Try as he might, thunking his sharp-toe into it jarred loose no chips. An ivory radiance oozed from the layers. Knots of gaseous esty floated, spitting beacons. They lit the shadowy reaches with probing beams, like airy lanterns drifting on unseen winds.

Slowly the soft light ebbed. The seemingly solid rock grew shadows, as if a sun were setting somewhere deep in the foggy stone. Blades of sunlight radiance danced deep within it, like summer’s promise cutting deeply into a watery cavern. He felt himself suspended above an abyss of nothingness, a mere crust keeping him from plunging down into—what?

Unease crept up his spine. Luminosities played far down inside the seemingly solid rock. Like a gulf of nothingness. He hung above sulky depths.

He shook himself. No time to fall into abstracted moods. He called up a smattering of geology from Isaac—who, predictably, wanted to discourse on the slip and slide of planets. Toby cut him off.

“This stuff, it looks like, uh, a funny kind of limestone.”

<They call it timestone.>

“But what is it?”

Quath began to explain but Toby could not keep his mind on the talk, compared with the slippery immediate feel to everything here, the give to air and rock alike. He let the information filter down to the parliament that was himself, where gobbets of succulent information fed the Aspects and Faces and the one smoldering Personality. They took to it eagerly, while he simply felt, scarcely thinking at all. Shibo asked,

So science has grabbed time and made it like a kind of space?

He relayed this to Quath, who clacked and said, <The esty is an arena for the struggles of particles and fields. Or else maybe there was nothing but curved esty—and somehow everything else, matter and motion, came out of curving the esty.>

Shibo was as unsettled by this as he had ever felt her.

Maybe even in tiny pieces? Pebbles, sand? So that everything’s really, down deep, esty?

Isaac put in,

Many ages ago our science abandoned the simple notion that physics was geometry. But in this place . . .

Even Isaac seemed subdued by the silent strangeness.

Toby was restless from the strangeness of this place. “Come on—let’s go.”

<Where?>

“Uh . . .” Getting away from the weight of father and Family had been giddy, liberating. But now his mind was blank. “Just keep moving. I need to think.”

They went for a while without speaking. Quath’s silence grew to seem like a precise criticism, all the harder to answer because it was unspoken.

They worked their way toward a distant upthrust of green, thinking it to be a grassy hill from which they could get a better view. But as they approached Toby saw striations working in the layers of it, colors mixing flame-yellow and reddish-brown and scattershot blue. Sometimes shards of emerald emerged, as if from a struggle of the light within.

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.

<Esty cannot last.> Quath didn’t seem disturbed. <As I suspected.>

“Where’d it go?”

<Somewhen else.>

“Why?”

<I gather that a construction in esty shares the property of being in anxious equilibrium with the property of duration.>

“Huh? You mean this whole place can’t last?”

<In principle, no. In practice, it is like your skin. Some sloughs away, and other esty grows to replace it.>

“Seems a funny way to build.”

<It is the living way.>

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?”

<I have learned to carry some.>

“Me, too. Let’s eat. Then some sleep. Talk later.”

<You realize the grave course you have set.>

“Yeasay. Feeling good for the first time in quite a while.”

<I do not like to understand so little.>

“Funny—that’s just what I do like, right now.”

TWO

Time’s Grip

He 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.”

<Good morning, though the light here does not properly lend itself to that description.>

“I’m stuck. Lemme—”

<I don’t advise—>

“It’s got me.”

<Still—>

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.

<An unfortunate side effect of the physics. I should have anticipated—>

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—”

<I should have realized. Esty rock is not truly solid.>