Authors: Gregory Benford
Furious Gulf (32 page)
Without warning a sheer cliff writhed in scraping 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 welldone 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.
“Where’d it
go
?”
“Why?”
being
in anxious equilibrium with the property of duration.>
“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 grass.
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.”
Time’s Grip
H
e woke up fuzzily. Shibo was crooning to him, a soft voice playing down through his body, massaging 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 grass, 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 brimming, 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—”
“It’s
got
me.”
He yanked hard. The right hand came free with an awful ripping sound—and a flash of white-hot pain. “Ow!”
The entire back of his hand was raw, a scarlet patch of oozing corpuscles. It had left behind a tattered rag still stuck to
the timestone. Already turning brown, blood thickening in air.
Toby clutched his hand and swore. He popped open his medical pouch, fished out supplies and slapped an all-purpose bandage
on the bloody 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 grass, 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. stone—such as where you let your hand lie—absorbs quickly. Elsewhere, it does not—so dirt and life can survive. All quite
ingeniously constructed.>
Toby barely heard this. The bandage was a living layer doing its work, regrowing his skin. Already the back of his hand wriggled,
a scummy 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 grass 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-shifting 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.
“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 shining 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 butterfly 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 glass was gone and
he could breathe. The bird had wafted by without a twitter or slightest show of concern. Only as it passed 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. The atmosphere 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 passing draft. With admiration 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 grass. Blood everywhere, guts glistening fresh, an acid scent. Head cracked open,
eyes staring. At the back of the skull, shiny electricals.
“Damn! It’s got mech parts.”
“And
here.
”
“All this time I thought we were safe.”
“Double dog damn. That bird, it looked real pretty.”
“They did before, remember? That crazy leader on Trump, that Supremacy—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.”
“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.
The Rock of Chaos
T
o “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.”
“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.