Paths curled over into tunnels—with him inside. They stretched long and necked down.

He had to crawl for his life to get through squeezing-down knotholes. Some were slow, others brutally fast. He dived through one that groaned, trying to slam shut upon him, and lost a boot heel in the process. The heel sheared off clean, removing any doubts about what it would have meant to be a little slower. He had to limp for a long while before it grew back.

And all the while he felt a deepening loneliness. He woke from a sound sleep, calling Quath with a dry throat. He dreamed, and was speaking eternally to Killeen in a hoarse voice that couldn’t get through the fog around him. He hoped that they were still alive somewhere and at other times he knew with a final, leaden certainty that they were not.

Events passed. After a while he found that he knew how to read a shifting three-dimensional map, to follow a trail over slick rock, to memorize landmarks no matter what angle he saw them from, to build a fire in misty wind-whipped rain, to treat bites from small wriggly animals, to rappel down a trembling cliff, to glide down a glacier of frozen air, to splint his own broken bone and lie doggo long enough for the two days it took to heal, to find water under gritty sand, to coax and load a burro-beast he found wandering by itself, to bury a body torn into long strings—evidence of mechs, he guessed.

He patched up a rubber flyer he found on a saddleback ridge and used it to fly a great long distance on a rough wind. After he crashed, the front caught up with him. A sudden, biting blizzard.

No shelter. He started digging back into timestone itself, a chip at a time. As he dug in the sharp cold, events peeled off when he struck them with his field shovel. Cries and odd coughs came from them, as they sheared and broke like crystalline planes.

He reached a layer that brimmed with the heat of some past summer. With some hollowing out he had a cave big enough to curl up in.

That lasted out the deep cold. He slept, grateful for warmth, but Killeen was talking to him through the milky fog. Toby, Toby. The next words were just beyond hearing. He strained to catch them and woke up. Warmth, loneliness. Then he felt that the timestone was warm because it was slowly mashing him, trying to close in. “Damn!” He rolled out and staggered away into pale light, the tag end of the blizzard.

Besen, the mechs will get her too if they can suck out of me what they want . . . and it’ll be because of me and my damn fool running . . . and if the mechs win here, it’s forever, no Bishops ever again, gone to dust and never knowing what all this is, what it means . . .

He found himself muttering as he moved, but there was not much to the thoughts except the aloneness he now had as a kind of companion.

A smash-storm came and taught him to dodge falling rock. When it was over the landscape had contorted again and he learned how to climb out of a slick box canyon, how to slide down a steepening peak before it broke off and sailed on its own across what looked like empty air.

After more time passed than he could recall, he even got so he could predict the wrenching weather—sort of.

All that had changed him by the time he met the first people.

TWO

Rational Laughter

He found them deep in a savannah, living by cultivating some gnarled yellow grain crops he did not recognize.

They took care of him. He was in worse shape than he thought and yet somehow not being able to understand them helped.

They spoke no language he knew or had chips for. They were small and what they lacked in power and bulk they made up in a compact grace. They were balanced, self-contained. The women were demurely radiant, lithe and with warm, veiled eyes that sparkled as they talked.

Both sexes seemed compressed, with broad shoulders capping the V-shaped rise from their narrow waists. They had a perfect, erect carriage, a swagger-free lightness. Their skins were smooth, glowing golden-brown beneath elaborate confections of blue-black hair.

The Families had taken inordinate care with their hair and for the long years on the run had made that their only fashion indulgence. Here, in contorted gravities that turned like weather, hair could perform miracles—cant into impossible shelves, swirl upward like a frozen black fire, veer and swoop and verge on the comic.

They had the usual two sexes and four genders, with both varieties of homosexuals wearing customary hair, symphonies of oblique provocation. He liked it all. Signs were always more fun than talk and the small vocabulary he mastered cast him agreeably back onto his intuition. He learned to read the unspoken, which was more interesting anyway.

As he rested up—not for long, though, as everyone worked or else didn’t eat—he began to get an idea of how different these people were.

To them, every detail should be dwelt upon, every moment occupied. The task at hand, that was everything. When you worked there was no other world, only the compressed moment of the job. All thought of other jobs, of vexing moments past or future, were banished. Except for some distracting aches in his right arm and ribs, picked up in his long flight, he managed pretty well.

Their community life centered on an elaborate, staged drama. Talk of mechs and the esty bored them. They wanted only to discuss the current play. Toby went to one and found that this was regarded as a great honor to them. The audience stood and applauded him by clapping their lips together as he sat down. Or at least he thought that was what they meant; later, he wondered if he had committed some blunder.

The drama began immediately after he sat so he did not have time to think on the matter. The play depended utterly on concentration. Without the tight control and immersion of the actors, Toby could see how it could be excruciatingly dull.

In practice it wasn’t. He sat riveted as an actor entered the stage and walked with an inhuman slowness around the rim of it, inches from the audience but immeasurably distant in her enveloped presence. She controlled her rhythm and step so utterly that no extraneous finger gesture or eye twitch disturbed movement that was like the surface of a black lake, unrippled, but telling much. To Toby the actor seemed to pass through the air of the theater, clothed in a silence that could cut through a tornado. Then, later, the same scene occurred again. This time microphones amplified each sweep of silky feet across bare boards. A whispery music followed each move, transforming the event utterly, until he could scarcely recognize it.

He found that the drama, which had so little action he could sum it in a sentence, had a strangely soothing effect on him. It seemed to say, Pay attention—that being focused on the moment was more important than playing head games about the past or future.

Odd, once he thought about it. Because this was a place where past and future weren’t so easy to separate. They flowed together at places, a muddy riverrun.

They had already fought mechs here. It took him a while to find out even this simple fact because they spoke so little. Once he came upon a burial ceremony—held not in a ritual place but in the street—which seemed to be for someone taken by mechs. Their homes and workshops were like the intersecting hulls of Argo inverted, so that from a distance they looked like blisters growing together. Burns scarred them and two had big holes punched through.