“How long?”

<The Illuminates say it is at least several tens of thousands of your years old.>

“Ummm.” Toby thought of history in terms of his Aspects, not in “years.” Isaac was of the later Arcologies. Poor fractured Zeno was from even further back. History was people, not numbers. Impatiently he said, “So if we’re the first to be here, we get to do the naming.”

<That is a human convention?>

“Tradition, we call it. A right, really.”

<“Rights” are not a useful concept here.>

“Hey, come on. We could use some of those fancy names. Places the Aspects go on about.”

Instantly there flooded into his idling mind a shotgun blast of names, titles, all tinged with faint echoes of silvery memory. Tombs of Ishtar. Grand Palace. Altars of Innocence. Goddam-mountain. Bamboozle Bridge. Androscogginn. Pinnacle Prime. Dassadummakeag. Ever-rest. Pike’s Pyramid. Isis. Mount Olive. DoDeDeed. Angry Sink.

<Why name them at all?> Quath asked quietly.

Something in her tone made Toby blink. It was an odd human vanity, he saw, a desire to grab and hold. Shibo helped him see what every nomad knew in his sinews—that the world was to see and use and move on, part of the flow and trek of life. Naming the land didn’t fit.

“Well . . . Let ’em name themselves, then.”

But a part of him felt frustrated. He hid that from Shibo. Or tried.

FIVE

Hard Spark

Despite steep passes and rough ground they made good time—whatever that meant, in a twisted esty-place that kept confusing Toby’s ways of thinking. Several times the air and rock swayed like things seen under water and he felt sick.

Weather, Quath said. The esty adjusting to the infall of mass. His inner ear told him that “down” was a matter of opinion, shifting as the timestone groaned and flakes popped off.

They entered wind-whipped desert. Jumbled terrain curved up and away into a burnt-orange sky. The other side of the Lane was so far away he could not make it out even under highest closeupping.

“Big place. Gravity’s opposite over there?”

<True. The sickness we feel comes from tidal wrenchings.>

“Uh huh. There’s somethin’ more, though. You feel it?”

<I sense being watched.>

“Yeasay. I can’t pin it down.”

<We are sensed in a diffused way. Unsettling.>

“Not mech, I’d say. Doesn’t smell like them.”

<Perhaps. The mechanicals are smarter than our kinds.>

“Some ways, maybe.”

<Yes. In some ways.>

Quath was getting jittery. She said little and her legs fidgeted when she wasn’t using them.

It got hotter, then suddenly cold. A dry wind sucked and chimed like faint music. Small esty waves rippled by. The whispery tones were clear but mysterious, inhuman but pleasant to a lonely ear, deeply still and yet moving with the flexing of the esty.

“Sure not much water here,” Toby said, trying to keep some talk going against their shared uneasiness.

<Liquid water is a rarity in the galaxy. Near the Eater the problem of supporting organic forms such as ourselves is far worse. I am sure the esty is made to collect and conserve water with high efficiency.>

“You figure it was made for us? I mean, humans?”

<No. Most planetary life shares fundamental chemistries. Mine is not so different from yours.>

“I remember you saying once that you’d mingled genetic stuff with some species, way back in history. Was it with us?”

<No. We engaged with a higher form, I am sure.>

“Oh yeasay? How high?”

<Our records are vague. But the connection took us to a higher plane of contemplation. More advanced than single-minded forms.>

Toby wasn’t sure what “advanced” might mean, and was not much impressed if it meant you were huge and had to clank around in a hard carapace and knock over things without noticing.

He had tried to shave in the mornings here but the water and soap had the fluid sucked out of them by the air before he was half through. Aridity squared, air like a sponge.

Breezes of thwarted gravity led them into a territory of demented vegetation. Corkscrew ferns twisted in tight loops all around them. Giant fronds feathered to catch the sporadic light of the distant esty walls.

<They respond to the esty weather,> Quath said. <A helix can better resist the shears and warps of changing gravity.>

Each corkscrew was a scaled-down woodland. Their helical sheets were veined in green and orange, concealing pockets and crevices packed with creatures who clicked and chattered and whistled, calling from the coiling complexity of the parent tree. For fun he tried to catch a mouse with wings and ended up with a skinned elbow, from snatching futilely at nothing but air.

He was eating some delicious purple fruit when he felt a twinge in his sensorium. Not much, just a wrinkle. Then a pale ghostly wedge shot through his senses. Blunt inspection. Not the earlier subtle sense of eyes just beyond view.

He looked up. Something long and tapered came gliding high up in the brassy sky.

He had felt such cool, remorseless force before.

Quath called, <Quick!> and was off, moving fast.

Toby followed. To watch Quath go up a slope was to see the job reduced to its essentials. They got under some dense trees. He was running and trying to identify the skittering sensorium traces when a massive boom hammered down through the forest.

It flattened them both. His sensorium rang. Limbs crashed nearby. Helical fronds rained down.

<Keep low. I shall spread a deceptive screen.>

“Mechs. They’re high up.”

<Some small figures. One large.>

“Damn!”

<Not mere reconnaissance, as with the bird.>

“Double dog damn!”

<It is ominous that the mechanicals have invaded the Lanes.>

“They must’ve broken in.”

<Yes, but why now? Observe their patterns. Clearly they are searching.>

“I remember some of these patterns and—” Something in his sensorium, coming fast.

<I am a disadvantage to you now. I am far easier to find.>

“Quath . . . It’s the Mantis.”

A long silence. Striations moved at the edge of his sensorium.

<I heard of this form from Killeen. A higher order of mech.>

“Dangerous as hell, too.”

The Mantis shape moved in a strange zigzag way. One moment it was shrinking, seeming to go further down the Lane—and next he caught its movement along a ridgeline nearby, half hidden by the glowing rock.

<Others.>

Smaller forms flitted among puffball clouds. One skimmed whispering over the canopy, veered, was gone.

“We thought we killed the Mantis back on Snowglade.”

<I wonder if the higher orders of mechs die at all.>

“We blew it to pieces with Argo’s exhaust!”

<We think of selves bound up in bodies. The mechs may not.>

“Well, slicing them up seemed to work pretty well.”

<Think of this manifestation, if you must, as a kind of cousin to the Mantis you knew.>

Toby laughed. “Mechs with relatives?” Family was so human; mechs had no need of the concept. “So you figure it’s coming here, snooping around . . .”

<I agree. This implies an unsettling revision of our ideas.>

“My Family’s escape from Snowglade . . .”

<Perhaps it was not as it appeared.>

“Maybe it was a setup?”

<It brought you to the world where I captured Killeen.>