“Is the stutter over?” Angelina cried, excited.
“I don’t know.” Nikka frowned, deepening the crow’s-feet of lines around her eyes. “Time seems to be accelerating outside.”
“We’re holding fixed in space, sliding in time?” Ito asked.
“Looks to be,” Nikka said. Physics here seemed to Nigel to be largely a matter of opinion.
The sliding, coiling timestone was churning as before when a waning came, and the next waxing there were valleys, soil, plant life. The land here was cut and worked by unknowable forces and yet the weather also had ordinary touches: sudden showers, the drifting smell of sage, meat curing somewhere in a distant smokehouse.
The runoff storm water sorted itself out into streams and then slow-moving rivers lined with tuft-topped trees. The soil beside them sometimes shot up into a mottled sky. Jagged crests shaped as they watched, spikes raking cottony clouds.
Cautiously they hiked out into the new land. Oddly shaped creatures scampered among the rocks, dancing on webbed feet as though the ground were too hot to bear. The family went down a long grade and could see what looked like log houses at the feet of steep hills, windows glowing orange, dusky smoke blown so hard from their stone chimneys that it flattened along the roofs and trailed like flags down the valley. Through a cut in these hills they came into a dark bowl and a city spilled out like a shower of cinders stirred from an unseen fire, pinpoints going on as the light from the esty ebbed. But no people. Nigel realized that it was moving, the entire construction somehow crawling toward them. A city-thing, alive.
He wondered what it could contain. Was there anything more to surprise a burnt-out wreck like him? A place that could startle him and yet let him sleep peacefully?
Though of course, he thought, nodding ruefully, he would still wake in the morning with the odd familiar gargoyle of fears sitting on his chest, peering into his face, grinning toothless and triumphant.
Abruptly timestone jutted through the topsoil. It split and burned, jagged teeth raking the land. They ran back to their own area, barely making it.
The Grey Mech appeared shortly afterward.
TWENTY-TWO
Far Futures
Lying sorely in a crevice of timestone, much later, Nigel recalled a time long ago when contact had been possible between humanity and the bewildering zoo of mech constructs. He had bound up his broken left arm and waited for sleep to take him. He fixed upon the past because thoughts of where his family might be would do him no good. When he could walk again he would go look. That was all.
Some mechs back then had convinced members of Nigel’s own crew that existence as a mechanical creature was both better and longer lasting than the fragile life of “organic” creatures. So quite willingly some lower forms of the Grey Mech had “incorporated”—their term—several friends of his. “Uplifting,” they termed it.
The process was painless. As mechs his friends became contrived boxes mounted on skeletal frames. They moved about the landscape seldom and when Nigel had tried to talk to them about their lives they seemed distracted—as if carrying on a telephone conversation while watching something more interesting on television, he thought. What they did say was bland, empty, and yet somehow chilling.
He had waited some years until he was again in the particular Lane where this had happened. He settled in behind some rocks at a goodly distance from where he knew the Grey Mech’s lower forms sometimes came. The ones who had uplifted his friends.
Their sensors were good and he could not get too close. One of the under-forms appeared and he was sure of its identity by its electromagnetics, its spectral hiss and clang. He shot out its undercarriage. With a weapon whose physics he did not quite understand he put three holes through the main frame of it. The mech went silent, its electromagnetic buzzings winking off. Something small climbed out of it and tried to get away and Nigel shot it eight times with great satisfaction. He later learned that the other under-forms had been incorporated back into the Grey Mech so he had to be content with the one.
Of this he dreamed, as his arm ached and his heart burned leaden in his chest.
It rained hard in the sullen dark. Vegetation beat at itself in the lashing winds. Lightning leapt across the sky. He could see the forks of yellow and green snaking high above where the esty folded over onto itself in a blithely twisted geometry.
No sign of the Grey Mech.
No, Grey Mechs, he corrected himself. That had been a rather large error.
Two Grey Mechs had appeared in the Lane. Ashen, blocky, each headed for the buildings. He remembered the frozen tableau: Benjamin and Nikka and himself, scrambling for the segments of the Transit device. Ito and Angelina, turned to flee.
Time was hopelessly warped here, he had conceded that long ago, but the same old question remained. Could he have done anything different?
TWENTY-THREE
Verge of Extinction
In the few seconds before the dusky shapes reached them he had shouted, “Transducers!”—meaning the big pyramid-shaped wedges that transferred stored electrical energy into gravitational pulses.
“At which?” Nikka yelled into a roaring, rising wind raised by the Grey Mechs.
His eyes jerked from one Grey Mech to the other. Nikka slapped her wrist to the console, popped the interface.
Which one? Both? Two ashen chunks with no visible means of flight. Pivoting on an unseen axis, in a sky they ripped with their passage.
Not acting together. Each responding to the other’s darting swerves.
One was closer, larger, coming fast, and in desperation he chose it. “There!”
Nikka aimed and fired the transducers in one quick swivel of her interface hand. The ground buckled with the release of acoustic power and they all three sprawled. The leading Grey Mech shuddered but came on.
Ito and Angelina never reached the house. The leading Grey Mech loosed a bolt that seemed to wrap itself like a scintillating blue-white cloak around them. They twisted and fell.
Fringes of the bolt killed Nigel’s in-body electronics instantly. He had struggled halfway to his feet when the queasy jolt of his systems going dead knocked him down again.
Strumming, nearly overpowered, his defenses teetered on the verge of extinction.
He looked up at what he expected to be his last vision. Numbly he watched the spectacle of two Grey Mechs battling each other across the sapphire sky. Spasms refracted down the streaming air. A shock wave slammed into him and he felt his body bounce from its power.
He tried to hang on to consciousness, but the chilly blackness had clasped him to itself—
TWENTY-FOUR
Alexandria
