In a clumsy burst of mimicry, one of the inverted humans tried to rise onto his feet to get a better look at Hichy and Inata, but he lost his balance, staggered, and crashed violently to the ground. Not everyone can be a biped.
"I think I've found an explanation," the girl said to her brother while they were being nudged in the back by the soles of feet.
"Do you think it'll help us?"
"Yes, to understand. That's always where you have to begin. Let's imagine they arrived by the staircase the same way we did. What made you want to do a somersault and turn around?"
"Melio, of course. It was when I saw him floating weightless that I understood..."
"See! But maybe they didn't have a cat. When they reached the place where gravity reversed, they must have held onto the ceiling. But since the ceiling was also the floor upside down, maybe they just kept going like that, walking on their hands."
"That makes sense. Well, it makes hand-sense instead of foot-sense."
"And then they got used to it and mutated that way. That's the law of evolution. Look, the youngest ones have longer arms than their parents so their heads are less close to the ground."
Hichy held his cat tightly in his arms. The little animal was utterly terrified and clung to his master, sinking his claws deep into his flesh. He poked out his little head and licked the boy's cheek, which set off a concert of explosive flatulence and frantic spasms throughout the crowd surrounding them.
"!gnitsugsid s'tI ,hA," a child exclaimed.
"Look away," said his mother while keeping her eyes fixed on the twins.
The armed guards became irritated and quickened the pace. That forced the twins to take long strides. Despite the adaptation of the inverted people's bodies to their incongruous position, Hichy and Inata still had the advantage of standing upright, something prehistoric men before them had taken millions of years to perfect. Very quickly, it was the soldiers who began to struggle and had to run to keep up with them. That allowed them to outdistance the cluster of curious onlookers following them as though in a procession. A long line trailed behind them, and only a few especially swift individuals managed to stay close at their heels.
The floating crust of earth on which they stood was particularly vast, so they still had to walk for quite a while before finally being allowed to stop. It was a kind of island like those found off Brittany or in the Pacific. Primitive though they were, the natives were clean and well dressed. They also seemed well fed, and their large population indicated that their resources were plentiful.
An old woman was waiting for them on the threshold of her home, a hut made of wooden planks with a thatched roof. She wore an enormous necklace of shells around her backside, which was especially surprising since the idea that there could be an ocean or a sea somewhere seemed improbable indeed.
"The ring of the Great Whole was passed down to me by my father, who inherited it from my grandfather, and so on for more than ten generations," she explained in her windy voice, noticing her visitors' interest in her jewellery.
Her grey hair spread across the ground like the tentacles of an octopus or the train of a wedding dress. It was the first person they had seen wearing it so long. Her heavy breasts were supported by a sturdy bra so they would not fall in front of her face. The inverted position clearly offered no real advantage, and it was astonishing that no one had had the idea in ten generations of changing direction. Her gnarled arms suffered from having to support her too-heavy body, and every step was laborious.
She flopped down rather than sat into a wicker armchair, still with her head toward the ground, though the blood pressure on her brain was relieved by that more neutral position from a gravitational point of view.
The armed guards had withdrawn a few paces at their chief's orders and had lowered their heads in deference. As for the crowd, it had remained at a distance, as though held back by an invisible barrier.
"You are surprised that I am not surprised by your appearance, aren't you?" the clan priestess went on, addressing the children. "That is because I have the advantage of knowing your world while you do not know mine. The one who is able to understand the other always has the advantage in such a situation. Come, I will show you."
She led them inside. There was no furniture more than fifty centimetres high, so that a gaze skimming along the ground could make sense of it and everything could stay within foot's reach. A mattress lay on a wooden base, and there was neither kitchen nor running water.
The old woman opened a small wooden chest at the cost of a contortion no longer suited to her age and took out a carved object. It was a small ebony statuette, rather crude, but clear enough to recognise a warrior standing upright and proud on his two feet with his head held straight. In short, it was the representation of a perfectly ordinary human being, and above all one the right way up.
"I believe this is one of our common ancestors," the old lady said. "I am its guardian. Our people were driven here by tribes hostile to us. We came upon this floating island and have remained trapped there for hundreds of years."
"Why didn't you turn yourselves the right way up?" Inata asked.
"The right way up?" she echoed in surprise. "It is not we who are upside down, but this world. We stayed in the orientation that has always been ours, and remained faithful to our country of origin."
The distance between the organ responsible for speech and the eyes was deeply troubling to the twins. They did not dare look at the place the sound was coming from and kept their gaze fixed on the priestess's eyes. But with her mouth hidden and her eyes upside down, her body language was out of sync with her words. It was as if she were not the one speaking at all, and having the mouth and eyes in the same place seemed far better suited to spoken exchanges. This was not, strictly speaking, a spoken exchange, since it was not being formed with the mouth, but we have dwelt long enough on that particularly embarrassing subject already.
"The soldiers will now take you to the king. I have seen with my own eyes that you are quite harmless."
Offended by that remark, Hichy would gladly have reacted, but his sister, far more diplomatic than he was, took his arm. They saluted the religious guide and rejoined the soldiers. Their hostile attitude had turned into a sort of fearful respect, a private conversation with the priestess being a privilege granted only to guests of distinction.
"It gives me a headache to see them upside down like that," Hichy whispered. "When I do a handstand, it rushes to my head in less than a minute."
"Yes, but it's practical in case of haemorrhage."
"What do you mean?"
"The brain is the most important organ in the body. If it is no longer supplied with blood, you die. That's why you lay down people who are injured. Their brains are better irrigated with blood and therefore less vulnerable."
"Yeah, well. I prefer my head where it is."
Since walking on one's hands was the only means of transportation known to the humans, that was how, or at least in its spatially mirrored transcription, they made their way to the king. The crowd still followed them, though more and more individuals had grown tired, and the interest aroused by those two children with their heads in the air had waned somewhat.
The monarch's castle stood atop a small hill and looked like a medieval model. Building such a fortress with one's feet was an achievement, but is that not what those without arms do every day?
They crossed the drawbridge and entered the building under the wide-eyed stares of the people inside. The crowd of onlookers dispersed, barred from entering. They climbed a great stone staircase and were received in the hall where the royal council was in session. The debates ceased as they were pushed inside, and it was in a deathly silence that they advanced timidly toward the throne of Dagobert I, whose trousers were upside down, though that was not at all disturbing since the same was true of all his subjects and he too was upside down. In the face of the appearance of humans capable of standing on their feet, the concerns of the royal council seemed pitifully banal.
The king was not sitting but lying on his belly more than two metres above the floor, which allowed him alone not to have his eyes at ground level and to take in the whole assembly with a single glance, this posture giving him incredible authority over the court gathered below him. Hichy and Inata feared being thrown into a hostile environment, but it was with a long series of flatulent sounds and spasms that he greeted them. He was laughing at them, then, which was hardly respectful, but he had the right to do so as king and master of the one and only world he knew.
"Why are you upside down?" he asked when he had finished laughing.
"In a Galilean frame of reference, or through the prism of your chosen orientation?" Hichy asked in almost perfect inverted language. "And what if it were you who were upside down?"
Alarmed looks turned toward that young boy who had dared to answer like that. What a lack of respect. What impertinence. Already the guards had stepped forward to seize the twins and silence them by tearing out their tongues. But the monarch sprawled on his throne gave them a discreet signal with his foot and burst into laughter all over again. The nobles and dignitaries, whose expression is only ever cowardice and submission, imitated him just as they would have imitated their master had he reacted in the opposite manner.
"I like the two of you very much, even if you do speak with your mouths. Who would have thought that was possible? And yet I have already seen tumblers who spat fire and swallowed swords! I invite you to dine with me at noon so that you may tell me where you come from. If you were able to come here, that means one can get out again, does it not? This land is very pleasant, but my army needs a few enemies to fight in order to perk up. The session is adjourned!" he announced to the assembly.