“Sounds more to me like that little disagreement with the rock slide,” Benjamin drawled.
They all laughed. Nigel had just recovered from a foolhardy skid down a stony creek bed. On a plastic shell he had caromed from one side to the other, unable to stop on the slick runway. When they hauled him out of the pool at the slide’s base he had protested, limping badly, that after all, the children had got through it perfectly well.
“You’re too old to take risks,” Angelina had said.
“If you don’t take risks, you’re dead anyway but don’t know it,” Nigel had said sourly, rubbing a pulled muscle and a swelling, bruised knee.
Worms, though, were a bit more than risky. They were an inevitable flip side of the esty’s flexible stability. At a deep level, space-time itself was like a biological system. Anything that provided a niche eventually acquired parasites.
Where the esty thinned, wormholes were born—pulled out of the quantum foam that underlay everything. Worms lived on the gravity waves that wrestled through the esty, parasites on space-time itself.
Worms could link one portion of the esty to another, tapping the energy flow between them. They demanded stupendous tensions and outward pressures to hold open their throats. The pressure sustaining a human-sized worm was like that at the heart of a massive neutron star. But a short walk away from it, the effect was not even noticeable. Fields alone held worms open, both magnetic and subatomic, fed by the smoldering energies of the esty itself.
Worse, worms could even reproduce. They spawned other snaky scavengers, which flicked and twisted between the layers and Lanes of the esty’s hieroglyphic geometries. So they could give birth, just as they could kill. The lacerated woman had probably died in the worm, sucked in and mutilated.
Nigel pointed out that worms were an inescapable risk of life here, and Angelina made a face. “Aw, you’re just trying to say you want to go down the rock slide again.”
“I think not, actually,” Nigel responded with a grimace to her jibe. “But I wonder . . . did this woman know what she was getting into?”
Nikka arched an eyebrow. “Do we?”
THREE
Interfacer
They were busy with vegetable farming and the long groves of fruit-bearing trees, mostly from old Earth, and so did not get much time to watch the place where the woman had emerged. The spot fumed, a sour smell that wrinkled the nose from a considerable distance.
Children seldom think of their parents as anything other than fundamental building blocks of their world, unchanging givens, like the postulates that go before a geometric proof. With Nigel and Nikka this was just as well.
Measured in flatspace time they were older than they liked to talk about in front of the children. In their own local coordinates they were only a few centuries old, thanks to coldsleep and the relativistic effects of the ramscoop starship. Medical science and good luck had left them feeling still rather spry, but experience gave a certain oblique cast to the expressions that passed between them. The children noticed those but shrugged them off as more adult mystery.
One day—a term they used by convention, for in the esty there were wanings and waxings of light, but no sun or stars, ever—a pet got loose and ventured too close. It was a raccoon named Scooter they kept outside on a high wire leash, the end of it strung on a rope between two trees so the raccoon could run back and forth. The bandit-eyed bundle of energy shredded laundry and stole food at every chance and Nikka, angry, would yank it up in the air by the leash. The raccoon would dance on the air until it got the idea of not doing that anymore. For a while, anyway.
Nikka would promise to cook it up next meal with the long potato hash she made and the coon would get silent. They knew it could understand. Scooter talked, sometimes. But not well. Nobody thought to warn it about the spot and when it again found a way to untie itself—Benjamin swore the thing was getting smarter—it followed Angelina. The coon ventured too close to the spherical seethe, got singed, and lost a finger’s worth of tail.
Its squeaky voice complained, “Mad at me. Hurt me.”
Nikka noticed that the tail was sheared off cleanly. The worm had snapped at it. The raccoon grumbled but held still for a bandage.
“You ran away,” she scolded it.
“Need to study.”
“Looks like the worm took a sample to study you.”
As they laughed over this at dinner Angelina, who kept track of communications, said, “We got a signal today. Orders, really. Said the Old Ones are interested.”
Nikka stopped spooning out the tangy long potatoes. “That means some Interfacer will show up in spit and polish.”
“Really?” Angelina’s mouth formed an O of frozen delight.
“They’re just human, like us,” Ito said with a sardonic tone just a bit too heavy, to show that he was older and experienced, though he had never seen an Interfacer either.
“I’ll talk to some old friends at the Node. Perhaps I can keep us out from under their kindly care.” Nigel ate slowly, reflecting, as talk buzzed around their table.
He did not like the idea of bringing in higher authority, the enigmatic Old Ones. They were impressive, yes. But it was the nature of humanity to not stand in awe of anything for very long. After many years of exposure to them Nigel felt as if the Old Ones were like nosy mountains, certainly majestic but always looking over his shoulder while he was trying to get something done.
Later he talked on farcomm with a few old friends at the Node. Earthers, but intelligible. He got nowhere. Worms were too important to be left entirely to mere humans. His living legend status made no difference.
The Interfacer craft arrived during the next waxing. It twisted all over the air like a long mathematical proof the eye could follow only so far, then lost in turning complexity. Air as fluid, craft like an eel. As if Mozart could make his notes visible, lacy in the sky while you listened to them. In the esty’s curved space, travel was never straight-line. It more nearly resembled a slide down unseen ramps of coalesced air.
Family Walmsley squinted upward at the confusing descent. Loops piled like unrolling a scroll. Lacy vapor trail strips unfurled, making one infinitely recurving utterance, cleaving sky like a prow, tossing time and music to each side like a sheared wake. It made their heads ache.
The Interfacer woman who brought the Old Ones’ message was not so imposing. Her face was stretched tight, shiny over the bones, so red-faced she reminded Nigel of a boiled ham in a suit. Her collar had popped free of its little pearl clip so that her neck bulged like a swollen snake. Big wrists stuck out of her shirt sleeves and her eyes had the fixed narrow glaze of a woman staring at a match flame.
Not all Earthers were impressive. Nigel wondered idly if an Earther nerd was something like this. She did not change expression as she studied the seething spot. “A fresh esty Vor.”
“Vor?” Nikka asked, her hands in her hip pockets in unconscious imitation of the woman’s stance.
“Slang for ‘Vortex.’ I’ve only seen two fresh ones in all my years. This data you sent”—the stolid woman waved a disk—“is very important. Very. You should have taken more care with the body.”
Nigel said evenly, “We had a lot of picking to do in the orchard.”
“No excuse,” she spat back. “The data is undoubtedly from the far future. It bears on the destiny of the entire esty.”
“How?” Benjamin asked. Nigel could tell from Benjamin’s face that he was impressed, if not by the woman at least by her aircraft. Well, time would teach him.
“We know that the mechanicals have been studying antimatter since ancient times. They are constructing elsewhere in the galaxy great laboratories, orbiting the pulsars—all to capture large numbers of positrons. This message, sent in a dying mind”—she waved the disk again as if it were a murder weapon in a trial—“proves that they have designs on the entire galaxy. It shows huge positron swarms. Hostile to life—to our life, anyway.”