“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.
And what did their opinion matter, Toby thought wryly, since they were around for such a short glimmering? His Isaac Aspect tendered up an ancient rhyme,
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.
1 100
2 99
