PART FIVE
Malign Attentions
ONE
The Pain of Eternity
Toby woke feeling tired but clean. He had been out for a long time. His arm throbbed less now. Blunt pain, as if it were seeping away from him.
Shibo wasn’t there.
He had her chip in his carrypouch. Now he probed for her self. Skated over inky crevices where his Aspects lived their compacted semi-lives. Tramped through the galley of Faces.
Gray passageways yawned. Isaac and Zeno and the others called to him and wanted to talk about Shibo. They always wanted to talk. About anything. But of Shibo there was nothing.
He knew shreds might still cling somewhere in him. A Personality was by nature diffused, hard to grasp. So he would have to watch carefully. The earlier signs—mood shifts, deflections of his attention, outright seizure of his sensorium—had been increasingly overt. If traces of her remained, they would be subtle.
He got up, creaking. Sore. With a bone-deep weariness that sleep could not take away.
No skittering warnings in the sensorium. It expanded like a blue bubble in his vision and brushed against only the rustlings of the forest and dark-bellied clouds. Time to get back to business.
Years of Family discipline had taught him to follow orders when he did not like them. Something in the way Quath told him to leave had the force of an order.
He carried it out without thinking. Thought, after all, was a luxury when living depended on speed and concealment and silent savvy.
He moved with his sensorium compressed to a half-sphere barely bigger than his arms’ reach. That allowed practically no time to defend against one of the spark things that had hit Quath. But it would make him harder to find, he hoped.
When he reached the next high point he peered backward. Shadowy forms, gliding like leaves blown on systematic breezes. Quath. Quath. He yearned to send the call.
More burnt-yellow sparks jumped and bounced among the forest. Others cruised far up toward the other enclosing curvature of the Lane. Where he had left Quath something fired vicious hot-white bolts.
Toby knew it would be foolish to try to raise Quath’s signal but the desire to do it was almost uncontrollable. At last he turned away and devoted himself to speed.
He ran for some time before he noticed that he was crying. Never, on the long pursuits the Family had endured on Snowglade, had he ever felt alone. Now the sour desperation of his predicament descended on him and he could not stop the anguish bubbling up in him. No Quath, no Family, just bare empty flight.
What would Killeen think? He made himself stop, willing the hardness into himself until the tears quit. He had to uphold the Bishop way. Even here, even alone. Maybe especially here.
He came to a bare stony territory. Would he be too exposed here? Dirty-gray clouds hugged the ground and then lifted suddenly, as if some giant had snatched them away. But there were none of the airborne forms that hovered half-seen like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. So he went on.
Something came over a distant peak and vectored in on him. He shot at it and missed and it burned his right side in an instant. His second shot got off as he went down. It caught the thing. A quick, buzzing fireball. Something tiny, tumbling. It crashed down, a sound like the air ripping apart.
He had shat his pants. That made him disgusted with himself but his right arm was more important.
The pain made his hands tremble. He got his right side up and running again with some repair work. His arm was sore but would move again.
He found running water nearby and got cleaned up. Humbling work. In an abstract way he was surprised he had been so scared. All fear, he realized, later seems somewhat ludicrous.
By the time he could limp over to where the thing had gone down there was just a hole in the ground. He had been damn lucky to wing the thing and knew it.
He licked his lips, feeling the fear again. If he kept going this way one of the seekers would track him for sure, bring down a whole flock the next time.
He remembered Quath’s little lesson about the sums and how in this geometry, Lanes were like those pairs of numbers. Each pair summed to a hundred, and rearranging them endlessly kept the grand total constant. The esty stayed intact.
And the total did not have to be a hundred or a thousand or a million. The Lanes could number a million. Or a billion. Or some other word offered by his chattering Isaac Aspect, big words ending in -ion that just said that it was bigger than any person could ever know.
So he was not surprised when time wore on and he kept moving and saw no one. He might never meet a human again. The Lanes could snake on for an uncountable, twisty forever.
The trick was to find a way out of this particular place. A way the mechs could not track easily. How? Just running harder wasn’t enough.
Puzzles thickened in his head. Quath had said that gravity was esty, curved. Mass did that. Planets held you to them by curving space-time, which humans felt as a clear, strong force. Yeasay, fine.
But Isaac said that esty curvature generated further curvature. So gravity could make more of itself, conjuring up more from less. Something had knitted this esty so that it held firm. It even prospered here on the lip of the abyss, kissing the Eater of Everything.
“Anything you understand, you can use,” Toby muttered to himself as he trotted. He remembered this was a saying of his grandfather Abraham, and wondered where in this place old Abraham might be.
“Abraham, he would’ve done something with this stuff,” he said, voice frail against the whispery musics of the landscape.
No place to run, not literally anyway. And he was getting tired.
So he tried to shape the timestone. Logic said it was impossible but logic wasn’t doing too well here lately, was it?
His weaponry had no effect, but after laser-cutting the stuff glowed. He tried microwaves, sonics, even a nano-reamer he still carried from Snowglade days. Nothing worked.
Next he used the whole spectrum. No response. He hit it with pulsed infrared. For the barest instant a thin grin split the stone.
Again. This time it lasted longer and he jammed his boot in and shoved. It gave, then started crushing his boot. He yanked free and the stuff slammed shut.
Next time he was more careful. First, he found a place where he felt nauseous. Dimpling perspectives, watery light, refractions of sound and space. Where the Lanes intersected, gravity twisted.
