“It’s defensive, period,” Nikka said mildly. “To even attempt a return we need to open the worm in a controlled way.”
“How hard is that?” Nigel asked.
She shook her head. “Even experts shy away from that, if they’re smart. It’s dangerous work.”
“What’s it take?” Benjamin asked. He had his mother’s upturned chin and her quiet assurance that given time and tinkering, miracles were routine.
“Some integrative graviton sensors, a field generator which can deliver a terrawatt at ten kilohertz acoustic . . . and a Causality Engine.” Nikka sat gingerly on a boulder. She had twisted her back in the flickering microsecond of transition through the Vor.
Benjamin’s mouth sagged. No miracles were going to happen right away.
Nigel asked skeptically, “Causality Engine? I thought we could take causality for granted.”
Nikka shook her head, the sheen of her long, braided black hair catching the light. “It’s keeping causality in proper order that takes control.”
Nigel had left the ever more complex physics of the esty to others in favor of his orchards, as a proper reward of age. Nikka still relished technical detail, and it took her quite a while to convey to them the realms of chaotic logic. Daunting stuff.
A Vor was a “chaotic attractor” that linked portions of the esty in random fashion. But the links had a cyclic logic, so that any given connection would recur . . . in time. Generally, a long time. Making it happen again demanded deft mathematical control of the lip of the Vor. The process resembled stirring a pot, using bursts of gravitational radiation.
She was explaining this when a pale pink craft sliced across their clouded sky and banked over them. Its backwash slammed down a fist of heated air, making them duck. It settled a short distance away on oddly angled struts of purple metal that ended in disk footpads.
A woman came rapidly toward them, shanks hiking her forward as though in a race. She wore jet-black, porous ceramic eyes that wrapped around her head like a combination of hat and spectacles, yet left the crown of her honey hair uncovered.
“I’ll go set rate,” she announced in a preemptory voice, heavily accented in broad a’s and eh’s.
“For what?” Ito asked. He was nearer her and she seemed to assume he was delegated to speak.
“Don’t stall.”
“We’re not—”
“Look, I be first in. So I get the bid.”
Ito looked irked. “First in what?”
“You know not? You’ve beed inside a suspension bubble. I waited days for it to pop.”
Ito frowned. “A . . . time bubble?”
“Checko.” She raked them all with an assessing gaze. “You be stable, though. I looked over your chunk from the air. It snapped off a section of ordinary rock. Settled in well, I sayed.”
“Where are we?”
“Sawazaki Lane. Your equipment—early era, right? I be good with antiques.”
“We tunneled through to a human Lane, though, right?” Ito persisted.
Nigel watched his son’s expression as the realization dawned that they could just as easily have popped out in some hellhole Lane of methane gas or bitter cold. Nigel and Nikka had known that but, as Nikka had said to him in private, what could they have done? The mechs had sent their sliver of esty caroming out into the larger esty, and it had lodged where laws of nonlinear dynamics took it.
“Sure, did you not plan to?” Distracted, the woman glanced at her sleeve. “Ummm. As I calc, I could offer you a single pointo price for all of it.”
She looked at them, an entirely phony smile splitting her face, showing bright yellow teeth. “Sight unseen. I willn’t bother. Not my style to poke around too much with people standing right there. Don’t much need the money. I just take what luck brings me.”
Ito gaped. “What? Buy everything?”
“Flat fee basis. Leave or take.”
Nikka let her jaw jut out in a way Nigel knew well. “We aren’t interested.”
The woman frowned. “Look, I know how it is. You must’ve saved most of your nut to get this big a spread slipstreamed in, right? I’ll allow for that, believe me.” She rolled her eyes theatrically. “Even though I usually get my budget busted when I do.”
Nikka did not smile back. “No deal.”
“Huh? You’re trans-importers, right?”
“No,” Nikka said. “We’re refugees.”
“Well then, you’ll be needing cash, won’t you? I can see my way clear to offer—”
“We won’t sell,” Nigel said mildly.
Her ceramic eyes prowled them. Facets winked as she turned her head, diagnostics probing. She wore a scarf, barely visible above an ivory jacket cut to show one obvious weapon, an antique-looking pistol on its own pop-out handle, and to conceal several others that made mere ripples in her sleek contours.
“You people know not Sawazaki law, do you?” Again the eye-roll. “Lord, protect me from amateurs.”
Nigel said, “We were blown here by mechs. Certainly we would appreciate assistance in getting back home.”
She brightened. “Well then—”
