Furious Gulf (37 page)

“If they get you, know what they’ll do?” Saying it out loud helped. “They’ll suck out all you know. Use it against Besen and
Killeen and ever’body.”

His voice was stern and that helped, too. He realized how much he missed that simple thing, the sound of humanity, a voice
not his own.
So damn screwed up you’re talking to yourself,
another part of him said, but he pushed that thought away. Anything that made him feel better helped, and the hell with analyzing.

Back to work.

Progress was slow. He found a rippling ridgeline with esty-fog rolling over it in strands of orange light. He tried the cutting
again. A broad line cracked the stone. Through it he caught a whiff of something vile and poisonous, pale green vapors—and
kicked at the stone to close it, fast. Hard as the esty was to open, acoustic tremors could zip it shut again. The stuff had
a kind of surface tension.

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.

H
e 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.

The drama began immediately after he sat so he did not have time to think on the matter. The play depended utterly on concentration.
Without the tight control and immersion of the actors, Toby could see how it could be excruciatingly dull.

In practice it wasn’t. He sat riveted as an actor entered the stage and walked with an inhuman slowness around the rim of
it, inches from the audience but immeasurably distant in her enveloped presence. She controlled her rhythm and step so utterly
that no extraneous finger gesture or eye twitch disturbed movement that was like the surface of a black lake, unrippled, but
telling much. To Toby the actor seemed to pass through the air of the theater, clothed in a silence that could cut through
a tornado. Then, later, the same scene occurred again. This time microphones amplified each sweep of silky feet across bare
boards. A whispery music followed each move, transforming the event utterly, until he could scarcely recognize it.

He found that the drama, which had so little action he could sum it in a sentence, had a strangely soothing effect on him.
It seemed to say,
Pay attention
—that being focused on the moment was more important than playing head games about the past or future.

Odd, once he thought about it. Because this was a place where past and future weren’t so easy to separate. They flowed together
at places, a muddy riverrun.

They had already fought mechs here. It took him a while to find out even this simple fact because they spoke so little. Once
he came upon a burial ceremony—held not in a ritual place but in the street—which seemed to be for someone taken by mechs.
Their homes and workshops were like the intersecting hulls of
Argo
inverted, so that from a distance they looked like blisters growing together. Burns scarred them and two had big holes punched
through.

These people were well organized. They held defense drills and used weapons he could not figure out. They said the latest
mech incursion to the esty had been going on as long as it took to raise a girl to half-height—which seemed to be their way
of measuring time—and had been worse earlier. Some had missing legs and arms to prove it.

He told them as much as he could of Family Bishop and the long way that had led him here. Still, he was not really one of
them because he had done different things for his scarred and burnished armor. Mostly he had just stayed alive. Here they
had engaged the mechs and killed them, lured and suckered and defeated them, though taking casualties all down the line of
course. Getting banged up like Toby was mostly an accident and they all knew that, quite different from being in a battle
because you wanted to be there.

And they did. A small woman told him with great fervor how they were fighting for some big idea. He could not quite get clear
what the idea was and after a while gave up pushing on his vocabulary. The woman talked fast and seemed to treat any question
as disagreement.

Toby thought about that after watching their slow, grave drama. One performer had carried a drum with a mech brain inside,
so that when she hit the drum bottom the brain would bounce around. It struck the top and bottom drumheads while the performer
went on clapping the heads. The counterpoint made an eerie echo with the brain-rattle. What that meant he could not tell but
it chilled him.

One dark time after he had finished his job he walked back to where he would sleep. A chilling wind rippled the few lights
glimmering in the soft mist. He knew somehow that he would never have gone into a battle for some kind of general principle.
He had fought and run for the Family—run mostly, and fought only when he had to.

These quiet men and women were different. They had a separate age-old tradition of being holed up here in an esty that they
didn’t understand. Or at least they could not explain it to him. Maybe they knew it in a way he could not. Living through
things gave you that sometimes.

He remembered the long empty docks where they had berthed the
Argo
. Big and covered with scratches, chipped and marred. Deserted except for
Argo
, like arms stretching out to embrace and welcome ships that came no more.

These people had said that few ships came any longer from the worlds beyond, the planets like Snowglade. Many smaller craft
slipped between the portals of the esty itself, shortcutting between Lanes. Few planetary Families came into the Lanes any
more because they were nearly all dead. Failed.

Their history didn’t square with his own understanding. That fit, too. The Lanes ran on different clocks. Some lay deeper
in the steep curvature around the black hole so time ran slower there. And the esty itself mixed and tangled events, so that
human memory churned with it.

He gave up on figuring when he found that he had walked too far in the gloom. That was the first time he realized how much
he missed his father. He cried for a while in the dark and was glad no one could see him.

Something in him said it was stupid to feel embarrassed about crying. He had never thought that before. Wondering about it
that way made him suspect a trace of Shibo. But he could catch no sliver of her anywhere.