As they did, shrieks peeled off the timestone wall. Sheets of brittle sound, like the final desperate cries of small birds being torn apart.
Yet the mosaic kept on, a perpetual floating play of forces he could not comprehend, issuing humming songs. Rough coughs, pained screeches, staccato, insectlike pepperings—none seeming to repeat, or bring meaning to the action.
Only then did Toby see that his attempts to impose meaning on the vision were pointless. He was witnessing a passing event from some unknowable elsewhen, flaking off the timestone as he watched. An ancient record dissolving into fog as it sheared away from the spongy surface. The motion he witnessed came as fine planes peeled off, each invisibly thick, like the thin slice that separates future from past.
He reflected on what Quath had said. He didn’t much like science—which he thought of as a fearsome entity, not ideas but a force of nature, for he had never met a scientist and would not know what one looked like. Here science had seized time, stripped away many of the everyday aspects, and made it like a kind of unsteady, pliant thing. It made lives seem like riffling pages in a book.
Gingerly he reached out, stroked the face of the event-matter. It was water-cool here, untouchably hot there—again, no logic, no scheme. And that was the flat fact of it: occurrence beyond human categories, brought forth from places unknowable.
Then the timestone ruptured. He had looked into it, assuming the flatness of the events there, each coming toward him as the layers peeled off into filmy fog.
Abruptly a stalk-thing poked out of the mist. It wriggled. Shards of silvery ice flaked off it. The rubbery stalk extruded from the timestone, thicker than his arm and longer. With a pop it wriggled free and fell at his feet. It hooted, low and clear. A plaintive call.
And more followed it. They floundered from the timestone as if spat out—moist, shining, making what had been comfortably distant images suddenly smelly and real. A fountain of liquid obsidian spouted to his left. It crystallized in air and fell tinkling. Panels of dusky mist marched above his head. One of the blobs grew out of the timestone and attached itself to a floating lump of water. The stalk farted a core of hard blue gas and the blob answered with a whorl of velvety fire.
Eerie, unreal. Shibo said,
Remember that all this comes out of laws, physical laws. These are trapped events from somewhere else in the esty. We should explore it.
“Uh . . .” Head foggy. “How come?”
This is a way to find what else lurks in the esty. We cannot go to these places ourselves.
“Can’t see how I’d want to anyway.” Whispering.
Do not be timid!
“Looks funny . . . risky.”
Go forward. When I was in flesh I never felt cowardice.
“No, you got me wrong, I’m just saying—”
I wanted to know more about the world. That’s the only smart way to stay alive. Believe me, I know how dead you can be inside if something stops you from—if you stop trying, learning, changing.
“Shibo . . . I don’t . . .”
Coward. Open yourself to it!
He stepped closer.
Blue-black flames danced up and licked at Toby before he could move. They were warm and soft and made him want more of their obliging comfort. He felt uneasy but within himself there was a push-pull of diverging impulses. Shibo’s Personality moved massively, blotting out his caution with a silky, calming curiosity.
We must explore this place. It is wonderful, I think. You were so right to come here.
“I didn’t, really, I just . . .”
His words trailed away. Shibo wanted to explore this strangely swarthy flame and so he stooped and put his hands and forearms into the purpling mass.
Cool, slick. Not a fire at all. It felt even better now. So pleasant to thrust up to the shoulders, his face full in it. Fragrances swarmed through him—sweet, pliant.
So comfortable. Beckoning.
Then he remembered the addictive amusements . . . back there . . . in the gray city . . . the one he had left. Something important about that.
The stuff wriggled all over his face. He wrenched away. Scraped at it with leaden hands. Gluey ropes stuck to him. Licking strands inched across his mouth, nose, eyes. He slapped at them, stripped them away. A vile reek leapt up into his nostrils: flavors like emotions—angry, vindictive, spiteful, wronged love.
He wadded up the cloying filament, struggling against waves of fleeting but sharp emotions. He dropped the fluffy, welcoming resilience and instantly regretted doing it. The pang of remorse was keen and oddly bitter. Shibo punched through to him with
Get away! Quick!
—and he was off, scrambling fast, part of him flooded with remorse, another scared.
“What was that?”
Some form of parasite. Rather sophisticated.
“You told me to do it.”
I only suggest. I cannot act.
Her hurt tone irritated him. “You leaned on me, dammit, made—”
He slammed into Quath in his hurry. As he picked himself up she sent one of her keen-edged staccato bursts that was as close as she got to sounding like human laughter.
“Those’re trouble,” Toby said lamely.
It had all been internal, he saw. Fever-ripples of contrary emotions danced across his skin where the velvet had grasped. His fresh epidermis on the back of his injured hand sent him a puckering sense of pleasure, as if the flesh was being kissed by a wide, welcoming mouth.
FOUR
Unsettled Movement
They had run themselves out and still the seeping light did not ebb.
They were not on a revolving planet, so day and night did not make their cyclic claims. A fitful glow soaked through from exposed teeth of timestone, casting shadows among the green and yellow foliage. Toby went hard until his boots dragged, so they stopped and slept. Still no sign of anyone else. Or of pursuit.
He woke up to hear Shibo singing. Words pealed, a delicate but persistent melody, light and airy. Then he realized that his eyes were open but he saw nothing.
He blinked to restore vision. Twisted trees, big-bellied clouds, rock—his vision flickered, stabilized. He sat up, disturbed. Nothing threatening nearby. Wind sighing in the stringy brush. A sulphurous lance of light cutting a foggy glade to his left.
There was no reason for her to co-opt his senses. “What . . . ?”
I needed an outing. You were soundly asleep so—
“Yeasay, and now I’m not. No thanks to you.”
After your misadventure yesterday, I expect you could use a little help.
“Misad—oh, the purple flames? You were the one wanted to give it a closer look.”
You misremember. I alerted you to it when you were up to your chin in—
“Not the way I recall. You were at my back, pushin’ the whole time, wanting to touch it.”
You have edited out your own attraction.
“The hell I have. I wondered what it was, sure, but—”
Let’s not argue. We escaped without harm—together. That is the important point. As long as we remain together and alert, even in such a strange and wonderful place we can stay safe.
This little lecture put his teeth on edge but he kept quiet. Directing thoughts to her would just make her say more and right now he wanted inner silence, a chance to think by himself. For himself.
He went for a call of nature. While he was burying it so the smell would be hard to track, Shibo talked to him. He butted her back—pressure against a stiff wall. He struggled silently, mouth twisting, and then came the shock: he could not get rid of her. She was always there now, riding behind his eyes.
Why should you not want my help?
“Why? ’Cause I got no choice anymore.
You are too young to go forth without my aid.
“How ’bout I decide that?”
My point exactly
. You can make bad decisions, you know.
“At least they’d be mine.”
We have such a closeness. Do not push me away.
Something about her “closeness” made him uneasy, but he could not find the words.
—a cloying sense of moist pressures, syrupy air that would not leave his heaving lungs, liquid running in through his nose and ears and unwilling mouth, snaky fog-feelers sweet, so sweet—
When his breathing was back to normal he tramped back to Quath. She had warmed up some of his own field grub, stock she was carrying for him.
He forgot about Shibo. The greasy excellences of the hot, oily food pushed her presence clear out of his consciousness. Which was a relief. She had been hanging in him for days now, heavy as a wet boot. He only realized this when she was subdued.
“Uh huh. Dreams, I guess.”
“How would you know?”
“You read my face when I’m asleep?”
“Measurements of what?”
“My God! You work pretty hard.”
“Naysay, I just give people a squint and figure out—hey, you mean that’s how I know how people feel?”
“But for you it is?”
“And if you don’t?”
Toby knew that thought was a net of racing electrical impulses, the dance of atoms speaking through their fleet messengers. But was that all his thoughts meant? He looked at Quath without knowing what to say.
“It’s Shibo. Something about her.”
“Yeah . . .”
“Hey, I’m better than that.”
“Hey, come on. That’s so simplified. Hell, I feel steady and composed plenty of times—just not lately, is all. And Besen, lookit her. She’s as kick-ass as they come, when she gets riled.”
“You got sex on the brain, big-bug,” Toby said uneasily.
“That’s what’s going on in me?”
“What’ll I do?”
“Which?”
“So if I built up this ‘self-sense’ . . . ?”
“Ummm.” He was having trouble keeping his attention on the discussion. He felt a foreboding when he paid exact attention to Quath’s words. But then an itch in his servo-couplers would make him scratch, or a yawn, or some small piping of his sensorium. He would lose the thread of Quath’s argument.
It seemed as if all kinds of little things were poking at him, making his attention veer away from this problem. “The other way—”
“Yeasay.” A deep breath. “Look, I’ll handle this on my own.”
“We got plenty more to worry about.”
“Leave me—and her!—alone.”
Toby leaped up, prickly with energy. He walked off, contracting his sensorium, cutting off discussion. Quath’s words were still with him. You are impelled to unsettled movement, androgen-agitated. His boot thumped in frustration on a chunk of timestone.
He drank from the stream that muttered nearby. The water was sharp and fast-running. It cleared his head and quite suddenly he became aware that he felt deliciously lazy from the sleep. The uneasiness in him was gone, soothed away somehow, and he did not ask what had done it.
As he walked back to Quath a distant peak cracked apart and showered down glittering fragments. Pensively he gazed around at the warped greatness. “Hey, y’know, we could name these.”
“Maybe nobody’s been in this particular Lane before. Could be, right?”
“How long?”
“Ummm.” Toby thought of history in terms of his Aspects, not in “years.” Isaac was of the later Arcologies. Poor fractured Zeno was from even further back. History was people, not numbers. Impatiently he said, “So if we’re the first to be here, we get to do the naming.”
“Tradition, we call it. A right, really.”
<“Rights” are not a useful concept here.>
“Hey, come on. We could use some of those fancy names. Places the Aspects go on about.”
Instantly there flooded into his idling mind a shotgun blast of names, titles, all tinged with faint echoes of silvery memory. Tombs of Ishtar. Grand Palace. Altars of Innocence. Goddam-mountain. Bamboozle Bridge. Androscogginn. Pinnacle Prime. Dassadummakeag. Ever-rest. Pike’s Pyramid. Isis. Mount Olive. DoDeDeed. Angry Sink.
Something in her tone made Toby blink. It was an odd human vanity, he saw, a desire to grab and hold. Shibo helped him see what every nomad knew in his sinews—that the world was to see and use and move on, part of the flow and trek of life. Naming the land didn’t fit.
“Well . . . Let ’em name themselves, then.”
But a part of him felt frustrated. He hid that from Shibo. Or tried.
FIVE
Hard Spark
Despite steep passes and rough ground they made good time—whatever that meant, in a twisted esty-place that kept confusing Toby’s ways of thinking. Several times the air and rock swayed like things seen under water and he felt sick.
Weather, Quath said. The esty adjusting to the infall of mass. His inner ear told him that “down” was a matter of opinion, shifting as the timestone groaned and flakes popped off.
They entered wind-whipped desert. Jumbled terrain curved up and away into a burnt-orange sky. The other side of the Lane was so far away he could not make it out even under highest closeupping.
“Uh huh. There’s somethin’ more, though. You feel it?”
“Yeasay. I can’t pin it down.”
“Not mech, I’d say. Doesn’t smell like them.”
“Some ways, maybe.”
Quath was getting jittery. She said little and her legs fidgeted when she wasn’t using them.
It got hotter, then suddenly cold. A dry wind sucked and chimed like faint music. Small esty waves rippled by. The whispery tones were clear but mysterious, inhuman but pleasant to a lonely ear, deeply still and yet moving with the flexing of the esty.
“Sure not much water here,” Toby said, trying to keep some talk going against their shared uneasiness.
“You figure it was made for us? I mean, humans?”
“I remember you saying once that you’d mingled genetic stuff with some species, way back in history. Was it with us?”
“Oh yeasay? How high?”
Toby wasn’t sure what “advanced” might mean, and was not much impressed if it meant you were huge and had to clank around in a hard carapace and knock over things without noticing.
He had tried to shave in the mornings here but the water and soap had the fluid sucked out of them by the air before he was half through. Aridity squared, air like a sponge.
Breezes of thwarted gravity led them into a territory of demented vegetation. Corkscrew ferns twisted in tight loops all around them. Giant fronds feathered to catch the sporadic light of the distant esty walls.
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