“That’s me. Deep down, I’m superficial.”
“But you just, you just—” and she did the absolute worst thing, burst into tears. The one measure he could never confront with a wry smile and his lofty disdain for the nagging intrusions of life.
So it ended as it had so many times before. He took her in his arms. Simple sympathy and body warmth made up for words. They comforted each other with a knowingness born of time and troubles past. It was a long while before they slept.
SEVEN
A Few Microseconds
The Walmsleys visited the worm seldom because there was plenty of work to be done in the long, stretching groves, amid the sweet scent of crops coming.
Seasons of a sort came and went in the esty and one had to pick fruit when the fitful warming of the timestone brought it to peak. They were in the fields when a hard yellow-white streak raced through the air high above and slammed into the esty where the woman had appeared.
The weapons of the Old Ones answered. Hard radiation spiked at the edge of Nigel’s sensorium. He seldom used this Earther tech, but for the moment it was on full range. He turned his head—
—a swift sensation of something massive and gray, high up in the air but closing fast—
—A silence swelling like a bubble toward the family.
They were loading up a produce carrier. The impulse hit before they could even pivot to flee.
Brilliant glare enveloped them. The air seemed to clot—a thick, massive deadening. A flicker wrapped around them like neon rain, illuminated by green sheet lightning—
—curling tendrils—
—sheets glowing like ghost fire—
And when it had passed, the far terrain around them was bare, hostile, steaming with sulphurous vapors.
Machines worked in slivers of seconds that humans could not perceive. Huge energies slice time as they shatter it. The battle between the Grey Mech and the Interfacers’ weapons was over—had been decided, transmitted, antiseptically digested by distant minds, its effects calibrated and assessed.
The mechanicals’ attack had distorted the esty. Mere bystanders in the spreading gulp of the reflexing esty, the Walmsleys had been swept through the wormhole portal, a swerve in space-time accomplished between two thuds of the human heart.
EIGHT
Antiques Dealer
It took them days to figure out, first, what had happened and, second, what they could do about it.
The first answer was buried in the fast diagnostics of the Interfacer defenses. Nikka retrieved those. The mech attack had dimpled them through to another place in the esty. Not merely to the other end of the wormhole, which presumably connected to a far future. Instead, the intensity of the flux of gravitational radiation emitted in the battle had whipped the wormhole to some other location in the esty.
It had sheared off most of their groves. With them went a lot of equipment and their pet raccoon. A sliced fraction of their original farm sat uneasily in a new place.
Another space, another time. Another space-time.
The second answer was harder to accept: nothing.
“We can’t, well, reverse this grav gear?” Exasperated, Ito slapped one of the modular cylinders. It seemed undamaged.
Nikka shook her head, tired. She had kept up her technical ability better than Nigel. She could read the interlaced matrices of the artificial intelligence that maintained the Interface apparatus. “It is a defensive net, not a transport device.”
Ito had always been impatient with recalcitrant equipment. He busted a knuckle trying to get a seal off one of the smooth, enigmatic cylinders. “How can they leave us stranded like this?” He twisted his mouth in exasperation while Nigel watched with something like amusement. Nigel had never expected organizations to get him out of scrapes and was quite sure that he was too old to start.
“You have to understand that the esty isn’t just a convenient mass to live on, a source of local gravity,” Nigel said. “Such as a planet, for example.”
Blank looks. None of the three children had ever lived on a planet.
Despite an extensive education, he reminded himself, they could not truly visualize the most elementary aspects of it—an empty blue sky overhead, giving way to stars at night that swung around the black bowl in serene circles; raucous weather churning out of vagrant winds, driven by complex vector forces; horizons that always curved away, so that ships showed their masts first as they approached; the very oceans such ships could sail on, implying a colossal lavishness of water; the wholly different sensation of living at the bottom of a gravity well, while above yawned a vast abyss, visible to a glance upward.
“It’s rubbery,” Nigel said. “And unpredictable.”
The fact that they lived in a portion of the esty noted for its solidity did not lessen this fact, but Nigel saw that in bringing up the children so far from the spongy zones, he and Nikka had perhaps erred on the side of safety.
Angelina objected, “But the Interfacer said—”
“Nobody really controls the esty,” Nikka said. “Not even the Old Ones. It evolves and we live in it.”
Angelina gestured upward, where a lightly forested land hung far away, curving behind cottony clouds. It looked as though they were in a spectacular spinning cylinder, pinned to its outer walls by centrifugal force.
But spin did not do the job. The esty held itself together by folding space-time—by curving itself in unimaginable thin sheets, stacking time and space like pages of a vast book, the events and substance of whole lives and eras encased in walls that felt as solid as granite.
Einstein had seen that mass curved space-time. The esty reversed the equality, making curved esty itself feel like mass, planet-solid. A building material. The esty was far more lively than mere boring matter, for indeed in a profound way it was alive, the compacted stuff of existence that could spawn more of itself. It even had parasites, the worms.
“How can we get back to home?” Angelina asked plaintively.
“We can’t,” Nikka said flatly. “No gear for it.”
“We can’t use this, then?” Ito slapped the inert cylinder. He was a fine worker and loved his mother but fire flashed in his eyes when confronted with balky machinery.
