“Me either. Some way he needs it, more than the Legacy . . . or me.” He swallowed hard but the lump in his throat would not go away.
Into his mind sprang scattershot images, ripples of sensation, rushing fragments of ideas briefly glimpsed and then tumbling away. Shibo lurked just behind his nervous eyes.
You cannot understand what is going on here and neither can Killeen. I urge you to relax into it, not strive so hard.
Toby felt a hot flare of indignation. “Look, it’s your ass I’m saving.”
From the erosions of real life, yes. Do not think I cannot feel appreciation for that. And it would be best for us to be together for at least a while longer.
His hurt irritation swerved to grateful warmth. “You want it, I want it. My father, he can’t see that.”
Do not suppose this relieves you from your Family obligations.
Shibo’s whispery words carried a flinty edge. “What obligations?”
To find Abraham. To carry forward the Family ways.
To this he had no reply. Shibo’s Personality engulfed him, cool and lofty. She spoke in longer sentences than the real Shibo ever had. Her Personality had begun picking up the jittery anxieties of chip-bound selves, a flavoring utterly unlike the living Shibo.
Was she learning from Isaac and Zeno and the others, taking on some old-timey warp? He vaguely sensed her changes but he hoped they were not important.
He loped with easy grace through stands of trees, bounding over gnarled briars, making Quath clack and clang her scissoring legs to keep up. Out, away, free.
He had shucked off the flexmetal husk of Argo, peeled away his father’s iron hand—and the heady rush of it sent spurts of driving energy into his legs. As a boy he had learned the hammering arts of flight, of hardship in constant movement, and now the joy of it returned. So he was totally unprepared when the ground began to slip and twist beneath his crunching boots.
“Quath! Something’s—”
“What’s happening?”
Frayed air, sudden rushing mists. The space around Toby had a give and tremor to it, an unsettling porosity. It was as if the molecules of the leaden air were sucking substance out of him, tiny mouths making his skin prickle and jump.
Skinny trees whipped at him as if lashed by a fierce wind. Yet Toby felt only still air.
Then a churning wrench at his feet, his knees—and he was flying, no weight, the trees now dim blue shadows raking past. Quath was a blob, brown-soft and pooling into a teardrop.
Illusion? He could not tell, but a fist was knotting and unknotting itself inside his stomach. The issue resolved as Quath swelled, stretched into shimmering dirt-colored droplets—then slammed into him, a hard sharp crack in the chest.
“Ah! What’s going—”
“What’s the damned [untranslatable] mean?”
“Stocas what?”
Toby wrapped arms around a burnished coppery shank. Purple air-whorls and raking winds snatched at his legs, worried his boots. A screeching red patch of steaming air streaked by, growing dirty roots as he watched, a plant being born from nothing.
He clung with all his strength and felt his joints pop. Seals in his microhydraulics yearned to open. He expanded his sensorium.
Howling vagrant senses flooded him. Plucked at his eyes. Tilted his sense of balance until he was convinced that he was somehow holding Quath aloft with his arms, a vast weight plunging down upon his neck and shoulders—and then in a flicker he was holding Quath above a pit, a black yawning abyss of red-tinged fires and sputtering wrath.
He had to keep Quath from falling! He felt his ankles strum and stretch, metal-hot and elongating into impossible cords of frayed muscle—
Then he was simply plunging, walls rushing past. Down a tube that snaked and grew shiny ribs as Toby watched, still spinning. Quath whirling by.
She orbited him on a long tether. It was one of her telescoped arms. Torn free of her, and used to connect them. As Toby inhaled, it stretched—and he smelled his own acid-sharp fear.
“Quath!”—but the ivory head that swiveled to regard him was a whirling mass of bulging sockets and wiggly stalks, deeply alien face-scapes, not one expression but many. Eyes and lurching mouths and planes of cheek and jowl all working against each other, the personalities of his friend spattering across the great head.
Unreadable. This, more than the slamming colors and ripping winds, frightened Toby and sent a chill through his aching, straining joints.
Quath’s rasping was harsh and yet calm, resigned.
A pearly fog dispersed, blown by some unseen wind, and Toby saw far below them—though they were not falling toward any place now—a mass of pinhole openings in a broad plain. The pinholes danced, refracted by great distance.
They flew along the plain as though blown by a wind, soundless but for a soft chime almost like tiny voices. One pinhole swelled and he could make out small bumps on it. Toby closeupped the nodules and found their crests crowned by dashes of white—and then realized that these were snowcapped mountains.
Toby saw the size of the thing he was witnessing—a plain sprawling away into hazy infinity, a whole flat world. Seething with pores. Pockets that opened and closed like slippery mouths.
They lurched sidewise, Toby barely keeping both gloved hands on Quath. Rushing winds, hard-slamming acceleration.
The mountaintops streamed by like tiny ridges. Something slammed them forward with a rude kick, up and away from a yawning cavern that churned with brooding shapes. A sudden veer, and they were back above the plain. The multitude of other pinholes churned and jostled like an angry crowd. Gravity’s gullet.
“What . . . what are they?” Toby called.
“Places to go?”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m rethinking this whole idea, buggo.”
Hold. Just a little longer. If you lose Quath—
The hole puckered. Toby had the unpleasant sensation that it was preparing to swallow them—and then it did.
In a blur of wrenching speed they rushed through gauzy spaces, his eyes filming and suddenly thick with tears. Then he heard a rasp, felt a thump—and they were on a field of ropy, tough grass. He felt himself gingerly and sat up.
“Uh!” Muscles complained. No bones seemed to grind against themselves.
Quath was already surveying the curved bowl that arced away in all directions—though she moved a little unsteadily on her feet. Toby could not see where they had come from, but a small dappling in the sky flic
kered, hinting at a huge space above—and then was gone.
“That like to pulled me apart.”
“That was weather?”
He felt bruised. “I don’t get it. What happened?”
“That’s happening now? How come?”
He remembered how this whole esty place had swelled up out of the ergosphere. Worlds within worlds, all moored somehow. “What holds it together?”
“Start with the esty then. What keeps it ridin’ around near a black hole, when that hole’s supposed to eat stars for breakfast?”
“Huh?” Toby rubbed his shoulders, fighting cramps. His muscles were bunched hard and he had to pound on them to free them up any. He lay back, tired. “So this esty, it’s written into the, the—”
Toby brushed at the soft, moist grass. At first it moved away. Then it caressed his fingers. “This grass—it’s esty-stuff?”
“Ummm. Good to know grass is still grass.”
Toby lay back and let Quath go on. She was trying to get across slippery ideas. He fumbled with them and finally decided to simply accept.
Primates, Quath had once told him, liked to reason by analogy, like holding up an orange and seeing how it was like a planet. Here something like that was needed. Capillaries, arteries, the esty as flow.
But the feel of this place was off balance, not like anything he had ever known. Pressing textures played along his skin. The air kept stretching and relaxing, rubbery. Tremors beneath him radiated upward into the cottony blanket above. The esty, adjusting itself? The waves were just below the edge of hearing—yet he felt them through his bones, a heavy pulse.
And on top of this, the troubled sense of being watched. Scrolling feelers in his sensorium. When he focused on them they dispersed.
Toby stared up in wide-eyed awe. “Land as fat as God’s pocket.” A cloud dissipated and he saw high above a vast curving green mat, spotted in vibrant yellows and purples. Land, far away.
The roof of this Lane arced over them, as if they were in a huge spinning cylinder, pinned to the sides by centrifugal force. But there was no spin, Quath told him. Or nothing that would seem to humans like spin. Instead, the esty held itself together with its own curvature of . . . itself. He struggled with the idea, got nowhere, so tossed it aside.
And tucking up and away from him, to all sides, the speckled forests. He had seen ancient pictures like this, sights called up by Aspects and sent into the Family sensorium for entertainment after a long day’s foot travel, but he had always figured they were figments, artworks, mere fancies of a dead past. Lush green unending.
“Huh? To doubt again?”
“Hmmmm . . .” Light seeped from a rocky hill nearby. Toby got up, edgy despite the embracing calm here. He walked over to the shining stone and kicked it with a boot.
Try as he might, thunking his sharp-toe into it jarred loose no chips. An ivory radiance oozed from the layers. Knots of gaseous esty floated, spitting beacons. They lit the shadowy reaches with probing beams, like airy lanterns drifting on unseen winds.
Slowly the soft light ebbed. The seemingly solid rock grew shadows, as if a sun were setting somewhere deep in the foggy stone. Blades of sunlight radiance danced deep within it, like summer’s promise cutting deeply into a watery cavern. He felt himself suspended above an abyss of nothingness, a mere crust keeping him from plunging down into—what?
Unease crept up his spine. Luminosities played far down inside the seemingly solid rock. Like a gulf of nothingness. He hung above sulky depths.
He shook himself. No time to fall into abstracted moods. He called up a smattering of geology from Isaac—who, predictably, wanted to discourse on the slip and slide of planets. Toby cut him off.
“This stuff, it looks like, uh, a funny kind of limestone.”
“But what is it?”
Quath began to explain but Toby could not keep his mind on the talk, compared with the slippery immediate feel to everything here, the give to air and rock alike. He let the information filter down to the parliament that was himself, where gobbets of succulent information fed the Aspects and Faces and the one smoldering Personality. They took to it eagerly, while he simply felt, scarcely thinking at all. Shibo asked,
So science has grabbed time and made it like a kind of space?
He relayed this to Quath, who clacked and said,
Shibo was as unsettled by this as he had ever felt her.
Maybe even in tiny pieces? Pebbles, sand? So that everything’s really, down deep, esty?
Isaac put in,
Many ages ago our science abandoned the simple notion that physics was geometry. But in this place . . .
Even Isaac seemed subdued by the silent strangeness.
Toby was restless from the strangeness of this place. “Come on—let’s go.”
“Uh . . .” Getting away from the weight of father and Family had been giddy, liberating. But now his mind was blank. “Just keep moving. I need to think.”
They went for a while without speaking. Quath’s silence grew to seem like a precise criticism, all the harder to answer because it was unspoken.
They worked their way toward a distant upthrust of green, thinking it to be a grassy hill from which they could get a better view. But as they approached Toby saw striations working in the layers of it, colors mixing flame-yellow and reddish-brown and scattershot blue. Sometimes shards of emerald emerged, as if from a struggle of the light within.
Without warning a sheer cliff writhed in scraping agony above them, like something laboring to be born. A sheet peeled off, cracking and booming, curling away like a petal of an immense flower. Its base yanked free.
Toby ran back, trying to get clear. But the sheet did not fall.
Instead the still-curling layer compressed, contracting along its length and then along its width, shrinking, complaining in grating groans—all the while oozing burnt-orange rays, as though some unseen fire baked inside. The edges turned crimson and then curled back, showing a welldone brown. Still it dwindled, crevices sputtering with fist-sized flares, and—crack! the sheet vanished. A sharp concussion knocked Toby flat. He felt as if somebody had smacked him in the forehead with a stick.
“Wher
e’d it go?”
“Why?”
“Huh? You mean this whole place can’t last?”
“Seems a funny way to build.”
Without their noticing it the glow around and above them dimmed. Blades of radiance shot through filigree clouds. A chill edged the air. Toby said, “Guess we’re done for a while,” and sat down on a hummock sprouting a wiry yellow grass.
It had been long years since he had fled for a full and exciting day across unknown terrain, and despite all the worries he kept at the back of his mind, he felt unreasonably good. Never mind that his Family lay behind him, that he missed them already. Ache crept up his calves and a ferocious hunger sprouted in his belly.
“You got rations?”
“Me, too. Let’s eat. Then some sleep. Talk later.”
“Yeasay. Feeling good for the first time in quite a while.”
“Funny—that’s just what I do like, right now.”
TWO
Time’s Grip
He woke up fuzzily. Shibo was crooning to him, a soft voice playing down through his body, massaging his muscles and strumming along fibrous nerve nets.
Wake. I love you for what you did and I will help you through this place. Hard I can be, and soft, too. For you. But you must wake now, as much as you would like to stay down there in the syrup and cotton.
“Uhhhhh . . . okay . . .”
—a liquid licking pleasure, soft darks, crooning winds outside, musky delights below, pulses hammering, sharp tang of blood from a bitten lip, quickening gasps—
He pushed the feelings away. Pleasant, but he knew he had to wake up. A dream? Somehow more concrete than that . . .
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