“Uh, yeasay. In fact—”
“The same exact words.”
Cermo grinned and nodded.
Nothing happened for a day, no call to battle or further revelations, and they got hungry.
Foraging was not easy in a landscape you didn’t understand.
This Lane proved that not all the esty had been made to please Man. Here the bluffs and ridges looked like they had been shaped hastily with a putty knife. The sole tree they saw thrashed in an angry wind, its topknot finally blowing off in a pocket of wind, fluttering and fraying over somber flats like a fragmenting bird. Eroded mesas topped in gray sent yellow streaks down their shanks, trickles turning to a burnt-orange tinge that suggested the rot of rust. Across the sky swam faraway, similar ground, curving like a vastly distant roof with its own business of twisted timestone grown over by persistent growth, greasy vegetation raked by winds. They foraged and got nothing. A thin cold rain started, falling onto a hardpan purple plain that looked poisoned by lurid wastes, a topographical monument to the worst in life.
They met people but conversations made no sense. They were tough, with outsized hands that looked as though they were made for handling lumber without gloves in freezing seasons. Killeen used his language chips, courtesy of Andro back in the portal city. That made people’s talk come through almost right:
“What cord it is?”
“For how come now you do that, you?”
“While I was popping the seams out, me, something come loose wasn’t s’posed and give it all to pieces sudden.”
But a party of them did give the three men something to eat. Most of it they could even keep down.
They had all passed through different Lanes, wildly different experiences.
Cermo described a thing that grew across an entire large Lane, somehow harvesting the differentials in gravitation along a twisty axis. People who lived near it said it was not a plant or an animal but some combination, which made no sense.
Toby described his life in what its natives called the River Lane. They thought it was infinitely long since nobody who went far down it ever came back. It had been risky taking artifacts far uptime, since that increased something called its “temporal potential,” and the slightest perturbation would cause it to snap back downtime, streaking yellow as it went. Attempts to drop electrodes into the river and extract currents led to a temporally unstable shoreline and splintering destruction.
Killeen found the people more disturbing. He had passed through a region ruled by a revered figure called the Tyrant. The term was an endearment, not a criticism. Killeen got to see this figure at a distance, holding open court. Beside the Tyrant squatted a dark brown woman on a leather mat. The Tyrant was holding audiences and when not pleased would simply wave his head in a rocking motion, a blend of a nod and a shake that came off as a wobble. The meaning was not something midway between yes and no, as Killeen learned when the squatting woman proved to be an executioner, conveniently nearby. The leather mat was to prevent blood from getting on the immaculate green tiles of the palace courtyard.
“They all seem so, well, occupied with themselves,” Toby said.
“Been under the umbrella so long, think it don’t rain,” Cermo explained, jutting out his jaw.
Killeen thought about how it was for Bishops and said, “We’re always lookin’ up from what we’re about, eyeing the horizon. That’s what it takes to stay ahead of mechs.”
Toby and Cermo nodded and agreed that people here could take punishment from mechs well enough, but they were different. And that certainly no Bishop would ever want to be like these folk, not at all.
They pieced together their stories, particularly of the chaos after the mechs destroyed the portal city. Cermo had been with the main body of Bishops and had seen many fall. Killeen knew of Jocelyn’s death and Toby knew of none. Killeen could see that Toby brooded over his abandoning the Family just before the attack. Instead of talking it out, he simply hugged his son and later the three of them did some Ranking-talk, each taking turns hurling insults at the other, the more pointed the better. Plenty came out that way and the code of the Ranking forbade anyone taking it hard, so that ranking cleaned out the dark corners and threw away the trash there, without studying it much.
They felt better afterward and even got some liquor from a passing local in trade for some extra leggings Cermo had. They were feeling pretty fine by the time the Mantis appeared.
THREE
Some Terrible Wonder
This world was raining instructions.
Nigel Walmsley crouched under an immense, billowy tree and watched downy seeds pucker out on the great limbs. Plants in this Lane had proceeded upon a different line of evolution than any he had seen. They coddled their seeds internally, giving vegetable birth to them when conditions were good for their taking hold on nearby soil. Parent trees exuded a sap, too, which followed the wind-borne, gossamer seeds on the prevailing wind. The sap was either a nutrient or an insect repellent or both; Nigel could not quite work it out from his spotty biological education. He had graduated from Cambridge only a generation or so after Crick and Watson had discovered the double helix, and that was nearly thirty thousand years ago. He felt a bit of allowance was in order.
The cottony parachutes of the seeds flavored the air. They blew in gusts of restless wind, snagged in oily bushes, fell fruitlessly into ponds. Their downy cellulose was fluff, packages delivering the essential DNA. Or perhaps here some other entwined matrix carried the genetic instructions; the galaxy had produced a profusion of copying tools. No matter; whatever molecules curled about each other in a snaky mating dance, the purpose was to spread orders for making more enormous trees—or better, seeds giving away free directions for making more of themselves. The tree’s apparent charity was in fact self-promotion; the foundation of life. Trees rained down—in the language of the long-dead TwenCen when his own concepts got imprinted—programs, written in the ancient style: as digital as a computer disk. Algorithms: tree-growing, seed-sending, atomic algorithms.
Other programs flitted through this air, too—mech signals, compacted into narrow bursts that fizzed with energy. Alarm, fear, panic. Or so he would have termed them once. Mechs had what he called uber-programs, or meta-instructions, not emotions. They corresponded to the drives and deep, unconscious impulses that humans carried like prehistoric baggage.
And their calls echoed in Nigel’s sensorium, uncannily like the high cries of flocking birds.
Warily he duck walked from under the canopy to the edge of a cliff.
He looked up. The resemblance was perhaps an example of evolutionary convergence. On Earth, the marvel of the eye had come forth in several different organisms, octopus and mammal alike. Here, the strange, diaphanous mechs swarming above looked a bit like a flight of pelicans.
From them forked fire. It crackled down and struck the fleeing forms on a broad plain.
From below came fainter signals of terror and grief. There were many aliens here in the Labyrinth, couched away in their respective Lanes. Now the gliding, killing mechs herded them and interrogated them electronically, inflicting death with casual error. All part of the work of searching for certain pesky primates. And others.
He had come here because of faint, scattershot signals he had picked up. They carried the tinge of the alien, yet with a lacy, human flavor too.
Their source was fleeing up the cliff. A good target for the airborne mechs. He felt it below, sensed two broad-winged mechs vector on it.
A startling flash leapt from the sky. It struck the cliff. No pain-jab, no response at all—until something zipped back up, like a return stroke of lightning. Then the two mechs were turning, burning, winged pyres.
Whatever was coming was formidable. Nigel backed into the trees.
A big half-mechanical body darted with startling speed over the cliff edge. It came toward him. He knew better than to run. It sent, <I smelled you, too.>
“It’s been a while since my last bath,” Nigel said, but he knew what this thing meant. They were about the same business, in a way that mere lumpy words could not convey. The big alien was of the Myriapodia, an alien kind that had long ago outfitted their Natural bodies with augmentations. Yet the Myriapodia were not mechanical in true nature. They hated the mechs, who had long sought their extinction.
<I carry a human of use to you.>
“How so?” Nigel had met Myriapodia before but it was best to be wary of anything so different.
