“Double dog damn. That bird, it looked real pretty.”
<I find it disturbing that the mechanicals know how to integrate organic forms with their own.>
“They did before, remember? That crazy leader on Trump, that Supremacy—his head was packed with stuff like this.”
<True. I should have generalized from that.>
“But who’d think? Inside a bird, even.”
<It was studying us for a bit too long, I thought.>
“If it had time to send a signal to whatever made it—”
<Quite so. What are the chances that a mech device would find us, in the labyrinths of the esty?>
“Ummm. Depends on how many Lanes there are.”
<There may be uncountably many. The mathematics of this place is coy with infinities.>
Coy? Quath picked some pretty funny words, sometimes. “Depends on how many spies the mechs’re sending, too.”
<This bird implies, then, that the mechanicals are much concerned. 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. <Uncertainties converge. I believe we must again make use of the esty’s prime property—concealment.>
THREE
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 space 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, nobody can stop it, yeasay? And space, that’s what keeps everything from mashing 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 space-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.
They passed 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 shiver 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.”
<How?>
“We’ve run out on the Family. That bird—what if mechs’re all over this place now?”
<You believe the mechanicals will seek all the humans here?>
“Bishops, anyway. Come on.”
<Where?>
“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?”
<I do not know.>
“We came this way, yeasay?”
<Indeed.>
“The Lane connection, it was somewhere around here.” Hills, trees, sky—all different.
<The esty is strongly stochastic at the Lane connections, for those are the instability loci.>
Toby sagged down, eyes blank. “So we can’t find our way back?”
<I fear not.>
So they reversed again. Fruitlessly returning over the same ground was 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 am letting stochasticity—that is, chance—choose to favor us.>
“I—I don’t get it. What’re we looking for?”
<An obliging accident.>
“Sounds like a contradiction in terms.” He panted hard, slippery air clogging his throat.
<You told me once of a simple puzzle you had solved. Here:>
Into his sensorium framed a pattern of paired numbers.
1 100
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.”
<True. But in this sum I merely rearranged the numbers in a random way—but I kept them all, so that the total remains four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. The esty is so devised. What Andro called the Lanes are subsets of the entire spacetime here, tunnels opening and closing at random. But the sum of it all—the four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of it—remains the same. Nothing is gained or lost.>
“Uh, okay. What’s the point?”
<The esty conserves itself. But the continual shifting of the Lanes makes a map of the esty impossible. Relying on the stochastic nature of the interplaying Lanes is the only way to protect them.>
“The mechs can’t find any particular Lane, because it’s never in the same place twice?”
<Or the same when.>
“Hiding in time, not space?”
<In both—in esty. The Lanes evolve by interacting. The falling of a single timestone can multiply its effect, building disorder. Similarly, in a planet’s weather, a mere passing wind can stir forth a storm. Scrambling the esty Lanes rearranges them in time and space. No mathematical algorithm can unbind them or trace their evolution. Security rests on the firm rock of chaos.>
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 space.
But some fraction of humanity had fled into the esty’s chaos. Mechs could not map this spaghetti space, 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.
“So where do we go?”
<Forward. The farther we go, the more tangled our path becomes.>
“How’ll we ever get back to the Family?”
<I do not know. I suspect that they, too, will enter this labyrinth.>