“Humans aren’t so easy to figure, you said once.”
<He has been obsessed with coming here, that I knew. His shadow falls across his memories of Shibo. That his love of the woman would intrude upon your relationship—this I could not anticipate.>
“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—”
<I had warned of this. Sealed-away sections of spacetime. They have their own atmospheres, biospheres. Such spaces are seldom visited, the Andro person said, for they lie within the jointed esty-work which reflects—>
“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—”
<Hold to me. The [untranslatable] seizes us.>
“What’s the damned [untranslatable] mean?”
<We writhe in the stochasticity.>
“Stocas what?”
<The time-spun evolution of the esty. Grab my legs!>
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.
<Hold. I am losing a leg.>—and her shank sheared off. It rang hard against him. “Ow!”
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. <Be still. Hold on. This is the stochasticity. The random esty’s laborings.>
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.
