The moist forest around him lay at the end of a long shadowy tunnel and purple flies buzzed in halos around the tunnel walls.
Closing, far away. Sliding dark.
He pitched forward into the tunnel.
Frames
In one frame of reference, the Wedge whirls at a blistering angular velocity, skimming razor-close to the speed of light.
In another mathematical frame, it stands stationary in a geometric manifold. Still, silent. Lines of folded space-time eddy about it.
In this view, despite excruciating gradients and wrenching torques, the Wedge is an island of tranquil stability. Gravitational radiation from the black hole coalesces about its slippery contours.
Waves lap. Languid, easy. Torsional stresses play like intricate spider webs along slick, pulsing bulges.
This pressure sustains the Wedge against all lashing dissipations. It has done so for an interval whose length—or duration—depends upon the local geometry of the observer.
In still another frame of reference, the Wedge is locked in unending, furious struggle with the black hole.
Forces wrestle. The Eater seeks to eat. The Wedge jams itself between the Eater’s jaws. Pries them open. Plugs the gullet. Saves itself.
All are true.
Each is a frame. Truth is the sum of all frames.
Down the magnetic field lines that thread the Wedge, rubbery yet unbreakable, trickle wave packets of rippling complexity. They carry information in the only fashion that can slip through the knotted weave of the Wedge.
Along these slender strands—wiry, coiled lifelines—the mechanical civilization converses with its delegate. The machine intelligences gather in packets, elaborate sliding decompositions of data. They linger above the fray of the great accretion disk, in the eternal sleet of hard radiation. Against this torrent the gliding minds use defenses of ceramic and metal.
By rippling the magnetic field lines they converse with their delegate. Hollow voices down a vast well.
At the bottom, the lone creature hears. Replies. Always amid discord, the delegate must both debate and act. Dividing its intelligence yet again, it assigns separate portions to these tasks.
It does not enjoy the pleasures of its rulers, who float in majestic remove. It must endure the rasp and grit of the lands within the Wedge. Seeking, always seeking.
All parties to the discussion think at the speed of light. Their voices cannot escape their origins, however, or the assumptions of their kind.
I/You have explored a huge array of vaults and spaces, |>A<|. Yet you find nothing!
I have discovered a wealth of primate culture!
That was not your task, |>A<|.
How well I know. Our own ancient data imply that there are special, message-bearing primates. I have sought them. But they are difficult to separate from the hordes of primates here.
There are so many? Hiding from us?
They fear us—quite rightly, I suppose.
Search out these certain message-bearers! Be done with such irritants.
The spaces here are innumerable.
Continue. Secure the minimum of three genetic layers which we/you require.
We have the basic biological information from the oldest generation, the “grandfather.” But the nature of the coded message demands three generations. Direct biological descent.
The Legacies implied that we/you needed full analysis of them. This means complete and viable copies.
I/We think not. They could just as well be dead.
I have been carefully reading each surekill I make. My subunits are equally careful. I shall not miss the characteristic signature of the particular primate we need, the youngest. I knew him.
On their planet?
He was useful in securing his father-self when I wished to make a capture.
I hope you/we can do as well now/here.
You/We are fading from our/your field of view. Is the Wedge damaging?
I have navigated the shifts here, but there is a troubling background sense. Something more lurks in these warped passages.
What is it? I/You have heard reports from earlier units we/all sent into the Wedge. Before they vanished from us/you.
I do not know how to describe it. A faint trembling presence beyond my fields. But it is not localized.
An echo.
I think not. It comes from everywhere but does not repeat what I send. I am uneasy.
Stifle your/our reactions. You/We act for us/all, remember.
This is not the time for hesitation.
Kill them all if you/we can. I/We would be done with this vexation.
I have surekilled so many. My factors overload. So much wealth to know and savor!
Forget your/our strange sense of beauty! Never before has such a strong agency as you/we penetrated the Wedge so deeply. Know them, yes. Then end these parasites in their last lair.
Savage them!
I obey.
PART FIVE
Malign Attentions
ONE
The Pain of Eternity
Toby woke feeling tired but clean. He had been out for a long time. His arm throbbed less now. Blunt pain, as if it were seeping away from him.
Shibo wasn’t there.
He had her chip in his carrypouch. Now he probed for her self. Skated over inky crevices where his Aspects lived their compacted semi-lives. Tramped through the galley of Faces.
Gray passageways yawned. Isaac and Zeno and the others called to him and wanted to talk about Shibo. They always wanted to talk. About anything. But of Shibo there was nothing.
He knew shreds might still cling somewhere in him. A Personality was by nature diffused, hard to grasp. So he would have to watch carefully. The earlier signs—mood shifts, deflections of his attention, outright seizure of his sensorium—had been increasingly overt. If traces of her remained, they would be subtle.
He got up, creaking. Sore. With a bone-deep weariness that sleep could not take away.
No skittering warnings in the sensorium. It expanded like a blue bubble in his vision and brushed against only the rustlings of the forest and dark-bellied clouds. Time to get back to business.
Years of Family discipline had taught him to follow orders when he did not like them. Something in the way Quath told him to leave had the force of an order.
He carried it out without thinking. Thought, after all, was a luxury when living depended on speed and concealment and silent savvy.
He moved with his sensorium compressed to a half-sphere barely bigger than his arms’ reach. That allowed practically no time to defend against one of the spark things that had hit Quath. But it would make him harder to find, he hoped.
When he reached the next high point he peered backward. Shadowy forms, gliding like leaves blown on systematic breezes. Quath. Quath. He yearned to send the call.
More burnt-yellow sparks jumped and bounced among the forest. Others cruised far up toward the other enclosing curvature of the Lane. Where he had left Quath something fired vicious hot-white bolts.
Toby knew it would be foolish to try to raise Quath’s signal but the desire to do it was almost uncontrollable. At last he turned away and devoted himself to speed.
He ran for some time before he noticed that he was crying. Never, on the long pursuits the Family had endured on Snowglade, had he ever felt alone. Now the sour desperation of his predicament descended on him and he could not stop the anguish bubbling up in him. No Quath, no Family, just bare empty flight.
What would Killeen think? He made himself stop, willing the hardness into himself until the tears quit. He had to uphold the Bishop way. Even here, even alone. Maybe especially here.
He came to a bare stony territory. Would he be too exposed here? Dirty-gray clouds hugged the ground and then lifted suddenly, as if some giant had snatched them away. But there were none of the airborne forms that hovered half-seen like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. So he went on.
Something
came over a distant peak and vectored in on him. He shot at it and missed and it burned his right side in an instant. His second shot got off as he went down. It caught the thing. A quick, buzzing fireball. Something tiny, tumbling. It crashed down, a sound like the air ripping apart.
He had shat his pants. That made him disgusted with himself but his right arm was more important.
The pain made his hands tremble. He got his right side up and running again with some repair work. His arm was sore but would move again.
He found running water nearby and got cleaned up. Humbling work. In an abstract way he was surprised he had been so scared. All fear, he realized, later seems somewhat ludicrous.
By the time he could limp over to where the thing had gone down there was just a hole in the ground. He had been damn lucky to wing the thing and knew it.
He licked his lips, feeling the fear again. If he kept going this way one of the seekers would track him for sure, bring down a whole flock the next time.
He remembered Quath’s little lesson about the sums and how in this geometry, Lanes were like those pairs of numbers. Each pair summed to a hundred, and rearranging them endlessly kept the grand total constant. The esty stayed intact.
And the total did not have to be a hundred or a thousand or a million. The Lanes could number a million. Or a billion. Or some other word offered by his chattering Isaac Aspect, big words ending in -ion that just said that it was bigger than any person could ever know.
So he was not surprised when time wore on and he kept moving and saw no one. He might never meet a human again. The Lanes could snake on for an uncountable, twisty forever.
The trick was to find a way out of this particular place. A way the mechs could not track easily. How? Just running harder wasn’t enough.
Puzzles thickened in his head. Quath had said that gravity was esty, curved. Mass did that. Planets held you to them by curving space-time, which humans felt as a clear, strong force. Yeasay, fine.
But Isaac said that esty curvature generated further curvature. So gravity could make more of itself, conjuring up more from less. Something had knitted this esty so that it held firm. It even prospered here on the lip of the abyss, kissing the Eater of Everything.
“Anything you understand, you can use,” Toby muttered to himself as he trotted. He remembered this was a saying of his grandfather Abraham, and wondered where in this place old Abraham might be.
“Abraham, he would’ve done something with this stuff,” he said, voice frail against the whispery musics of the landscape.
No place to run, not literally anyway. And he was getting tired.
So he tried to shape the timestone. Logic said it was impossible but logic wasn’t doing too well here lately, was it?
His weaponry had no effect, but after laser-cutting the stuff glowed. He tried microwaves, sonics, even a nano-reamer he still carried from Snowglade days. Nothing worked.
Next he used the whole spectrum. No response. He hit it with pulsed infrared. For the barest instant a thin grin split the stone.
Again. This time it lasted longer and he jammed his boot in and shoved. It gave, then started crushing his boot. He yanked free and the stuff slammed shut.
Next time he was more careful. First, he found a place where he felt nauseous. Dimpling perspectives, watery light, refractions of sound and space. Where the Lanes intersected, gravity twisted.
Second, he cut and heated it. He jabbed, pried, ran through variations of weaponry. Sweaty work. He cut his hand, scorched an arm. Nothing came right the first time. But it seemed that he was slicing deeper into the timestone. The fatigue got to him and he had to stop and rest. Sweat trickled into his eyes and then he knew it wasn’t sweat.
Tears again. He was impatient with himself this time. Killeen would snort and look the other way. Besen would be sympathetic, and that would be even worse.
“If they get you, know what they’ll do?” Saying it out loud helped. “They’ll suck out all you know. Use it against Besen and Killeen and ever’body.”
His voice was stern and that helped, too. He realized how much he missed that simple thing, the sound of humanity, a voice not his own. So damn screwed up you’re talking to yourself, another part of him said, but he pushed that thought away. Anything that made him feel better helped, and the hell with analyzing.
Back to work.
Progress was slow. He found a rippling ridgeline with esty-fog rolling over it in strands of orange light. He tried the cutting again. A broad line cracked the stone. Through it he caught a whiff of something vile and poisonous, pale green vapors—and kicked at the stone to close it, fast. Hard as the esty was to open, acoustic tremors could zip it shut again. The stuff had a kind of surface tension.
After that he learned to sense the dimples and fluxes in the esty. He could slit one open for a quick look, but it slammed back tight.
Which was lucky, most of the time. Some passageways led to Lanes of vacuum. Others to stony, chilling landscapes. A few to howling, dusty tornadoes.
His systems warned him of openings that brimmed with searing radiation. He closed up fast, but one time something hot and fluid shot out and darted away before the seam shut. It cut a deep streak across the sky.
Once he saw a whole city through a momentary slit. Its streets turned and looped around each other. So did the oblong buildings, and traffic of slender tubes teemed in and out of the porous walls. The things inside the tubes looked like boiling white stones. They seemed to take some interest in him and he felt a wave of sudden, solid fear. He let the portal crash shut.
After a few dozen times he had learned the feel of it, a kind of craft. For days he simply fooled and tinkered and forgot about what was probably following him. If he was to ever find the Family or Abraham, he had to master the skills here.
The spots where the esty seemed pliable kept moving, restless loci. He was half-nauseous as he worked the stone but that was the price. Finding the moment to strike, the angle, the spectrum—it became more like hunting than craftwork, intuitions unspoken.
Most Lanes seemed hostile to human life. Not all. He slipped through one that seemed pleasant, the first time he had tried to wriggle his way in.
It worked, barely. He lost some skin and suffered frostbite in his fingers. But he got through into a valley of fractured timestone. At least it was more interesting than where he had been.
What’s more, experience taught him that the timestone lied. Many times he sat eating whatever he had gathered and blending it in with his rations, and marveled at the formal, clean-lined shapes of distant ranges. They were elegant, serene, pointed. Then later he met them close up and knew them for what they were—rough, unforgiving.
Torsions pulled at him in the broken slides he struggled across, along the jagged ledges he pulled himself over. Torques played along the narrow and shifting shelves he crawled along, afraid to look down or up because those directions were fickle and flickering.
Paths curled over into tunnels—with him inside. They stretched long and necked down.
He had to crawl for his life to get through squeezing-down knotholes. Some were slow, others brutally fast. He dived through one that groaned, trying to slam shut upon him, and lost a boot heel in the process. The heel sheared off clean, removing any doubts about what it would have meant to be a little slower. He had to limp for a long while before it grew back.
And all the while he felt a deepening loneliness. He woke from a sound sleep, calling Quath with a dry throat. He dreamed, and was speaking eternally to Killeen in a hoarse voice that couldn’t get through the fog around him. He hoped that they were still alive somewhere and at other times he knew with a final, leaden certainty that they were not.
Events passed. After a while he found that he knew how to read a shifting three-dimensional map, to follow a trail over slick rock, to memorize landmarks no matter what angle he saw them from, to build a fire in misty wind-whipped rain, to treat bites from small wriggly animals, to rappel down a
trembling cliff, to glide down a glacier of frozen air, to splint his own broken bone and lie doggo long enough for the two days it took to heal, to find water under gritty sand, to coax and load a burro-beast he found wandering by itself, to bury a body torn into long strings—evidence of mechs, he guessed.
He patched up a rubber flyer he found on a saddleback ridge and used it to fly a great long distance on a rough wind. After he crashed, the front caught up with him. A sudden, biting blizzard.
No shelter. He started digging back into timestone itself, a chip at a time. As he dug in the sharp cold, events peeled off when he struck them with his field shovel. Cries and odd coughs came from them, as they sheared and broke like crystalline planes.
He reached a layer that brimmed with the heat of some past summer. With some hollowing out he had a cave big enough to curl up in.
That lasted out the deep cold. He slept, grateful for warmth, but Killeen was talking to him through the milky fog. Toby, Toby. The next words were just beyond hearing. He strained to catch them and woke up. Warmth, loneliness. Then he felt that the timestone was warm because it was slowly mashing him, trying to close in. “Damn!” He rolled out and staggered away into pale light, the tag end of the blizzard.
Besen, the mechs will get her too if they can suck out of me what they want . . . and it’ll be because of me and my damn fool running . . . and if the mechs win here, it’s forever, no Bishops ever again, gone to dust and never knowing what all this is, what it means . . .
He found himself muttering as he moved, but there was not much to the thoughts except the aloneness he now had as a kind of companion.
A smash-storm came and taught him to dodge falling rock. When it was over the landscape had contorted again and he learned how to climb out of a slick box canyon, how to slide down a steepening peak before it broke off and sailed on its own across what looked like empty air.
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