That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
—SWINBURNE
“The Garden of Proserpine”
ONE
Molten Time
Toby continued down the silver river in search of his father.
He crouched in his skiff, swaying with the rippling currents, and watched his trawling line. He had not eaten for two days. His vegetarian principles had not held up well under perpetual pursuit and ravagements. A fat yellow fish shimmered far down in the filmy water but would not bite.
Curiosity overcame hunger and he leaned over to see if the fish was nosing about his line. Instead of plump prey he saw himself, mirrored far down in a tin-gray metal current. But his image wore the cane hat he had lost overboard yesterday. He stared down into the trapped time flow, which had kept pace with his skiff’s downtime glide. Frowning, he studied his optimistic gaze of yesterday. A smudged forehead, sprigs of greasy hair jutting around his big ears, a determined set to the jaw that looked faintly absurd. He would have to learn to give less of himself away. Adults could do that without thinking.
He edged back from the lip of the shallow-bottomed skiff. He had fashioned the skiff from scrap metal in order to negotiate this strange river with is mixture of fluids, silky waters, and conducting metals, and he knew how rickety the shell was. The liquid metal current was rising through the skin of water. It could sink him with a casual brush. Danger dried his mouth, tightened his throat.
Down through murky water he had glimpsed a slow churn of ivory radiance. Mercury shaped the broad, mud-streaked course. Treachery lurked in that metallic upwelling—oblong-shaped many-armers, electric vipers, fanged things that glided through the metal currents like broad-winged birds.
He lay still in the skiff bottom, hoping the time-dense flow would subside. A queasy temporal swell oozed through his gangly body. To distract himself from the nausea he gazed up at the great spreading forest that hung overhead.
Patches of bare timestone shimmered there, opulent with smoldering glows. The esty here was tubular, dominated by this shiny snake river that wound through bluffs and forests. Downriver, the yawning bore of his circumscribed cosmos faded into ivory mist. He could see a sizable city there beside a shimmering bend. Behind him, uptime, he could make out the immense curve of the esty and its rich hills until perspective warped and blurred them. He was tempted to thumb up his binoculars to see—
A thump against the skiff. Something heavy, moving.
He held his breath. Normally the skiff moved feather-light, responding to the rub and press of the air’s very compression behind him as he voyaged down the silver river and thus accelerated through time.
Irregular patches of bare timestone crust overhead gave forth smatterings of prickly light. He wished for a moment of darkness to hide him. Volcanoes of iridescence erupted from the land on the opposite curve of esty-tube. Light splintered down and beat on him. He bore the sudden blast of heat without a sound.
You are acquitting yourself well
came the whispery words from Shibo. The fragments of herself had begun calling to him. The small voice was soothing and plaintive and he knew he had to resist it.
He concentrated on the sounds from below. He could not hear anything clearly because the timestone was splitting high above. It would not fall on him; local gravity was always down.
This is an awful place. You have survived nobly.
“Naysay. I kept my head down.”
I could help you so much more if you would just give me functions I could use. You are lonely and need the—
Answering her was a mistake. She went on and on and he had to concentrate to push her down. She had tried before to mutiny, take control of himself, a traitor Personality. For that there was no forgiveness.
She fought him with tiny cries. He thought of another woman, of Besen, of making love to her, skin smooth and creamy. He longed to see Besen again. That helped. The memory of her swamped Shibo’s wracked sobs.
Smooth skin . . . The face of the water was also smooth . . . and deceptive.
Everything here was dangerous. The exploding timestone came from monstrous collisions between unknown energies, distant flares of the Eater, vast meaningless violence beyond human ken. But the mechs were here, too, and he suspected everything now. He had seen them in the distance. They seemed at a disadvantage here in this moist tunnel-like Lane. Their wrecked bodies sometimes floated by him on the river. But they kept coming; they always had.
Something worried the water’s surface.
He sat up and reached for his paddle and a skinny thing shot out of the water and snapped past his head. He ducked and slapped the tendril with his paddle. A knobby angular wedge with slitted yellow eyes heaved up from the wrinkled water. It smoked acrid green, out of its metal element, and struck at him again. He swung the paddle. It caught the tendril and sliced through.
The mercury-beast bleated and splashed and was gone. He dug into the water with the paddle—half its blade sheared cleanly off—and thrust hard. Splashing behind.
He labored into deeper water. The green fumes swirled away. When the currents calmed he veered toward shore. The big-jawed predator could snap him from the surface in an instant, crunch his skiff in two, if it could extend out of the low-running streams of silver-gray mercury and ruddy bromium. A turbulent swell had brought it up, and might again.
His arms burned and his breath rasped well before the prow ran aground. Hurriedly he splashed ashore, tugging a frayed rope. He got the skiff up onto a mud flat and into a copse and slid it far back to hide it among leafy branches.
Weakly he flopped down and fetched forth some stringy dried blue meat to quiet the rumble in his stomach. His systems were mostly dead now, crapped out in his long flight. Servos barely ran in his knees and arms. His weapons had discharged and the rest were unreliable. They were designed to bring down mechs anyway and useless for hunting. He had started eating meat when he got really hungry and was somewhat ashamed to admit that he liked it. Principle melted before the flame of necessity.
He peered at dense forest and patchy mud flats and decided to explore a little. The silent power of the river insulated a lonely skiff from the rhythms of land and made coasting downstream and downtime natural, silkily inevitable. He would learn nothing that way, though.
He walked upshore, into the silent press of time that felt at first like a mild summer’s breeze but drained the energy of anyone who worked against it. As he went he eyed the profusion of stalks and trunks and tangled blue-green masses that crouched close to the river’s edge like something waiting. It had been a long while since he had fled the destruction of the giant pyramid mountain and the Walmsley man from Family Brit. He had been happy to find this strange Lane with its silver river and to ease down it, following timelines that flowed nearer the black hole. He had learned some of the culture and had begun to like the soft humanity of it, its archaic charm.
No signs of people. He kept up a good pace and became distracted and so was unprepared. A short man with a duckbill blunderbuss stepped from behind a massive tree trunk and just grinned.
“What’s the name?” the man asked, spitting first.
