The woman subsided for a while. They moved around her, following the instructions of the artificial intelligence, which spoke with a hushed, calming voice. The program had a false note of sympathy that always irritated Nigel, but the family found it reassuring.
Nikka saw the bulge of the woman’s optic disk—papilledema, the soothing computer voice supplied, speaking of severe damage to the woman’s outsized cranium. Fractures ran through the body, as if it had been systematically stepped upon. Cracked ribs and hips and calves, ending in toes snapped off clean. Blood vessels had been raked and cauterized by a tunneling fire. No one knew how to fix these things readily and the computer would not hazard a guess as to their cause. As they inventoried the damage and patched where they could, the woman gave a harsh bark. Her eyes flew open in a kind of discharging overload, and she sat up.
“Grey Mech . . . knows . . . got to . . . sky . . . fire, fire . . .”
She yawned, startled jaws agape with bright fresh pain—and went completely limp. By the time her head slapped back on the pad her life functions had gone flatline.
Nothing Angelina or Benjamin or Ito could do could bring a spark back into the body. Her mind was blown to shards. They started the small measures that would snatch back some fragment of the woman: circulating her blood with a pump inserted into the bloodstream, reading her cortical map.
“From the esty,” Nigel said as they worked.
“And she mentioned the Grey Mech,” Benjamin said. They glanced at each other soberly.
Nigel ran the diagnostics program but otherwise kept his distance. He had seen a lot of damaged people in his time and did not share his children’s fascination. “She came up from the wormhole spot, correct?—same as long ago.”
Benjamin, the younger son, cocked his mouth doubtfully. “That body was dead too?”
“A man near here named Ortega found it hanging half-exposed out of a kind of fog-ball, he said.” Nigel was quite old now, nearly four hundred of the old Earth years by his reckoning, but he remembered fairly well. This territory he tread softly, for it brought up doubts about himself, of who he had been long ago, of what the abyss of centuries had swallowed—
He stopped himself from thinking that way and went on. “That’s the only case I ever heard of around here, but esty history has a few more.”
“From that shaky spot in the Lane?” Benjamin shook his head. “But worms, they’re like balls, spheres, not like holes in a wall.”
“True,” Nikka said. “But worms can open up best in compacted esty. There is more free energy available there, or so the theory goes.”
Benjamin stopped working, his hands resting on the blood-spattered table. “So this woman passed through a worm? I thought the pressures inside were incredible.”
“They are. The body Ortega found was stretched, pulped. From far upstream time,” Nigel said.
“Suredead?” Benjamin asked, eyes rapt.
Nigel said, “A few memories, but nobody could assemble a Personality from them.”
Nigel thought then of the distant space and time from which this cooling woman had probably come. A one-way passage to a past or future unknown, a journey fraught with murderous forces.
Yet she had come. Or been sent? “Bringing something,” he mused.
Benjamin frowned. “Bringing what?” With long, bony fingers he searched among the tatters they had cut from the body. “Nothing here but cloth.”
Ito was swaddling up the cutting stink where the woman’s bowels had loosened in her final, clenching agony. “D’you think the Old Ones’ll want to look at her?”
“I hope not,” Nikka said. “They’ll take forty forevers to send somebody out here.”
Nigel said crabbily, “I hope she’s not going to rot quickly, like the one Ortega found.”
Nikka rebuked him sharply, eyes irked in her leathery face. “Don’t be calloused.”
“Respect for the dead doesn’t mean you take risks.” Nigel looked a little sheepish over his remark and felt called to defend it.
“Full protocols?” Angelina asked. She was muscular and compact from work in the groves and smiled prettily despite the circumstances.
Benjamin said eagerly, “I’ll get the readers.” As the youngest, just entering adolescence, he sprang to take on any task, to show he wasn’t much behind his sister, the middle child. Ito had been that way but lately had left his teenage years and did not have his bearing straight, Nigel judged, on where to go from there.
All but Benjamin knew about the man Ortega found, who had gone bad in ways—fungus growing while you watched, spores blown off, eyes popping vapor—that had inspired in them childhood nightmares. Even now, nearly fully grown, none of them liked to recall Nigel’s warnings and pictures: boils that had sprouted like small glassy domes from the man’s flesh, festering purple and angry red. They had burst with wet pops and ejected spongy drops that stuck and had to be scraped off with a knife. And scraped fast—they sought food, boring into flesh.
They made the readings with speed. Nikka checked to be sure the scanning patches were flat against the woman’s skull. The moment they were done Benjamin asked with a flat, false calm, “Better get her under the soil, then?”
“No,” Angelina ventured. It was not like her to challenge her brothers, but she had found this woman and from the set of her chin Nigel knew she felt some sense of odd possession and responsibility. “What if the Old Ones want it?”
Nigel nodded, obviously to Angelina’s surprise. “Talking to authorities, best to keep things simple. Last time they made Ortega and I do the digging-up.”
Angelina gasped. “You did?”
“The Old Ones believe in local responsibility. Or seem to—they make their human agents run things that way. I was a neighbor, so I dug—period.” Nigel shrugged. “Had to do it in skinsuits. It became a trifle hot. Thirsty work.”
All three Walmsley children looked uneasily at each other. This detail their father had not told before. The set of Benjamin’s chin said that as the younger brother he wanted his fair share of any decision. “Those scientists, they’ll want a full report, do their experiments, take samples. You know how they are.”
Nikka’s worried frown deepened. “I wouldn’t trust our storage. The rot could get out and—”
“Let’s put her back into the esty,” Angelina said brightly.
The idea was simple yet stunning. Buried in soil, the body could be recovered. In esty, never.
They had all been shaken by the erupting of the esty again, after years of slumbering. The idea of setting foot among the shifting tides of the nonrock, the timestone, was bothersome. Yet, Nigel saw, none of them wished to show such concern to the others. That zone of the esty was the stuff of local legend and the children both feared its promise of mystery and adventure and yearned for it. So they agreed.
They processed the readings first. That was all custom required: a scan of the neural beds, of memory vaults in the cerebral cortex, an inventory that could at least establish the broad outlines of who this woman had been. Bodies from the future came forth in only a few known spots and it had been Nigel’s intention to live near one.
The woman’s body had already begun to warp and ooze as they lugged it back into the head-spinning deviations of the rumbling, ozone-sharp wormhole zone. Ito and Angelina carried it with cat-like balance, as though ready to leap. Fast, humming high frequencies ran through their shared sensorium, a kind of warning system that linked them. This eruption was just beginning and promised to be big. An acrid scent cut the air. Zephyrs of bitter heat caught at their nostrils and the footing trembled with expectation and menace. They brought the body back to where they had found it, or tried to, for already a gravitational chasm had opened there. A powdery sapphire cloud hovered above the foaming esty itself. The air torqued them with tugs and pushes.
