“I am rather older than you may suppose.”
“But you couldn’t be—”
“Could and am. I’ve stretched matters out, of course. Had to. I fetched up at the very bottom of this steep gravitational gradient, along the elastic timeline—”
“The, uh . . . ?”
“Sorry, that’s an old way of talking. I mean, this is a stable point, this esty. We’re in a descended Lane, one where time runs very slowly. I—”
“Slow?” Maybe this was why Toby had been having trouble with his internal clock. When he had been near their ship Argo his systems lagged the ship’s, if he went too far into the city beyond. He could never trace the cause. He checked it reflexively, ticking along steadily if he looked far down into the corner of his left eye and blinked. There: 14:27:33. “Measured by what?”
“Good point. Measured with respect to the flat space-time outside, far from the black hole.”
“So this is a kind of time storage place?”
“Indeed. I’ve stored myself here, one might say. And there are other things, many others, this far deep in the esty.”
“When did you do it?”
Toby was trying to place this dried-up old man in the pantheon of Family Bishop legend, but the very idea seemed a laugh. The men and women who had started the Families, at the very beginning of the Hunker Down, had been wise and farsighted. The founding fathers and mothers. Better than anybody alive today, that was pretty clear. And for sure they wore clothes.
“Before the ‘Hunker Down.’ Well before. I spent a great while in Lanes squirreled away, deep, letting time pass outside.”
“So you weren’t actually doing anything?”
“If you mean, did I get out occasionally, yes. To the early Chandeliers, in fact. On my last excursion, to several worlds.”
Toby snorted scornfully. “You expect me to swallow that?” His Aspects were trying to pipe in with some backup information, but he was confused enough already.
Walmsley yawned, not the reaction of wounded innocence Toby had expected of a practiced liar. “Matters little if you don’t.”
A sudden suspicion struck him. “You were around in the Great Times?”
“As they’re called, yes. Not all that great, really.”
“We ruled here then, right?” That was the drift of countless stories from Citadel Bishop days. Humanity triumphant. Then the fall, the Hunker Down, and worse after.
“Nonsense. Rats in the wall, even then. Just a higher class of rat.”
“My grandfather said—”
“Legends are works of fiction, remember.”
“But we must’ve been great, really great, to even build the Chandeliers.”
“We’re smart rats, I’ll give you that.”
Not trying to hide his disbelief, Toby asked, “You helped build those? I mean, I visited one—was booby-trapped. Derelict, sure, but beautiful, big and—”
“The grunt labor was done by others, really, from Earth.”
Toby snorted in disbelief. Walmsley cocked an eye. “Think I’m pulling your leg?”
“What’s that mean?”
“That I’m having you on.” A crinkled grin.
Toby frowned doubtfully, glancing at his leg.
“That is, I’m joking.”
“Oh. But—Earth’s a legend.”
“True enough, but some legends still walk and talk. These legends were of the second wave, actually, us being the first. Whole bloody fleet of ramscoops, better than the mech ship we’d hauled in on. Smart rats.”
Toby nodded slowly. Why would this dried-up runt lie?
So Earthers had built the Chandeliers? Maybe Earthers weren’t mythical folk, after all. They probably really ran things during the Great Times, then, too. But for sure nobody like this wrinkled dwarf could have. “Uh huh. So it’s Earther tech in the Chandeliers.”
“Polyglot tech, really—mech, Earthborn, plenty of things slapped together.”
“By who?” Toby still wasn’t impressed with this dwarf.
“By us. Humanity. The Earthers who came in the second wave were still, I suppose, the same species as us. But . . .” A strange melancholy flickered in his face. “Different. Much . . . better.”
“Better at tech?”
“More than that. Dead on, they were beyond merely impressive. Made miracles, just tinkering with the huge range of gear they—we—captured down through centuries. Others did it, I mean—I tired of tech quite some time ago.”
