Always the sense of being watched. But more than that—the feel of being part of a hazy whole.

This gnarled world held steady because it held true, swallowing its rivals. And he was now digested into it. He knew this without knowing how he could be so sure.

He had opened a door, that was all. Used his knack of ripping a momentary hole in the esty. To let in forces that would not have been able to arrive so swiftly—or at all.

Maybe he had made a difference. Or maybe he was finally old enough to know that asking whether you made a difference or not was really not the point. You had to try, was all.

Do not think we are neglectful of you. We do hope you live to help. No guarantees, though.

Later, his sole hard and lasting memory came from what happened when the discharge flattened him. It had been only a passing shred of the larger events above.

The explosion must have occurred inside him, for the canopy he checked later was undamaged. But he had witnessed the immensity of the passing presence and had for a slim moment taken part in what it had to do.

Somehow he had been the switch. Opening the door meant he was in the circuit. But electrons don’t know much about radio, even though they swim like fish among resistances, capacities, seas of potential.

Whatever fed the ferocity had used him, the consciousness he carried, to focus itself.

To be part of it was something he could scarcely think about without getting the shivers and fidgets.

He had felt the indifferent powers at work. Worse, he had sensed the many lives that flared, hurt, and died. They were at least equal in their torments. Multitudes joined in and the weight from above crushed them without even noticing their pains.

He did. Not as distant news, but as immediate experience. More than anything he remembered the agony.

For that split moment his teeth sang in their sockets. The calcium rib-rods that framed his chest became chromed and knobby bones, slick and sliding. Swift metallic grace. Purpling storms raced down squeezed veins, up shuddering ligaments. His toes rattled, strumming, talking hard to the ground. His ankles danced on their own, click click of bones trying so hard they would soon fracture.

Head thrown back, neck stretched. Skin feathered and frayed and electric-sharp in polarized light. His spine was parabolic, crackling. Hurricane hallways yawned in him, the lockjawed agony-song screeching.

It raced through him. It sought its true enemy and he did not know if the voltage-fire was from the mechs or if it came forth from imponderable discharges deep in the frying forest. And it did not matter. He was of the fury and in it and for that moment he was its conductor. Currents passed without knowing him.

The rage plunged down through hip sockets polished by blue-green, hungry worms. Snakes of luminous frenzy swarmed hungrily over bone lattices, eating.

And for him it was enough. All he could remember clearly later was the pain. Pain blissful and complete. Plenty of it.

He awoke lying in gray ash. Silence, soft rain. An air mouse coasted by.

No need to move. Just think.

He saw what it was about the mechs, the high up ones, that was different. They had an awful beauty in their detachment. A hard concentration on the business of dealing in death without being in any danger of it. They did not die in the way that people had to. Maybe that was a true advance. He did not know. He could envy them or hate them but it would be better to do neither.

He was alone now in a way he had never been. The strangeness of the mechs had made him see that. Family Bishop, his father, even Quath—when they were close they made a world for him. Without them he was alone finally against the firm facts. He knew things now that he could not have known any other way. He had fled from his father out of confusion and principle and a bitter anger, all mixed together. He had not known he carried all that until now and now it was too late.

Maybe that was how it had to be and you never learned anything well unless you learned it backward, looking down a long channel of experience at it. You had to bring what you had along with you. Your courage and failures and resentment and all the rest of it.

Then the universe would try to fit you in and if you did not fit it broke you. Some people fit all right after that. Toby understood that something had broken in him and that all he could hope for was that maybe afterward he would be stronger where he had broken.

He had grown up believing that the universe was hostile to people and in a way that made them important. They were locked in a grand struggle with a great enemy.

The truth was a lot worse. The universe did not care at all.

The mechs were like that. Implacable but not concerned with people as people, seeing them only as another element in a flat, meaningless landscape. Just doing their tasks and not even feeling their own strange phony deaths.

He found the bird that had talked to him. It lay blackened and crushed, eyes swelling with dried blood. He buried it.

In the end all this was about the Self. Killeen had made it hard for Toby to be himself, though maybe that was something that had to happen with all sons and fathers. And he would never know how much of that had come from Shibo’s silent diffusion into him.

In a strange way the Mantis wanted the same thing. The one commodity that Toby would never give. The Self.

He remembered the joy and pace of commerce, back in that portal city. But there the trading enhanced the Self. Giving fair value meant trading true. It helped define who you were. Same with the Family, which was a kind of machine for the making of Self through action.

It would never have happened this way if he had been with the Family or even with Quath. Family kept the sharp edges away. Family was a fiction, he knew that now. A fiction defending against the furious gulf that yawned in all directions.

But a truthful fiction, too, because the story Families told by their example made it possible to go on. The gulf was always there and you would see it again, certainly for one last time, but there was no special haste in getting to that moment. After you had seen the gulf you spent the rest of your time knowing that it was there waiting and would come again. In knowing this he was now free.

Below all the colossal energies of mechs and matter lay the whole long history of the human Hunker Down. Who had made that happen? Why had Bishops and all the rest of the Families been condemned to the hard-scrabble skin of planets, when a refuge like the Wedge was here? While dwarves like that Andro got to enjoy it.

Below that riddle were the Bishops, still alive when plenty of other Families were dead. Just luck, Toby thought. But it made you wonder.

And finally there was the Calamity. He had fled from that catastrophe long ago, back when he was a boy but did not know what a boy was. He and his father had lost Abraham that day. But now Abraham was here somewhere. Somehow.

To understand even a little piece of all this, Toby would have to find Abraham. In a place where direction meant nothing and time was a place.

Partway up he heard footsteps. He was sure they were steps and coming from above. He hurried up the slope. There were level walkways spaced at even intervals as he went up.

The walkways went off to left and right and he presumed they led all the way around the structure. They curved into the distance and he could see no one on the ones below. He labored against a steepening incline and reached the next walkway.

No one on it. But the footsteps came slower now. As he climbed farther the footsteps got fainter as though he had left them behind. They spaced farther and farther apart.

Dopplering in time. Going away into a future or a past, borderlands of the real. As if the walker were slowing, hesitating, getting sluggish from fatigue. Toby himself began to tire but he could still hear the steps coming in long low notes and so kept on.