I have taken a sample of you. Yours is the last DNA needed.
* * *
“I saw a copy of Abraham, Dad. The mechs must’ve read his DNA and mind as well.”
“Damn!” Killeen shouted. But there was nothing for him to shoot.
* * *
I am the lowest of my Order which can speak to you primates. The Exalteds cannot occupy so narrow a conceptual space. They have granted me special abilities for this supreme task. But other logics prevail as well. The Lane above is about to tear open into the wrack of the Eater. I cannot save you, but I did come to harvest the youngest’s genetic material.
* * *
“Son, I figured it would help me find you, so—”
“You let it help you get here.”
Winds rose, growling. Leaves stripped from the bushes.
Killeen said bitterly, “It didn’t give me much choice.”
“I know.” Toby gripped his father’s arm. Something wordless passed between them as they both squatted, cowering beneath a whipping gale that shrieked toward the blackness above.
* * *
My tracking of you, Killeen, was always benign. I had hoped to harvest you all, once my obligation to the Highers was exhausted. We could be together then.
* * *
“We’ll rip your guts out!” Killeen spat back. Toby admired the bravado in his father’s automatic answer. Meaningless, of course.
* * *
Such consummation is the greatest fate such as you can hope to share.
* * *
Killeen fired a bolt at a glow that frisked through the air. Not the Mantis, no, but his father was never one to meekly listen.
* * *
You have played a role, as well, in the bringing of fulfillment to our kind. When this sample is read, then united with the codes of yourself, Killeen, and your own father—perhaps we can speak then.
* * *
“Speak?” Toby shouted against the wind’s howl. “We’ll die here!”
* * *
I fear I cannot intervene to rescue you. This esty is coming apart. I now depart.
* * *
“You can get us out!” Toby hollered.
* * *
I cannot waste time and energy opening a portal. My central task, brooking no compromise, is to save this manifestation of myself, to bring the sample of Toby to the Highers.
* * *
The entire dome above them swarmed with black, eating tongues.
Killeen cried, “Save Toby! You dunno but what you’ll need more than that little bit of him! Leave me, take—”
But the Mantis was gone.
The first booming shocks hit them then. Like immense drum rolls they flattened trees and smashed the men to the ground.
Toby rolled, stunned. He looked up into the far sky and saw where the blackness was leading. Pulverized knots of fiery orange fled away from it—backward, down. Fragments of the Lane. Ripped away and already tortured into incandescence.
Away. Inward. Toward the final consuming point of the Eater, the singularity cloaked in its own twisted geometry. The esty was spilling into the black hole. The snarl of curvature had finally won. It would draw them to it, the final grave.
At first he saw the dust whorl in the corner of his eye. He was trying to concentrate on the swallowing dark above even though the wind now battered at him. A limb hit him in the leg and gouged a painful streak of red as it departed. Killeen was trying to say something, arms waving. The violence overwhelmed their sensoria comm.
Bushes, grass, brown clouds of dirt—all tore and rasped at him.
The filmy thing standing beside him did not move.
He looked at it square then and it said, “I will open.”
It tried to make itself into the shape of a man but against the angry air that was impossible. Tiny motes made it up, somehow holding crude shape against the gale.
He heard, very clearly, Do not think we are neglectful of you. We do hope you live to help.
He had felt that message before. It had saved him and he had never known why.
Then the esty beneath them vanished. They fell.
PART SIX
Wedded to the Substrate
ONE
Partial to Primates
The bird would come, Nigel Walmsley knew. But at least he could carve out some time for himself. It might be the very last. He had fled to this pocket of esty in part because time ran differently here. He used that to rest and reinvent himself.
The assault on the Library had been a shock but in the long line of his life there had been many such. He did not know if he would find the magnetic storage of his Nikka but then he had been there before, too.
He had barely gotten away, helped by Highers—he thought. It was all wisps of memory.
He knew that in this manifestation he had to get a surer sense of himself and that would take time. But the Bishops and others were moving fast. So he came here. A place to scoop out a pocket of time, a pause before going back to the play. The last act was coming.
There was enough food just for the gathering, at least for a while. A bird assembled itself nearby and told him that with the expected flow senses of time in the Lanes of importance to him, he could remain here a while. He would be needed later. He did not ask what for because he knew by now there was no point in it.
He roved the narrow, bulbous Lane. He followed methods he had learned long ago in the American Southwest, when he had been training with NASA and took solitary weekends wandering in the dry canyons of New Mexico and Arizona.
Au revoir, Etats-Unis. Somewhere out there in the galaxy’s churn, America was a ruin, walls like broken teeth on a plain. If even that. In Nigel the name echoed still.
Tracing the drainages upstream. Looking in shady alcoves under the canyon walls. Here was sandy soil that testified to the true age of the esty: enough to simmer and bake raw galactic matter into strata and then wear it down to grains again. Animals had left litter—they knew shelter at least as well as humans—and pack rats stored their precious baubles. Humans were like other indolent, meandering species. They had left debris cast aside as they lounged, trash the true record of past celebrations. Shards, chips, bits of metal and glass and unknown materials all mixed together. The warpage of time made it impossible to know how many centuries of relative interval had lodged these here but he took some odd reassurance from the rubbish nonetheless.
People passed through, even here. They had heard that there were troubles elsewhere but since the mechs had not reached their particular remote Lanes they discounted most of it as mere talk. Still, everybody knew that travel was broadening.
Some were traders and some just journeying with no particular destination in mind. The esty afforded little certainty that once you set out you would arrive at a particular place on time and they were used to that, too. It did not improve them much but at least it made them more interesting.
“Lord it was hard getting in here. When are you people going to get around to improving it?”
“Slightly after I leave,” Nigel said with a straight face.
“What kind of improvement? I’d suggest—”
“My leaving was the improvement I had in mind.”
“Ha ha. Well, is there any better flux point further on?”
“I don’t think so. The best way out is the way you came in.”
“We would see the same scenery twice.”
“It looks better leaving.”
“Aren’t we just a little distance in esty-cords from the Majumbdahr Lane?”
“Which one would that be?”
“Where they have that beautiful city?”
“I don’t know how to measure how far it is but I would venture that it is not nearly far enough.”
“Well, I prefer cities to this trackless nothing.”
“Trackless is the best part about it.”
“With more water it would be a lot more like where we come from.”
Nigel smiled. “What would b
e the point of another place like what you already have?”
“Nobody here to talk to anyway.”
“I’ve been known to talk to myself.”
Some uneasy laughter from the travelers and then one says, “You must get awful lonely.”
“I have good company.”
“Where are they?”
Pointing at his head, he said, “In here.”
“Uh, well, anything dangerous around here?”
“There’s you.”
“We’re not dangerous! We wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“I’ll have to ask the flies about that.”
“You know, I’d like to live here alone like you.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“If you come I’ll be here and you won’t be alone. Neither will I.”
“Well, I mean almost alone.”
“That’s like being almost pregnant.”
“You take everything so literally!”
“I don’t take everything at all. In fact I take almost nothing any longer.”
They would pass through with all the speed one could plausibly wish for but he was still far happier to see the back of them than the front. On Earth one of the prevailing clichés had been that all people are basically alike. To the extent that it was weakly true it was also useless because you never knew if they were alike in being vicious or kind or anything in between. In any case the variety was more interesting than the similarities. But then, he would think with a shrug, how could he ever lose faith in a species that had such an endearing trait? You could say whatever you liked to them and they would not take you seriously, not even take offense—as long as you told the strict truth. They never recognized it.
The bird came while he was resting.
“Do not think we are neglectful of you,” it warbled from a branch.
He watched its wings shimmer. Sometimes the light from beyond it came through and he could see how thin the illusion was. They manifested themselves this way to anchor his attention. He knew it was not necessary but appreciated the formal compliment of their taking the trouble.
“I need more time here.”
“There is none. You have lived long in this warpage.”
“I’m fair well warped myself.”
It never responded to wit, sarcasm, irony, or the rest of his habitual devices. He wondered if the seething band of particles really did speak for a high intelligence; wasn’t humor essential?
“Matters moved athwart our courses.”
Was this their idea of speaking to him in his own language? Maybe they had gotten hold of some Shakespeare.
“Was there any Elizabethan poetry in the Library?” Let it work its way through that chain of associations.
“No time for entertainments.”
“You mean idle conversation?”
“The mechanicals have the necessary genetic information.”
He felt a stab of sadness. He had watched the Family Bishop saga, and many others, from such time-swallowed foxholes as this, for millennia. “Are the carriers dead?”
“Certainly so. They were in a Lane which the mechanicals opened.”
“To get in?” That was routine. Expensive, against the defenses of the esty, but the mechanicals could exert their powers at the right points and bring it off. They had before.
“To rupture.”
“Bloody hell.”
“They unlocked the coordinate structure.”
“How?”
“A one-to-one mapping of quantum coordinates to a doubly infinite manifold.”
“I see.” It was talking down to him but he was used to that. “So they forced an identity of the coordinates to the first manifold—”
“And then switched to the second.”
“The esty unzipped.”
“Only in some few hundred Lanes.”
“Only.” It did not catch the sarcasm.
“By design, they selected Lanes for high probability that one or more of the three genetic carriers would be present.”
“How many dead?” Pointless, but automatic.
“Unknown but exceeding five million primates. The species number count is higher still.”
“Over five million species?”
“We are vast.”
“So the Ecstasy Codes are out.”
“They will soon spread. To avert catastrophe we must summon all help.”
“I’m not much use.”
“You have been effective in the past.”
“Ummm.” He had seen the original Codes, known in more recent eras as the Trigger Commands. Portions of them had been handed down in the Galactic Library. For backup, the ancient Naturals had stored them genetically. That had been the purpose, really, of the Natural expedition to Earth so long ago. The wreck in Marginis crater he had helped explore, preserved in vacuum on Earth’s moon, had been a casualty in the struggle between the mechs and the Naturals, a carnage steeped in huge history before humanity had ever evolved.
And, he recalled wistfully, he had met Nikka there. Drawn to the shadowy half-felt mystery, they had recognized something in each other that went deep and true.
He pulled himself back from the memories. Some stuck with him, no matter what. “Bit difficult to know just who to save in all this.”
“The mechanicals are working on the Grand Problem.”
“Ummm. So I saw.” He remembered his long expedition to the stuttering end of time, using the worm. His sons and daughter, Benjamin and Ito and Angelina, were long gone into the Lanes, hotly pursuing their own energetic destinies. Now and then he used the Library resources to locate them. They would have grand reunions, swear to keep in better touch, and then they all would move on.
“You are thinking what?”
“Impatient, aren’t you?”
“The mechanicals will perish.”
“So? Primates are dying right now.”
“We cannot take sides in the sense that a specific species can.”
It fidgeted on the branch it appeared to hold in razor-sharp talons. Alarming, perhaps, if they had not been a tenth of a millimeter deep.
“You’re not a single species?”
“We are of a Phylum in which such subsections are meaningless. Species are a human category.”
“I don’t follow.”
“That is why you are in your Phylum.”
“Um. Have I just been insulted?”
“Have you ever insulted an ant?”
“Now I know I have been.”
“We cannot be partial to primates, I remind you.”
“Think I’m just too caught up in species-specific behaviors, then?”
“You must come.”
The bird skittered back and forth on its limb, imitating the nervous behavior of a pigeon waiting for a crumb. Good copy-work; they were getting better at nonverbal signals.
He sighed. How many times had he rushed off in aid of the crisis of the moment? He truly did not know, could not know. In time, even intense memories get discarded if they are not essential. And much of what he had done, down through millennia, had added up to very little.
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.
The Bishops were another story. “I’ll get my boots.”
TWO
The Gathering Up
Killeen and Toby had to get repairs before they were workable again. The slippage through the esty walls had bruised and sprained them in odd places. They had fallen into a mass of greasy vegetation and ended up chopping their way out into a Lane neither of them had ever seen.
Toby bubbled with joy. Killeen watched him and his heart filled with memories of Toby’s mother, of all the hard times since. He had found his son again, after what seemed years—though in the esty, he would never know how long it had been—and they were on the move again. They covered ground without speaking much and that was just fine, too.
The shadowy figure who had spoken did not appear again. “Be
tter things to do, prob’ly,” Killeen said wanly, nursing his right leg. His inboards said it had a lot of chem repairs to do and he should sit still. Or lie down. Neither was easy.
“C’mon, Dad, give it a rest.”
“But somethin’s happening.”
“Without us, right now.”
“But the Mantis—”
“I don’t think we have to fidget about that. It’ll find us.”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure.”
“What to do? It’ll still be able to knock us over.”
“Naysay, not if those Trigger Codes work.”
Toby frowned. Killeen had told all he knew but it came out Killeen fashion, a bit fuzzy about the history and details. “They’ll kill them? Suredead?”
“Way I heard it was, it’s like a disease. It makes them sick, then dead.”
“Breaks down their functions so they get less and less able.”
“Yeasay.” He got up and paced. He limped but the irritation was worth the feeling of movement.
“We’d still best be careful of the Mantis, if it finds us.”
“But maybe we can truly kill it this time.”
“This is about a lot more than the Mantis.”
Killeen scowled. “Not for me.”
Not for me.
He had learned something in his passage through this twisted place, Killeen realized. He had been a drunk and a failure and then a Cap’n. He knew Bishop ways. These people nestled in here were different.
Warriors were of a world apart, a very ancient one that ran in parallel with the comfortable lot of humanity. He had listened to his Aspects when they talked to him of this. For the first time he actually found all the lore and history useful.
The warrior culture could never be that of civilization itself, although all civilizations in history owed their very existence to the warrior. He had learned enough to know that once humans had come out of nature, and so shared instincts that argued for flight, for intelligent cowardice, for self-
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