Andro took it with irritating calm. The little man remarked on the curvature of the esty and how a cockroach could crawl over a fresh-picked apple without ever knowing that it was traveling on a curve until it passed the same stem a few times and got the idea. Its world was curved and finite but had no boundary, no wall. Apple everywhere, without end. A savvy cockroach would stop trying to escape the apple after a while.
Killeen was feeling somewhat cockroachy at the time, bent over with nausea as they fell in a pearly fog. They had entered it without his quite noticing how and his sensorium gave him no bearings. His Aspects chattered at him with useless advice. He shut them up to be miserable on his own.
In the churning mist hollow rasps buffeted them. He tasted a fiery wetness. Andro was saying something about the esty being designed so that even the flux points where curvature changed rapidly were not too strong. That seemed to mean that the stresses would not actually rip an arm out of its socket, though they might come close. At the time he was grateful for any reassurance.
They did not so much fall as they popped out. Into—a swamp. Killeen splashed and flailed to keep from sprawling face down in the rank mud. He staggered to a hummock of blue-green grass.
“Damn!” he called hoarsely to Andro, who was struggling up from the muck. “How come we—”
The blue-green grass had already looped around one leg and was inching up his other. Killeen fought his way off the hummock and onto a spit of dry land, where Andro already sat resting. “I, I, how’d we get here?”
“It’s stochastic,” Andro said. “No one to blame, really.”
“Stow what?”
“Chaotic, to you.”
Killeen’s Arthur Aspect put in,
The shifting esty coordinates are completely governed by the classical Einstein field equations, of course, in the strong field limit. But even completely determined relations will yield unpredictable outcomes, if they run long enough.
Killeen shoved the Aspect back into its niche. This esty thing was beyond Arthur’s experience, but Aspects yearned to get out of their confinement loops, so they spoke up at every opportunity. Sometimes it was like running a classroom of bright but too energetic children, their hands always raised with some smartass answer. “So you dunno where we are?”
“Safer, I’ll bet. That’s why I wanted to go through that timestone.”
“You knew it would work?”
Andro touched his nose. “Smelled right.”
“You’ve got a tech tells you when timestone opens?”
“No, intuition. Let the ol’ subconscious do the work.”
“Um. Mechs might’ve come this way, too.”
“I’d rather play the odds—”
Andro leaped up as if hearing something—and sprawled into the mud. He surfaced and whispered, “They’re here—mech signals.”
Killeen had heard nothing. He turned very carefully. Trees like balls of fluff swayed and breathed soft mutters above.
Killeen’s nerves were jumpy. With all he had learned at the Restorer, with all the ungainly, blood-rich tapestry of human history he now carried as an unwelcome weight, trudging through muck was just about what he expected. That was what humanity had been doing for an ageless, painful time.
He caught a whisper of scrambled, spiky cues. He knew from field experience that these came when you were in the secondary emission lobe. Sideways angling waves interfered with each other to form small, fast-moving peaks. Abraham had explained it to him once. It was a facet of physics, a telltale nobody who used waves could avoid. Particles were tight and waves spread out, and in their spreading left clues.
Skreeeeeee—
Close. He slogged up onto rocky ground. A vacant plain beyond.
That meant nothing. The Mantis had been invisible to his sensorium and there were higher forms here, had to be.
“What do you think it is?” Andro asked from behind.
“Quiet.”
Mechs hardly ever used crude acoustic sensors, but you never knew.
They moved around the edge of the plain for a while but nothing came of it. A gully ran into the swamp and Killeen headed up it. They came to a wide depression. Both stopped. Killeen’s breath came faster as he watched the pile heaped into the bowl below.
“God . . . what did they . . .” Andro backed away from the sight.
“Something got them.”
This time the dead were not human but the effect was chilling anyway. The piles of skeletal, greasy, mech carcasses were immense. Every kind Killeen had ever seen was here, steel and carbon-fiber, globular and angled, huge and tiny. Some had smashed themselves against each other and spilled out their elegantly machined guts. Their arrogant angles and ribbed solidity had struck fear into Killeen more times than he could ever recall. Now they seemed empty gestures. In stillness they were just assemblies of parts. Fodder for mech scavengers now, a bowl of the rusting, unresisting dead.
“What could do this?”
Killeen shook his head. The Cap’n who had taught him so much, Fanny, had always said, Savvy the mechthink before it savvies you. The crammed-together mech cadavers were here like some sort of lesson, but . . . what kind? “Damn awful, all I can say.”
“I never heard . . .” Andro gulped. He was tiring out.
The gully was deep here. Steep-sided, like a ravine.
Killeen started scrabbling up out of it and Andro followed and that was when he caught the side lobes again.
He quick-tapped his left molars to bring up the reds in his vision. Blues washed away and he saw in the far infrared a glowing, rumpled land seething with liquid fire. The esty roof above faded to a blank white and across the jutting ramparts of timestone swept crimson tides of temperature.
