Furious Gulf (36 page)

I’ll do anything you want!

No point in waiting. He took all the tips in a tight grip and breathed deeply.

Wait! Please!

For a long, hard moment he could not move. She had his muscles locked and he felt her sleeting anger slam into him full force.

She had been a wonderful woman once and living on like this had made her into something else. Carrying a Personality was far
harder than an Aspect, but something else had happened between them. Something about her and him, the imponderable mix of
people. Not the fault of either, maybe, just a fact.

He did not know if the true Shibo could ever come back again in a Personality but that was not the point now, and in a flash
of close contact between them he told her that, not in words but in pangs of sharp remorse.

Two heartbeats. Then her reply.

Her fury battered against him. His right hand shook. Fingers went numb. Hard to hold the tips in them. His breath caught.

She moved fast, trying everything. His sphincter clenched, balls ached. Jumpy nervous energy wormed across his skin. His chest
froze up. Hand jangling, thumb askew, muscles rock-hard.

He made himself relax his right hand and let the wrist go free. In the backlash of the muscles he reversed the tension against
her and moved.

He jerked the tools out at all four quadrants. They came free.

No you can’t I love you love Killeen love all of you don’t make me stop please please I can’t can’t can’t can’t can’t can’t

His hand brought the tips around all bright-bloody and with skin caught in them. Like a single muscle his body shivered. A
violent jerking, throwing off a sheen of droplets. Lungs heaved as if he had been under water a long time.

The moist forest around him lay at the end of a long shadowy tunnel and purple flies buzzed in halos around the tunnel walls.

Closing, far away. Sliding dark.

He pitched forward into the tunnel.

I
n one frame of reference, the Wedge whirls at a blistering angular velocity, skimming razor-close to the speed of light.

In another mathematical frame, it stands stationary in a geometric manifold. Still, silent. Lines of folded space-time eddy
about it.

In this view, despite excruciating gradients and wrenching torques, the Wedge is an island of tranquil stability. Gravitational
radiation from the black hole coalesces about its slippery contours.

Waves lap. Languid, easy. Torsional stresses play like intricate spider webs along slick, pulsing bulges.

This pressure sustains the Wedge against all lashing dissipations. It has done so for an interval whose length—or duration—depends
upon the local geometry of the observer.

In still another frame of reference, the Wedge is locked in unending, furious struggle with the black hole.

Forces wrestle. The Eater seeks to eat. The Wedge jams itself between the Eater’s jaws. Pries them open. Plugs the gullet.
Saves itself.

All are true.

Each is a frame. Truth is the sum of all frames.

Down the magnetic field lines that thread the Wedge, rubbery yet unbreakable, trickle wave packets of rippling complexity.
They carry information in the only fashion that can slip through the knotted weave of the Wedge.

Along these slender strands—wiry, coiled lifelines—the mechanical civilization converses with its delegate. The machine intelligences
gather in packets, elaborate sliding decompositions of data. They linger above the fray of the great accretion disk, in the
eternal sleet of hard radiation. Against this torrent the gliding minds use defenses of ceramic and metal.

By rippling the magnetic field lines they converse with their delegate. Hollow voices down a vast well.

At the bottom, the lone creature hears. Replies. Always amid discord, the delegate must both debate and act. Dividing its
intelligence yet again, it assigns separate portions to these tasks.

It does not enjoy the pleasures of its rulers, who float in majestic remove. It must endure the rasp and grit of the lands
within the Wedge. Seeking, always seeking.

All parties to the discussion think at the speed of light. Their voices cannot escape their origins, however, or the assumptions
of their kind.

I/You have explored a huge array of vaults and spaces, |>A<|. Yet you find nothing!

I have discovered a wealth of primate culture!

That was not your task, |>A<|.

How well I know. Our own ancient data imply that there are special, message-bearing primates. I have sought them. But they
are difficult to separate from the hordes of primates here.

There are so many? Hiding from us?

They fear us—quite rightly, I suppose.

Search out these certain message-bearers! Be done with such irritants.

The spaces here are innumerable.

Continue. Secure the minimum of three genetic layers which we/you require.

We have the basic biological information from the oldest generation, the “grandfather.” But the nature of the coded message
demands three generations. Direct biological descent.

The Legacies implied that we/you needed full analysis of them. This means complete and viable copies.

I/We think not. They could just as well be dead.

I have been carefully reading each surekill I make. My subunits are equally careful. I shall not miss the characteristic signature
of the particular primate we need, the youngest. I knew him.

On their planet?

He was useful in securing his father-self when I wished to make a capture.

I hope you/we can do as well now/here.

You/We are fading from our/your field of view. Is the Wedge damaging?

I have navigated the shifts here, but there is a troubling background sense. Something more lurks in these warped passages.

What is it? I/You have heard reports from earlier units we/all sent into the Wedge. Before they vanished from us/you.

I do not know how to describe it. A faint trembling presence beyond my fields. But it is not localized.

An echo.

I think not. It comes from everywhere but does not repeat what I send. I am uneasy.

Stifle your/our reactions. You/We act for us/all, remember.

This is not the time for hesitation.

Kill them all if you/we can. I/We would be done with this vexation.

I have surekilled so many. My factors overload. So much wealth to know and savor!

Forget your/our strange sense of beauty! Never before has such a strong agency as you/we penetrated the Wedge so deeply. Know
them, yes. Then end these parasites in their last lair.

Savage them!

I obey.

Malign Attentions

T
oby woke feeling tired but clean. He had been out for a long time. His arm throbbed less now. Blunt pain, as if it were seeping
away from him.

Shibo wasn’t there.

He had her chip in his carrypouch. Now he probed for her self. Skated over inky crevices where his Aspects lived their compacted
semi-lives. Tramped through the galley of Faces.

Gray passageways yawned. Isaac and Zeno and the others called to him and wanted to talk about Shibo. They always wanted to
talk. About anything. But of Shibo there was nothing.

He knew shreds might still cling somewhere in him. A Personality was by nature diffused, hard to grasp. So he would have to
watch carefully. The earlier signs—mood shifts, deflections of his attention, outright seizure of his sensorium—had been increasingly
overt. If traces of her remained, they would be subtle.

He got up, creaking. Sore. With a bone-deep weariness that sleep could not take away.

No skittering warnings in the sensorium. It expanded like a blue bubble in his vision and brushed against only the rustlings
of the forest and dark-bellied clouds. Time to get back to business.

Years of Family discipline had taught him to follow orders when he did not like them. Something in the way Quath told him
to leave had the force of an order.

He carried it out without thinking. Thought, after all, was a luxury when living depended on speed and concealment and silent
savvy.

He moved with his sensorium compressed to a half-sphere barely bigger than his arms’ reach. That allowed practically no time
to defend against one of the spark things that had hit Quath. But it would make him harder to find, he hoped.

When he reached the next high point he peered backward. Shadowy forms, gliding like leaves blown on systematic breezes.
Quath. Quath.
He yearned to send the call.

More burnt-yellow sparks jumped and bounced among the forest. Others cruised far up toward the other enclosing curvature of
the Lane. Where he had left Quath something fired vicious hot-white bolts.

Toby knew it would be foolish to try to raise Quath’s signal but the desire to do it was almost uncontrollable. At last he
turned away and devoted himself to speed.

He ran for some time before he noticed that he was crying. Never, on the long pursuits the Family had endured on Snowglade,
had he ever felt alone. Now the sour desperation of his predicament descended on him and he could not stop the anguish bubbling
up in him. No Quath, no Family, just bare empty flight.

What would Killeen think? He made himself stop, willing the hardness into himself until the tears quit. He had to uphold the
Bishop way. Even here, even alone. Maybe especially here.

He came to a bare stony territory. Would he be too exposed here? Dirty-gray clouds hugged the ground and then lifted suddenly,
as if some giant had snatched them away. But there were none of the airborne forms that hovered half-seen like something glimpsed
out of the corner of your eye. So he went on.

Something came over a distant peak and vectored in on him. He shot at it and missed and it burned his right side in an instant.
His second shot got off as he went down. It caught the thing. A quick, buzzing fireball. Something tiny, tumbling. It crashed
down, a sound like the air ripping apart.

He had shat his pants. That made him disgusted with himself but his right arm was more important.

The pain made his hands tremble. He got his right side up and running again with some repair work. His arm was sore but would
move again.

He found running water nearby and got cleaned up. Humbling work. In an abstract way he was surprised he had been so scared.
All fear, he realized, later seems somewhat ludicrous.

By the time he could limp over to where the thing had gone down there was just a hole in the ground. He had been damn lucky
to wing the thing and knew it.

He licked his lips, feeling the fear again. If he kept going this way one of the seekers would track him for sure, bring down
a whole flock the next time.

He remembered Quath’s little lesson about the sums and how in this geometry, Lanes were like those pairs of numbers. Each
pair summed to a hundred, and rearranging them endlessly kept the grand total constant. The esty stayed intact.

And the total did not have to be a hundred or a thousand or a million. The Lanes could number a million. Or a billion. Or
some other word offered by his chattering Isaac Aspect, big words ending in -
ion
that just said that it was bigger than any person could ever know.

So he was not surprised when time wore on and he kept moving and saw no one. He might never meet a human again. The Lanes
could snake on for an uncountable, twisty forever.

The trick was to find a way out of this particular place. A way the mechs could not track easily. How? Just running harder
wasn’t enough.

Puzzles thickened in his head. Quath had said that gravity was esty, curved. Mass did that. Planets held you to them by curving
space-time, which humans felt as a clear, strong force. Yeasay, fine.

But Isaac said that esty curvature generated further curvature. So gravity could make more of itself, conjuring up more from
less. Something had knitted this esty so that it held firm. It even prospered here on the lip of the abyss, kissing the Eater
of Everything.

“Anything you understand, you can use,” Toby muttered to himself as he trotted. He remembered this was a saying of his grandfather
Abraham, and wondered where in this place old Abraham might be.

“Abraham, he would’ve
done
something with this stuff,” he said, voice frail against the whispery musics of the landscape.

No place to run, not literally anyway. And he was getting tired.

So he tried to shape the timestone. Logic said it was impossible but logic wasn’t doing too well here lately, was it?

His weaponry had no effect, but after laser-cutting the stuff glowed. He tried microwaves, sonics, even a nano-reamer he still
carried from Snowglade days. Nothing worked.

Next he used the whole spectrum. No response. He hit it with pulsed infrared. For the barest instant a thin grin split the
stone.

Again. This time it lasted longer and he jammed his boot in and shoved. It gave, then started crushing his boot. He yanked
free and the stuff slammed shut.

Next time he was more careful. First, he found a place where he felt nauseous. Dimpling perspectives, watery light, refractions
of sound and space. Where the Lanes intersected, gravity twisted.

Second, he cut and heated it. He jabbed, pried, ran through variations of weaponry. Sweaty work. He cut his hand, scorched
an arm. Nothing came right the first time. But it seemed that he was slicing deeper into the timestone. The fatigue got to
him and he had to stop and rest. Sweat trickled into his eyes and then he knew it wasn’t sweat.

Tears again. He was impatient with himself this time.
Killeen would snort and look the other way. Besen would be sympathetic, and that would be even worse.