“It can’t be helped. You know that,” Nikka said. She had slipped beside him, her footsteps covered by the hollow crashing of timestone far up on the hazy curve of this spherical Lane.
“Should’ve let that body rot, moved away,” he said morosely.
“We wouldn’t be us, then.”
“Is that so bad? Change your dance steps, learn a new tune.”
“We’re doing what we’ve always wanted to do. Looking long, you used to call it.”
“Quite.” He sighed. “I always wanted to see over the far horizon. This—”
“Time is a horizon, too.”
SEVENTEEN
Transit; Wait
Stochastic.
Not a word he liked, too pedantic, when all it meant was chaos, disorder, the fitful randomness of life and esty. Their gravitationally transduced energy propelled their wedge of local esty through the worm in jolting, stochastic motions.
Transit; wait. Transit; wait.
They never knew precisely how long they would stay at any of the pauses along this worm-Vortex. They could watch the surroundings, but feared to venture out. They ate up their provisions this way as their frustration built.
No map of the esty was possible. Its contorted geometry roiled with fitful energies, a rubbery, sliding turmoil. Lanes were often long, snaky, bulging into spheres and lopsided bubbles without warning, stretching to expose fresh, wrenched topographies of timestone.
Sometimes their pause-points were in the same Lane, so they watched its speeded-up evolution. As timestone evolved by its own kinetics, topsoil tumbled and spilled in great alluvial fans. Beaten beneath hammering rains that accompanied the changes, the soil molded into new hills and valleys below the craggy peaks of freshly emerging timestone. Life was resilient, adapting. In bright canyons trees tunneled up from recent burials, and most plants could survive a temporary churning to emerge into the stone’s own waxing radiance again.
Nikka got grim-faced when Ito and Benjamin wanted to explore the nearby Lanes they intersected. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Ask your mother. She’ll tell you that it’s ‘stochastic.’”
“So?”
“We’re not desperate enough yet.”
But they were running short of food and Ito was restless, Nigel saw, beyond his endurance. After a full-scale family argument over the big polished dining room table they decided to let both Ito and Benjamin forage. Nikka, Angelina, and Nigel spent an anxious time awaiting their return as the timer on the capsule ticked down to the next Transit.
With only an hour to spare, and Nikka muttering that the uncertainty in such calculations was more than two hours, easy, they came across the rugged timestone at a trot, backpacking food. Benjamin said they had seen nothing much but, as Nigel had guessed, Ito had reveled in it.
They voyaged on, Transiting and pausing and watching the long slow epic of organic life-forms and mechs in the lands beyond. Usually they were isolated on a timestone terrain. Sometimes battles raged in the distance and they anxiously watched the unknown combatants, hoping to be ignored.
Usually they were, but several times mechs had cruised overhead and twice Ito and Benjamin had knocked them down with glee, using projection weapons the Chairwoman had sold them. Probably they were lucky, having the advantage of surprise in this era, but Nigel made them stop it because luck did not last forever.
They got into worse trouble at the next pause. Here a passing woman told them that the mechs had launched a new plague, wind-borne and virulent. Nine out of ten in her city had died. The Walmsleys gave her food and she went on and that night they came down with it, too. Fever, violent dysentery, sinuses clotted with yellow spongy growths. Ito had walking dreams, seeing the gates of a private hell and struggling to run through them to some glimpsed reward. Nigel and Angelina grabbed him and held him down for hours before the delusions passed in a fit of sweating babble that spilled from Ito’s mouth like a river of hallucination, so wild that Nikka—a part of her always dispassionate, even with her own children—wrote some of it down.
The delusions struck Nigel next and unloosened in him the many haunted memories that accompany anyone who chooses to live long.
—Cramped spacecraft maneuvering near Earth’s crisp white moon.
—Swimming darkly through the icy waters of a moon, into an interior ocean filmed with kilometers of ancient ice.
—Winds blowing acid dust in his face as aliens like huge radio antennas lumbered toward him in the frying heat.
—Their aching long flight to reach the esty, in search of refuge from a galaxy that seemed filled to overspilling with mechs.
He spoke of these, sputtering in the warm spray of dislocated words, and could not recognize his own foot sticking naked at the other end of the bed, or the blood he coughed up, or even the perpetual frown that furrowed Nikka’s face in the dim night.
The only factor that saved them was their simple distance in esty-coordinates, he realized later. The mech-made virus was so tuned to the humans of this place-period that it missed them by a hair. So they merely groaned and sweated and fouled themselves, the disease taking a full week to work its way through each. They carried it through three pauses and were out of food again by the time they could all walk without shaky knees.
EIGHTEEN
Marching
Evidence of mech-wrought damage lay everywhere. Charred cities, blasted landscapes, bedraggled populations torn by raids.
Once, while they were foraging for information and food, a mech caught Nigel and Angelina in the open. It was crawler type and burned Angelina pretty badly before he could knock out its mainmind. When he saw how much Angelina was suffering he put her to sleep with a sedative and while waiting for it to take full effect in a rage he pulled off the mech’s working arm and used it to bash in the carapace, letting himself go completely to the sheer boiling energy of it. Then he carried Angelina across his back, barely reaching their farm buildings before he collapsed. He was sobered for days afterward as he watched her recover, fevered sweat glazing her eyes.
Seen through the prism of the esty, Nigel thought as he tended his daughter, life was like a long march, an endless column of forlorn souls moving forward through surrounding dark. Locked into their own eras, nobody knew where they were going. Still, in every society they glimpsed, there was plenty of talk and the fools pretended to understand more than they were saying. There was merry laughter, too, and somebody was always passing a bottle around.
But now and then somebody stumbled, didn’t catch himself right, lurched aside and was gone, left behind. The dead.
Sliding timewise-forward, sometimes backward, poking their heads out where the chaotics of the harnessed worm commanded, Nigel saw the long mortal march in snatches, which made it all the more telling.
Whole societies eventually joined the individual dead. For them the march stopped at that moment. Maybe some had a while longer, lying back there on the hard ground, already wreathed in fog—time to watch the parade dwindle away, carrying on its lights and music and raucous jokes.
For us the dropouts are back there somewhere, he thought, fixed in a murky landscape we’re already forgetting.
He could recall others who had stayed behind, years ago. With a little sigh or a grunt of agony or just a flickering of fevered eyelids, they left the human march. No longer did they know the latest jokes or the savor of a fresh bottle of wine, or what the hottest rumors were about. The march saddened him. He remembered friends long lost, wished he could tell them what was up nowadays, share a laugh or a lie.
As he read his latest indices, now covertly so that Nikka did not see, he thought, Right—and the point, you brooding old bulk, is that you know your station above the tide of time is temporary. That persistence is your only virtue beyond theirs, and it is artificial. That someday you would catch an ankle and go down and the murk would swallow you, too. Maybe it would be better if you didn’t have that puzzled, startled moment of staring at
the retreating heads, the faces already turning away from you. Maybe it was best if you couldn’t hear that last parting round of hollow laughter from a joke you would never know, the golden lantern light already shining on them and not on you.
And it will happen to everyone you have known or ever will.
Somehow he never got used to that.
NINETEEN
Storytelling
They could flee in space-time, but biology followed. They all had a relapse of the mech-made plague, far milder but bad enough.
Ito recovered first. When he simply announced that he was going out for provisions, in the pause they had just come to, no one could mount more than feeble resistance. The next Transit was days away, the probability indices said.
“Probably! Only probably!” his mother protested weakly.
“There’s no ‘probably’ about our starving, though,” Ito said grimly. So he left.
The time passed in fever and worry. But they all were better by the time Ito returned, loaded down and with a bad leg wound.
To Nigel the sight of his oldest coming through their front door was like the sun coming out after a night that had lain on them all like a sullen lid. As he helped Ito store the vegetables and fruit, he felt a difference in his son. Dinner that evening drove the difference home. Ito spoke more directly, clearly, face free of the stretched tensions Nigel remembered from late adolescence.
Like many men and women compelled to action by restlessness of body and spirit, Ito had no interest in the notion of adventure. But he knew storytelling well enough to see what people saw in it and so recounted with accurate detail incidents that seemed ordinary to him, arising out of necessity:
—the mech like a snake which attached itself to his leg and could not be dislodged (he found, while bellowing in frustrated rage) except by finally singing to it;
—towns built aslant and of both surpassing beauty and stunning ugliness;
—aliens galore, who treated him with utter indifference, while he found them fascinating;
—the beheading of a woman for unspeakable acts she had performed with a mech, which was both horrifying and puzzling, for no one could explain the mech’s motivation, while the woman’s seemed to lie within the known range of human perversions;
—a mech religion which worshiped animals exclusively, attributing to them a natural wisdom;
—a castle of glass through which the passerby could see the inhabitants living out their lives under constant scrutiny, never concealing even the most private acts;
—a waterfall that rose upward and formed ice at its summit, building a glinting blue-white mountain.
Nigel realized as they went to bed that his son had made a transit of his own, one that few speak of and most do not recognize until years after.
TWENTY
Generations
On they voyaged, slipping through sheets of esty, tugged by the energy flux of the worm. Nikka rigged an optical sensor on their capsule’s outside and they saw, slowed enormously, the instant of Transit. A filmy sheen formed around their farm, contours rippling.
Though in their simple picture a wormhole was like a tube passing between floors of a building, the floors different space-times—a glinting needle piercing ebony esty cloth—the worm was in fact three-dimensional in their frame.
At the shaved second when they passed through, the worm was a flickering spherical glaze. It swelled, swallowed them, then dwindled away to a point—which vanished with a spray of golden brilliance and stomach-turning torques. To Nigel it felt as if he were climbing up his own chilly vertebrae.
They watched the esty beyond their small area, sometimes for mere minutes before it changed again. Scenes and lands flickered beyond their small preserve. They witnessed eras with no visible human presence, others with jammed cities teetering on shaky timestone, still more with no atmosphere—so their pressure skins snicked shut immediately when they emerged—and others with virulent, acrid gases for air. Some pauses were long enough to venture forth.
Through all this Nigel and Nikka reached a new equilibrium, a sweet sad realization spawned from the vistas of time they had traversed. There were myriad incidents—some small and telling, others large and dangerous and finally meaningless, and they all pointed toward the heartache and matching joy of humanity itself.
They met, in glancing fashion, teaming tribes, rich in spirit and intellect. Soldiers, who drank with gusto and ate with undisguised zest, though they knew they would face battles on the morrow that would probably decimate their ranks. Scholars, bent by their pilgrimages and ravaged by poverty, yet still warm with the satisfactions of the studies to which they had devoted their lives. Children, playing among the blackened ruins of their homes. Parents, rejoicing in their infants even as calamity closed in around them. In cities growing stranger still as they Transited further, people sang slow, sad songs in the streets even as mech forces gathered high in the Lane above, and crowds collected to see magicians perform tricks and make ancient jokes, all greeted with raucous laughter. Among the few dazed survivors of other assaults, on other twisted landscapes, the Walmsleys met stoic survivors who nonetheless found fresh loves, new friends, and began again. Generations melted away and others came forth, with only a few managing to hang on to time for as long as Nikka and Nigel had, and through it all somehow a frail, brave, human light always streaked the surrounding shadows.
The old non sequitur, that species became degenerate as they went on, found no evidence here. Humanity bristled with activity. Societies rose and fell with stubborn indifference to earlier failures.
In the face of the inevitable end, and the inevitable questions, Nigel reflected, none is exempt: witness Jesus’s wail of despair as he edged rather tentatively into eternity. He did not know what to make of such dogged human persistence. Nikka was less puzzled, and beamed with pride in her own kind.
TWENTY-ONE
Inflection Point
They came to the far end of their curved worm’s path through the esty. Nikka declared from the data, “We’ve gotten damped into a stutter.”
“Which is?” Nigel stepped out into the local familiarity of their farm. Beyond, the lands were strangely shadowed.
“We’re hung up, basically. The Vortex worm turns here”—she smiled at the small joke, much needed as the family grasped her point—“and begins an opposite curvature in the esty. We’ll be going back from here on.”
“Going home!” Angelina cried happily, clapping her hands.
“But?” Nigel was pensive.
Nikka gave him a rueful nod. “But . . . we’re stalled here, at the inflection point. We’re retracing the same interval of time over and over.”
“Stuttering in space-time.” Nigel rolled the idea around in his mind.
They walked to the edge of their land. In what seemed like the solid mass beyond Nigel saw pale blades and soft blue shadows, as if deep somewhere a sun were setting. Radiant blades danced as if refracted beneath a lake’s wind-blown skin, like summer’s liveliness probing into a deep watery cavern. And as he watched, the whole thing repeated. And repeated.
It was unsettling and he nearly lost his footing, the way a man approaching a sheer drop goes weak in the legs even though still on solid ground. A mere crust kept him from an abyss.
“We’re cycling through the same moment,” Ito whispered. “Over and over.”
“Damn!” Benjamin was not awed. He just wanted to go home.
Then the scene jolted. Hills rose, bristling with raw rock. In jumpy, flashing images they watched the slopes weather, ruts cutting in. Peaks wore to knobs, hills slumped—and strange spires rose, icy blue. Glaciers of eerie green slid through valleys. Nigel realized they were not glaciers at all but some immensely cold superfluid, in the terminal death of the farthest future. They were seeing the slices of time into which information still could be packed, wedges of instants harvested from an immense span of time. They could fathom the sliding immensities that wrecked mountains and
oozed into nothingness, for they were witnessing physics and dynamics beyond the hinge of human time.
Then, abruptly, they were back to the same endlessly cycling moment they had seen before. Somehow they had leaped far beyond, then back. They watched the repeating interval for a while but nothing more happened.
“Mom . . . How do we get out of a stutter?” Angelina asked quietly.
“We don’t do anything.” Nikka stared at the timestone, which coiled incessantly like a pile of glowing snakes. “We wait it out.”
“How long?” Benjamin looked at the seethe, distaste curling his lip.
Nigel wondered disagreeably whether the question meant anything, if time cycled outside. And space, too—he could see the same shards rise and descend, rise and descend. But their little wedge of esty ran on its own time axis. Or so he thought. How would he know? His head began to hurt.
Nikka said, “I’m afraid that is a stochastic variable, irreducible.”
Nigel erupted, “Everything’s chaotic here!”
Nikka smiled. “Except you. You’re perfectly predictable.”
That made them all laugh, but it did not seem so funny after several days of edgy waiting.
Then events beyond shifted.
The air turned cold with a sudden ferocity no planetary environment could ever match. And without any visible cause, the land began to evolve beyond their encapsulated chunk of farm.
“Is the stutter over?” Angelina cried, excited.
“I don’t know.” Nikka frowned, deepening the crow’s-feet of lines around her eyes. “Time seems to be accelerating outside.”
“We’re holding fixed in space, sliding in time?” Ito asked.
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