He loped with easy grace through stands of trees, bounding over gnarled briars, making Quath clack and clang her scissoring legs to keep up. Out, away, free.
He had shucked off the flexmetal husk of Argo, peeled away his father’s iron hand—and the heady rush of it sent spurts of driving energy into his legs. As a boy he had learned the hammering arts of flight, of hardship in constant movement, and now the joy of it returned. So he was totally unprepared when the ground began to slip and twist beneath his crunching boots.
“Quath! Something’s—”
<I had warned of this. Sealed-away sections of spacetime. They have their own atmospheres, biospheres. Such spaces are seldom visited, the Andro person said, for they lie within the jointed esty-work which reflects—>
“What’s happening?”
Frayed air, sudden rushing mists. The space around Toby had a give and tremor to it, an unsettling porosity. It was as if the molecules of the leaden air were sucking substance out of him, tiny mouths making his skin prickle and jump.
Skinny trees whipped at him as if lashed by a fierce wind. Yet Toby felt only still air.
Then a churning wrench at his feet, his knees—and he was flying, no weight, the trees now dim blue shadows raking past. Quath was a blob, brown-soft and pooling into a teardrop.
Illusion? He could not tell, but a fist was knotting and unknotting itself inside his stomach. The issue resolved as Quath swelled, stretched into shimmering dirt-colored droplets—then slammed into him, a hard sharp crack in the chest.
“Ah! What’s going—”
<Hold to me. The [untranslatable] seizes us.>
“What’s the damned [untranslatable] mean?”
<We writhe in the stochasticity.>
“Stocas what?”
<The time-spun evolution of the esty. Grab my legs!>
Toby wrapped arms around a burnished coppery shank. Purple air-whorls and raking winds snatched at his legs, worried his boots. A screeching red patch of steaming air streaked by, growing dirty roots as he watched, a plant being born from nothing.
He clung with all his strength and felt his joints pop. Seals in his microhydraulics yearned to open. He expanded his sensorium.
Howling vagrant senses flooded him. Plucked at his eyes. Tilted his sense of balance until he was convinced that he was somehow holding Quath aloft with his arms, a vast weight plunging down upon his neck and shoulders—and then in a flicker he was holding Quath above a pit, a black yawning abyss of red-tinged fires and sputtering wrath.
He had to keep Quath from falling! He felt his ankles strum and stretch, metal-hot and elongating into impossible cords of frayed muscle—
Then he was simply plunging, walls rushing past. Down a tube that snaked and grew shiny ribs as Toby watched, still spinning. Quath whirling by.
<Hold. I am losing a leg.>—and her shank sheared off. It rang hard against him. “Ow!”
She orbited him on a long tether. It was one of her telescoped arms. Torn free of her, and used to connect them. As Toby inhaled, it stretched—and he smelled his own acid-sharp fear.
“Quath!”—but the ivory head that swiveled to regard him was a whirling mass of bulging sockets and wiggly stalks, deeply alien face-scapes, not one expression but many. Eyes and lurching mouths and planes of cheek and jowl all working against each other, the personalities of his friend spattering across the great head.
Unreadable. This, more than the slamming colors and ripping winds, frightened Toby and sent a chill through his aching, straining joints.
Quath’s rasping was harsh and yet calm, resigned. <Be still. Hold on. This is the stochasticity. The random esty’s laborings.>
A pearly fog dispersed, blown by some unseen wind, and Toby saw far below them—though they were not falling toward any place now—a mass of pinhole openings in a broad plain. The pinholes danced, refracted by great distance.
They flew along the plain as though blown by a wind, soundless but for a soft chime almost like tiny voices. One pinhole swelled and he could make out small bumps on it. Toby closeupped the nodules and found their crests crowned by dashes of white—and then realized that these were snowcapped mountains.
Toby saw the size of the thing he was witnessing—a plain sprawling away into hazy infinity, a whole flat world. Seething with pores. Pockets that opened and closed like slippery mouths.
<Hold hard!> Quath called.
They lurched sidewise, Toby barely keeping both gloved hands on Quath. Rushing winds, hard-slamming acceleration.
The mountaintops streamed by like tiny ridges. Something slammed them forward with a rude kick, up and away from a yawning cavern that churned with brooding shapes. A sudden veer, and they were back above the plain. The multitude of other pinholes churned and jostled like an angry crowd. Gravity’s gullet.
“What . . . what are they?” Toby called.
<The Lanes, I believe. So Andro termed them.>
“Places to go?”
<If we knew how to move in this place, I suppose so. But I believe no one has that knowledge—or can have it.>
“Where are we going?”
<I do not think there is an answer to that, until we arrive.>
“I’m rethinking this whole idea, buggo.”
<It is far too late for that. Actions have consequences.> Something somber and yet matter-of-fact in Quath’s tone was chilling. Toby held tight to the alien’s leg and watched as a particular pinhole began to grow nearby. He realized that they were speeding toward it, turning at angles and spinning in a random dance, while vagrant forces plucked at his fluttering legs, his painful arms, and gurgled the fluid in his ears. He forced away bitter nausea but it hovered in the back of his throat.
Hold. Just a little longer. If you lose Quath—
The hole puckered. Toby had the unpleasant sensation that it was preparing to swallow them—and then it did.
In a blur of wrenching speed they rushed through gauzy spaces, his eyes filming and suddenly thick with tears. Then he heard a rasp, felt a thump—and they were on a field of ropy, tough grass. He felt himself gingerly and sat up.
“Uh!” Muscles complained. No bones seemed to grind against themselves.
Quath was already surveying the curved bowl that arced away in all directions—though she moved a little unsteadily on her feet. Toby could not see where they had come from, but a small dappling in the sky flickered, hinting at a huge space above—and then was gone.
“That like to pulled me apart.”
<In worse weather it would have. And I as well.>
“That was weather?”
<Esty weather. The space-time responding to the addition of more infalling matter. Redesigning itself self-consistently.>
He felt bruised. “I don’t get it. What happened?”
<The esty flexed and bore us along with it. We are in a different Lane than before. A separate space-time, usually closed off from countless others. Only when readjustments occur do the Lanes intersect.>
“That’s happening now? How come?”
<Remember the star which split open? It is working inward through the disk. Its added mass now forces the entire geometry near the black hole—including this esty—to adjust.>
He remembered how this whole esty place had swelled up out of the ergosphere. Worlds within worlds, all moored somehow. “What holds it together?”
<No one knows. Yet it persists.>
“Start with the esty then. What keeps it ridin’ around near a black hole, when that hole’s supposed to eat stars for breakfast?”
<I gather that one might as well question why a drawing remains on a sheet of paper when you slide it across a table.>
“Huh?” Toby rubbed his shoulders, fighting cramps. His muscles were bunched hard and he had to pound on them to free them up any. He lay back, tired. “So this esty, it’s written into the, the—”