“Following us?”
<Do not forget Abraham.>
“Yeasay. Let’s find him first.” He nodded to himself. Having a sense of purpose made him feel better. And this was a better place to be than stuck inside Argo, by far.
<You are following your species-specific behavior.>
Toby had the uneasy feeling that Quath knew what he was thinking. “How’s that?”
<Your primate societies often were ripe with ritual journeys. Young men went off on quests into unknown lands. They had adventures, learned much, and returned transformed.>
“You been studying us again?”
<I do always.>
Toby had been feeling guilty about enjoying this, especially now that they couldn’t get back to the Family. “We’re not so damned predictable!”
<I note patterns. You may have needed to escape the father, in order to define yourself.>
“Hey, you’re pretty heavy with the crap here.”
<I am trying to understand a very strange species.>
“Sometimes understanding’s the booby prize, buggo.” Toby laughed and put all such theorizing out of his mind. It was a luxury, the kind of thing people in cities did. He settled into the rhythm of the run.
He watched the landscape with wary respect, aware now that it took time to shape time. Esty storms had carved out intricate canyons of compacted instants. Compressions and twistings made unscalable walls, stomach-turning drop-offs, boxlike traps of curved, silent timestuff.
Moving through the gasping-hard slopes and sudden gaps was exhausting. Quath had ample energy, but the pace began to tell on Toby. He kept looking back to check for signs of pursuit. Unbidden, his father’s words in their last encounter pealed through his mind.
Shibo was there to comfort him, to immerse sharp memory in her soft presence. She sang and delighted him, distractions galore.
Still, the feeling of pursuit would not leave him. His calves began to ache, his breath rasped. He forced himself to keep up with Quath’s great bulk, which seemed to flow easily over the jumbles of gravel and swelling rock.
Finally, when Toby was sweating hard, they took a break at the base of a steep cliff. Quath lowered herself to an easeful position atop her legs and seemed to fall instantly asleep, the first sign he had ever had that she slept at all. Or maybe, with her multiple minds, she was just resting, and letting some fraction of herself stay on watch.
Above them the cliff had spires, pools that hung to the sheer face like teardrops of black iron, and sky-piercing poles of a sickly yellow. But the cliff face itself was smooth. Toby watched a creamy frieze seem to float out of the rock—a slanted void where blobs and strings wrapped and coiled together. He walked over to look.
He peered into a deep field where shadows played. A moment from some other time and place, a painting of agonies. The slow-moving mosaic leaked jarring sounds, like steel racketing on steel.
Deep down in the timestone, ruddy, pulsing blobs fell upon green-tinged stalks, squeezing them until pus oozed from purpling tips. Image-bursts came ratcheting out of the rock like agonies released.
Toby watched, fascinated, and read the action as a battle, a slaughter of the stalks by predatory blobs the color of dried blood. Only after a while did he glimpse the tiny slate-gray stalks that tumbled in the wake of each struggle. Then he guessed that the blobs were somehow assisting in the mating of the stalks, or milking from them the next generation of hesitant, torpid infant stalks.
But this impression itself soon was destroyed by the sight of sickly-yellow blobs emerging from the tips of the new stalks, wobbling like soap bubbles, and then attaching themselves to the mottled underside of the larger blobs.
As they did, shrieks peeled off the timestone wall. Sheets of brittle sound, like the final desperate cries of small birds being torn apart.
Yet the mosaic kept on, a perpetual floating play of forces he could not comprehend, issuing humming songs. Rough coughs, pained screeches, staccato, insectlike pepperings—none seeming to repeat, or bring meaning to the action.
Only then did Toby see that his attempts to impose meaning on the vision were pointless. He was witnessing a passing event from some unknowable elsewhen, flaking off the timestone as he watched. An ancient record dissolving into fog as it sheared away from the spongy surface. The motion he witnessed came as fine planes peeled off, each invisibly thick, like the thin slice that separates future from past.
He reflected on what Quath had said. He didn’t much like science—which he thought of as a fearsome entity, not ideas but a force of nature, for he had never met a scientist and would not know what one looked like. Here science had seized time, stripped away many of the everyday aspects, and made it like a kind of unsteady, pliant thing. It made lives seem like riffling pages in a book.
Gingerly he reached out, stroked the face of the event-matter. It was water-cool here, untouchably hot there—again, no logic, no scheme. And that was the flat fact of it: occurrence beyond human categories, brought forth from places unknowable.
Then the timestone ruptured. He had looked into it, assuming the flatness of the events there, each coming toward him as the layers peeled off into filmy fog.
Abruptly a stalk-thing poked out of the mist. It wriggled. Shards of silvery ice flaked off it. The rubbery stalk extruded from the timestone, thicker than his arm and longer. With a pop it wriggled free and fell at his feet. It hooted, low and clear. A plaintive call.
And more followed it. They floundered from the timestone as if spat out—moist, shining, making what had been comfortably distant images suddenly smelly and real. A fountain of liquid obsidian spouted to his left. It crystallized in air and fell tinkling. Panels of dusky mist marched above his head. One of the blobs grew out of the timestone and attached itself to a floating lump of water. The stalk farted a core of hard blue gas and the blob answered with a whorl of velvety fire.
Eerie, unreal. Shibo said,
Remember that all this comes out of laws, physical laws. These are trapped events from somewhere else in the esty. We should explore it.
“Uh . . .” Head foggy. “How come?”
This is a way to find what else lurks in the esty. We cannot go to these places ourselves.
“Can’t see how I’d want to anyway.” Whispering.
Do not be timid!
“Looks funny . . . risky.”
Go forward. When I was in flesh I never felt cowardice.
“No, you got me wrong, I’m just saying—”
I wanted to know more about the world. That’s the only smart way to stay alive. Believe me, I know how dead you can be inside if something stops you from—if you stop trying, learning, changing.
“Shibo . . . I don’t . . .”
Coward. Open yourself to it!
He stepped closer.
Blue-black flames danced up and licked at Toby before he could move. They were warm and soft and made him want more of their obliging comfort. He felt uneasy but within himself there was a push-pull of diverging impulses. Shibo’s Personality moved massively, blotting out his caution with a silky, calming curiosity.
We must explore this place. It is wonderful, I think. You were so right to come here.
“I didn’t, really, I just . . .”
His words trailed away. Shibo wanted to explore this strangely swarthy flame and so he stooped and put his hands and forearms into the purpling mass.
Cool, slick. Not a fire at all. It felt even better now. So pleasant to thrust up to the shoulders, his face full in it. Fragrances swarmed through him—sweet, pliant.