<Your genus drifts between these polar extremes—a mode with great survival value, and so seen again and again throughout higher life. But frequent gray does not disprove that black and white exist.>
“You got sex on the brain, big-bug,” Toby said uneasily.
<Your sexual geometries shape your perception of the world—a collaboration between male and female, a painting etched by tensions. Man is pointed toward invasion. Woman exploits the advantages of the hidden, the never-fully-knowable, the grotto of welling darkness. This is the strategy of your species. Merging them in a mind so young as yours is inherently destabilizing.>
“That’s what’s going on in me?”
<I believe so.>
“What’ll I do?”
<I do not know. We are without the required technology for the two principal remedies. As I understand your primate minds, the optimum cure would be to reinforce your own subcharacters.>
“Which?”
<Perhaps your self-sense. That is an idiosyncratic agent present in all human minds. It supports an obliging illusion—that a single self rules your intellect and senses.>
“So if I built up this ‘self-sense’ . . . ?”
<It would counter the areas which the Shibo Personality is invading.>
“Ummm.” He was having trouble keeping his attention on the discussion. He felt a foreboding when he paid exact attention to Quath’s words. But then an itch in his servo-couplers would make him scratch, or a yawn, or some small piping of his sensorium. He would lose the thread of Quath’s argument.
It seemed as if all kinds of little things were poking at him, making his attention veer away from this problem. “The other way—”
<We do not have the equipment to adequately carry out—>
“Yeasay.” A deep breath. “Look, I’ll handle this on my own.”
<I believe the problem can only worsen.>
“We got plenty more to worry about.”
<I fear that—>
“Leave me—and her!—alone.”
Toby leaped up, prickly with energy. He walked off, contracting his sensorium, cutting off discussion. Quath’s words were still with him. You are impelled to unsettled movement, androgen-agitated. His boot thumped in frustration on a chunk of timestone.
He drank from the stream that muttered nearby. The water was sharp and fast-running. It cleared his head and quite suddenly he became aware that he felt deliciously lazy from the sleep. The uneasiness in him was gone, soothed away somehow, and he did not ask what had done it.
As he walked back to Quath a distant peak cracked apart and showered down glittering fragments. Pensively he gazed around at the warped greatness. “Hey, y’know, we could name these.”
<I do not follow.>
“Maybe nobody’s been in this particular Lane before. Could be, right?”
<Possibly. Though humans and others have occupied this complexity for very long times.>
“How long?”
<The Illuminates say it is at least several tens of thousands of your years old.>
“Ummm.” Toby thought of history in terms of his Aspects, not in “years.” Isaac was of the later Arcologies. Poor fractured Zeno was from even further back. History was people, not numbers. Impatiently he said, “So if we’re the first to be here, we get to do the naming.”
<That is a human convention?>
“Tradition, we call it. A right, really.”
<“Rights” are not a useful concept here.>
“Hey, come on. We could use some of those fancy names. Places the Aspects go on about.”
Instantly there flooded into his idling mind a shotgun blast of names, titles, all tinged with faint echoes of silvery memory. Tombs of Ishtar. Grand Palace. Altars of Innocence. Goddam-mountain. Bamboozle Bridge. Androscogginn. Pinnacle Prime. Dassadummakeag. Ever-rest. Pike’s Pyramid. Isis. Mount Olive. DoDeDeed. Angry Sink.
<Why name them at all?> Quath asked quietly.
Something in her tone made Toby blink. It was an odd human vanity, he saw, a desire to grab and hold. Shibo helped him see what every nomad knew in his sinews—that the world was to see and use and move on, part of the flow and trek of life. Naming the land didn’t fit.
“Well . . . Let ’em name themselves, then.”
But a part of him felt frustrated. He hid that from Shibo. Or tried.
FIVE
Hard Spark
Despite steep passes and rough ground they made good time—whatever that meant, in a twisted esty-place that kept confusing Toby’s ways of thinking. Several times the air and rock swayed like things seen under water and he felt sick.
Weather, Quath said. The esty adjusting to the infall of mass. His inner ear told him that “down” was a matter of opinion, shifting as the timestone groaned and flakes popped off.
They entered wind-whipped desert. Jumbled terrain curved up and away into a burnt-orange sky. The other side of the Lane was so far away he could not make it out even under highest closeupping.
“Big place. Gravity’s opposite over there?”
<True. The sickness we feel comes from tidal wrenchings.>
“Uh huh. There’s somethin’ more, though. You feel it?”
<I sense being watched.>
“Yeasay. I can’t pin it down.”
<We are sensed in a diffused way. Unsettling.>
“Not mech, I’d say. Doesn’t smell like them.”
<Perhaps. The mechanicals are smarter than our kinds.>
“Some ways, maybe.”
<Yes. In some ways.>
Quath was getting jittery. She said little and her legs fidgeted when she wasn’t using them.
It got hotter, then suddenly cold. A dry wind sucked and chimed like faint music. Small esty waves rippled by. The whispery tones were clear but mysterious, inhuman but pleasant to a lonely ear, deeply still and yet moving with the flexing of the esty.
“Sure not much water here,” Toby said, trying to keep some talk going against their shared uneasiness.
<Liquid water is a rarity in the galaxy. Near the Eater the problem of supporting organic forms such as ourselves is far worse. I am sure the esty is made to collect and conserve water with high efficiency.>
“You figure it was made for us? I mean, humans?”
<No. Most planetary life shares fundamental chemistries. Mine is not so different from yours.>
“I remember you saying once that you’d mingled genetic stuff with some species, way back in history. Was it with us?”
<No. We engaged with a higher form, I am sure.>
“Oh yeasay? How high?”
<Our records are vague. But the connection took us to a higher plane of contemplation. More advanced than single-minded forms.>
Toby wasn’t sure what “advanced” might mean, and was not much impressed if it meant you were huge and had to clank around in a hard carapace and knock over things without noticing.
He had tried to shave in the mornings here but the water and soap had the fluid sucked out of them by the air before he was half through. Aridity squared, air like a sponge.
Breezes of thwarted gravity led them into a territory of demented vegetation. Corkscrew ferns twisted in tight loops all around them. Giant fronds feathered to catch the sporadic light of the distant esty walls.
<They respond to the esty weather,> Quath said. <A helix can better resist the shears and warps of changing gravity.>
Each corkscrew was a scaled-down woodland. Their helical sheets were veined in green and orange, concealing pockets and crevices packed with creatures who clicked and chattered and whistled, calling from the coiling complexity of the parent tree. For fun he tried to catch a mouse with wings and ended up with a skinned elbow, from snatching futilely at nothing but air.