He lay sprawled across spongy grass, arms spread out, boots off, servos dead. Vulnerable. He tapped an incisor two short raps and felt his servos stutter back to life. His sensorium, spread wide for guard duty, contracted into a half-sphere. Nothing funny on the perimeter, no orange-haloed possibles lying doggo inside. Suit weaponry brimming, fresh-charged when he left Argo.
Safe to stir. Long ago his father had taught him to appear dead when he awoke, until he was fully ready to fight. He lifted his right hand—
—and it wouldn’t budge. It lay palm-up on smooth, cool timestone. The flesh near his knuckles felt cold, stiff. He pulled harder. A little give, not much. He sat up awkwardly, hand pinned to rock. “Quath.”
<Good morning, though the light here does not properly lend itself to that description.>
“I’m stuck. Lemme—”
<I don’t advise—>
“It’s got me.”
<Still—>
He yanked hard. The right hand came free with an awful ripping sound—and a flash of white-hot pain. “Ow!”
The entire back of his hand was raw, a scarlet patch of oozing corpuscles. It had left behind a tattered rag still stuck to the timestone. Already turning brown, blood thickening in air.
<An unfortunate side effect of the physics. I should have anticipated—>
Toby clutched his hand and swore. He popped open his medical pouch, fished out supplies and slapped an all-purpose bandage on the bloody damage. “How’d—what—”
<I should have realized. Esty rock is not truly solid.>
“Feels solid.”
<It is compressed events, rendered as mass. Press against it long enough and you become part of the event.>
“What ‘event’? That stuff tried to eat me.”
<Do not ascribe intention to physical law. Your skin became wedded to the esty. It began to diffuse into the occurrencespace which this substance is.>
“You mean everything here can sop us up, like sponges?”
<Only if you dwell long enough in close proximity—within a few atomic lattice spacings, say.>
“This grass, even the air?”
<Not at all. They are ordinary mass, the simple form of matter.>
Toby shook his head. “Look, let’s eat some of that ordinary stuff. Provisions, I mean. I’m woozy.”
Quath threw him a ration. <I gather that the timestone does eat matter placed against it, but at different speeds. The bare stone—such as where you let your hand lie—absorbs quickly. Elsewhere, it does not—so dirt and life can survive. All quite ingeniously constructed.>
Toby barely heard this. The bandage was a living layer doing its work, regrowing his skin. Already the back of his hand wriggled, a scummy green mat eating his drying blood and making epidermis. But Family bioengineering—when it had existed as a living craft—had dictated that repair came first. Nurture was far down the list, so the pain still made him grit his teeth. He turned off most of it by going though his subcontrols, but it took time. Pain could also be a useful reminder, so it was not easy to block.
He ate some of his rations, sitting gingerly on grass a good distance from any timestone. Morning was nothing like sunrise here, though there was a crisp bite in the air. Patches of stone exuded pale beams of light that scattered among the twisted trees. Distant peaks brimmed with slow-shifting colors. When the clouds far above parted he could see other sources of radiance giving off diffuse glows that came and waxed and flared again in long, patient pulses.
<This light seems to come from the accretion disk around the black hole. It becomes trapped in the esty and carried along by solidified past events.>
“Seems enough to grow trees.”
<The virulence of the disk is muted here until it sustains life. This cannot be accidental.>
“Who you figure made this?”
<Not even the Philosophs know. I am too humble to speculate. Use of the fabric of space-time as construction material is a skill beyond my comprehension.>
“How ’bout us?”
<You? Primates?>
“Why not? We made Argo, a long way back. And don’t forget the Chandeliers.”
<You do not understand how much greater the esty is.>
“Ummm. You’re impressed by big ideas. Me, I’m impressed by a tore-up hand.”
Toby had meant the suggestion as a joke anyway. He had long ago given up trying to understand where things came from. Time enough for such luxuries when he felt safe. If ever.
Down the shining air came a bird. It was the first he had seen since Snowglade, in the years before Citadel Bishop fell. The mechs had found birds a fairly trivial exercise in extinction and had easily blown them from the skies.
This one was far larger than anything he had seen aloft that was not mech. It neither fluttered like a butterfly nor soared like a predator hawk, but instead sported with proud reliance on the fields of the air. He watched it snag something he could not make out. Then it wallowed through a milky strand of congealing vapor, more like swimming than flying.
The cup of mottled air blew over Toby and he felt a sudden sharp chill. He tried to raise his arm and found it would not go, that he could not even bat his eyes. His chest froze. Muscles locked up. Then the stuff like translucent glass was gone and he could breathe. The bird had wafted by without a twitter or slightest show of concern. Only as it passed did he see that it had four wings and an outsized head. Yellow wings churned against a gathering breeze and the air thickened around it. Winds curled. The atmosphere turned a color like chalk meeting rust.
“Quath!”
<Wait. It passes.>
“Some weather,” was all Toby could manage to say.
<Esty can sublime into vapor, I believe, even liquid—or so the “Introductory Text” implied. It mingles with the air. Try not to breathe it in.>
Toby got his breathing right again. His chest hurt. Rock that turned to air? And maybe back again? He let his aching lungs subside.
Another bird came slow-flapping down a passing draft. With admiration Toby followed its artful course on vagrant winds. “I dunno about this place, old bug-girl. If you have to check it out before you draw a breath—”
Quath shot the bird. It blew to pieces. Toby cried out in alarm. “What’d you—”
<Look at it.>
Toby found parts of the body in some stumpy grass. Blood everywhere, guts glistening fresh, an acid scent. Head cracked open, eyes staring. At the back of the skull, shiny electricals.
“Damn! It’s got mech parts.”
<Made by them. Adroitly disguised.>
“And here.”
<Precisely. Mechanicals have infiltrated the esty Redoubt.>
“All this time I thought we were safe.”
<So do many. They scrupulously filter visitors such as ourselves for mechanical spies, for microscopic agents, for intrusive programs in human computers. Andro said these measures were effective.>
“Double dog damn. That bird, it looked real pretty.”
<I find it disturbing that the mechanicals know how to integrate organic forms with their own.>
“They did before, remember? That crazy leader on Trump, that Supremacy—his head was packed with stuff like this.”
<True. I should have generalized from that.>
“But who’d think? Inside a bird, even.”
<It was studying us for a bit too long, I thought.>
“If it had time to send a signal to whatever made it—”
<Quite so. What are the chances that a mech device would find us, in the labyrinths of the esty?>
“Ummm. Depends on how many Lanes there are.”
<There may be uncountably many. The mathematics of this place is coy with infinities.>
Coy? Quath picked some pretty funny words, sometimes. “Depends on how many spies the mechs’re sending, too.”
<This bird implies, then, that the mechanicals are much concerned. That they are hunting you.>
“Me? C’mon, my father’d like to get his hands on me, but
mechs? I’m not important to them.”
Quath’s servos wheezed uneasily. <Uncertainties converge. I believe we must again make use of the esty’s prime property—concealment.>
THREE
The Rock of Chaos
To “make use” meant moving fast over unknown terrain, looking for a pore-opening. Toby thought of the wrenching places where the esty boiled open as sick-making confusions, but Quath spoke of them as the finest work of intelligence she had ever encountered.
Toby tried hard to understand as they ran, loping over sheets of timestone. His hand still hurt fiercely and he stepped lively, afraid that the apparently solid rock would suck him in. Quath made her screeching, ratchetlike laugh about this but he did not think it was funny.
Part of his problem was envisioning time and space all gumboed together to make something he could walk on. He was acutely aware of the time, all right. Of the enhanced, vivid now that divided the known but fading past from the unknown, ghostly future. But how did you marry that to distance?
“Time, well, nobody can stop it, yeasay? And space, that’s what keeps everything from mashing together—so what’ve they got in common?”
Toby was trying to provoke her, but Quath took it all very solemnly. Gravely she explained.
Listening, Toby caught an occasional glimmering. Humans had an awareness of things becoming, bursting forth into concrete solidity, and then fading into a limbo of memory. Quath said that space-time, the esty, contained real time, and the transience of human experiences was only an illusion peculiar to living creatures.
Time goes, you say? ah no!
Alas, time stays, we go.
—and cackled with weird glee.
They passed by huge blank timestone walls, porous with blurred light. Giant towers worked and popped with energy nearby, growing like triangular trees. Some seemed able to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart with their restless energy. Quath and Toby hurried by. They ventured with scarcely a pause into abrupt turns, mazy avenues of timestone. Toby had kept himself in pretty fair condition on Argo, he thought, but he had a trial in just keeping Quath within sight. His lungs burned. Servos ran hot.
He stopped abruptly. “Quath, I was wrong. Dead wrong.”
<How?>
“We’ve run out on the Family. That bird—what if mechs’re all over this place now?”
<You believe the mechanicals will seek all the humans here?>
“Bishops, anyway. Come on.”
<Where?>
“I’m heading back.”
He felt good about himself for the next few hours, while they backtracked. Quath kept quiet. After a while Toby saw why.
“Uh . . . which way from here?”
<I do not know.>
“We came this way, yeasay?”
<Indeed.>
“The Lane connection, it was somewhere around here.” Hills, trees, sky—all different.
<The esty is strongly stochastic at the Lane connections, for those are the instability loci.>
Toby sagged down, eyes blank. “So we can’t find our way back?”
<I fear not.>
So they reversed again. Fruitlessly returning over the same ground was demoralizing. And the terrain was subtly different, which deepened Toby’s gloom. He had run away from his father, straight into a trap. A place that forgave no errors.
Quath kept looking around, studying, distracted. When he asked her why, she said, <I am letting stochasticity—that is, chance—choose to favor us.>
“I—I don’t get it. What’re we looking for?”
<An obliging accident.>
“Sounds like a contradiction in terms.” He panted hard, slippery air clogging his throat.
<You told me once of a simple puzzle you had solved. Here:>
Into his sensorium framed a pattern of paired numbers.
1100
299
343
6197
596
**
**
5051
“You messed it up. Each pair was supposed to add up to a hundred and one. There were fifty of them, so that multiplied out to, uh, to five thousand and fifty.”
<True. But in this sum I merely rearranged the numbers in a random way—but I kept them all, so that the total remains four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. The esty is so devised. What Andro called the Lanes are subsets of the entire spacetime here, tunnels opening and closing at random. But the sum of it all—the four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of it—remains the same. Nothing is gained or lost.>
<The esty conserves itself. But the continual shifting of the Lanes makes a map of the esty impossible. Relying on the stochastic nature of the interplaying Lanes is the only way to protect them.>
“The mechs can’t find any particular Lane, because it’s never in the same place twice?”
<Or the same when.>
“Hiding in time, not space?”
<In both—in esty. The Lanes evolve by interacting. The falling of a single timestone can multiply its effect, building disorder. Similarly, in a planet’s weather, a mere passing wind can stir forth a storm. Scrambling the esty Lanes rearranges them in time and space. No mathematical algorithm can unbind them or trace their evolution. Security rests on the firm rock of chaos.>
Toby slowed, the idea sinking in. People had hid out here. Long ago, in the Hunker Down Era. Back then Bishops and all the Families had dug into the planets for protection, figuring the mechs worked best in space.
But some fraction of humanity had fled into the esty’s chaos. Mechs could not map this spaghetti space, so they could never be sure of finding all human colonies. He could see what Quath meant with the arithmetic, sort of. But the weirdness of it remained—that disorder was safer than planets, tougher to untie than snarled barbed wire.
Numbers could hold simple, supple majesty. Maybe the strangest part of all this was that reality reflected the dance of numbers. Laws compelled the esty to knot and flex, laws ruled by the skittering logic of chaos. Compared to that mystery, the mechs seemed almost ordinary.
“So where do we go?”
<Forward. The farther we go, the more tangled our path becomes.>
“How’ll we ever get back to the Family?”
<I do not know. I suspect that they, too, will enter this labyrinth.>
“Following us?”
<Do not forget Abraham.>
“Yeasay. Let’s find him first.” He nodded to himself. Having a sense of purpose made him feel better. And this was a better place to be than stuck inside Argo, by far.
<You are following your species-specific behavior.>
Toby had the uneasy feeling that Quath knew what he was thinking. “How’s that?”
<Your primate societies often were ripe with ritual journeys. Young men went off on quests into unknown lands. They had adventures, learned much, and returned transformed.>
“You been studying us again?”
<I do always.>
Toby had been feeling guilty about enjoying this, especially now that they couldn’t get back to the Family. “We’re not so damned predictable!”
<I note patterns. You may have needed to escape the father, in order to define yourself.>
“Hey, you’re pretty heavy with the crap here.”
<I am trying to understand a very strange species.>
“Sometimes understanding’s the booby prize, buggo.” Toby laughed and put all such theorizing out of his mind. It was a luxury, the kind of thing people in cities did. He settled into the rhythm of the run.
He watched the landscape with wary respect, aware now that it took time to shape time. Esty storms had carved out intricate canyons of compacted instants. Compressions and twistings made unscalable walls, stomach-turning drop-offs, boxl
ike traps of curved, silent timestuff.
Moving through the gasping-hard slopes and sudden gaps was exhausting. Quath had ample energy, but the pace began to tell on Toby. He kept looking back to check for signs of pursuit. Unbidden, his father’s words in their last encounter pealed through his mind.
Shibo was there to comfort him, to immerse sharp memory in her soft presence. She sang and delighted him, distractions galore.
Still, the feeling of pursuit would not leave him. His calves began to ache, his breath rasped. He forced himself to keep up with Quath’s great bulk, which seemed to flow easily over the jumbles of gravel and swelling rock.
Finally, when Toby was sweating hard, they took a break at the base of a steep cliff. Quath lowered herself to an easeful position atop her legs and seemed to fall instantly asleep, the first sign he had ever had that she slept at all. Or maybe, with her multiple minds, she was just resting, and letting some fraction of herself stay on watch.
Above them the cliff had spires, pools that hung to the sheer face like teardrops of black iron, and sky-piercing poles of a sickly yellow. But the cliff face itself was smooth. Toby watched a creamy frieze seem to float out of the rock—a slanted void where blobs and strings wrapped and coiled together. He walked over to look.
He peered into a deep field where shadows played. A moment from some other time and place, a painting of agonies. The slow-moving mosaic leaked jarring sounds, like steel racketing on steel.
Deep down in the timestone, ruddy, pulsing blobs fell upon green-tinged stalks, squeezing them until pus oozed from purpling tips. Image-bursts came ratcheting out of the rock like agonies released.
Toby watched, fascinated, and read the action as a battle, a slaughter of the stalks by predatory blobs the color of dried blood. Only after a while did he glimpse the tiny slate-gray stalks that tumbled in the wake of each struggle. Then he guessed that the blobs were somehow assisting in the mating of the stalks, or milking from them the next generation of hesitant, torpid infant stalks.
But this impression itself soon was destroyed by the sight of sickly-yellow blobs emerging from the tips of the new stalks, wobbling like soap bubbles, and then attaching themselves to the mottled underside of the larger blobs.