Toby realized he had been holding his breath. He finally gasped for air. The crew stirred restlessly, murmuring, stunned. Jocelyn asked Toby’s question before he could get up the courage.
Her eyes seemed to drill through the intense air of the Bridge. “The jet goes outward. We follow it?”
Killeen stiffened. “The mechs will block us.”
“Where, then?”
“Into the jet. Maybe there’s a way.”
FOUR
Motes Such As You
Toby was passing by a minor side corridor when he caught the tang of smoke. He blinked, sniffed—and followed the acrid stink at a trot.
The corridor was unlit, the phosphors deliberately off. Ahead he saw dancing flames. There was nothing worse on a starship than fire—burning the very air they needed, while threatening to breech the hull and let in swallowing vacuum. He hurried—and stumbled over a man squatting near the fire.
When he picked himself up he saw by the orange flames that people were huddled around a big pile of smoky corn husks and popping dried branches. But the blaze was young, under control. Bright eyes danced with reflected firelight and they all laughed at his surprise. “Siddown! Take a load off,” someone called.
He knew the fire would leave sooty stains on the ceiling, as others had in innumerable nooks of the ship, but he saw the need. The Families were vagabonds. A communal fire took them back to the one shelter they trusted, even when surrounded by a threatening night.
He let himself slide into it, too. It was restful, remembering the long treks of his boyhood, the biting cold nights beneath a brilliant sky. Smoke licked at his eyes. The crackling yellow spirits danced. Shadows played on faces staring moodily into the unending mystery of flame.
“You look tired, Toby-lad,” Cermo said from nearby.
Toby was surprised to see Cermo here, and even closer, Jocelyn. Usually the highest ship’s officers kept a certain distance from the others. But here Cermo was settled onto his beefy haunches, the age-old posture. It left you always ready to jump and move, if surprised. Useless here, of course, but a warming reminder of their shared past, their wary vulnerability.
“Been working the fields,” Toby answered.
“Good crop?”
“Asparagus. Lost most of it.”
Jocelyn said mildly, “Time was, we just picked the food and moved on.”
Cermo nodded sadly. “We hunted, we gathered, hit the mech centers for whatever extra we wanted.”
Answering murmurs came from around the shadowy circle. Toby grinned. “Come on—I was there. It was living by our wits, the mechs on our backs every minute. It could be worth your life to take a breather.”
Cermo shook his head, thick muscles working in his neck, catching the gleam of the snapping flames. “At least we didn’t just dig in the dirt. Sure, some gardening in Citadel Bishop—but we weren’t hardscrabble clod-busters. We were free. Nature was the only farmer, and we just picked.”
Toby knew where this was coming from. People were forever getting nostalgic for a rosy past they made better than it ever was. And they did it when the present was tough and tight. “Jocelyn, you remember—always looking over our shoulder for mechs, eating scraps, on the run morning to night—”
“How’s it different now?” she shot back.
Another woman’s voice called from the murk, “Mechs got us trapped.” A Fiver accent.
Toby nodded. “But we’re in a human ship, fighting our way through them.”
“We’re running,” Jocelyn said. “Those big bugs, they did the fighting. But now they’re way behind us, holding off some of the mech ships—and we’re running.”
Toby snapped, “Hey now, that’s what the Myriapodia want. Quath’s in touch with them, and she says they’re fighting a rearguard. So we can figure out what’s so important in here. Just give us a little time and—”
“Time’s what we don’t have,” Cermo said solemnly, his eyes tortured. “We’re heatin’ up already, and we haven’t even reached that galactic jet.”
“Give the Cap’n a break, huh?” Toby said. “Maybe the jet’s what we want.”
Jocelyn laughed dryly. “That? It’s just a column of cooling gas. Refugee junk that got away from the black hole.”
Toby didn’t like to argue his father’s case, but something made him speak out against this aimless, hang-mouth talk. “Hey, give him time. We’re moving, we’re in good shape, and—”
“He brought us here with no more idea of what we were getting into than a camp rat.”
An older man snickered. “I’d say he don’t know enough to pour piss outta a boot with a hole in the toe and directions writ on the heel.”
This got a good hearty laugh.
“Look, we all like to air our lungs,” a Trump-accented voice said. “But where I come from, we had to stick with the Cap’n.”
Toby nodded vigorously. “I won’t honeyfuggle you about how tight things are. But yeasay—we got to keep true.”
Voices came pelting in from all directions now, some objecting, others backing him up. Trump Families for Killeen, firm as steel. Bishops dog-mouthing the Cap’n, even though he was one of their own.
The sooty flavor of the air and the brooding dark made it easy for people to speak out, let fly with a few hard-edged words, sharpen the air. The corncobs gave forth their sweeter smoke, cracking and fizzing. Slowly their talk turned more meditative, lost its harshness as people got their inner fears out, saw them for what they were, and stuffed them back into the mental pouches where everyone had to keep the dark moments. So the fire did its work, and its spreading blue fog made the nook a warmer, more human place.
When a call came on comm for Toby, he was reluctant to leave. But it was the Bridge, and he hurried.
He passed by a wall screen on his way. The soft blue jet hung before them now, its shimmer working upward, away and against the iron reds and burnt golds of the virulent disk, far below. Dry heat stirred the air. An odd humming sounded through the ship, like a bass note sounded far away. It made Toby jittery. By the time he reached the Bridge he was not surprised to see his father looking weary and gray, his uniform wrinkled from long hours.
“Toby! You’re needed.”
“Uh, why?” Everybody seemed worked up, but there was nothing new on the wall screens.
“That.” Killeen gestured at long filaments of rosy gas that trailed alongside the jet. The Argo was cruising hard through the immense, glowing filigrees. They had passed through such “weather” before, though these luminous strands twisted with restless energy.
“So? More fireworks.”
“Not quite. I’ve spoken with these before.”
“Spoken?” His father had been on duty too long.
“Not for years, and maybe you don’t remember. The voice from the sky.”
“Huh?” Toby shook his head. So much had happened, and they understood so little of it.
“The Magnetic Mind. This is it.”
Now Toby remembered.
—Years before, standing in a rocky valley while skittering veins of green and yellow played through the sky like searching fingers. Striations that worked the furious air and finally had found them. Hot filaments had vibrated like angry breezes, speaking through the sensorium input each person carried in the back of the skull.
An intelligence that lived, somehow, in silvery radiances. It had spoken to Killeen—though the entire Family could overhear, witnesses as a colossal intellect delivered a message in the sky. Toby recalled that childhood memory in an instant, the way a warm kitchen smell can bring a vibrant mother’s voice to life long after . . .
He shook himself. The memories of far childhood, back in the happy closeness of the Citadel, could come flooding through him at any time.
But this was not the right moment. Those were a boy’s recollections, and he had to stop thinking like a boy.
He refocused on the huge, stringy luminescence that grew steadily before the Argo, and made himself ask
, “How do you know? I mean, this could be just some kind of lightning or something.”
Killeen smiled without humor. “I guess it is, in a way. Vital lightning, the same as you and I are really walking heaps of controlled burning. That’s what keeps us going, thinking, doing. Oxygen burns our food, one of my Aspects says. This thing uses electricity, generated by that disk down below.”
“How?”
“I dunno. But energy is energy, and the way I figure it, this thing has learned how to stack magnetic fields, build them up into something like a body.”
Toby liked to appear capable and savvy in front of ship’s officers, but the striations before Argo didn’t look like anything he remembered. “Huh?”
Killeen shrugged. “I’ve been getting prickly feelings, like something probing at me.” He shook his head. “Hard to explain, but it’s like before. The Magnetic Mind glues itself together with magnetic fields. Or maybe it just is magnetic fields, period. And it lives somewhere here, so . . .”
A deep strumming came up through Toby’s heels. At first he thought it was the ship’s acceleration as it fought against the lurking gravitational pulls here in this riot of mass and light. Then he noticed that the quivering came and went with a slow rhythm. He felt it through his ears and hands, too. Pulses. Then the odd vibration climbed into the massive walls and filled the air of the Bridge with a heavy presence.
Give sign if you perceive.
The voice was gritty, granite-hard, immense.
“Not like before,” Killeen whispered. “Then it used our sensoria. Now—look, the whole room is shivering.”
I am charged with a task of discernment. If you be of the tribe of Bishop, give voice.
The Bridge was acting as a giant amplifier for the hollow, lordly voice, the walls ringing and shaking like a loudspeaker. Toby wondered how a thing that was just magnetic fields, with no weight or substance, could do that.
Killeen looked cornered, surrounded by the voice. Then he barked out, “Bishops we are. I’m Killeen. Remember?”
So you are. I forget nothing, and store tidings of times ancient beyond your imaginings in the curls and knots of my being. I recall your particular flat odor and squashed, slanted self. Good—I have been enjoined to inspect you.
“By who?” Killeen called. The Bridge crew stood transfixed, and the voice ignored him.
I seek another as well. It is termed “Toby” and must be with you if you are to receive further attentions from the inner realm.
“I’m here,” Toby shouted.
Are you? Let me taste . . . Each of you tiny things has a different aroma, an angularity. Such pointless profusion!
“We’re different people!” Toby protested.
Skittering spokes shot through him, electric-quick and bristling with points of pain. Probing. Then they were gone.
You are the flavor termed “Toby”—your animal signatures match the genetic inventory, crude though it is. Creation is so trivially diverse, endowing each of you with oblique gene-scents and dusky shadings. Such a waste of natural craft! Detail and artful turns, needlessly multiplied, throwing reason to ruination.
“We like ourselves pretty well,” Toby said, tight-lipped.
So you do. All is illusion. Still, I must report that you are here. Then I hope to be quit of this obligation and irritant.
“Wait!” Toby cried. “What’s this about? Who wants to know?”
A power which sits further inward.
“Well, what is it?”
It is not of the cold, dead flecks of matter such as you inhabit. The power which presses me to this task speaks to me through my feet, which rest in the warm hearth of the plasma disk.
“Yeasay,” Toby persisted, “so it’s a, a plasma cloud?” Whatever that was.
It dwells somewhere below me, in storm-cut majesty, but is unknowable to as large an entity as I.
Killeen called, “You said last time, years ago, that my father had something to do with this.”
Years? I do not know such terms . . .
Killeen said, “A major part of our present lifetimes. I—”
But which “present” do you reside in? Duration, distance—these are primitive terms.
Killeen was visibly puzzled. “Look, was my father—”
Tiny forms such as yourselves are impossible to resolve in the warp of energies at my feet. But such terms and names come rippling up to me, along the cables of myself. When such information was loaded onto my eternal tangle of knowledge-knots, and thus the age of this clotted cognizance, I cannot know. Forms such as yourself were once there, yes—squalid primitives. Their persistence in the realm of immense clashes-imponderable is quite unlikely.
“You’re saying he’s dead?” Killeen asked sharply.
Tiny lives wink like flames beneath my footpoints. My whole motivation to assume this field-form is to rise above mortality and its minute matters. I cannot register small endings, any more than animals like you sense grains of sand as you trod them.
“Is he—”
I go. If the power below desires more, I shall touch you further.
“Wait! We need to know what to do here, how to escape—”
The vibration of the Bridge walls cut off, leaving a hush.
Killeen threw up his hands, swearing, and then drove a fist into the wall. A painful smack.
This shocked Toby more than the abrupt departure of the Magnetic Mind. He realized how much his father had bottled up, how desperate he was beneath his flinty exterior.
“Dad—what did it mean? What—”
“Damned if I know. That thing treats us like bugs.”
“Well, we don’t much like to talk to bugs, either,” Toby pointed out reasonably, hoping to josh Killeen out of his scowling, nasty mood. Then he thought a moment and added to himself, Except Quath.
“I wonder if it could be? My father, Abraham, here?”
“Don’t see how. We never found his body at the Citadel—but we had to run pretty quick then, there wasn’t much time.” He shook his head in a flicker of weariness. “That was a long time ago, a long way off.”
—and Toby felt it all again. Steel stripped from stone, caved-in ceilings, masonry and smashed furniture, lives ripped away. Smoke seething from crackling fires. Intricate warrens squashed into stone and slag. Blood running in gutters. Rivulets of browning red running from beneath collapsed buildings. The strange silence after the mech flyers had left. Wind blowing through snapped-off girders.
—And his father, wandering the ruins. Abraham! he had shouted. Over and over. The name snatched away by a hungry wind, lost in swirls of smoke.
Then he was back from the searing memories. He watched his father blink, face haggard, and then pull himself together.
Killeen said shakily, “I figured he was dead. Had to be.”
In Killeen’s face Toby saw how much his father wanted to believe that somehow Abraham was here, that the Magnetic Mind knew more than they did. But at the same time, the Mind obviously found humans repugnant, and would not lift a finger to help them.
Then Toby reminded himself that the Mind had no fingers, nothing but electromagnetic pressures and waves. But didn’t it say it had feet?
When the Mind had spoken to them before, back on Trump, it had said something about being an intelligence that had slipped free of matter, and lived solely in the states available to magnetic fields. Apparently such states lasted longer. The Mind seemed to think it was immortal. He remembered Killeen chuckling, saying, “Forever’s a long time”—because the Mind might be huge and powerful, but it could sure seem petty and finite, too. Which made it even harder to deal with. A god, at least, wouldn’t be insulting.
“Look, Dad, what are you going to do?” Maybe in a moment of openness like this Killeen would say what he really thought.
“Do?” Killeen looked at Toby as though just noticing him. “Get into that jet. See what it’s like.”
“Why? Can we escape that way?”
Killeen
gave him a veiled look. “That gas is movin’ out pretty quick. It’ll give us a boost, maybe even shield us some. Make us hard to pinpoint.”
“We can ride it outward?”
“Could be.”
Toby grinned. “Great. Crew’ll be glad to hear that.”
“Oh? How come?”
“They’re worried, think you just want to go further on in, no matter what.”
Killeen gave nothing away. “I’m not saying the jet idea will work. We’ll just try.”
“Sure, Dad, sure—but there’s hope, right?”
Killeen gazed at his son for a long while, emotions playing across his face so rapidly that Toby could not read them. “Could be. Could be.”
FIVE
Tiny Minds
When he got really out of sorts, Toby went for a run.
Since nobody could go hull-walking any more, because of the hard radiation that now bombarded Argo, he had to go jogging through lesser-used corridors. Thumping along the same monotonous route, he let his subconscious rummage around among his problems. Maybe his deeper layers could come up with something smart, he thought, though without much hope. Family Bishop was headed for a crisis, for sure.
He had gone to Quath for advice or just some good, reassuring insult-trading—but the alien had brushed him off.
She had rattled her enormous telescoping arms, as if for punctuation. There seemed to be several new ones, maybe worked up from other parts of her carcass. Quath had a way of redesigning herself—maybe as the Myriapodia’s equivalent of a fashion statement, Toby thought. Arms waved and clashed with a metallic ring, like a breeze blowing through a forest of steel trees.
“Hey, you old collection of spare parts, listen anyway.”
“Huh! You think just a fraction of you is enough to talk to me?”
“Never mind! Sometimes talking to you is like shouting down a well, Quath.”
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