Above them the cliff had spires, pools that hung to the sheer face like teardrops of black iron, and sky-piercing poles of a sickly yellow. But the cliff face itself was smooth. Toby watched a creamy frieze seem to float out of the rock—a slanted void where blobs and strings wrapped and coiled together. He walked over to look.

He peered into a deep field where shadows played. A moment from some other time and place, a painting of agonies. The slow-moving mosaic leaked jarring sounds, like steel racketing on steel.

Deep down in the timestone, ruddy, pulsing blobs fell upon green-tinged stalks, squeezing them until pus oozed from purpling tips. Image-bursts came ratcheting out of the rock like agonies released.

Toby watched, fascinated, and read the action as a battle, a slaughter of the stalks by predatory blobs the color of dried blood. Only after a while did he glimpse the tiny slate-gray stalks that tumbled in the wake of each struggle. Then he guessed that the blobs were somehow assisting in the mating of the stalks, or milking from them the next generation of hesitant, torpid infant stalks.

But this impression itself soon was destroyed by the sight of sickly-yellow blobs emerging from the tips of the new stalks, wobbling like soap bubbles, and then attaching themselves to the mottled underside of the larger blobs.

As they did, shrieks peeled off the timestone wall. Sheets of brittle sound, like the final desperate cries of small birds being torn apart.

Yet the mosaic kept on, a perpetual floating play of forces he could not comprehend, issuing humming songs. Rough coughs, pained screeches, staccato, insectlike pepperings—none seeming to repeat, or bring meaning to the action.

Only then did Toby see that his attempts to impose meaning on the vision were pointless. He was witnessing a passing event from some unknowable elsewhen, flaking off the timestone as he watched. An ancient record dissolving into fog as it sheared away from the spongy surface. The motion he witnessed came as fine planes peeled off, each invisibly thick, like the thin slice that separates future from past.

He reflected on what Quath had said. He didn’t much like science—which he thought of as a fearsome entity, not ideas but a force of nature, for he had never met a scientist and would not know what one looked like. Here science had seized time, stripped away many of the everyday aspects, and made it like a kind of unsteady, pliant thing. It made lives seem like riffling pages in a book.

Gingerly he reached out, stroked the face of the event-matter. It was water-cool here, untouchably hot there—again, no logic, no scheme. And that was the flat fact of it: occurrence beyond human categories, brought forth from places unknowable.

Then the timestone ruptured. He had looked into it, assuming the flatness of the events there, each coming toward him as the layers peeled off into filmy fog.

Abruptly a stalk-thing poked out of the mist. It wriggled. Shards of silvery ice flaked off it. The rubbery stalk extruded from the timestone, thicker than his arm and longer. With a pop it wriggled free and fell at his feet. It hooted, low and clear. A plaintive call.

And more followed it. They floundered from the timestone as if spat out—moist, shining, making what had been comfortably distant images suddenly smelly and real. A fountain of liquid obsidian spouted to his left. It crystallized in air and fell tinkling. Panels of dusky mist marched above his head. One of the blobs grew out of the timestone and attached itself to a floating lump of water. The stalk farted a core of hard blue gas and the blob answered with a whorl of velvety fire.

Eerie, unreal. Shibo said,

Remember that all this comes out of laws, physical laws. These are trapped events from somewhere else in the esty. We should explore it.

“Uh . . .” Head foggy. “How come?”

This is a way to find what else lurks in the esty. We cannot go to these places ourselves.

“Can’t see how I’d want to anyway.” Whispering.

Do not be timid!

“Looks funny . . . risky.”

Go forward. When I was in flesh I never felt cowardice.

“No, you got me wrong, I’m just saying—”

I wanted to know more about the world. That’s the only smart way to stay alive. Believe me, I know how dead you can be inside if something stops you from—if you stop trying, learning, changing.

“Shibo . . . I don’t . . .”

Coward. Open yourself to it!

He stepped closer.

Blue-black flames danced up and licked at Toby before he could move. They were warm and soft and made him want more of their obliging comfort. He felt uneasy but within himself there was a push-pull of diverging impulses. Shibo’s Personality moved massively, blotting out his caution with a silky, calming curiosity.

We must explore this place. It is wonderful, I think. You were so right to come here.

“I didn’t, really, I just . . .”

His words trailed away. Shibo wanted to explore this strangely swarthy flame and so he stooped and put his hands and forearms into the purpling mass.

Cool, slick. Not a fire at all. It felt even better now. So pleasant to thrust up to the shoulders, his face full in it. Fragrances swarmed through him—sweet, pliant.

So comfortable. Beckoning.

Then he remembered the addictive amusements . . . back there . . . in the gray city . . . the one he had left. Something important about that.

The stuff wriggled all over his face. He wrenched away. Scraped at it with leaden hands. Gluey ropes stuck to him. Licking strands inched across his mouth, nose, eyes. He slapped at them, stripped them away. A vile reek leapt up into his nostrils: flavors like emotions—angry, vindictive, spiteful, wronged love.

He wadded up the cloying filament, struggling against waves of fleeting but sharp emotions. He dropped the fluffy, welcoming resilience and instantly regretted doing it. The pang of remorse was keen and oddly bitter. Shibo punched through to him with

Get away! Quick!

—and he was off, scrambling fast, part of him flooded with remorse, another scared.

“What was that?”

Some form of parasite. Rather sophisticated.

“You told me to do it.”

I only suggest. I cannot act.

Her hurt tone irritated him. “You leaned on me, dammit, made—”

He slammed into Quath in his hurry. As he picked himself up she sent one of her keen-edged staccato bursts that was as close as she got to sounding like human laughter.

<Afraid of the fish?> Quath had missed the whole drama.

“Those’re trouble,” Toby said lamely.

It had all been internal, he saw. Fever-ripples of contrary emotions danced across his skin where the velvet had grasped. His fresh epidermis on the back of his injured hand sent him a puckering sense of pleasure, as if the flesh was being kissed by a wide, welcoming mouth.

<Everything here is.>

FOUR

Unsettled Movement

They had run themselves out and still the seeping light did not ebb.

They were not on a revolving planet, so day and night did not make their cyclic claims. A fitful glow soaked through from exposed teeth of timestone, casting shadows among the green and yellow foliage. Toby went hard until his boots dragged, so they stopped and slept. Still no sign of anyone else. Or of pursuit.