The retreat did not make sense to him. Each Lane was a kind of space-time pocket. Apparently the mechs had breached this one with magnetic pressures. In the long run they would work their way through and kill whatever they found. There must be defenses here but none seemed to work this time.
That was the trouble with seeking shelter down here in the deep esty, he realized, so close to the black hole itself. Time ran slowly here, which was fine for storing things. Walmsley had mentioned that holding the Galactic Library in close to time-stasis meant that it decayed slower.
That also meant that the mechs could sit outside, in comparatively flat space-time, and patiently develop their techtricks. People in the esty could not keep up. It was not a matter of intelligence, but of the ticking of time.
Which meant that this particular Lane was probably doomed. It was huge, certainly. But now he could see mech shapes flitting high in the vault above. When he had to cross a stretch of flat land he glimpsed a colossal battle up there, all flash and dazzle. For a moment he felt as if he were back on Snowglade, and it brought a pang. Flat land gave the sky such a chance to be anything it would. Here, distant lands curved across. Far away, yes, but he still knew he was enclosed. Trapped.
He had fashioned ways to cut through the esty stuff before. If he could squeeze through a momentary hole, he might pass into another Lane. Somewhere in here there were Bishops. He would not find them in this Lane, he was pretty sure.
He tried his tricks, lasers and thumbers and the rest. They did not work. The esty-mass was impacted, sometimes spongy, other times rock-hard. His Isaac Aspect popped up in his mind.
It is worth noting that stone, which you believe to be so firm, is like all matter a soufflé of empty space and furious probabilities.
“Shut up,” Toby muttered, and thrust the micro-Personality back in its cubbyhole. “You’re nothing more than a chip half the size of my bittiest fingernail.”
I do concur that you should find a way through, however.
When the Aspect gave him irritating advice it often rushed to apologize. Who wouldn’t, when getting out of its cell depended entirely on Toby’s good will?
He fled into hilly country. The fighting kept on in the high vault. He could see the magnetic field lines now; his inboard systems had picked up the trick at the pyramid. The lines were splayed, jumbled, not the orderly shapes of the Magnetic Mind.
Sometimes there came a sound like tearing the arms off a shirt. Timestone would flower forth. Clouds of it rose like volcanic plumes lit from within by pale fires. They slowly sank back. The air rippled around them and puckered so that Toby could glimpse for an instant different landscapes beyond: scooped valleys, craggy mountains, murky chasms. Sometimes people moved across these passing scenes and he once yelled to a woman who looked to be close. Then the smoky exploded timestone drifted back down as if rejoining its natural flowing place and she evaporated with a small cry.
He met a band that was burying its dead. Humans, they looked to be. He could not understand a word they said. His inboards couldn’t recognize the lingo either.
The timestone here was scorching to the touch and glowed with a hellish light. The heat brought lassitude, but the dead bodies nearby gathered strength of a different sort, flavoring the air. Toby moved off.
The people did too, stopped and camped and cooked without fire somehow. He stayed with them because it seemed safer, considering the aliens he had seen. At least he knew something about people.
These feasted on the animals they could catch or kill. In the retreat there had been plenty to snare or stab. They ate slabs of meat and crammed it in with cups of stinging alcohol. Toby watched carefully, fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.
He tried to remain neutral. Other tribes, other Families, other customs. He had learned that much. He saw that the meat-eaters grew tired as they finished. Flesh, he knew, took longer to digest. The drinkers got loaded, addled, a touch crazy. They were clumsier and stumbled easily.
A woman came to him in the dark, after the timestone finally dimmed. He had been sleeping soundly. When he smelled her musk, a scent he knew well despite being in his own mind still a boy, he felt what she wanted. They spoke no words and he did as well as he could. He fell asleep feeling tired but contented. In the morning she was gone and the rest of her people with her. So much for humans sticking together here.
From long hours of watching the crashing cliffs, waiting his chance to pick a way through, he grasped the strange hard fact that much of what passed in his life was forever beyond his understanding. He alone imposed meaning on his life and often he failed. Certainly he had failed at the pyramid.
To live with that, the fact of incompleteness, was to finally comprehend the place of humanity in a universe that, far worse than being your enemy, was indifferent and unknowable.
THREE
The Impressed Man
He woke up at the next “waxing.” Nobody here used “morning” or “sunset” or any of the other words that seemed automatic but didn’t apply anymore. The next time the light came was a “waxing” and they came remarkably regularly between the “wanings,” as if arranged.
Toby got up and was about to start eating when he saw a man lying face down in a big clearing below. He went down to see. Up the slope came a woman, rosy-haired and face contorted. Her belly was sticky red and pushed over to one side. Two other women wearing identical gray coveralls were helping her up.
Toby offered to help. The wounded woman crossed her hands under her big bosom and he saw between her fingers blood seeping. She shook her head and the gray overalled women did too, as if the wounded one was giving orders. They went on without a word.
In the clearing the man was face down in the middle of broken stubs of rock. A pale yellow gas billowed out of a perfectly round hole a few steps from the man. As Toby approached he saw that the man had not been very big but was now. He was smooth and intact and only a hand’s width deep, flattened uniformly.
Only a trickle of blood worked away from his shoulder and there was no other sign of damage to the body. Toby touched the creamy skin. It was pebbled, as if small bubbles had formed beneath and could not break through.
He ate breakfast with a passing group of thin-faced men and women who looked exactly alike. When they had first caught sight of the man some had started to run away. Then they came back for some reason and sat down and started chewing.
“Did you see him hit?” one of the women asked Toby. She spoke a kind of slanted talk that his inboards could translate.
“Naysay. What does that?”
“A skimmer, we call it.”
“What’s it look like?”
“Kind of burnt-brown lookin’. Comes along about head-high off the ground.”
“You see it?”
“Felt it. Like somebody ticklin’ the balls of your feet.”
Toby saw from their faces and the eager way they ate that there was an unspoken celebration. It wasn’t me. See? It wasn’t me again.
Once he recognized the look in their faces he had to admit that he understood the feeling because he had it too. The dead could not be recovered here. The technology wasn’t available and by the time you got to somebody who had been mashed flat by some force you couldn’t even understand it was too late anyway.
The dead he had seen were already receding into dim images. They weren’t him, and neither was this squashed figure he had never known. It would be different if any were Bishops.
