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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
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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
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FURIOUS GULF
277
crack. Only his sensorium could sort it out, presenting it to him like a
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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.
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278
Gregory Benford
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.
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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 fibs. 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.
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7
Passing Currents
Later--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.
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