“Feels solid.”

<It is compressed events, rendered as mass. Press against it long enough and you become part of the event.>

“What ‘event’? That stuff tried to eat me.”

<Do not ascribe intention to physical law. Your skin became wedded to the esty. It began to diffuse into the occurrencespace which this substance is.>

“You mean everything here can sop us up, like sponges?”

<Only if you dwell long enough in close proximity—within a few atomic lattice spacings, say.>

“This grass, even the air?”

<Not at all. They are ordinary mass, the simple form of matter.>

Toby shook his head. “Look, let’s eat some of that ordinary stuff. Provisions, I mean. I’m woozy.”

Quath threw him a ration. <I gather that the timestone does eat matter placed against it, but at different speeds. The bare stone—such as where you let your hand lie—absorbs quickly. Elsewhere, it does not—so dirt and life can survive. All quite ingeniously constructed.>

Toby barely heard this. The bandage was a living layer doing its work, regrowing his skin. Already the back of his hand wriggled, a scummy green mat eating his drying blood and making epidermis. But Family bioengineering—when it had existed as a living craft—had dictated that repair came first. Nurture was far down the list, so the pain still made him grit his teeth. He turned off most of it by going though his subcontrols, but it took time. Pain could also be a useful reminder, so it was not easy to block.

He ate some of his rations, sitting gingerly on grass a good distance from any timestone. Morning was nothing like sunrise here, though there was a crisp bite in the air. Patches of stone exuded pale beams of light that scattered among the twisted trees. Distant peaks brimmed with slow-shifting colors. When the clouds far above parted he could see other sources of radiance giving off diffuse glows that came and waxed and flared again in long, patient pulses.

<This light seems to come from the accretion disk around the black hole. It becomes trapped in the esty and carried along by solidified past events.>

“Seems enough to grow trees.”

<The virulence of the disk is muted here until it sustains life. This cannot be accidental.>

“Who you figure made this?”

<Not even the Philosophs know. I am too humble to speculate. Use of the fabric of space-time as construction material is a skill beyond my comprehension.>

“How ’bout us?”

<You? Primates?>

“Why not? We made Argo, a long way back. And don’t forget the Chandeliers.”

<You do not understand how much greater the esty is.>

“Ummm. You’re impressed by big ideas. Me, I’m impressed by a tore-up hand.”

Toby had meant the suggestion as a joke anyway. He had long ago given up trying to understand where things came from. Time enough for such luxuries when he felt safe. If ever.

Down the shining air came a bird. It was the first he had seen since Snowglade, in the years before Citadel Bishop fell. The mechs had found birds a fairly trivial exercise in extinction and had easily blown them from the skies.

This one was far larger than anything he had seen aloft that was not mech. It neither fluttered like a butterfly nor soared like a predator hawk, but instead sported with proud reliance on the fields of the air. He watched it snag something he could not make out. Then it wallowed through a milky strand of congealing vapor, more like swimming than flying.

The cup of mottled air blew over Toby and he felt a sudden sharp chill. He tried to raise his arm and found it would not go, that he could not even bat his eyes. His chest froze. Muscles locked up. Then the stuff like translucent glass was gone and he could breathe. The bird had wafted by without a twitter or slightest show of concern. Only as it passed did he see that it had four wings and an outsized head. Yellow wings churned against a gathering breeze and the air thickened around it. Winds curled. The atmosphere turned a color like chalk meeting rust.

“Quath!”

<Wait. It passes.>

“Some weather,” was all Toby could manage to say.

<Esty can sublime into vapor, I believe, even liquid—or so the “Introductory Text” implied. It mingles with the air. Try not to breathe it in.>

Toby got his breathing right again. His chest hurt. Rock that turned to air? And maybe back again? He let his aching lungs subside.

Another bird came slow-flapping down a passing draft. With admiration Toby followed its artful course on vagrant winds. “I dunno about this place, old bug-girl. If you have to check it out before you draw a breath—”

Quath shot the bird. It blew to pieces. Toby cried out in alarm. “What’d you—”

<Look at it.>

Toby found parts of the body in some stumpy grass. Blood everywhere, guts glistening fresh, an acid scent. Head cracked open, eyes staring. At the back of the skull, shiny electricals.

“Damn! It’s got mech parts.”

<Made by them. Adroitly disguised.>

“And here.”

<Precisely. Mechanicals have infiltrated the esty Redoubt.>

“All this time I thought we were safe.”

<So do many. They scrupulously filter visitors such as ourselves for mechanical spies, for microscopic agents, for intrusive programs in human computers. Andro said these measures were effective.>

“Double dog damn. That bird, it looked real pretty.”

<I find it disturbing that the mechanicals know how to integrate organic forms with their own.>

“They did before, remember? That crazy leader on Trump, that Supremacy—his head was packed with stuff like this.”

<True. I should have generalized from that.>

“But who’d think? Inside a bird, even.”

<It was studying us for a bit too long, I thought.>

“If it had time to send a signal to whatever made it—”

<Quite so. What are the chances that a mech device would find us, in the labyrinths of the esty?>

“Ummm. Depends on how many Lanes there are.”

<There may be uncountably many. The mathematics of this place is coy with infinities.>

Coy? Quath picked some pretty funny words, sometimes. “Depends on how many spies the mechs’re sending, too.”

<This bird implies, then, that the mechanicals are much concerned. That they are hunting you.>

“Me? C’mon, my father’d like to get his hands on me, but mechs? I’m not important to them.”

Quath’s servos wheezed uneasily. <Uncertainties converge. I believe we must again make use of the esty’s prime property—concealment.>

THREE

The Rock of Chaos

To “make use” meant moving fast over unknown terrain, looking for a pore-opening. Toby thought of the wrenching places where the esty boiled open as sick-making confusions, but Quath spoke of them as the finest work of intelligence she had ever encountered.

Toby tried hard to understand as they ran, loping over sheets of timestone. His hand still hurt fiercely and he stepped lively, afraid that the apparently solid rock would suck him in. Quath made her screeching, ratchetlike laugh about this but he did not think it was funny.

Part of his problem was envisioning time and space all gumboed together to make something he could walk on. He was acutely aware of the time, all right. Of the enhanced, vivid now that divided the known but fading past from the unknown, ghostly future. But how did you marry that to distance?