Galactic Center - Furious Gulf Part 17

"But what is it?"Quath began to explain but Toby could not keep his mind on the talk, 211.compared with the slippery immediate feel to everything here, the give to air and rock alike. He let the information filter down to the parliament that was himself, where gobbets of succulent information fed the Aspects and Faces and the one smoldering Personality. They took to it eagerly, while he simply felt, scarcely thinking at all. s.h.i.+bo asked,So science has grabbed time and made it like a kind of s.p.a.ce?He relayed this to Quath, who clacked and said, s.h.i.+bo was as unsettled by this as he had ever felt her.Maybe even in tiny pieces? Pebbles, sand? So that everything's really, down deep, esty?Isaac put in,Many ages ago our science abandoned the simple notion that physics was geometry. But in this place...Even Isaac seemed subdued by the silent strangeness.

Toby was restless from the strangeness of this place. "Come on--let's go."

"Uh..." Getting away from the weight of father and Family had been giddy, liberating. But now his mind was blank. "Just keep moving. I need to think."

They went for a while without speaking. Quath's silence grew to seem like a precise criticism, all the harder to answer because it was unspoken.

They worked their way toward a distant upthrust of green, thinking it to be a gra.s.sy hill from which they could get a better view. But as they approached Toby saw striations working in the layers of it, colors mixing flame-yellow and reddish-brown and scattershot blue. Sometimes shards of emerald emerged, as if from a struggle of the light within.

Without warning a sheer cliff writhed in sc.r.a.ping agony above them, like something laboring to be born. A sheet peeled off, cracking and booming, curling away like a petal of an immense flower. Its base yanked free.

Toby ran back, trying to get clear. But the sheet did not fall.

Instead the still-curling layer compressed, contracting along its length and then along its width, shrinking, complaining in grating groans--all the while oozing burnt-orange rays, as though some unseen fire baked inside. The edges turned crimson and then curled back, showing a well21 2.done brown. Still it dwindled, crevices sputtering with fist-sized flares, and--crack! the sheet vanished. A sharp concussion knocked Toby flat. He felt as if somebody had smacked him in the forehead with a stick.

Quath didn't seem disturbed. "Why?"

.... Huh? You mean this whole place can't last?"

"Seems a funny way to build."

Without their noticing it the glow around and above them dimmed.

Blades of radiance shot through filigree clouds. A chill edged the air. Toby said, "Guess we're done for a while," and sat down on a hummock sprouting a wiry yellow gra.s.s.

It had been long years since he had fled for a full and exciting day across unknown terrain, and despite all the worries he kept at the back of his mind, he felt unreasonably good. Never mind that his Family lay behind him, that he missed them already. Ache crept up his calves and a ferocious hunger sprouted in his belly.

"You got rations?"

"Me, too. Let's eat. Then some sleep. Talk later."

"Yeasay. Feeling good for the first time in quite a while."

"Funny--that's just what I do like, right now."

2.

Time's Grip He woke up fuzzily. s.h.i.+bo was crooning to him, a soft voice playing down through his body, ma.s.saging 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 gra.s.s, 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g, 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.""I'm stuck. Lemme--"

214."It's got me."He yanked hard. The right hand came free with an awful rippingsound--and a flash of white-hot pain. "Ow!"The entire back of his hand was raw, a scarlet patch of oozing corpus cles. It had left behind a tattered rag still stuck to the timestone. Alreadyturning brown, blood thickening in air.

antic.i.p.ated-- >..

Toby clutched his hand and swore. He popped open his medicali.; pouch, fished out supplies and slapped an all-purpose bandage on the:.

b.l.o.o.d.y damage. "How'd--what--""Feels solid.""What 'event'? That stuff tried to eat me.""You mean everything here can sop us up, like sponges?";....

"This gra.s.s, even the air?"Toby shook his head. "Look, let's eat some of that ordinary stuff.Provisions, I mean. I'm woozy."Quath threw him a ration. Toby barely heard this. The bandage was a living layer doing its work, regrowing his skin. Already the back of his hand wriggled, a sc.u.mmy 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 gra.s.s 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-s.h.i.+fting 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.

215.

"Seems enough to grow trees.""Who you figure made this?""How 'bout us?""Why not? We made Argo, a long way back. And don't forget the Chandeliers.""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 s.h.i.+ning 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 gla.s.s was gone and he could breathe. The bird had wafted by without a twitter or slightest show of concern. Only as it pa.s.sed 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. Theatmosphere turned a color like chalk meeting rust."Quath!""Some weather," was all Toby could manage to say.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 pa.s.sing draft. With admira- 216.

tion 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--"Toby found parts of the body in some stumpy gra.s.s. Blood everywhere, guts glistening fresh, an acid scent. Head cracked open, eyesstaring. At the back of the skull, s.h.i.+ny electricals."d.a.m.n! It's got mech parts.""And here."

"All this time I thought we were safe.""Double dog d.a.m.n. That bird, it looked real pretty.""They did before, remember? That crazy leader on Trump, thatSupremacy--his head was packed with stuff like this."

"But who'd think? Inside a bird, even.""If it had time to send a signal to whatever made it--""Ummm. Depends on how many Lanes there are."

Coy? Quath picked some pretty funny words, sometimes. "Depends on how many spies the mechs're sending, too."< p="">

That they are hunting you.>"Me? C'mon, my father'd like to get his hands on me, but mechs? I'm not important to them."Quath's servos wheezed uneasily. 3.

The Rock of Chaos To "make use" meant moving fast over unknown terrain, looking for a pore-opening. Toby thought of the wrenching places where the esty boiled open as sick-making confusions, but Quath spoke of them as the finest work of intelligence she had ever encountered.Toby tried hard to understand as they ran, loping over sheets of timestone. His hand still hurt fiercely and he stepped lively, afraid that the apparently solid rock would suck him in. Quath made her screeching, ratchetlike laugh about this but he did not think it was funny.Part of his problem was envisioning time and s.p.a.ce all gumboed together to make something he could walk on. He was acutely aware of the time, all right. Of the enhanced, vivid now that divided the known but fading past from the unknown, ghostly future. But how did you marry that to distance?"Time, well, n.o.body can stop it, yeasay? And s.p.a.ce, that's what keeps everything from mas.h.i.+ng together--so what've they got in common?"Toby was trying to provoke her, but Quath took it all very solemnly.

Gravely she explained.Listening, Toby caught an occasional glimmering. Humans had an awareness of things becoming, bursting forth into concrete solidity, and then fading into a limbo of memory. Quath said that s.p.a.ce-time, the esty, contained real time, and the transience of human experiences was only an illusion peculiar to living creatures.And what did their opinion matter, Toby thought wryly, since they were around for such a short glimmering? His Isaac Aspect tendered up an ancient rhyme, Time goes, you say? ah no!Alas, time stays, we go.

--and cackled with weird glee.

21 8.They pa.s.sed by huge blank timestone walls, porous with blurred light. Giant towers worked and popped with energy nearby, growing like triangular trees. Some seemed able to s.h.i.+ver the sky and wrench the stars apart with their restless energy. Quath and Toby hurried by. They ventured with scarcely a pause into abrupt turns, mazy avenues of timestone. Toby had kept himself in pretty fair condition on Argo, he thought, but he had a trial in just keeping Quath within sight. His lungs burned. Servos ran hot.

He stopped abruptly. "Quath, I was wrong. Dead wrong."

"We've run out on the Family. That bird--what if mechs're all over this place now?"

"Bishops, anyway. Come on."

"I'm heading back."

He felt good about himself for the next few hours, while they backtracked.

Quath kept quiet. After a while Toby saw why.

"Uh... which way from here?"

"We came this way, yeasay?"

"The Lane connection, it was somewhere around here." Hills, trees, sky--all different.

Toby sagged down, eyes blank. "So we can't find our way back?"

as So they reversed again. Fruitlessly returning over the same ground demoralizing. And the terrain was subtly different, which deepened Toby's gloom. He had run away from his father, straight into a trap. A place that forgave no errors.

Quath kept looking around, studying, distracted. When he asked her why, she said, "I--I don't get it. What're we looking for?"

Into his sensorium framed a pattern of paired numbers.

219.I.

100.2.

99.

3.

43.

61.

97.

5.

96.

50.

51.

"You messed it up. Each pair was supposed to add up to a hundred and one. There were fifty of them, so that multiplied out to, uh, to five thousand and fifty." "Uh, okay. What's the point?"

"The mechs can't find any particular Lane, because it's never in the same place twice?"

"Hiding in time, not s.p.a.ce?"

Toby slowed, the idea sinking in. People had hid out here. Long ago, in the Hunker Down Era. Back then Bishops and all the Families had dug into the planets for protection, figuring the mechs worked best in s.p.a.ce.

But some fraction of humanity had fled into the esty's chaos. Mechs could not map this spaghetti s.p.a.ce, so they could never be sure of finding all human colonies. He could see what Quath meant with the arithmetic, sort of. But the weirdness of it remained--that disorder was safer than planets, tougher to untie than snarled barbed wire.

Numbers could hold simple, supple majesty. Maybe the strangest part of all this was that reality reflected the dance of numbers. Laws compelled the esty to knot and flex, laws ruled by the skittering logic of chaos.

Compared to that mystery, the mechs seemed almost ordinary.

220.

"So where do we go?" "How'Il we ever get back to the Family?" "Following us?""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.Toby had the uneasy feeling that Quath knew what he was thinking.

"How's that?" "You been studying us again?"

Toby had been feeling guilty about enjoying this, especially now that they couldn't get back to the Family. "We're not so d.a.m.ned predictable!""Hey, you're pretty heavy with the c.r.a.p here.""Sometimes understanding's the b.o.o.by 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 comalacted instants. Compressions and twistings made unscalable walls, tomach-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.s.h.i.+bo 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.

221.

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 a.s.sisting 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 pa.s.sing 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 ent.i.ty, 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, a.s.suming the 222.

therf[:]'ere, each coming toward him as the layers peeledflatness oftheeventsoff in,t,o filvfaOtalk thirirhing poked out of the mist. It wriggled. Shards ofAvrup y ' -. The rubbery stalk extruded from the tmesto.n.e,.s,il.v,ery ,ce fl,a .keadrrfaint-rr-'d longer. With a pop it wriggled free and fell at his mlccer.man n. Is.

- ;9 clear. A plaintive call.

feet. nh:Omtr loloanwedCd it. They floundered from the timestone as if spat drz-aking what had been comfortably distant imagest.c,rysta, lled n, .alt bffdbs grew out of the timestone and attached itself to anls n. each: t.me or, me. ov-lf ... The stalk farted a core of hard blue gas and the blob noaung ump of water , *.

*- 1'1 of velvety fire.

answered with a whorl c Eerie, unreal. s.h.i.+bo 0c:o sacb . iIl this comes out of laws, physical laws. These Remember that all -a from somewhere else in the esty. We should are trapped events explore it.

come?"

"Uh..." Head fogg;g*gy'

This is away to fin--n--d--what else lurks in the esty. We cannot go to these places ourselz "Can't see how I'd /2 i want to anyway." Whispering.Do not be timid!

risky."

"Is funny ... riI was in fiesh I never felt cowardice.

Go forward. When "lIo, you got me d -wrong, I'm just saying--"

o: more about the world. That's the only smart I wanted to know o Believeway to stay alive. E 'cs you me, I know how dead you can be inside if something stop from--if you stop trying, learning,changing."s.h.i.+bo ... I don't.

Coward. Open yocurselfto it!He stepped closer, z--s danced up and licked at Toby before he couldBlue-black flames 223.

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. s.h.i.+bo's Personality moved ma.s.sively, 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. s.h.i.+bo wanted to explore this strangely swarthy flame and so he stooped and put his hands and forearms into the purpling ma.s.s.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.So comfortable. Beckoning.Then he remembered the addictive amus.e.m.e.nts.., back there.., in the gray city.., the one he had left. Something important about that.The stuff wriggled all over his face. He wrenched away. Sc.r.a.ped at it with leaden hands. Gluey ropes stuck to him. Licking strands inched across his mouth, nose, eyes. He slapped at them, stripped them away. A vile reek leapt up into his nostrils: flavors like emotions--angry, vindictive, spiteful, wronged love.He wadded up the cloying filament, struggling against waves of fleeting but sharp emotions. He dropped the fluffy, welcoming resilience and instantly regretted doing it. The pang of remorse was keen and oddly bitter. s.h.i.+bo punched through to him with Get away! Quick!

--and he was off, scrambling fast, part of him flooded with remorse, another scared."What was that?"

Some form of parasite. Rather sophisticated.

"You told me to do it."

I only suggest. I cannot act.