Furious Gulf (33 page)

Toby sagged down, eyes blank. “So we can’t find our way back?”

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, to favor us.>

“I—I don’t get it. What’re we looking for?”

“Sounds like a contradiction in terms.” He panted hard, slippery air clogging his throat.

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.”

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?”

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?”

“Hiding in time, not space?”

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?”

“How’ll 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?”

learned much, and returned transformed.>

“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
damned predictable!”

“Hey, you’re pretty heavy with the crap here.”

“Sometimes understanding’s the booby 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 compacted instants. Compressions and twistings made unscalable walls, stomach-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.

Shibo 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.

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 assisting 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 passing 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 entity, 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, assuming the flatness of the events there, each coming toward him as the
layers peeled off into filmy fog.

Abruptly a stalk-thing poked out of the mist. It wriggled. Shards of silvery ice flaked off it. The rubbery stalk extruded
from the timestone, thicker than his arm and longer. With a pop it wriggled free and fell at his feet. It hooted, low and
clear. A plaintive call.

And more followed it. They floundered from the timestone as if spat out—moist, shining, making what had been comfortably distant
images suddenly smelly and real. A fountain of liquid obsidian spouted to his left. It crystallized in air and fell tinkling.
Panels of dusky mist marched above his head. One of the blobs grew out of the timestone and attached itself to a floating
lump of water. The stalk farted a core of hard blue gas and the blob answered with a whorl of velvety fire.

Eerie, unreal. Shibo said,

Remember that all this comes out of laws, physical laws. These are trapped events from somewhere else in the esty. We should
explore it.

“Uh . . .” Head foggy. “How come?”

This is a way to find what else lurks in the esty. We cannot go to these places ourselves.

“Can’t see how I’d want to anyway.” Whispering.

Do not be timid!

“Looks funny . . . risky.”

Go forward. When I was in flesh I never felt cowardice.

“No, you got me wrong, I’m just saying—”

I wanted to know more about the world. That’s the only smart way to stay alive. Believe me, I know how dead you can be inside
if something stops you from—if you stop trying, learning, changing.

“Shibo . . . I don’t . . .”

Coward. Open yourself to it!

He stepped closer.

Blue-black flames danced up and licked at Toby before he could 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. Shibo’s Personality moved
massively, 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. Shibo wanted to explore this strangely swarthy flame and so he stooped and put his hands and forearms
into the purpling mass.

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 amusements . . . 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. Scraped 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. Shibo 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.

Her hurt tone irritated him. “You leaned on me, dammit, made—”

He slammed into Quath in his hurry. As he picked himself up she sent one of her keen-edged staccato bursts that was as close
as she got to sounding like human laughter.

Quath had missed the whole drama.

“Those’re trouble,” Toby said lamely.

It had all been internal, he saw. Fever-ripples of contrary emotions danced across his skin where the velvet had grasped.
His fresh epidermis on the back of his injured hand sent him a puckering sense of pleasure, as if the flesh was being kissed
by a wide, welcoming mouth.