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Quath's servos wheezed uneasily.
again make use of the esty's prime property--concealment.>
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3
The Rock of Chaos
To "make use" meant moving fast over unknown terrain, looking for a
pore-opening. Toby thought of the wrenching places where the esty boiled open
as sick-making confusions, but Quath spoke of them as the finest work of
intelligence she had ever encountered.
Toby tried hard to understand as they ran, loping over sheets of timestone.
His hand still hurt fiercely and he stepped lively, afraid that the apparently
solid rock would suck him in. Quath made her screeching, ratchetlike laugh
about this but he did not think it was funny.
Part of his problem was envisioning time and space all gumboed together to
make something he could walk on. He was acutely aware of the time, all right.
Of the enhanced, vivid now that divided the known but fading past from the
unknown, ghostly future. But how did you marry that to distance?
"Time, well, nobody can stop it, yeasay? And space, that's what keeps
everything from mashing together--so what've they got in common?"
Toby was trying to provoke her, but Quath took it all very solemnly.
Gravely she explained.
Listening, Toby caught an occasional glimmering. Humans had an awareness of
things becoming, bursting forth into concrete solidity, and then fading into a
limbo of memory. Quath said that space-time, the esty, contained real time,
and the transience of human experiences was only an illusion peculiar to
living creatures.
And what did their opinion matter, Toby thought wryly, since they were around
for such a short glimmering? His Isaac Aspect tendered up an ancient rhyme,
Time goes, you say? ah no!
Alas, time stays, we go.
--and cackled with weird glee.
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21 8
Gregory Benford
They passed by huge blank timestone walls, porous with blurred light. Giant
towers worked and popped with energy nearby, growing like triangular trees.
Some seemed able to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart with their
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restless energy. Quath and Toby hurried by. They ventured with scarcely a
pause into abrupt turns, mazy avenues of timestone. Toby had kept himself in
pretty fair condition on Argo, he thought, but he had a trial in just keeping
Quath within sight. His lungs burned. Servos ran hot.
He stopped abruptly. "Quath, I was wrong. Dead wrong."
"We've run out on the Family. That bird--what if mechs're all over this place
now?"
"Bishops, anyway. Come on."
"I'm heading back."
He felt good about himself for the next few hours, while they backtracked.
Quath kept quiet. After a while Toby saw why.
"Uh... which way from here?"
"We came this way, yeasay?"
"The Lane connection, it was somewhere around here." Hills, trees, sky--all
different.
instability loci.>
Toby sagged down, eyes blank. "So we can't find our way back?"
as
So they reversed again. Fruitlessly returning over the same ground
demoralizing. And the terrain was subtly different, which deepened
Toby's gloom. He had run away from his father, straight into a trap. A
place that forgave no errors.
Quath kept looking around, studying, distracted. When he asked her why, she
said,
"I--I don't get it. What're we looking for?"
"Sounds like a contradiction in terms." He panted hard, slippery air clogging
his throat.
Into his sensorium framed a pattern of paired numbers.
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FURIOUS GULF
219
I
100
2
99
3
43
61
97
5
96
50
51
"You messed it up. Each pair was supposed to add up to a hundred and one.
There were fifty of them, so that multiplied out to, uh, to five thousand and
fifty."
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kept them all, so that the total remains four thousand nine hundred
ninety-nine. The esty is so devised. What Andro called the Lanes are subsets
of the entire space-time here, tunnels opening and closing at random. But the
sum of it all--the four thousand nine hundred ninety-
nine of it--remains the same. Nothing is gained or lost.>
"Uh, okay. What's the point?"
map of the esty impossible. Relying on the stochastic nature of the
interplaying Lanes is the only way to protect them.>
"The mechs can't find any particular Lane, because it's never in the same
place twice?"
"Hiding in time, not space?"
timestone can multiply its effect, building disorder. Similarly, in a planet's
weather, a mere passing wind can stir forth a storm. Scrambling the esty Lanes
rearranges them in time and space. No mathematical algorithm can unbind them
or trace their evolution. Security rests on the firm rock of chaos.>
Toby slowed, the idea sinking in. People had hid out here. Long ago, in the
Hunker Down Era. Back then Bishops and all the Families had dug into the
planets for protection, figuring the mechs worked best in space.
But some fraction of humanity had fled into the esty's chaos. Mechs could not
map this spaghetti space, so they could never be sure of finding all human
colonies. He could see what Quath meant with the arithmetic, sort of. But the
weirdness of it remained--that disorder was safer than planets, tougher to
untie than snarled barbed wire.
Numbers could hold simple, supple majesty. Maybe the strangest part of all
this was that reality reflected the dance of numbers. Laws compelled the esty
to knot and flex, laws ruled by the skittering logic of chaos.
Compared to that mystery, the mechs seemed almost ordinary.
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Gregory Benford
"So where do we go?"
"How'Il we ever get back to the Family?"
"Following us?"
"Yeasay. Let's find him first." He nodded to himself. Having a sense of
purpose made him feel better. And this was a better place to be than stuck
inside Argo, by far.
Toby had the uneasy feeling that Quath knew what he was thinking.
"How's that?"
off on quests into unknown lands. They had adventures, learned much, and
returned transformed.>
"You been studying us again?"
Toby had been feeling guilty about enjoying this, especially now that they
couldn't get back to the Family. "We're not so damned predictable!"
yourself.>
"Hey, you're pretty heavy with the crap here."
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"Sometimes understanding's the booby prize, buggo." Toby laughed and put all
such theorizing out of his mind. It was a luxury, the kind of thing people in
cities did. He settled into the rhythm of the run. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]