After that he learned to sense the dimples and fluxes in the esty. He could slit one open for a quick look, but it slammed back tight.
Which was lucky, most of the time. Some passageways led to Lanes of vacuum. Others to stony, chilling landscapes. A few to howling, dusty tornadoes.
His systems warned him of openings that brimmed with searing radiation. He closed up fast, but one time something hot and fluid shot out and darted away before the seam shut. It cut a deep streak across the sky.
Once he saw a whole city through a momentary slit. Its streets turned and looped around each other. So did the oblong buildings, and traffic of slender tubes teemed in and out of the porous walls. The things inside the tubes looked like boiling white stones. They seemed to take some interest in him and he felt a wave of sudden, solid fear. He let the portal crash shut.
After a few dozen times he had learned the feel of it, a kind of craft. For days he simply fooled and tinkered and forgot about what was probably following him. If he was to ever find the Family or Abraham, he had to master the skills here.
The spots where the esty seemed pliable kept moving, restless loci. He was half-nauseous as he worked the stone but that was the price. Finding the moment to strike, the angle, the spectrum—it became more like hunting than craftwork, intuitions unspoken.
Most Lanes seemed hostile to human life. Not all. He slipped through one that seemed pleasant, the first time he had tried to wriggle his way in.
It worked, barely. He lost some skin and suffered frostbite in his fingers. But he got through into a valley of fractured timestone. At least it was more interesting than where he had been.
What’s more, experience taught him that the timestone lied. Many times he sat eating whatever he had gathered and blending it in with his rations, and marveled at the formal, clean-lined shapes of distant ranges. They were elegant, serene, pointed. Then later he met them close up and knew them for what they were—rough, unforgiving.
Torsions pulled at him in the broken slides he struggled across, along the jagged ledges he pulled himself over. Torques played along the narrow and shifting shelves he crawled along, afraid to look down or up because those directions were fickle and flickering.
Paths curled over into tunnels—with him inside. They stretched long and necked down.
He had to crawl for his life to get through squeezing-down knotholes. Some were slow, others brutally fast. He dived through one that groaned, trying to slam shut upon him, and lost a boot heel in the process. The heel sheared off clean, removing any doubts about what it would have meant to be a little slower. He had to limp for a long while before it grew back.
And all the while he felt a deepening loneliness. He woke from a sound sleep, calling Quath with a dry throat. He dreamed, and was speaking eternally to Killeen in a hoarse voice that couldn’t get through the fog around him. He hoped that they were still alive somewhere and at other times he knew with a final, leaden certainty that they were not.
Events passed. After a while he found that he knew how to read a shifting three-dimensional map, to follow a trail over slick rock, to memorize landmarks no matter what angle he saw them from, to build a fire in misty wind-whipped rain, to treat bites from small wriggly animals, to rappel down a trembling cliff, to glide down a glacier of frozen air, to splint his own broken bone and lie doggo long enough for the two days it took to heal, to find water under gritty sand, to coax and load a burro-beast he found wandering by itself, to bury a body torn into long strings—evidence of mechs, he guessed.
He patched up a rubber flyer he found on a saddleback ridge and used it to fly a great long distance on a rough wind. After he crashed, the front caught up with him. A sudden, biting blizzard.
No shelter. He started digging back into timestone itself, a chip at a time. As he dug in the sharp cold, events peeled off when he struck them with his field shovel. Cries and odd coughs came from them, as they sheared and broke like crystalline planes.
He reached a layer that brimmed with the heat of some past summer. With some hollowing out he had a cave big enough to curl up in.
That lasted out the deep cold. He slept, grateful for warmth, but Killeen was talking to him through the milky fog. Toby, Toby. The next words were just beyond hearing. He strained to catch them and woke up. Warmth, loneliness. Then he felt that the timestone was warm because it was slowly mashing him, trying to close in. “Damn!” He rolled out and staggered away into pale light, the tag end of the blizzard.
Besen, the mechs will get her too if they can suck out of me what they want . . . and it’ll be because of me and my damn fool running . . . and if the mechs win here, it’s forever, no Bishops ever again, gone to dust and never knowing what all this is, what it means . . .
He found himself muttering as he moved, but there was not much to the thoughts except the aloneness he now had as a kind of companion.
A smash-storm came and taught him to dodge falling rock. When it was over the landscape had contorted again and he learned how to climb out of a slick box canyon, how to slide down a steepening peak before it broke off and sailed on its own across what looked like empty air.
After more time passed than he could recall, he even got so he could predict the wrenching weather—sort of.
All that had changed him by the time he met the first people.
TWO
Rational Laughter
He found them deep in a savannah, living by cultivating some gnarled yellow grain crops he did not recognize.
They took care of him. He was in worse shape than he thought and yet somehow not being able to understand them helped.
They spoke no language he knew or had chips for. They were small and what they lacked in power and bulk they made up in a compact grace. They were balanced, self-contained. The women were demurely radiant, lithe and with warm, veiled eyes that sparkled as they talked.
Both sexes seemed compressed, with broad shoulders capping the V-shaped rise from their narrow waists. They had a perfect, erect carriage, a swagger-free lightness. Their skins were smooth, glowing golden-brown beneath elaborate confections of blue-black hair.
The Families had taken inordinate care with their hair and for the long years on the run had made that their only fashion indulgence. Here, in contorted gravities that turned like weather, hair could perform miracles—cant into impossible shelves, swirl upward like a frozen black fire, veer and swoop and verge on the comic.
They had the usual two sexes and four genders, with both varieties of homosexuals wearing customary hair, symphonies of oblique provocation. He liked it all. Signs were always more fun than talk and the small vocabulary he mastered cast him agreeably back onto his intuition. He learned to read the unspoken, which was more interesting anyway.
As he rested up—not for long, though, as everyone worked or else didn’t eat—he began to get an idea of how different these people were.
To them, every detail should be dwelt upon, every moment occupied. The task at hand, that was everything. When you worked there was no other world, only the compressed moment of the job. All thought of other jobs, of vexing moments past or future, were banished. Except for some distracting aches in his right arm and ribs, picked up in his long flight, he managed pretty well.
Their community life centered on an elaborate, staged drama. Talk of mechs and the esty bored them. They wanted only to discuss the current play. Toby went to one and found that this was regarded as a great honor to them. The audience stood and applauded him by clapping their lips together as he sat down. Or at least he thought that was what they meant; later, he wondered if he had committed some blunder.