Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  Killeen felt oddly pleased. “Most young people don’t care enough about history to remember stuff like that.”

  She turned to study his face. “How can you not? Only way we can make sense of all this.”

  “Sure—if you’ve got time. We’ll be hustlin’ pretty hard now.”

  Her eyebrows narrowed. “Forget who we are, what’s the point goin’ on?”

  “Right.” Killeen was obscurely proud of her quiet vehemence. This Tribe might succumb to His Supremacy, but he was quite sure the Bishops would not.

  “Besen…I’m glad you’re with Toby. He and I aren’t getting on well right now.”

  She smiled. “Rough times for us all.”

  “The time when a boy breaks away and makes his own path, well…”

  “I know.”

  “I…I appreciate the help,” he finished lamely.

  “You’re not doing so bad,” she said, and went back to her labors. Killeen stood regarding the valley and wrestling with his thoughts. In principle he was in a simple situation. A Cap’n followed Tribal orders. But he sensed something deeply dangerous in all this.

  “Reportin’, Cap’n,” Jocelyn said formally. He had not heard her approach.

  “You take care those chips?”

  “Kicked a li’l ass, looks like it’ll be okay.”

  “Good. How’re our reserves?”

  “Not much.” She punched her wrist and a graphicdisplay inventory of edible supplies appeared in Killeen’s right eye, available on blink-access.

  He studied the hills. There had been thick woods in the arroyos. Many were clogged by mudslides. Swaths of trees were already gray and dead. “Bet we’ll scavenge the territory around here fast, too. Pick it clean.”

  “I’ll see if the Families got any food stores.”

  Killeen gestured toward the creek that snaked its way down the dusty valley. “Water’ll be no problem for a while. If something samples that creek downstream, though, it’ll know we’re here.”

  “Cybers?”

  Killeen scowled, looking at the sprawl of Families open and careless in the valley. “Likely. Point is, what we get from fightin’ Cybers?”

  Jocelyn studied his face. Did she suspect anything? he wondered.

  He had told Shibo as much as he could about his time inside the Cyber. She had agreed that until he understood it better, it was probably a bad idea to relate the story in full to others.

  To the Family’s questions he had let on, without actually lying, that he had somehow stowed away on the body of a Cyber and then escaped from the subterranean nest when a chance came. He could scarcely explain the colliding sensations that had assaulted him inside the Cyber’s body. Those memories now provoked shudders of disgust in him. Images from them shot through his sleep. He had intentionally worked hard the day before in hopes that fatigue would grant him oblivion in sleep. But the brooding, shifting dreams had troubled him again. This morning’s fire had roused him from a terrifying sensation of suffocating in spongy air that swarmed into his lungs whenever he tried to draw a clean breath. To be yanked into the real world, even one with a raging fire to be put out, had been a relief.

  “We have any choice?” Jocelyn asked, her eyes concerned. Killeen wondered if he seemed odd to the Family; certainly Jocelyn was acting a little awkward and formal with him. Shibo, too, had been careful with him since his return, as if he were both fragile and unreliable. Well, Killeen reflected, maybe he was.

  “Prob’ly not. Looks like Cybers’re mostly interested in guttin’ this planet, though, not usin’ its surface.”

  He gestured above, where a thin skirt of clouds partly obscured a distant gray mottling. Patches of Cyber construction arced in polar orbits low on the horizon. The long arc of the cosmic string was a faint, pale yellow scratch across the sky. Something turned at the limits of his vision. He focused on it but saw only a thin trace image moving in equatorial orbit. Cybers owned space but for some reason did not use sky assault against them. Why?

  Jocelyn said, “They suck the core dry, take all its metal, we’ll have nothin’ but scrap left. That’ll kill all the plants, and prob’ly us, too.”

  Killeen listened to Arthur a quick moment and said, “My Aspects say there won’t be any big change in temperature for a while. Quakes are the big problem.”

  “His Supremacy says—”

  “Look, a man who thinks he’s God can’t be trusted much.”

  “I think we should believe in him.”

  “Believe him, or in him?”

  Jocelyn said warily, “I’ve watched him several more days than you have. He was most gracious. After all, we were people who suddenly dropped from the sky and placed demands on his Families—food, shelter. He helped us get away from the shuttles, before the Cybers tracked them. He is a natural commander!”

  “Look, ’member how Fanny was? That’s leadership. This guy—”

  “He is using new methods,” Jocelyn said adamantly. “These are terrible times, the old ways don’t work.”

  “They’re all we’ve got.”

  “Well then, by our mutual laws, as Elder he should have appointed a new Cap’n. You were gone, prob’ly dead. So if he’d stuck by the laws, you wouldn’t be Cap’n now.”

  Ah, he thought. “Who would?”

  She hesitated, then said, “His Supremacy asked me and I took on settling into camp. Negotiated with other Families.”

  “You’re to be commended. That’s all for now,” Killeen said, giving her a clipped salute. He pointedly turned his back to survey the valley again.

  His Ling Aspect broke in on his thoughts:

  That officer likes the taste of command. My experience is that even dangerous times do not slake that thirst.

  Killeen kicked a stone, enjoying the satisfying thunk as it bounded down the slope.

  EIGHT

  His Supremacy’s tent was sultry with sweet incense and tangy sweat. The fifteen Cap’ns arrayed in a crescent before the broad black desk stood stiffly at attention, as ordered. A layer of blue smoke hung over their heads. The cloying smell caught in Killeen’s throat, making him cough. His Supremacy frowned at the sound and repeated his command.

  “All Families will commit the same strength in this attack. We strike simultaneously. We all risk, we all triumph.”

  Killeen thought, And if we lose, nobody’ll be positioned for rear guard, nobody’ll cover our ass. But he did not dare say it.

  “We shall follow our same, victorious tactics—the way of right action that has brought us so far. Following the assault, we must destroy as many of the Cyber buildings as we can.”

  Killeen said, before caution could intervene, “I am most sorry, but I do not know the proper tactic.”

  His Supremacy turned almost lazily to gaze directly into Killeen’ s eyes. Until now the swarthy, compact man had delivered his speech with his eyes fixed on the blue haze, as though secrets lurked high in the tent.

  “I had imagined that you would have learned the revolutionary developments in battle I have brought about.”

  “I’ve seen your weapons. Quite extensive, some I’ve never heard about, but—”

  “Cap’n of the Bishops—a Suit unfamiliar to me as yet, but one I am willing to allow into my company of the devout—I understand your ignorance. When I foretold the arrival of your Family, I said the help which would fall from heaven would demand shaping. I and my officers are willing to fashion you to my higher ends, rest assured.”

  “Well, sir, I appreciate that. My Family will need—”

  “Perhaps you have not noticed that no one, in addressing me, uses the slight and paltry honorific ’sir.”’

  Killeen made the gesture he had seen the other Cap’ns use—a bow, while stepping back and casting his hands down at the floor. It seemed to imply total acceptance.

  His Supremacy nodded, looking almost bored. “You practiced the frontal assault, on whatever world sent you?”

  “On Snowglade, yeasay—but hardly ever, �
��cause mechplexes got their perimeters bracketed. Pick you off fast…” It took an effort to conclude, “Your Supremacy.”

  “I devised a devastating new way to use the frontal attack. It involves designating one Family as prime warriors, those who expose themselves early, to draw fire. A second party then surprises the enemy by springing forth from concealment. Then the main body assaults the nest.”

  “That second party—how do they stay hidden…Supremacy?”

  “By slipping into the tunnels of the vile Cyber nests.”

  Killeen frowned and said nothing. But the short man in his brilliant uniform looked reproachfully at him and said, “You have much to learn here, Cap’n. My revelation, which yielded this splendid method, assured me of our victories. It is not as though we proceed forward in shadow and uncertainty.”

  Killeen nodded, not knowing what he could say.

  “I foresee our triumph, carried on the wings of God, and my shoulders. You see, Cap’n of the Bishops, I have ascended to the panoply of Gods. As the representative of the Essential Will of nature, I am necessarily Divine in my own right.”

  His Supremacy explained this as if he were talking to a bright but ignorant child. Killeen had questions to ask but something in the curiously blank eyes of His Supremacy kept him silent.

  His Supremacy nodded as if satisfied and then shouted suddenly, “Sound the convocation! I must prepare the Families for the next step in their destiny!”

  Cap’ns and underofficers scurried to alert their Families. A rank of armed men and women fell to, their full running gear gleaming from a fresh polish. They clanked and wheezed as they escorted His Supremacy outside, dwarfing him in their sheathed shock boots.

  Killeen sent a quick summons to Jocelyn, Shibo, and Cermo. The assembly was already nearly complete in the valley outside, their Bishops positioned in rectangular ranks to the right flank of the formation. The brief address by His Supremacy to his Cap’ns had barely followed what Killeen knew of Tribal forms. Most of it he had found incomprehensible. Now His Supremacy would address the entire Tribe.

  The Tribe comprised all the surviving Families of this portion of New Bishop. No one spoke of the other Tribes which had lived on this world. Apparently mech cities had lately begun using humans in their conflicts. Though there had been incidents of that on Snowglade, Killeen’s Family lore held that competition among mechs was more like pruning unwanted branches from a fruitful plant. Here, though, mechs warred with one another. Had the Cybers timed their invasion to take advantage of that?

  Killeen walked down onto the valley floor beside the Cap’n of the Treys. Afternoon sunlight broke in patches through the cloud cover. He searched for the cosmic string but it was invisible. If it began spinning and preparing to suck again from the core, Killeen intended to get his Family to flat ground, no matter what the Tribe did.

  It seemed like a long time since the Treys’ Cap’n had led him away from His Supremacy’s tent, past the transfixing burial ceremony. Killeen mentioned that to her and the Cap’n replied, “Had a few more since. Cybers’re operatin’ over the next mountain range—what’s left of it. Couple Cybers nailed some Sebens, left the bodies with those mite eggs buried in their guts.”

  “Cybers could plant somethin’ more in the bodies, too,” Killeen said delicately.

  Lines furrowed the Cap’n’s already weathered, resigned face. “Like what?”

  “Tracers. Find us, usin’ ’ ’em.”

  She shook her head. “They don’t care enough. Just shoot our people when they get in the way. Not like mechs—least not yet.”

  “You worked for mechs.”

  “Sure—only way we’d survive.”

  “Where I came from couldn’t trust mechs that much.”

  “They got crazy. Started bustin’ up each other.”

  Killeen said cautiously, “That question I asked back there…I didn’t understand all he said.”

  “Just integrate your people’s electromag-tags, hailing codes, stuff like that.”

  “But look, there’s planning—”

  “We go in separately, once the team’s penetrated into the tunnels.”

  “What about supporting fire?”

  “Manage it yourself. Each Family backs up its own.”

  Killeen said skeptically, “Seems it’d be better if—”

  The Cap’n of the Treys gave him a tired, sardonic look. “I kinda like it this way. His Supremacy says do it this way, fine. That way I can pull my Family out fast, if things go bad.”

  “But coordination—”

  “Look, this plan’s the word of God.”

  The Cap’n said this in a voice that was suddenly flat, factual. Killeen opened his mouth to reply with a cutting jibe and saw that behind them walked three officers. When he glanced over his shoulder they seemed to be taking an interest in what he would say. He shut his mouth and nodded woodenly.

  He reached the Bishop formation just before His Supremacy began speaking. The words came to them over general comm, broadcast by linked capacities of a triangle of officers assembled just below His Supremacy on a small knoll.

  Even though Killeen had been told that the Tribe numbered well over two thousand, the sight of so many people turned out in ranks, nearly crossing the valley with their columns, was impressive. He had not seen so many since a grand holiday at the Citadel, when he had been a boy younger than Toby was now. Then the occasion had been festive; now a solemn, grim air pervaded the comm. Hoisted Family flags fluttered and snapped in the wind, patched and sunbleached.

  His Supremacy began with a convoluted history of their valiant battles, so filled with names and honorifics that Killeen could make no sense of it. Certainly it told him nothing of how the Families had fought, and Killeen began to suspect that His Supremacy in fact cared little for the essential details of maneuver and command. This emerged soon, as the man waved his hands wildly and described the evils of their enemies, his face congested with rage. The Cybers did not accidentally resemble demons from the pit, no—and soon they would return there, banished.

  “Rebuke and scorn, do they face! Defeat and castigation!”

  His Supremacy drew himself up and, even though Killeen kept a cool and skeptical part of himself withdrawn, the force of the man’s ardor began to penetrate.

  “Death comes to us all! But it cannot sting. The grave has no victory! It is where we are rewarded.”

  The vast crowd stirred as more long, rolling sentences washed over them. Killeen felt himself moved by the rhythmic, chantlike sweep. For the first time he understood how His Supremacy had held together a Tribe that had suffered shattering defeats and now faced an incomprehensible enemy of casual viciousness.

  “—at whose coming, to judge the All that Is, I shall stand upon the right hand—”

  The very air seemed to flicker with new intensity, hot filaments running on the breeze.

  “—render the things of metal and flesh into base matter! Shatter these minions of history’s last battle against us! For we arise from the natural substances of the universe, and are at one with it, and enjoyeth its fruits without artifice or corruption of spirit. We are the product of God’s own evolution. Monsters shall not fall from the sky and have these holy rewards, not if we hallow the ancients’ names.”

  Distant rumblings, as if mountains rubbed a coarse sky.

  “—for after the final liberating battle we shall go faring forth. We shall call to the most holy and majestic Skysower and be fed and brought forth!”

  Illuminations shot through the clouds. Something silvery stirred high up.

  “—to deliver us from the evil of this place. These devourers of worlds will fall, as the mechs fell before them. Believe in me—”

  A cyclonic churn parted the banks of mottled clouds. Killeen felt the crowd begin to notice.

  “—on Earth…as it is…in heaven!”

  Striations of blue descended, curving along long arcs. Traceries frenzied the air. A rush of heat beat down from a sk
y that seemed emptied. Yet Killeen’s sensorium quivered with pale, swift intricacy.

  “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. Malevolence focused by supreme will, we entreat you—”

  A gathering presence loomed in Killeen’s sensorium—yet the air showed only translucent, skittering feelers of luminescence. Killeen remembered suddenly seeing such immense flickerings before. They had lit the distant skies the night after the cyborg released him.

  “What—what?” His Supremacy croaked. His rhythm broken, he gaped at the display above.

  And a voice Killeen knew came fluttering, at first almost lost in wind-whisperings:

  I seek a particular human. Give sign if you can perceive this. I speak on magnetic wings, and bring tidings from the very center of this realm.

  His Supremacy’s voice boomed, full of undisguised surprise and joy. “I am here! I have brought your word by sword and daring—”

  No, you are not the one. I am enjoined to convey this only to the target human. My feet are mired in plasma, while these arms extend even unto your bitter-cold zones. Find me the one named Killeen. I speak for his father.

  NINE

  A tide of rustling disquiet swept across the valley. The ranks of the assembled Families wavered. Feet shuffled nervously, stirring dust that rose like a visible answer. Heads leaned back, trying to make out the shadowed filigree that danced featherlight across the sky.

  “What?” His Supremacy’s voice was weak and strained, compared with the full, resonant power that came hammering down from the fretted air. “It is…God? God speaks in this manner?”

  I seek a being of the class I perceive is gathered here. I have searched this world far beyond my obligation to do so, and found fair few of you small things. Such low forms are usually numerous, but you are rare among these sheltered enclaves I have examined—these rude, chilly planets of uninteresting, slow matter.

  “I speak for all humanity here,” His Supremacy cried.

  In Killeen’s sensorium the human voice seemed awash in a lapping fretwork of smoothed waves. The massive swells were gridworks that bulged and slid. He remembered the mathematically generated ocean he had sailed in the grip of the Mantis’s mind.