<Hold. I am losing a leg.>—and her shank sheared off. It rang hard against him. “Ow!”

She orbited him on a long tether. It was one of her telescoped arms. Torn free of her, and used to connect them. As Toby inhaled, it stretched—and he smelled his own acid-sharp fear.

“Quath!”—but the ivory head that swiveled to regard him was a whirling mass of bulging sockets and wiggly stalks, deeply alien face-scapes, not one expression but many. Eyes and lurching mouths and planes of cheek and jowl all working against each other, the personalities of his friend spattering across the great head.

Unreadable. This, more than the slamming colors and ripping winds, frightened Toby and sent a chill through his aching, straining joints.

Quath’s rasping was harsh and yet calm, resigned. <Be still. Hold on. This is the stochasticity. The random esty’s laborings.>

A pearly fog dispersed, blown by some unseen wind, and Toby saw far below them—though they were not falling toward any place now—a mass of pinhole openings in a broad plain. The pinholes danced, refracted by great distance.

They flew along the plain as though blown by a wind, soundless but for a soft chime almost like tiny voices. One pinhole swelled and he could make out small bumps on it. Toby closeupped the nodules and found their crests crowned by dashes of white—and then realized that these were snowcapped mountains.

Toby saw the size of the thing he was witnessing—a plain sprawling away into hazy infinity, a whole flat world. Seething with pores. Pockets that opened and closed like slippery mouths.

<Hold hard!> Quath called.

They lurched sidewise, Toby barely keeping both gloved hands on Quath. Rushing winds, hard-slamming acceleration.

The mountaintops streamed by like tiny ridges. Something slammed them forward with a rude kick, up and away from a yawning cavern that churned with brooding shapes. A sudden veer, and they were back above the plain. The multitude of other pinholes churned and jostled like an angry crowd. Gravity’s gullet.

“What . . . what are they?” Toby called.

<The Lanes, I believe. So Andro termed them.>

“Places to go?”

<If we knew how to move in this place, I suppose so. But I believe no one has that knowledge—or can have it.>

“Where are we going?”

<I do not think there is an answer to that, until we arrive.>

“I’m rethinking this whole idea, buggo.”

<It is far too late for that. Actions have consequences.> Something somber and yet matter-of-fact in Quath’s tone was chilling. Toby held tight to the alien’s leg and watched as a particular pinhole began to grow nearby. He realized that they were speeding toward it, turning at angles and spinning in a random dance, while vagrant forces plucked at his fluttering legs, his painful arms, and gurgled the fluid in his ears. He forced away bitter nausea but it hovered in the back of his throat.

Hold. Just a little longer. If you lose Quath—

The hole puckered. Toby had the unpleasant sensation that it was preparing to swallow them—and then it did.

In a blur of wrenching speed they rushed through gauzy spaces, his eyes filming and suddenly thick with tears. Then he heard a rasp, felt a thump—and they were on a field of ropy, tough grass. He felt himself gingerly and sat up.

“Uh!” Muscles complained. No bones seemed to grind against themselves.

Quath was already surveying the curved bowl that arced away in all directions—though she moved a little unsteadily on her feet. Toby could not see where they had come from, but a small dappling in the sky flickered, hinting at a huge space above—and then was gone.

“That like to pulled me apart.”

<In worse weather it would have. And I as well.>

“That was weather?”

<Esty weather. The space-time responding to the addition of more infalling matter. Redesigning itself self-consistently.>

He felt bruised. “I don’t get it. What happened?”

<The esty flexed and bore us along with it. We are in a different Lane than before. A separate space-time, usually closed off from countless others. Only when readjustments occur do the Lanes intersect.>

“That’s happening now? How come?”

<Remember the star which split open? It is working inward through the disk. Its added mass now forces the entire geometry near the black hole—including this esty—to adjust.>

He remembered how this whole esty place had swelled up out of the ergosphere. Worlds within worlds, all moored somehow. “What holds it together?”

<No one knows. Yet it persists.>

“Start with the esty then. What keeps it ridin’ around near a black hole, when that hole’s supposed to eat stars for breakfast?”

<I gather that one might as well question why a drawing remains on a sheet of paper when you slide it across a table.>

“Huh?” Toby rubbed his shoulders, fighting cramps. His muscles were bunched hard and he had to pound on them to free them up any. He lay back, tired. “So this esty, it’s written into the, the—”

<Do not struggle. Your language does not have the concepts. The esty is a space-time kernel embedded into another space-time, which in turn is curved by the black hole. The esty is a stable dip in this overall curvature. A well. A refuge.>

Toby brushed at the soft, moist grass. At first it moved away. Then it caressed his fingers. “This grass—it’s esty-stuff?”

<No, only the foundation is folded space-time. Ordinary matter accretes to it.>

“Ummm. Good to know grass is still grass.”

<Growing inside a small, pocket space-time. Like a capillary in the wall of a pulsing artery.>

Toby lay back and let Quath go on. She was trying to get across slippery ideas. He fumbled with them and finally decided to simply accept.

Primates, Quath had once told him, liked to reason by analogy, like holding up an orange and seeing how it was like a planet. Here something like that was needed. Capillaries, arteries, the esty as flow.

But the feel of this place was off balance, not like anything he had ever known. Pressing textures played along his skin. The air kept stretching and relaxing, rubbery. Tremors beneath him radiated upward into the cottony blanket above. The esty, adjusting itself? The waves were just below the edge of hearing—yet he felt them through his bones, a heavy pulse.

And on top of this, the troubled sense of being watched. Scrolling feelers in his sensorium. When he focused on them they dispersed.

Toby stared up in wide-eyed awe. “Land as fat as God’s pocket.” A cloud dissipated and he saw high above a vast curving green mat, spotted in vibrant yellows and purples. Land, far away.

The roof of this Lane arced over them, as if they were in a huge spinning cylinder, pinned to the sides by centrifugal force. But there was no spin, Quath told him. Or nothing that would seem to humans like spin. Instead, the esty held itself together with its own curvature of . . . itself. He struggled with the idea, got nowhere, so tossed it aside.

And tucking up and away from him, to all sides, the speckled forests. He had seen ancient pictures like this, sights called up by Aspects and sent into the Family sensorium for entertainment after a long day’s foot travel, but he had always figured they were figments, artworks, mere fancies of a dead past. Lush green unending.

<Humans and others have shaped the esty to their liking. Your father told me, when the Andro person was looking at your Legacy, that it contained a reference to this place. It was once referred to as “the Redoubt.”>

“Huh? To doubt again?”

<No, a place to retire to. I gather that humanity, and other carbon-based forms, came here to escape the mechs, long ago.>

“Hmmmm . . .” Light seeped from a rocky hill nearby. Toby got up, edgy despite the embracing calm here. He walked over to the shining stone and kicked it with a boot.