“I stay.” She lifted a hand in silent salute—and vanished.
“Ah! Damn!” Toby spat out in frustration.
“Sorry, but I had a point to make,” Nigel said. “You will find that the notion of self is a bit complex here.”
“I’ve got to get her out of me.”
Nigel said with compassion, “In time you’ll realize that what mechs call the ‘physical representation’ is only one phase.”
“Shibo really could be brought back, then?”
“In a sense.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Reality—a delightfully abstract term—is analog. Humans live and think there.”
Toby shrugged. “Yeasay, it’s real.”
“The mech world is essentially digital. You’ll never understand mechs until you realize how differently they view matters. And not only them. The Old Ones, the Highers—they do not share our sense of the self.”
“Highers?”
Walmsley knew the boy would understand it all best if it unfurled in a story. The classic primate manner of learning. Linear, relentlessly serial. Quite old-fashioned, yet it stuck.
Very well, best to go back a long way, to the time after he had backed away from the High Phyla entirely, sought the refuge of simplicity.
He sighed. “There’s so much to tell—”
PART TWO
Soon Comes Night
The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
—EDEN PHILLPOTTS,
A Shadow Passes, 1934
ONE
Worm
The body lay dying for some time before Angelina found it.
She had noticed a small cyclone of birds standing in the air above a churned-up span of smoldering rock and went to look. The small, four-winged birds were predators only in a flock, never alone. They banked on the warm updraft from the oozing soup of sun-orange rock below, peering down with hungry intensity.
The broken body stirred every now and then and the birds would rise a bit, a reflex born of long evolution, for if the prey revived it might be dangerous. Their courage was purely collective. Each would have fled in confusion were it not for the familiar, gene-deep helical churn of their updrafted gyre that calmed them all.
Angelina found the body folded up, as though broken in the legs and chest. It was a woman in a dark-red single-sheathed garment. The pliant weave was ripped and caked with blood already gone brown. As Angelina knelt to help she caught the coppery scent of fresh blood and saw an eyelid quiver. A patch seeped red at the temple.
That made Angelina send a quick comm alert to her brothers, Benjamin and Ito, who came from the house an hour’s walk away. They ran it in much less, bringing a sling and medical supplies.
Angelina had stopped most of the bleeding with a tourniquet, but the woman was in a bad way from the heat and dehydration on top of the catalog of injuries: chest a massive purple bruise, chin crushed in, right arm twisted at an impossible angle and showing white bone.
They got her in the sling and worked on the arm before carrying her back over the broken landscape. Only then did the slowly cycling tower of birds, hundreds-strong and chorusing a disappointed chip-chip-chip song, disperse into its timid, individual parts. Some still tracked the humans, for scouts were part of the collective genetic lessons as well.
The three had trouble getting back to safer ground and that was when they guessed the origin of the dying woman. Footing was unsteady. From long habit they thought of the solid stuff their boots struck as rock, but knew that the glowing, slippery sheen was the “esty”—S-T, a compacted form of space-time. The esty could be firm and dense at one moment and the next, blur and fuzz into a foglike film. Vital and durable yet flexing, following laws of its own nature, rules unknowable. Or at least unknown by humans of this era.
As they took turns carrying the listless body each of them was troubled by a sense of foreboding. In their circumscribed world this woman had come as a signal flare, an announcement. She opened again the doors of speculation, for they knew the tales of bodies belched forth by the esty from places and eras of danger and promise. They did not share these first tingling thoughts, but the air hung heavy among them.
Humans had lived here a long time, shaped by the esty and knowing it as the frame of their world. Yet it was also an enemy of capricious, almost vindictive spirit. It slipped beneath their boots as they carried the woman, who still oozed blood and pus at her many wounds. Blue-white flashes wracked the air. Vagrant electrical energies plucked at their sleeves like fugitive winds.
They reached their sprawling, ramshackle house. Their father, Nigel, had returned from the orchard. He frowned when he saw the damage. Already their mother, Nikka, had their auto-medical equipment rigged up and running, shiny and smooth despite its age, but there was by that time little hope.
The woman gasped and choked, her hot breath whistling past a broken tooth. For a moment she smacked her lips and seemed to savor the flavor of the home: sweet cloves and garlic, aging flowers, damp rags, thick soup simmering in an all-day pot, a woody tang tamed by a sheen of oil.
Her concussion spoke for her then, forcing clogged murmurs and hoarse cries from her raw throat.
“Sky . . . burning . . . ohkan . . . ohkan . . . get away!”
The family Walmsley glanced at each other. “The others we heard about,” Nikka whispered, “they never could talk.”
“This one won’t for long, I’ll wager,” Nigel said.
Something in him took an instant dislike to anything that disturbed his tranquil world, this rustic refuge he and Nikka had shaped. Earthers, mechs, Old Ones—their operatic clashes lay far away, in other Lanes, or out among the fevered stars. This woman brought all that to mind again.
Yet he had chosen this place for their farm. He had known that the eruption spots in the esty were important. Something in him did not want to quite let go of the larger stage.
