Sloping channel through which things can descend

Usage examples of slideway.

Tedi brought the airboat in along the Skyway, peeled off to follow the wide ribbon of the roof of the Slideway to a hangar tower.

Aenea once told me that there used to be fixed carbon-carbon lines running the length of the slideway, and the sledders had clipped on to them much as we would a cableway or rappel line, using a special low-friction clip ring similar to the cable pulley to keep from losing speed.

It is hard enough these days keeping the cableway clear: the fixed lines of the slideway had been unmanageable.

Sudden ice storms would freeze them to the side of the slideway and someone traveling 150 klicks an hour would suddenly have their clip ring encounter immovable ice.

And she had even gone to the extreme of dyeing her gorgeous red hair, risked her safety on Earth's slideways and sleazy Aisles, bearded inspectors with purloined documentation and.

But after a few days of literally learning the ropes of gear and climbing protocols on the rockfaces, ledges, cables, scaffolds, and slideways in the area, I volunteered for work duty and was given a chance to fail.

For a minute I am looking straight down at the moonlit phosgene clouds -- green as mustard gas in the lying moonlight -- then we are both racketing around a series of spirals, DNA-HELIX switchbacks, our sleds teetering on the edge of each bank so that twice my ice-axe blade bites into nothing but freezing air, but both times we drop back down and emerge -- not exiting the turns so much as being spit out of them, two rifle bullets fired just above the ice -- and then we bank high again, come out accelerating onto a straight, and shoot across eight kilometers of sheer ice wall on the Abruzzi Spur, the right banked wall of the slideway now serving as the floor of our passage, my ice axe spinning chips into vertical space as our speed increases, then increases more, then becomes something more than speed as the cold, thin air slices through my mask and thermal garments and gloves and heated boots to freeze flesh and to tear at muscle.

Below, a broad street had both slideways and vehicular traffic: bright blue and green monorail trains.