They stood again on the balcony with the Chairwoman, idle talk before bed, and across the distant porcelain sky shot something large and swift and somber. The Chairwoman’s eyes widened. “Grey Mech!” she cried, and crashed to the marble floor.
Thin cries of panic from all across the cupped city below. Nigel studied the dusky, hovering presence with abstract interest, hands on a gleaming brass railing.
“Get down!” Nikka called to him from her knees, hidden from view.
The Grey Mech rushed toward them, accelerating from high up. A chorus of despairing shouts came up to him from the expanse of streets and glassy buildings below. Casually he turned and walked inside.
“Probably wasn’t after us,” he said to Nikka as they stood in an elaborate ballroom. People rushed through, panicked, calling hoarsely to each other.
“We can’t be sure,” she said nervously.
“Come now. We aren’t remotely important to—”
The crash blew in the far wall. Hammer-hard impact, then an eerie silence.
It buried them under heavy furniture. They learned later, as a medical type patched them up, that a section of the Grey Mech had detached and gone prowling over the city. Fire lanced up from weapons below. It deflected these with dismissive ease. It had sent interrogating bursts of electromagnetic energy into every possible device, quickly sectioning the city’s grid, narrowing its search. The scrutiny sharpened upon this district but no further. Apparently it could not resolve whatever it sought. So the angular thing had fired pulses into the area, killing several hundred people and caving in the lower walls of the Chairwoman’s villa.
Nigel nodded. “You were right,” he said mildly to Nikka. “But why?”
The Chairwoman had suffered some bruises but that did not explain her jittery anxiety, hands clenching and unclenching, face bluish white. “Never did one attack us before. They be of the highest mech class, always ahead of our technology.”
“I see not much has changed,” Nikka said. “It was the same in our era.”
“They could slaughter us all.” The Chairwoman eyed them warily. “And they be after you?”
“A mere hypothesis,” Nigel said, yawning.
Nikka caught his glance and said, “I’m still not happy with the provisions you’ve supplied.”
“What?” The Chairwoman scowled, then said automatically, “We made a deal.”
“We won’t leave without—” and Nikka rattled off a further list.
The large woman opened her mouth and slowly closed it. “You must leave.”
“No we don’t,” Nigel said.
She glowered. He could see her step through the logic. If these Walmsleys were of interest to a Grey Mech, best be rid of them and count yourself lucky. “All right, the provisions—but you go at first light.”
Nikka nodded. Anything that drew the Grey Mech was bad for business.
“Still,” Nigel said distantly, later, “why should we be important?”
“Maybe because of where we’re headed?” Nikka asked.
That night he lay on a sort of pliant water pillow with Nikka and they watched the snake-like dog come into their room and investigate them. It was apparently fairly intelligent and in fact head of security there. To questions it gave a nod of the head and abrupt, slurred yhas or noah.
He ignored it after a while and realized, staring out at the encased night of this Lane, that he had become married to a flat, unremarked fatality. Yet this did not carry with it any of the usual gloom of earlier times. Maybe this was new wisdom or maybe fatigue but in any case he did not want to piss his life away on nonsense. Much of what he had once believed and felt he now saw as foolishness or at least useless. On the other hand, some moments shone like jewels.
He shook off this mood by immersing himself in Nikka, the love between them now so distant from labored technical strenuosities that he found it yielding up what seemed most impossible of all, moments of pleasurable surprise. He slept soundly. In the musty morning half-light they awoke lingeringly together.
“That dog was in the room when we were going at it.”
“I didn’t mind. Perhaps by now they’ve evolved to the point where at the crucial moment they politely look away.”
“Moment? You think it lasted only a moment?”
“Well, let’s say it was timeless.”
“That’s better. I do seem to recall the dog barking at an important point.”
“Oh? I thought that was you.”
FIFTEEN
Transit
The Causality Polarizer was mammoth, its compressive antennas perpetually yawning like vast bored mouths. They gaped in all six faces of an enormous, burnished ceramic cube. They reminded Nikka of speakers from a giant’s stereo set, she remarked. These were the ten-kilohertz oscillators, delivering a terrawatt in short-wavelength gravitational waves.
Still, Nigel liked the speaker analogy—because that was how it felt. The family sheltered in a metallic capsule set beside their house, back among the familiar setting that had been wrenched away from their home Lane. It felt good to simply be there, but from the moment he got into the capsule he fidgeted uneasily. The countdown did not help.
“The point of making a wormhole sprout out of a Lane is that you really can’t do it by yourself,” Nikka told him. “Takes astronomically too much energy, or more accurately, density of energy. The best we can do is ripple the esty surface, find a weak spot—a place where the Casimir force is substantial.”
“Who was Casimir?” Angelina asked.
“Who cares? He saw that in a true vacuum, there would be a force, one you could harness.”
“As we are about to?” Angelina looked skeptical.
