Toby let go of the useless empty package. The man’s head lolled and something went out in the eyes. For an instant he felt a pang of remorse and then he told himself that this was not his grandfather, had never been.
The Abraham was unconscious. Toby studied the weathered face and as he watched it seemed to cave in like a house burning from the inside.
He stepped back and butted into the nurse. There was a team working on the woman now. The nurse wasn’t busy so Toby asked him, “How’d he come to be here?”
“Walked in. Guess I should’ve seen what it was. Been busy here.”
“What’s . . . it . . . got?”
“Systemic breakdown. Those copies never get the autoimmunes right.”
“How long did it live?”
“Months real time, I’d guess. Could be weeks though.”
Toby gazed blankly at the wrecked parody of his grandfather. “Did it know it was going to die?”
“Expect not. These things run with minimum memories usually. Pointless to put in detail work like that.”
“The Restorer can make a copy that’s not the whole person?”
The nurse frowned at him. “Where you from?”
“Snowglade.” This nurse was not a dwarf like Walmsley but still was pretty short. Toby added, “A planet.”
“I see. Look, don’t let people hear you talk about making exact copies. That’s not just contra, it’s, well . . .”
“Immoral?”
“Damn right. Maybe on this glade place you people do that, but not here.”
“We don’t do it at all.”
“My Fam doesn’t either. I’m Sox.”
“Sorry if I—”
“No mind it. This one—” the nurse waved a hand at the Abraham, “it’s not a Restorer job anyway.”
“Then who . . . ?”
“Looks mech to me. They’re getting good lately.”
Toby watched the life drain out of Abraham and smelled the swampy air that came off it. While this had been going on Toby had not heard the woman in the next bed. Now she began screaming. It was as bad as anything he had ever heard on a battlefield. Not like the births he had seen at all. He stood there while the nurse and some others worked on the woman but he could not get his mind around the meaning of the cooling thing in the bed. When he looked up the woman was quiet again but there was no other sound in the room.
The nurse held aloft a bloody stump. It was plainly dead and plainly not even approximately human. In the faces around her Toby saw the blank dismay and realized that the damned endlessly tinkering mechs had done something to this woman, too.
He could guess what it was but he did not want to know for sure. He got out of there fast.
SIX
The Incredible in Concrete
He tried again and again to get out of the Lane. Slithering sounds and hollow echoes boomed down from the vault above and he knew the mechs were not far away. His sensorium was fitful since he had gotten some help with it at the field station. It rang with distant calls for help and he went on knowing that he could do nothing.
He reached a river and saw that it led down into a box canyon. He found some trees of a kind he had never seen before, sliced them down and built a raft out of bark. He cast off on it. Maybe the mechs would not detect him so well on water, and anyway he could always try to hide underwater. It was a forlorn hope but he clung to it.
In the mist ahead he thought he saw people. Their skins were paper-white and wrinkled, flesh hanging loosely from thick muscles. All over their faces were little blisters tufted with black hair. He was sick then but not because of the people—who were not there the next time he looked.
His stomach swerved. Nausea doubled him over, emptied his stomach. Bile droplets hung near him, like moons circling.
That was how he knew that he was falling. Or that there was no gravitation here, which was somehow the same thing, Quath had said.
To all sides rose steep cliffs of timestone that worked furiously with heat. Water gushed into steam.
Weight returned. The current slammed into him, cold and fast. He yelled angrily and it was not out of fear but as a thin human gesture against the clasping strangeness. Echoes reflected. Paired echoes, one tinny and one rumbling, and so strong that the last part of his call met the first part returning home, hollowed out.
Then he was weightless again.
Steam all around. Silence. He shouted and could not hear himself at all. The cottony air took everything and gave nothing back.
There was a thin chain to thinking, he realized, which began with seeing something noticeable, which in time made you see something that wasn’t apparent, which finally made you see something that wasn’t even visible—if you were doing it right. That was how he felt and then saw what he was in. A framed glow ahead showed him that he and a river were emerging from the ground, mysterious and whole.
A new esty Lane? He heard voices in the captured river as he left it. They were different from the babbling musics of the bright river ahead. Against a curved cliff the river engaged in muttered profundities, circling back on itself now and then to say things over, being sure that it had understood itself.
He could not breathe. Did not want to. The river ahead was bright and airy and a chatterbox, overfriendly, bowing to both shores with white froth so that neither would feel neglected.
The water turned to jelly and then to a liquid glass, imponderably slow. He tapped against it. A pane tumbled away and shattered. In its impact shards of dead moments blistered up and shouted. Popped into tiny droplets. Fell rattling to the ground. Rose up in dying amber flames.
