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.
<Humans and others have shaped the esty to their liking. Your father told me, when the Andro person was looking at your Legacy, that it contained a reference to this place. It was once referred to as “the Redoubt.”>
“Huh? To doubt again?”
<No, a place to retire to. I gather that humanity, and other carbon-based forms, came here to escape the mechs, long ago.>
“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.”
<They call it timestone.>
“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, <The esty is an arena for the struggles of particles and fields. Or else maybe there was nothing but curved esty—and somehow everything else, matter and motion, came out of curving the esty.>
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.”
<Where?>
“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.
<Esty cannot last.> Quath didn’t seem disturbed. <As I suspected.>
“Where’d it go?”
<Somewhen else.>
“Why?”
<I gather that a construction in esty shares the property of being in anxious equilibrium with the property of duration.>
“Huh? You mean this whole place can’t last?”
<In principle, no. In practice, it is like your skin. Some sloughs away, and other esty grows to replace it.>
“Seems a funny way to build.”
<It is the living way.>
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.
