“You got rations?”
<I have learned to carry some.>
“Me, too. Let’s eat. Then some sleep. Talk later.”
<You realize the grave course you have set.>
“Yeasay. Feeling good for the first time in quite a while.”
<I do not like to understand so little.>
“Funny—that’s just what I do like, right now.”
TWO
Time’s Grip
He woke up fuzzily. Shibo was crooning to him, a soft voice playing down through his body, massaging his muscles and strumming along fibrous nerve nets.
Wake. I love you for what you did and I will help you through this place. Hard I can be, and soft, too. For you. But you must wake now, as much as you would like to stay down there in the syrup and cotton.
“Uhhhhh . . . okay . . .”
—a liquid licking pleasure, soft darks, crooning winds outside, musky delights below, pulses hammering, sharp tang of blood from a bitten lip, quickening gasps—
He pushed the feelings away. Pleasant, but he knew he had to wake up. A dream? Somehow more concrete than that . . .
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.>
