—the beheading of a woman for unspeakable acts she had performed with a mech, which was both horrifying and puzzling, for no one could explain the mech’s motivation, while the woman’s seemed to lie within the known range of human perversions;
—a mech religion which worshiped animals exclusively, attributing to them a natural wisdom;
—a castle of glass through which the passerby could see the inhabitants living out their lives under constant scrutiny, never concealing even the most private acts;
—a waterfall that rose upward and formed ice at its summit, building a glinting blue-white mountain.
Nigel realized as they went to bed that his son had made a transit of his own, one that few speak of and most do not recognize until years after.
TWENTY
Generations
On they voyaged, slipping through sheets of esty, tugged by the energy flux of the worm. Nikka rigged an optical sensor on their capsule’s outside and they saw, slowed enormously, the instant of Transit. A filmy sheen formed around their farm, contours rippling.
Though in their simple picture a wormhole was like a tube passing between floors of a building, the floors different space-times—a glinting needle piercing ebony esty cloth—the worm was in fact three-dimensional in their frame.
At the shaved second when they passed through, the worm was a flickering spherical glaze. It swelled, swallowed them, then dwindled away to a point—which vanished with a spray of golden brilliance and stomach-turning torques. To Nigel it felt as if he were climbing up his own chilly vertebrae.
They watched the esty beyond their small area, sometimes for mere minutes before it changed again. Scenes and lands flickered beyond their small preserve. They witnessed eras with no visible human presence, others with jammed cities teetering on shaky timestone, still more with no atmosphere—so their pressure skins snicked shut immediately when they emerged—and others with virulent, acrid gases for air. Some pauses were long enough to venture forth.
Through all this Nigel and Nikka reached a new equilibrium, a sweet sad realization spawned from the vistas of time they had traversed. There were myriad incidents—some small and telling, others large and dangerous and finally meaningless, and they all pointed toward the heartache and matching joy of humanity itself.
They met, in glancing fashion, teaming tribes, rich in spirit and intellect. Soldiers, who drank with gusto and ate with undisguised zest, though they knew they would face battles on the morrow that would probably decimate their ranks. Scholars, bent by their pilgrimages and ravaged by poverty, yet still warm with the satisfactions of the studies to which they had devoted their lives. Children, playing among the blackened ruins of their homes. Parents, rejoicing in their infants even as calamity closed in around them. In cities growing stranger still as they Transited further, people sang slow, sad songs in the streets even as mech forces gathered high in the Lane above, and crowds collected to see magicians perform tricks and make ancient jokes, all greeted with raucous laughter. Among the few dazed survivors of other assaults, on other twisted landscapes, the Walmsleys met stoic survivors who nonetheless found fresh loves, new friends, and began again. Generations melted away and others came forth, with only a few managing to hang on to time for as long as Nikka and Nigel had, and through it all somehow a frail, brave, human light always streaked the surrounding shadows.
The old non sequitur, that species became degenerate as they went on, found no evidence here. Humanity bristled with activity. Societies rose and fell with stubborn indifference to earlier failures.
In the face of the inevitable end, and the inevitable questions, Nigel reflected, none is exempt: witness Jesus’s wail of despair as he edged rather tentatively into eternity. He did not know what to make of such dogged human persistence. Nikka was less puzzled, and beamed with pride in her own kind.
TWENTY-ONE
Inflection Point
They came to the far end of their curved worm’s path through the esty. Nikka declared from the data, “We’ve gotten damped into a stutter.”
“Which is?” Nigel stepped out into the local familiarity of their farm. Beyond, the lands were strangely shadowed.
“We’re hung up, basically. The Vortex worm turns here”—she smiled at the small joke, much needed as the family grasped her point—“and begins an opposite curvature in the esty. We’ll be going back from here on.”
“Going home!” Angelina cried happily, clapping her hands.
“But?” Nigel was pensive.
Nikka gave him a rueful nod. “But . . . we’re stalled here, at the inflection point. We’re retracing the same interval of time over and over.”
“Stuttering in space-time.” Nigel rolled the idea around in his mind.
They walked to the edge of their land. In what seemed like the solid mass beyond Nigel saw pale blades and soft blue shadows, as if deep somewhere a sun were setting. Radiant blades danced as if refracted beneath a lake’s wind-blown skin, like summer’s liveliness probing into a deep watery cavern. And as he watched, the whole thing repeated. And repeated.
It was unsettling and he nearly lost his footing, the way a man approaching a sheer drop goes weak in the legs even though still on solid ground. A mere crust kept him from an abyss.
“We’re cycling through the same moment,” Ito whispered. “Over and over.”
“Damn!” Benjamin was not awed. He just wanted to go home.
Then the scene jolted. Hills rose, bristling with raw rock. In jumpy, flashing images they watched the slopes weather, ruts cutting in. Peaks wore to knobs, hills slumped—and strange spires rose, icy blue. Glaciers of eerie green slid through valleys. Nigel realized they were not glaciers at all but some immensely cold superfluid, in the terminal death of the farthest future. They were seeing the slices of time into which information still could be packed, wedges of instants harvested from an immense span of time. They could fathom the sliding immensities that wrecked mountains and oozed into nothingness, for they were witnessing physics and dynamics beyond the hinge of human time.
Then, abruptly, they were back to the same endlessly cycling moment they had seen before. Somehow they had leaped far beyond, then back. They watched the repeating interval for a while but nothing more happened.
“Mom . . . How do we get out of a stutter?” Angelina asked quietly.
“We don’t do anything.” Nikka stared at the timestone, which coiled incessantly like a pile of glowing snakes. “We wait it out.”
“How long?” Benjamin looked at the seethe, distaste curling his lip.
Nigel wondered disagreeably whether the question meant anything, if time cycled outside. And space, too—he could see the same shards rise and descend, rise and descend. But their little wedge of esty ran on its own time axis. Or so he thought. How would he know? His head began to hurt.
Nikka said, “I’m afraid that is a stochastic variable, irreducible.”
Nigel erupted, “Everything’s chaotic here!”
Nikka smiled. “Except you. You’re perfectly predictable.”
That made them all laugh, but it did not seem so funny after several days of edgy waiting.
Then events beyond shifted.
The air turned cold with a sudden ferocity no planetary environment could ever match. And without any visible cause, the land began to evolve beyond their encapsulated chunk of farm.