The filmy thing standing beside him did not move.
He looked at it square then and it said, “I will open.”
It tried to make itself into the shape of a man but against the angry air that was impossible. Tiny motes made it up, somehow holding crude shape against the gale.
He heard, very clearly, Do not think we are neglectful of you. We do hope you live to help.
He had felt that message before. It had saved him and he had never known why.
Then the esty beneath them vanished. They fell.
PART SIX
Wedded to the Substrate
ONE
Partial to Primates
The bird would come, Nigel Walmsley knew. But at least he could carve out some time for himself. It might be the very last. He had fled to this pocket of esty in part because time ran differently here. He used that to rest and reinvent himself.
The assault on the Library had been a shock but in the long line of his life there had been many such. He did not know if he would find the magnetic storage of his Nikka but then he had been there before, too.
He had barely gotten away, helped by Highers—he thought. It was all wisps of memory.
He knew that in this manifestation he had to get a surer sense of himself and that would take time. But the Bishops and others were moving fast. So he came here. A place to scoop out a pocket of time, a pause before going back to the play. The last act was coming.
There was enough food just for the gathering, at least for a while. A bird assembled itself nearby and told him that with the expected flow senses of time in the Lanes of importance to him, he could remain here a while. He would be needed later. He did not ask what for because he knew by now there was no point in it.
He roved the narrow, bulbous Lane. He followed methods he had learned long ago in the American Southwest, when he had been training with NASA and took solitary weekends wandering in the dry canyons of New Mexico and Arizona.
Au revoir, Etats-Unis. Somewhere out there in the galaxy’s churn, America was a ruin, walls like broken teeth on a plain. If even that. In Nigel the name echoed still.
Tracing the drainages upstream. Looking in shady alcoves under the canyon walls. Here was sandy soil that testified to the true age of the esty: enough to simmer and bake raw galactic matter into strata and then wear it down to grains again. Animals had left litter—they knew shelter at least as well as humans—and pack rats stored their precious baubles. Humans were like other indolent, meandering species. They had left debris cast aside as they lounged, trash the true record of past celebrations. Shards, chips, bits of metal and glass and unknown materials all mixed together. The warpage of time made it impossible to know how many centuries of relative interval had lodged these here but he took some odd reassurance from the rubbish nonetheless.
People passed through, even here. They had heard that there were troubles elsewhere but since the mechs had not reached their particular remote Lanes they discounted most of it as mere talk. Still, everybody knew that travel was broadening.
Some were traders and some just journeying with no particular destination in mind. The esty afforded little certainty that once you set out you would arrive at a particular place on time and they were used to that, too. It did not improve them much but at least it made them more interesting.
“Lord it was hard getting in here. When are you people going to get around to improving it?”
“Slightly after I leave,” Nigel said with a straight face.
“What kind of improvement? I’d suggest—”
“My leaving was the improvement I had in mind.”
“Ha ha. Well, is there any better flux point further on?”
“I don’t think so. The best way out is the way you came in.”
“We would see the same scenery twice.”
“It looks better leaving.”
“Aren’t we just a little distance in esty-cords from the Majumbdahr Lane?”
“Which one would that be?”
“Where they have that beautiful city?”
“I don’t know how to measure how far it is but I would venture that it is not nearly far enough.”
“Well, I prefer cities to this trackless nothing.”
“Trackless is the best part about it.”
“With more water it would be a lot more like where we come from.”
Nigel smiled. “What would be the point of another place like what you already have?”
“Nobody here to talk to anyway.”
“I’ve been known to talk to myself.”
Some uneasy laughter from the travelers and then one says, “You must get awful lonely.”
“I have good company.”
