Toby put in, “How come we’re okay here?”
“I don’t want to go any closer, not when we can’t see what’s happening. Or figure out what that thing is.” He pointed to the glinting complexities of the mass oozing into being before them, like a strange crystalline mud. Their engines shook the walls, but to no avail; the great bulk swam nearer.
Jocelyn said, “Cap’n, I don’t think we’ve got the power to do any maneuverin’, anyway.”
Killeen compressed his lips. “Can we get far from that thing?”
“Doubt it. I’m gunnin’ her hard as I can.”
“Quath, what can we do?” Killeen at last made a naked appeal.
“I . . . we . . . came all this way.” Killeen watched the screens with a strange expression, one Toby had seldom seen these last few years—uncertainty. “Family Bishop has always known that the Eater was important. But where should we go?”
The way they both spoke made Toby’s hair stand up on end. It was like two old friends discussing suicide.
A part of Toby welcomed Killeen’s hesitation. He realized how much he missed the many-sided man he had known all his life, yet who now showed only one flinty face to the world. But then, as he watched, an edge returned to Killeen’s gaze. He whispered, “It’s got to be here.”
Jocelyn gave Quath a skeptical glance and worked through the long silence that hung in the fevered air. Then she quietly reported to Killeen. “Argo says there’s an orbit we can follow, to bring us to a place it calls ‘perigee.’ That’s just above the lip of the black hole. But if we go that near, we can never fight our way back out of the, well, the whirlpool.”
“You’re sure?” Killeen’s voice was clipped, flat.
“Near as I can be in this crazy place.”
Toby’s Isaac Aspect put in dryly,
The correct term is “peribarythron.” “Perigee” refers to Old Earth, and orbits near it. These ship computers must have been programmed by someone with a classical education, but little concern for proper technical detail. I hope such sloppiness does not extend—
Toby squeezed the Aspect back down. Its outraged squawk ended with what felt like an audible pop.
“Why’s the clock running so hard?” Killeen asked, pointing. Numerals flickered faster and faster.
Quath clattered her legs uneasily.
“That?” Killeen pointed at the slick, ever-swelling darkness before them.
In the mass, Toby could see complex ribs and valleys, arches and long columns. “It’s built, not natural,” he said.
Killeen blinked. “Yeasay! I knew! We came and—Abraham, the Magnetic Mind—they all lead to this.”
“How can something stay here?” Toby stared at it wonderingly. He could not guess what Killeen had envisioned, through the long years of their journey to this moment—some things his father never discussed—but plainly it wasn’t this. A puzzled frown stirred Killeen’s brow, then passed like a forgotten irritant.
“Doesn’t matter,” Killeen said flatly. “Plenty time later to figure out such stuff.”
Toby watched the screens with foreboding. The slick blackness grew and grew. It was as though it was drawing Argo to it with a slow, remorseless clutch. But the thing was not just getting closer. It seemed to swell into existence, emerging, being born from some unknowable place.
He had to put all this together in his mind, figure what it could mean. Toby closed his eyes to blot out the eerie sight. “Dad . . . Those Cyaneans, the places the Cosmic Circle cut through—didn’t the Magnetic Mind say the mechs made them?”
“Yeasay,” Killeen said. “Some kind of barrier, like a sand trap or something. But this . . .”
Killeen’s words trailed away. Toby opened his eyes as the spreading structure became sharper, showing them how large it truly was. Honeycomb terraces, valleys, shelves. Ranks and ranks of hexagonal openings, spider-fine webs of struts and cabling. Or was that just a way for the human eye to put together a comprehensible picture, Toby wondered, make patterns it could comprehend?
The Bridge was silent. Argo creaked and strummed with random stretchings and compressions. Toby wondered how long the ship could take this massaging by forces far vaster than itself.
Jocelyn called, “Cap’n, we’re burning fuel hard and heavy.”
“I know.”
“It’s, it’s—we’ve got just minutes left. Unless—”
Something firmed in Killeen’s face. “In the old days at Citadel Bishop we’d go out scavenging. No matter what we found, we’d haul it back and claim that’s what we’d gone looking for.”
He looked slowly around the Bridge. Everybody, including Toby and Quath, regarded him blankly. “Might’s well do the same here.” He pointed at the honeycombed patterns bathed in slippery, flickering light. “That’s our goal, Lieutenant Jocelyn. Take us in, and be quick about it.”
A long silence. Toby saw in the drawn faces the knowledge that this was their last gamble. They would throw the dice, throw them now and forever, into inky shadows.
Then the moment passed. Jocelyn moved quickly, crisply. She drew maximum thrust from the ramscoop engines, her fingers flying over the boards. In his sensorium Toby could sense the ship’s magnetic fields surge as they spread wider, an invisible net that snagged passing matter, sucked it into the reaction chambers, and spewed it out the back. The deck vibrated. Joints rasped and shrieked. Acceleration felt like a kick in the rump. They shot over the ebony landscape.
“Where exactly, sir?” Jocelyn was cool and efficient. Toby admired the collected way she turned to Killeen, one eyebrow raised. Might as well meet Fate in style. “Ah . . .” Killeen’s eyes swept the details that skated by beneath them. A high whine cut the air as Argo fought against storming yet invisible forces. “There.”
A small green dot winked at the very tip end of a long, pointed peninsula. Jocelyn said, “That wasn’t there a moment ago.”
Into the hovering silence Toby said, “Maybe somebody’s turned on the porch light.”
He recalled his mother doing that in Citadel Bishop, when he went out late to play with his friends in the soft summer nights. A familiar yellow-white glow, shielded against mech detection. Feeble in the gathering dark, fitful, but always there. He had liked to chase the little birds that glowed when they flapped their wings. No matter how far into the brush he had pursued them, following their rustling and cawing, he could always see the distant beacon of home. Stay within view of the light, she had said.
A lamp tuned to human eyes, not mechs. Not that it did any good in the end, Toby thought ruefully.
The green glow seemed to swim up toward them. A cavern yawned below it. With a nod Killeen told Jocelyn to slip down into it.
A swift, silky glide. They braked to a stop between enormous inky cliffs.
Here, too, the honeycomb design repeated on smaller and smaller scales. Fitful technicolor displays sparked all along the great ebony flanks, reflecting the spikes of doomed matter streaking through the darkness above. It was as though this place was the very end of creation, solid and immov
able, a night land beneath a restless, dying sky.
Then the honeycomb seemed to swell, to flicker—and they were inside the oily black walls. Inside whatever this thing was. With no visible transition.
Jocelyn eased the engines back. Killeen ordered the ship powered down to conserve energy. This brought a welcome calm to the deck. Quietness settled among them. There was nothing left to do now. No place left to go.
Still, Toby was startled when the watch officer at the main airlock hoarsely reported in. Everyone in the ship, Toby realized, was pulled tight enough to snap.
The watch Officer heard something. He patched it through. In the general sensorium the noise swelled, impossibly large and booming. It sounded for all the world like someone knocking on a door.
THREE
The Far Black
The man was a wrinkled dwarf, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“You’re from what era?” he asked, leading a band of five officers and Toby through a long, dimly lit corridor. A gloomy, low-ceilinged warren. Their boots rang on the hard, ceramic surface. Nobody answered, waiting for Killeen to break their silence, but he remained silent.
The dwarf shrugged. “Pretty recent, looks to be.”
Toby hadn’t seen the first encounter between Killeen and this short, muscular figure, but it didn’t seem to have settled anything.
“After the Calamity, as I told you,” Killeen said evenly. But his mouth was tight and bloodless.
“That doesn’t cut any thick air here, fella. All life’s a big old calamity, you look at it the right way.”
“Our home is the planet Snowglade, and I’ll thank you to keep your philosophy to yourself.”
The dwarf’s eyebrows arched, peering up at the Cap’n. “Oooh, you’re a systo-critic, eh?”
Killeen’s mouth twitched. Toby could tell his father was carefully feeling his way into a completely unknown situation. Strange, but looking completely ordinary. Killeen said formally, “We have come from the destruction of our world. We were led by portents and messages—”
“Fashion this—I had a chip installed just so I could speak this venac you’re squawking. So look, fella, I’d ’preciate some bandwidth here. Every ship comes limping in is from some esty pigeonhole, thinks we should know all their history, right down to the pimples on their cultural ass.”
“I expect respect for a delegation from a far outpost of—”
“Respect you’ll get from guys behind desks. Me, I got a job to do.” They reached the end of the corridor. Beyond yawned more round mouths of hallways.
Toby said, “I missed what you said earlier, so—well——what is this place?”
The dwarf blinked up at him. “Just an ordinary entrance portal. Better than most, I’d say, and—”
“No, I mean, what’s it a portal to?”
“Into the esty.”
“And what’s that?”
“Esty. S for space, T for time.” The dwarf waved them down a corridor and they kept walking. Doors slid open automatically as they passed. They ignored these invitations and behind them followed the whisk of closings.
“You mean we’re in some other kind of space-time here?” To Toby this place looked stupefyingly boring.
“Kids don’t learn much these days, do they?” the dwarf asked Killeen pointedly.
Toby couldn’t see how this shrunken little man could tell he was young, when Toby towered over him, and was searching for a barbed way to say this when Killeen murmured evenly, “We would all appreciate knowing what the hell this place is.”
“A stable chunk of convoluted esty. Inhabited. Governed. And now that you mention it, I haven’t heard any thanks for pulling you all in out of the Far Black.”
Killeen said sincerely, “We do thank you. We—”
“You’ll be paying for all this later, Captain, so don’t overdo the sincerity. Right now—”
“Who made this, this ‘esty’ of yours?” Toby burst in. “You people?” He looked doubtfully down at the man.
“Made it?” The dwarf shrugged. “It’s always been here.”
“How could it?” Toby demanded. “I mean, smack up against a black hole, the biggest in the galaxy—”
“Look, there’s things you flatlanders don’t grasp, kid. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to ask who made the esty when it has its own timeline anyway, see?”
Toby didn’t. “I just want to know—”
“Enough! Come on, you scrimmage, we’ve got to get you filtered.” The dwarf had led them into a narrow little room. “Won’t take long.”
The walls were porous yellow sponge. Toby was still puzzling over the dwarf’s remarks. When Killeen started to say something the dwarf stepped lightly outside, smirking. A concealed sheet slid down, clicking shut.
Cermo said with alarm, “He’s trapped us. What if—”
Abruptly the air seemed to compress around them. Then it reversed, screeching down in pressure, popping their ears. An array of lenses in the ceiling showered them with quick flashes of brilliant, brittle light. Toby squeezed his eyes shut but the flashes stung his face and hands.
This went on a long while. Bishops shouted, threatened to blow a hole in the wall—but Killeen ordered them to stop. “No obvious threat here. Stand fast.”
A humming presence seemed to probe at their skins with unseen hands. Blunt inspections traced among weapons, bodygear, clothes. Toby tried to see where this was coming from. His sensorium told him nothing but a noisy hash of meaningless signals. He was looking at a spot on the wall when suddenly a circular hole opened in it and rapidly grew. Soon it was a new doorway.
Beyond stood the dwarf, looking bored.” You’re reasonably clean. None of those mech spore-spies we’ve been getting lately. Where’d you say you were from?”
They bumped and elbowed each other in their haste to get out of the cramped room. From long habit, Bishops preferred the open. Killeen said with studied neutrality, “Who wants to know?”
“Ummm?” Among a menu of irritating mannerisms, the dwarf had a habit of staring off into space, as if consulting an Aspect. A polite Bishop would have at least glanced at who was speaking to him. “Oh, I thought I said: I’m Andro, scut-work specialist supreme. I make sure you don’t drag in too many proffo-plagues, siggos, or microeyeballs.”
“Siggos?” Toby asked.
“You’re post-Arc, right? Still, shoulda heard about this. Siggos are esty bombs, cute li’l mech gizmos. Nasty, about the size of a skin cell—which’s what they look like. Can blow a hole in just about any esty we got.”
“How many of these esty—?” Killeen began, but Andro was already marching away with dwarf-fast steps. Toby saw that since the man was closer to the ground, he could just sort of skate along, hardly bothering to lift his feet. The gravity here was lighter than Argo’s, and the officers, abubble with excitement and confusion, bounded too high on each step.
Toby guessed “post-Arc” meant after the Arcology Eras. This impatient dwarf knew their history?
“Where are we going?” Killeen called after Andro.
“Scrub-dub.”
Which proved to be like being held under a microscope and poked at by giants. The dwarf turned toward them, chattering a rapid-fire explanation, walking backwards—and clapped his hands.
Something scooped Toby up, jabbed and snipped and smelled him. Without any apparent cause, his clothes wriggled and twisted and got free of him. They vanished, flapping away into the clotted air. He shouted, and heard only an echo. Then a web of snaky stuff held him upside down while living, sticky strings ran all over his body, into his ears and even more intimate orifices. Still upside down, with his arms pinned below his head by a soft but insistent clamshell, he got a bath. Fragrant, flowery, ferocious. It, too, worked into every crevice he knew and several that felt like fresh ideas.
The clamshell let go. He fell—and plunged into a green soup. He emerged sputtering, only to be hauled ashore on a sandy beach by a pulse of magnetic fields. It seized on hi
s many metal implants and sucked him across the gritty purple sand—which lapped up at him, murmuring to itself like a microscopic mob. Somehow, being dragged didn’t hurt or even rub his skin raw. It was as though the sand flowed around him, exerting just enough pressure to keep him where it wanted. The sand-swarm ran all over his body, probed his nostrils, ears, ass, muttered disagreeably, and then meekly laid back down again, sighing. He stood up shakily. Grains of the gritty sand ran out his nostrils. It licked off his face and then fled into his hair, chuckling as it went.
Toby was not in a mood to laugh along. He stalked off the beach, just as Jocelyn fell out of an overhead cloud, tumbling in air, and splashed into the green soup pond. She shrieked and gasped.
“Just relax and let them do it to you,” Toby advised.
That didn’t seem to do any good. Jocelyn angrily slapped at the green soup. It lapped around her and magnetic fluxes grabbed her in a rather embarrassing position for a lady. The fluxes wrapped like ropes around her, Toby could see through his Dopplered sensorium/eye. Jocelyn floundered up onto the sand beach, sputtering.
Toby lost interest in her trials. He climbed over a sand dune and through a wall of pearly fog. Beyond it the dwarf was waiting, holding a fluffy yellow robe.
“Where’re my clothes?”
“Being reeducated,” Andro said with a distracted gaze.
“Huh?”
“Wear this while you eat.”
“Why?”
“It’s your tutor.”
“I didn’t know I’d enrolled.”
“Anybody comes through Port Athena gets the course, skyscraper.”
“Sky what?”
“Ancient term. Means you’re unnecessarily tall.”
“Ugly word for it. Seems to me you’re too short.”
“A few days of forehead-bashing on doorways will provide useful instruction.”
Toby shrugged and put on the ample yellow robe. It fit nicely, tucking itself in around him. “When do I get my clothes back?” he persisted.
“When they’ve graduated.” Andro pointed. “Right now you go that way.”
Furious Gulf Page 18