“Ask your mother. She’ll tell you that it’s ‘stochastic.’”
“So?”
“We’re not desperate enough yet.”
But they were running short of food and Ito was restless, Nigel saw, beyond his endurance. After a full-scale family argument over the big polished dining room table they decided to let both Ito and Benjamin forage. Nikka, Angelina, and Nigel spent an anxious time awaiting their return as the timer on the capsule ticked down to the next Transit.
With only an hour to spare, and Nikka muttering that the uncertainty in such calculations was more than two hours, easy, they came across the rugged timestone at a trot, backpacking food. Benjamin said they had seen nothing much but, as Nigel had guessed, Ito had reveled in it.
They voyaged on, Transiting and pausing and watching the long slow epic of organic life-forms and mechs in the lands beyond. Usually they were isolated on a timestone terrain. Sometimes battles raged in the distance and they anxiously watched the unknown combatants, hoping to be ignored.
Usually they were, but several times mechs had cruised overhead and twice Ito and Benjamin had knocked them down with glee, using projection weapons the Chairwoman had sold them. Probably they were lucky, having the advantage of surprise in this era, but Nigel made them stop it because luck did not last forever.
They got into worse trouble at the next pause. Here a passing woman told them that the mechs had launched a new plague, wind-borne and virulent. Nine out of ten in her city had died. The Walmsleys gave her food and she went on and that night they came down with it, too. Fever, violent dysentery, sinuses clotted with yellow spongy growths. Ito had walking dreams, seeing the gates of a private hell and struggling to run through them to some glimpsed reward. Nigel and Angelina grabbed him and held him down for hours before the delusions passed in a fit of sweating babble that spilled from Ito’s mouth like a river of hallucination, so wild that Nikka—a part of her always dispassionate, even with her own children—wrote some of it down.
The delusions struck Nigel next and unloosened in him the many haunted memories that accompany anyone who chooses to live long.
—Cramped spacecraft maneuvering near Earth’s crisp white moon.
—Swimming darkly through the icy waters of a moon, into an interior ocean filmed with kilometers of ancient ice.
—Winds blowing acid dust in his face as aliens like huge radio antennas lumbered toward him in the frying heat.
—Their aching long flight to reach the esty, in search of refuge from a galaxy that seemed filled to overspilling with mechs.
He spoke of these, sputtering in the warm spray of dislocated words, and could not recognize his own foot sticking naked at the other end of the bed, or the blood he coughed up, or even the perpetual frown that furrowed Nikka’s face in the dim night.
The only factor that saved them was their simple distance in esty-coordinates, he realized later. The mech-made virus was so tuned to the humans of this place-period that it missed them by a hair. So they merely groaned and sweated and fouled themselves, the disease taking a full week to work its way through each. They carried it through three pauses and were out of food again by the time they could all walk without shaky knees.
EIGHTEEN
Marching
Evidence of mech-wrought damage lay everywhere. Charred cities, blasted landscapes, bedraggled populations torn by raids.
Once, while they were foraging for information and food, a mech caught Nigel and Angelina in the open. It was crawler type and burned Angelina pretty badly before he could knock out its mainmind. When he saw how much Angelina was suffering he put her to sleep with a sedative and while waiting for it to take full effect in a rage he pulled off the mech’s working arm and used it to bash in the carapace, letting himself go completely to the sheer boiling energy of it. Then he carried Angelina across his back, barely reaching their farm buildings before he collapsed. He was sobered for days afterward as he watched her recover, fevered sweat glazing her eyes.
Seen through the prism of the esty, Nigel thought as he tended his daughter, life was like a long march, an endless column of forlorn souls moving forward through surrounding dark. Locked into their own eras, nobody knew where they were going. Still, in every society they glimpsed, there was plenty of talk and the fools pretended to understand more than they were saying. There was merry laughter, too, and somebody was always passing a bottle around.
But now and then somebody stumbled, didn’t catch himself right, lurched aside and was gone, left behind. The dead.
Sliding timewise-forward, sometimes backward, poking their heads out where the chaotics of the harnessed worm commanded, Nigel saw the long mortal march in snatches, which made it all the more telling.
Whole societies eventually joined the individual dead. For them the march stopped at that moment. Maybe some had a while longer, lying back there on the hard ground, already wreathed in fog—time to watch the parade dwindle away, carrying on its lights and music and raucous jokes.
For us the dropouts are back there somewhere, he thought, fixed in a murky landscape we’re already forgetting.
He could recall others who had stayed behind, years ago. With a little sigh or a grunt of agony or just a flickering of fevered eyelids, they left the human march. No longer did they know the latest jokes or the savor of a fresh bottle of wine, or what the hottest rumors were about. The march saddened him. He remembered friends long lost, wished he could tell them what was up nowadays, share a laugh or a lie.
As he read his latest indices, now covertly so that Nikka did not see, he thought, Right—and the point, you brooding old bulk, is that you know your station above the tide of time is temporary. That persistence is your only virtue beyond theirs, and it is artificial. That someday you would catch an ankle and go down and the murk would swallow you, too. Maybe it would be better if you didn’t have that puzzled, startled moment of staring at the retreating heads, the faces already turning away from you. Maybe it was best if you couldn’t hear that last parting round of hollow laughter from a joke you would never know, the golden lantern light already shining on them and not on you.
And it will happen to everyone you have known or ever will.
Somehow he never got used to that.
NINETEEN
Storytelling
They could flee in space-time, but biology followed. They all had a relapse of the mech-made plague, far milder but bad enough.
Ito recovered first. When he simply announced that he was going out for provisions, in the pause they had just come to, no one could mount more than feeble resistance. The next Transit was days away, the probability indices said.
“Probably! Only probably!” his mother protested weakly.
“There’s no ‘probably’ about our starving, though,” Ito said grimly. So he left.
The time passed in fever and worry. But they all were better by the time Ito returned, loaded down and with a bad leg wound.
To Nigel the sight of his oldest coming through their front door was like the sun coming out after a night that had lain on them all like a sullen lid. As he helped Ito store the vegetables and fruit, he felt a difference in his son. Dinner that evening drove the difference home. Ito spoke more directly, clearly, face free of the stretched tensions Nigel remembered from late adolescence.
Like many men and women compelled to action by restlessness of body and spirit, Ito had no interest in the notion of adventure. But he knew storytelling well enough to see what people saw in it and so recounted with accurate detail incidents that seemed ordinary to him, arising out of necessity:
—the mech like a snake which attached itself to his leg and could not be dislodged (he found, while bellowing in frustrated rage) except by finally singing to it;
—towns built aslant and of both surpassing beauty and stunning ugliness;
—aliens galore, who treated him with utter indifference, while he found them fascinating;
