But he felt a pulse of wrenching energy come from the spot he worked. A stab of gravitational energy released, a wave like a tide twisting at his guts.

Beneath him, a throb of energy. Mute, restive.

“Not enough,” the bird’s voice came. “Sad.”

“What more—”

“Too late.”

It came. A fever of probing energy rained around him. Sheets of pearly light shot along the great axis of this Lane. Toward him.

Something countered it. He felt without truly seeing a massive, blue-black presence. It reared up, thunderhead-thick. Bulky and bristling.

Like a top-heavy animal, head towering to the high roof of the Lane. It struck teeth of stone there and snapped at them.

The sheets of pearly light forked around this. Then they were on him, before he could believe something could move that fast. Shards of quick hotness struck down from the axis.

It attacked not merely him but the forest. Thousands of volts dropped their potentials along snaking paths in the sheared air. They struck, their transaction enacted.

In electric-blue brilliance he saw the bird fall dead from its branch.

And then a countersurge kicked skyward—quicker, a bright ricochet red-fast and yellow-hot. Snarling up through the air.

His sensorium told him all this as he dove for shelter—knowing at the same time that the gesture was meaningless, before such magnitudes—and data crackled through his spine.

Quath! Killeen! Dad, Dad! he sent in pure blind panic.

The splintering red-fast stroke came again. Blinding. The racing sharp reply. Again. And again.

The whole argument carried forward in wracked air. A long flash and crack. Only his sensorium could sort it out, presenting it to him like a solved problem. But telling nothing of what it meant.

Wind cut cold. He flattened himself against a tree that had fried into charcoal in an unnoticed instant. Acrid fumes bit his nostrils.

Stay down. He could not cough, would not cough, though he ached to do it. He could not let it find him.

Something heavy and muffled came stalking above the forest.

Looking. Easing down, around, through. He felt it without knowing how.

In the clogged dimness he could make out animals that for some reason ran in circles, demented, yelping their small cries. Air surged and they fell. Many screamed—small, thin shrieks, like fingernails scraping on slate. Then they dropped out of his sensorium, dead. He did not have time to think of them but their cries burned into him, for reasons he could not say.

A scarlet howling came seething down the axis. Bangs and pressures, piling atop each other. Accelerating, blunt collisions. Something deep, droning, metallic.

He crawled out from under a roof of smashed limbs and stood up. Better to face it this way. Though he knew this was unreasonable and not smart and probably not even adult.

A great power came slamming into the Lane. He crouched in fear.

From the thickets and timberlands came a slow-building reply.

Something seeped up the air, coiling like heavy fog, but with a disturbing momentum. The minute woven carpet of life here had evolved to absorb, he suddenly saw. Somehow, encoded in them was a response.

He felt even the minute beings around him digging in soft earth. Piping to each other. Working to some unimaginable purpose.

Each cog fitting together. Primed. And he was somehow linked into it. He had to decide when and where to deliver such energies.

He did not know how he knew, but the certainty of it laced through him. He was the most sentient here. He had to judge.

He had to try to kill the Mantis.

He hacked again at the esty. He emptied his power pack into microwaves, sensing the boil of energies beneath the esty here. Something wanted out. What had the bird said? Essences need entrance to this esty.

A pulse of gravity rippled up through his boots. Coming—

He kicked in his laser, tuned to infrared. So what if the Mantis could see it? Too late to worry now. Too late for anything but this moment. He fired it between his feet.

He was a hair trigger, balanced—

Conduit. Connector.

Draw it in. Coax.

Toby let a sliver of himself leak upward. A small wedge opening in his muted sensorium.

The presence edged closer. Sent feelers.

Time to do what he could. Even if it didn’t matter, in the face of such colossal energies. Toby cast his sensorium upward.

Here I am. See?

The weight descended. Darted its inspecting eyes at him.

Hovered. Nearer, nearer, still uncertain—

Then the forest opened. Toby sprang away, hit and rolled. A volcano erupted where he had been. And spread.

Violence whipped up from a billion leaves. Shallow roots, slumbering only a moment before, discharged stored charge. Luminous savagery arced up through intricate connections in the bodies of corkscrew trees. The canopy itself discharged frayed green fingers into welcoming air.

A sheet of yellow lightning rose. A reply.

Before he could move he felt the ground warm. A harsh pulse of infrared energy. Walls of hard heat.

Water fizzing forth. Pools filling. Streamers of cool vapor. Humidity flooded the congealing atmosphere. Lime-hot fungi on a nearby tree trunk rippled, fluoresced, shuddered.

Charged vehemence slammed into the axis of the Lane. Brilliance blared down.

Toby slapped hands over his head. A rock slammed into his ribs. A thunderclap of pressure flattened him.

He knew in the flashing instant that the true violence was happening all down the Lane—not physically at all, but furies inside minds, intelligences great and small, chained together.

And the fury erupted through them all, bringing death and bliss alike.

SEVEN

Passing Currents

Later—lying under a matted crush of vegetation, aching in every joint, letting his ribs stitch themselves back together—he understood a fragment of what had happened.

Life here was diverse in its defenses. Many-layered, silent, worn by time and seasoned by something more than natural forces. Odd bits that Quath had told him now converged, made sense.

Life struck down could still spring back. Opportunistic organisms, each part of intricately forged links, absorbed the brutal pounding and gave it back. For the forest was not merely a growth clinging to the shifting bedrock of the esty. It incorporated the esty into itself.

Countless slivers of esty, knitted into trees and shrubs and layered soil, brought electrical strengths. The interacting parts of the natural world now had circuits evolved from folded space-time. The forest had a diffused intelligence—or perhaps “intelligence” was a term that meant little here.

In some fashion it had worked beyond the categories of natural evolution that Toby understood. It echoed the far-spread links of the Mantis and its kind. And this intimate connectivity was wired into the genetic heritage of this whole vast esty.

Such a tapestry could eat a storm, fold it into its genes.

Learn from its punishment. Prepare.

It had been doing this for uncountable years. Buried in the deepest hiding place in the entire galaxy, the diffused self had learned far longer than a man could.

He had journeyed through the Lanes, thinking of them as corridors in some huge esty building. A false analogy.

The woven life here threaded realms he could not see. Only in scattered passing moments could his sensorium catch the deep, slow conversations of such a being.