Furious Gulf (41 page)

“Open what?”

“A door. Essences need entrance to this esty. Quickly!”

“Uh, how?”

The bird took a step on its branch, wings fluttering. “Do not think we are neglectful of you. We do hope you live to help.”

Toby snorted. “Thanksay, friend. But what the hell—”

Into his sensorium cascaded a wash of sensations. Images. Instructions. The sense was so vital and full that he moved instantly,
unbuckling his tools with one hand while he scuffed up leaves, looking for the right spot. There. Exposed esty.

Abruptly, the furnace glare above clicked off. Solid night. Where was the Mantis?

He worked in the utter solid black.

Torch, laser, microwave bursts. He could not tell how the esty responded, except for a momentary red glow.

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.

L
ater—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.

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.