They steered well clear of the dancing powder. It shaped into elongated cylinders, tear drops, fluted arabesques—which meant it was another manifestation of the far future. A sharp crack—and the esty flexed and slewed like a raft in a roaring river.
This threw Ito down and sent the body rolling, arms flapping, legs stiff and waving like sticks. It spun into the air and plunged toward the spatial fissure. The sapphire fog opened and closed like the mouth of a fish underwater, oval and meaningless. Nigel clung to his children and watched. The body seemed to dissolve, then became compacted and firm again, before merging with the stuff that only hours before had been reliable timestone. Then it was gone. Consumed, perhaps transported.
“Wonder where it went,” Benjamin mused, drawling.
“It’s slipping through the esty—‘Transiting,’ isn’t that what the Old Ones say?” Angelina asked uneasily, rubbing her gloves on her leggings as if to get clean of the body, its touch and smell. Yet her angular face showed an intrigued, puzzled expectation.
“Going that way didn’t seem to hurt it,” Benjamin said.
“Something sure did before,” Ito said. “Killed her.”
Nigel sniffed and jerked a thumb back toward home. “This place will soften up and spread. Happened that way last time. Let’s go.”
TWO
Annihilation Line
Within a relative hour—though hours could not be meaningfully measured here, and watches were mostly a concession to human habits of mind—the family had gathered around the long polished dining room table, beside the big fireplace where coals flickered and popped. There were no fossil deposits in the esty, because it was not very old, but compacted rock laced with burnable traces gave the same rosy glow.
The dead woman’s readings appeared as images deep in the surface of the table, constellations of memories played out as fragments and moments: the ruins of a life. Law required that they see if anything warranted an emergency call to the Old Ones. Nobody talked directly to them, of course. They were shadowy, alien minds who had made the esty. Seldom did they intervene in the affairs of the mere humans who clung to the twisty intricacies here.
When they were through rummaging through shattered memories, curiosity satisfied, only Nigel and Nikka wore grim scowls; the children yawned, bored. He felt more than ever the centuries dividing him and Nikka from their children.
“Guess the future’s not so great after all,” Benjamin said, sucking meditatively on his teeth.
“Should we send this stuff?” Angelina asked. She twisted her mouth with a comely lilt, an expression that always touched her father’s heart because she still did not know that she was genuinely beautiful. They lived in comparative isolation here, far down a lightly populated Lane, as he and Nikka had planned. Soon enough their children would come to know the torrent of cultures and technologies elsewhere in the esty.
“Not right away,” Nikka said, glancing at Nigel.
Ito caught her meaning. “There’s something in here.”
Nikka nodded. “Look at these.” She tapped her wrist pad and the tabletop flashed, finding an image: above a black horizon, smudges of rosy light. A sidebar broke this down, displaying bands of spectral light. “See? Pictures made at very high energies. And one strong peak.”
Ito was unimpressed. “Astro data. So?”
Nigel said dryly, “That peak is at an energy of point five-one-one million electron volts.”
Ito shrugged. “Yeah, so?”
Nigel knew his son’s casual challenge for what it was—energies contained in a young soul, spurting out in moments of arch nonchalance. “Son, that’s a lot of energy to pack into a single photon.”
“So?”
“It’s also precisely the sum squeezed out when an electron meets its antiparticle, the positron.”
“Ummm.” Ito frowned, not ready to give up his bored manner so easily. “Dad, you get interested in just about anything.”
Angelina blurted out, “You think this is anything? It’s antimatter, silly—dying!”
Ito said warily, “How do you figure that?”
“An electron and a positron come together, bang!” She smacked her hands together. “—nothing left but light. This light. The annihilation line. And look—it fills the sky!”
Nigel smiled, proud of her. To his despair, Nigel’s two sons were fine young men with only passing interest in matters technical.
Nearly thirty thousand years ago—in strict time as measured by the galactic rest coordinates, not the pliant esty time frame—Nigel himself had been a classic science nerd, addicted to his studies. Only later did his attentions turn to the immensely larger and more varied world of politics, literature, women.
A classic pattern, in the ancient TwenCen. His sons seemed to be going at it in reverse order. Or so the complaints from their neighbors—a half-day’s walk away, but with winsome daughters—said.
He studied the pictures. The dead woman had been outside, on a planet, watching—distant galaxies? Forming stars? The patchy clouds might be anything. They spoke of immense energies at work. A whole sky of photons that would fry biological life-forms. Where? When?
Nikka said, “The Old Ones will want this—soon.”
“Ummm.” Nigel gave her a canny glance. “Let’s say, the near soon.”
Benjamin said earnestly, “But we’re supposed to—”
“Right.” Nigel grinned, raising eyebrows. “And we always do what we’re supposed to.”
Nikka looked at him with an expression of tired tolerance. “You wanted to live in a quiet place. It’s a little too late to complain about being bored.”
“I’m not bored,” Nigel countered. “Just a bit curious.”
“You wanted to live near that worm thing out there, Dad,” his daughter said. “Why? It’s dangerous.”
Nigel waved an arm, taking in the rolling hills and long, flat-bottomed canyons. “Pleasant, a fine place to bring up children. That worm doesn’t act up much. We’re pretty safe here, tucked away in a Lane. Hard for the mechs to find. But that doesn’t mean we should stop learning. I’d like to see if something follows the woman. If the Old Ones send a delegation, you can be sure we’ll learn nothing. Strange things come through these esty worms and—”
“Your father likes to keep his hand in the game.”
