<I do not like to understand so little.>
“Funny—that’s just what I do like, right now.”
TWO
Time’s Grip
He woke up fuzzily. Shibo was crooning to him, a soft voice playing down through his body, massaging his muscles and strumming along fibrous nerve nets.
Wake. I love you for what you did and I will help you through this place. Hard I can be, and soft, too. For you. But you must wake now, as much as you would like to stay down there in the syrup and cotton.
“Uhhhhh . . . okay . . .”
—a liquid licking pleasure, soft darks, crooning winds outside, musky delights below, pulses hammering, sharp tang of blood from a bitten lip, quickening gasps—
He pushed the feelings away. Pleasant, but he knew he had to wake up. A dream? Somehow more concrete than that . . .
He lay sprawled across spongy grass, arms spread out, boots off, servos dead. Vulnerable. He tapped an incisor two short raps and felt his servos stutter back to life. His sensorium, spread wide for guard duty, contracted into a half-sphere. Nothing funny on the perimeter, no orange-haloed possibles lying doggo inside. Suit weaponry brimming, fresh-charged when he left Argo.
Safe to stir. Long ago his father had taught him to appear dead when he awoke, until he was fully ready to fight. He lifted his right hand—
—and it wouldn’t budge. It lay palm-up on smooth, cool timestone. The flesh near his knuckles felt cold, stiff. He pulled harder. A little give, not much. He sat up awkwardly, hand pinned to rock. “Quath.”
<Good morning, though the light here does not properly lend itself to that description.>
“I’m stuck. Lemme—”
<I don’t advise—>
“It’s got me.”
<Still—>
He yanked hard. The right hand came free with an awful ripping sound—and a flash of white-hot pain. “Ow!”
The entire back of his hand was raw, a scarlet patch of oozing corpuscles. It had left behind a tattered rag still stuck to the timestone. Already turning brown, blood thickening in air.
<An unfortunate side effect of the physics. I should have anticipated—>
Toby clutched his hand and swore. He popped open his medical pouch, fished out supplies and slapped an all-purpose bandage on the bloody damage. “How’d—what—”
<I should have realized. Esty rock is not truly solid.>
“Feels solid.”
<It is compressed events, rendered as mass. Press against it long enough and you become part of the event.>
“What ‘event’? That stuff tried to eat me.”
<Do not ascribe intention to physical law. Your skin became wedded to the esty. It began to diffuse into the occurrencespace which this substance is.>
“You mean everything here can sop us up, like sponges?”
<Only if you dwell long enough in close proximity—within a few atomic lattice spacings, say.>
“This grass, even the air?”
<Not at all. They are ordinary mass, the simple form of matter.>
Toby shook his head. “Look, let’s eat some of that ordinary stuff. Provisions, I mean. I’m woozy.”
Quath threw him a ration. <I gather that the timestone does eat matter placed against it, but at different speeds. The bare stone—such as where you let your hand lie—absorbs quickly. Elsewhere, it does not—so dirt and life can survive. All quite ingeniously constructed.>
Toby barely heard this. The bandage was a living layer doing its work, regrowing his skin. Already the back of his hand wriggled, a scummy green mat eating his drying blood and making epidermis. But Family bioengineering—when it had existed as a living craft—had dictated that repair came first. Nurture was far down the list, so the pain still made him grit his teeth. He turned off most of it by going though his subcontrols, but it took time. Pain could also be a useful reminder, so it was not easy to block.
He ate some of his rations, sitting gingerly on grass a good distance from any timestone. Morning was nothing like sunrise here, though there was a crisp bite in the air. Patches of stone exuded pale beams of light that scattered among the twisted trees. Distant peaks brimmed with slow-shifting colors. When the clouds far above parted he could see other sources of radiance giving off diffuse glows that came and waxed and flared again in long, patient pulses.
<This light seems to come from the accretion disk around the black hole. It becomes trapped in the esty and carried along by solidified past events.>
“Seems enough to grow trees.”
<The virulence of the disk is muted here until it sustains life. This cannot be accidental.>
“Who you figure made this?”
<Not even the Philosophs know. I am too humble to speculate. Use of the fabric of space-time as construction material is a skill beyond my comprehension.>
“How ’bout us?”
<You? Primates?>
“Why not? We made Argo, a long way back. And don’t forget the Chandeliers.”
<You do not understand how much greater the esty is.>
“Ummm. You’re impressed by big ideas. Me, I’m impressed by a tore-up hand.”
Toby had meant the suggestion as a joke anyway. He had long ago given up trying to understand where things came from. Time enough for such luxuries when he felt safe. If ever.
Down the shining air came a bird. It was the first he had seen since Snowglade, in the years before Citadel Bishop fell. The mechs had found birds a fairly trivial exercise in extinction and had easily blown them from the skies.
This one was far larger than anything he had seen aloft that was not mech. It neither fluttered like a butterfly nor soared like a predator hawk, but instead sported with proud reliance on the fields of the air. He watched it snag something he could not make out. Then it wallowed through a milky strand of congealing vapor, more like swimming than flying.
The cup of mottled air blew over Toby and he felt a sudden sharp chill. He tried to raise his arm and found it would not go, that he could not even bat his eyes. His chest froze. Muscles locked up. Then the stuff like translucent glass was gone and he could breathe. The bird had wafted by without a twitter or slightest show of concern. Only as it passed did he see that it had four wings and an outsized head. Yellow wings churned against a gathering breeze and the air thickened around it. Winds curled. The atmosphere turned a color like chalk meeting rust.
“Quath!”
<Wait. It passes.>
“Some weather,” was all Toby could manage to say.
<Esty can sublime into vapor, I believe, even liquid—or so the “Introductory Text” implied. It mingles with the air. Try not to breathe it in.>
Toby got his breathing right again. His chest hurt. Rock that turned to air? And maybe back again? He let his aching lungs subside.
Another bird came slow-flapping down a passing draft. With admiration Toby followed its artful course on vagrant winds. “I dunno about this place, old bug-girl. If you have to check it out before you draw a breath—”
Quath shot the bird. It blew to pieces. Toby cried out in alarm. “What’d you—”
<Look at it.>
Toby found parts of the body in some stumpy grass. Blood everywhere, guts glistening fresh, an acid scent. Head cracked open, eyes staring. At the back of the skull, shiny electricals.
“Damn! It’s got mech parts.”
<Made by them. Adroitly disguised.>
“And here.”
<Precisely. Mechanicals have infiltrated the esty Redoubt.>
“All this time I thought we were safe.”
<So do many. They scrupulously filter visitors such as ourselves for mechanical spies, for microscopic agents, for intrusive programs in human computers. Andro said these measures were effective.>