Toby leaped up, prickly with energy. He walked off, contracting his sensorium, cutting off discussion. Quath’s words were still with him. You are impelled to unsettled movement, androgen-agitated. His boot thumped in frustration on a chunk of timestone.
He drank from the stream that muttered nearby. The water was sharp and fast-running. It cleared his head and quite suddenly he became aware that he felt deliciously lazy from the sleep. The uneasiness in him was gone, soothed away somehow, and he did not ask what had done it.
As he walked back to Quath a distant peak cracked apart and showered down glittering fragments. Pensively he gazed around at the warped greatness. “Hey, y’know, we could name these.”
<I do not follow.>
“Maybe nobody’s been in this particular Lane before. Could be, right?”
<Possibly. Though humans and others have occupied this complexity for very long times.>
“How long?”
<The Illuminates say it is at least several tens of thousands of your years old.>
“Ummm.” Toby thought of history in terms of his Aspects, not in “years.” Isaac was of the later Arcologies. Poor fractured Zeno was from even further back. History was people, not numbers. Impatiently he said, “So if we’re the first to be here, we get to do the naming.”
<That is a human convention?>
“Tradition, we call it. A right, really.”
<“Rights” are not a useful concept here.>
“Hey, come on. We could use some of those fancy names. Places the Aspects go on about.”
Instantly there flooded into his idling mind a shotgun blast of names, titles, all tinged with faint echoes of silvery memory. Tombs of Ishtar. Grand Palace. Altars of Innocence. Goddam-mountain. Bamboozle Bridge. Androscogginn. Pinnacle Prime. Dassadummakeag. Ever-rest. Pike’s Pyramid. Isis. Mount Olive. DoDeDeed. Angry Sink.
<Why name them at all?> Quath asked quietly.
Something in her tone made Toby blink. It was an odd human vanity, he saw, a desire to grab and hold. Shibo helped him see what every nomad knew in his sinews—that the world was to see and use and move on, part of the flow and trek of life. Naming the land didn’t fit.
“Well . . . Let ’em name themselves, then.”
But a part of him felt frustrated. He hid that from Shibo. Or tried.
FIVE
Hard Spark
Despite steep passes and rough ground they made good time—whatever that meant, in a twisted esty-place that kept confusing Toby’s ways of thinking. Several times the air and rock swayed like things seen under water and he felt sick.
Weather, Quath said. The esty adjusting to the infall of mass. His inner ear told him that “down” was a matter of opinion, shifting as the timestone groaned and flakes popped off.
They entered wind-whipped desert. Jumbled terrain curved up and away into a burnt-orange sky. The other side of the Lane was so far away he could not make it out even under highest closeupping.
“Big place. Gravity’s opposite over there?”
<True. The sickness we feel comes from tidal wrenchings.>
“Uh huh. There’s somethin’ more, though. You feel it?”
<I sense being watched.>
“Yeasay. I can’t pin it down.”
<We are sensed in a diffused way. Unsettling.>
“Not mech, I’d say. Doesn’t smell like them.”
<Perhaps. The mechanicals are smarter than our kinds.>
“Some ways, maybe.”
<Yes. In some ways.>
Quath was getting jittery. She said little and her legs fidgeted when she wasn’t using them.
It got hotter, then suddenly cold. A dry wind sucked and chimed like faint music. Small esty waves rippled by. The whispery tones were clear but mysterious, inhuman but pleasant to a lonely ear, deeply still and yet moving with the flexing of the esty.
“Sure not much water here,” Toby said, trying to keep some talk going against their shared uneasiness.
<Liquid water is a rarity in the galaxy. Near the Eater the problem of supporting organic forms such as ourselves is far worse. I am sure the esty is made to collect and conserve water with high efficiency.>
“You figure it was made for us? I mean, humans?”
<No. Most planetary life shares fundamental chemistries. Mine is not so different from yours.>
“I remember you saying once that you’d mingled genetic stuff with some species, way back in history. Was it with us?”
