein, they did not have the courage to imitate the little ginger cat and go hunting themselves. They fell asleep as soon as the sun disappeared below them, which proved there really must be a planet somewhere, but that it was lost in the mist.
When he opened his eyes the next morning, after sleeping like a log directly on the ground and without bothering to build any shelter at all, Hichy had to bite his tongue to keep from screaming in terror. He shook his sister, who rubbed her eyes in protest.
"Why are you waking me up?" she asked. "I'm still tired."
"Whatever you do, don't make a sound. And above all, don't scream. I think we're being watched."
A crowd of what seemed to be humans was standing all around them, staring with a mixture of interest and wariness. A line of armed guards was trying to hold the curious onlookers back so they would not come too close. Could one even say that they were standing, since it was not their feet but their hands that touched the ground? They wore shoes, or some kind of gloves with soles, while their feet, held stiffly up in the air, were bare. As for their hair, it was cut very short so it would not serve as a broom.
Singular though that was, it was not even the strangest thing. What was far more unsettling was the appearance of those men, women, and children. They wore long, tight-fitting togas that left their buttocks exposed, since those were in the air, and covered their mouths, which were down below.
"They've got their butts in the air!" the boy blurted out.
"Shh, be quiet!" Inata replied. "We don't know whether these people are hostile. Do you think they understand us?"
"No idea. My name is Hichy," he said loudly, straightening up.
At the sight of him doing so, a pair of child's eyes less than twenty centimetres above the ground widened. The eyebrows rose, or rather lowered, since the little boy's body was upside down. A cry came out of his backside, a hoarse and frightening cry that triggered a general panic. Bottoms screamed, and bodies jostled one another in an attempt to flee. Some sprawled over their feet while howling. The twins watched the commotion without knowing what to do. Was it their fur coats that had frightened those strange beings so badly?
In the distance, the hoarse uproar doubled in intensity. Harsh discussions seemed to be taking place among the inverted people, who were hesitating too over how to react. After an interminable while, a delegation finally seemed to detach itself, led by guards armed with shields and spears that they held with their feet. They approached hand by hand, cautiously, and stopped a few metres away.
"?!nerdlihc fo tnorf ni ekil taht htuom ruoy yalpsid uoy od woH," said the cavernous voice of the one who seemed to be their leader.
The sound had come from a place one can scarcely mention in a book intended for young readers, but the reader will have understood that it was an orifice normally used for purposes other than speech by those who have their heads in the air and their feet on the ground.
"He spoke with his a...!" Hichy shouted.
"What did he say?" Inata asked. "I didn't understand a word."
"!htuom rieht htiw ekops yehT," cried one of the soldiers.
Eyes widened all around them. A series of flatulent noises came from the posteriors of their interlocutors, accompanied by spasms.
"That must be their way of laughing," Inata explained to her brother.
"In that case, I can't imagine what happens when they cry," he replied.
Once they had had their fill of laughing, the chief came a few steps closer, the laughter having relaxed the atmosphere.
"!taht nees reven ev'I ?nwod edispu uoy era yhW," he asked.
"I've never seen that! Why are you upside down?" Hichy asked.
"?gniyas uoy era tahW"
"What are you saying? I don't understand your language."
The warriors and the twins stared at each other for a long while, unable to communicate. Their respective dialects were both totally different and strangely similar at the same time.
"It's as if..." the brother began.
"As if they speak backwards!" his sister cried. "There's no reason their words shouldn't be reversed too. I'll try. .olleH," she said to their interlocutors.
A spark of astonishment lit the natives' faces. Even though her pronunciation was laborious, they seemed to have understood.
".atanI si eman yM," she said slowly.
"Enchanted," the chief replied, having discovered the trick as well.
So each side could understand and speak the other's language at the cost of a modest effort.
"Where we come from, showing your mouth is extremely rude," the leader explained. "And using it to communicate is absolutely disgusting. And putting your feet on the ground is filthy. Just look at them. They're all damaged. Being upside down is one thing, but cover your mouths immediately if you don't want us to lock you up for indecent exposure."
It was at that high-tension moment that Melio chose to leap from Hichy's arms and launch himself in pursuit of a field mouse that had had the bad luck to poke its snout out of hiding. The rodent was indeed running on all four paws, but with its belly in the air and its eyes pointing downward from its head. With a quick spring, the little ginger cat pounced on it and bit into it. At the sight of that, the policemen were even more stunned than they had been by the twins speaking with their mouths. They averted their eyes in outrage when Melio opened his jaws and swallowed it whole.
"Naturally, the animal resembles its masters," the chief observed in disgust. "Put these on and follow us."
He handed them two colourful togas and asked them to put them on after the warriors had erected a large screen in front of each of them. Hichy took off his fur pelt and put on the garment he had been given. It looked like an ordinary item of clothing and fit him perfectly, except for one more than unpleasant detail. A piece of cloth was missing at buttock level, precisely where it mattered most. A long collar continued upward like a neck warmer to allow them to cover the lower part of their faces.
"I cannot stay like this," he protested in the inverted language. "Give us more cloth, thread, and a needle."
After several discussions among the inverted humans, they were brought what they had asked for. It took a while, as the guards were not used to walking around with sewing kits, but they managed it eventually. The twins added a patch to their garments to make them more compatible with the customs of their own world, and were finally able to present themselves properly dressed before their hosts. Having their mouths covered was not especially pleasant, but it seemed to satisfy the chief. They looked far more presentable than in their dreadful outfits made of wild-beast fur.
The soldiers had to form a security cordon to hold back the crowd and let them pass. The curious pressed around them to get a better look. With eyes only a few centimetres above the ground, however, it was difficult for the inverted humans to see them, and the front places were especially coveted. As for the twins, they were completely turned upside down by that strange world.