“Naysay!” Killeen said angrily. “She’ll be with us.”
The judge hesitated, then her eyes narrowed. “How do we know you’ve really got this Myriapod?”
“We’ll bring her ashore,” Killeen said simply.
“What? Here? But that could be dangerous.”
“Not to us.”
She looked alarmed. “Those things killed people without pity.” Toby recalled Quath’s casual references to how she and her kind had thought of humans as Noughts, beings who didn’t matter a jot on the Myriapodia’s scale of things. And her forerunners had hunted primate-type species. Maybe people here were slow to forget—or knew something he didn’t.
“I’ll guarantee your safety,” Killeen said airily, plainly enjoying himself now. “And I won’t even charge you extra.”
Toby could tell that Cermo was having trouble containing his laughter. Then he looked behind them. Somehow, without their noticing it, a dozen people had quietly come into the big room and were standing at the back. They didn’t look threatening but they didn’t smile either. They wore small, rectangular backpacks and looked authoritative. This was serious stuff.
“Very well,” the judge said. “Please bring the alien here.”
“Not so fast,” Killeen countered. “I want some information.”
“I can assure you that you’ll be properly briefed once—”
“Now.”
“I suppose we could compromise somewhat—”
“And your Andro here, he said something about a message waiting for us.”
“In due time—”
“Same time as you question Quath. No later.”
She pursed her lips, paused, and then nodded to the people at the back of the room. “I would appreciate it if you would send a few of your people along with mine here. They can work out the transfer of the alien to our control.”
“Hey, you won’t own Quath,” Toby put in.
The judge looked at Toby as if seeing him for the first time, and not much liking the result. “We will establish proprietary ownership of the information we gain from—”
“You just take it for granted that Quath will talk to you at all,” Toby said rapidly, looking at his father. “Plenty times, she won’t say a peep.”
“I believe that is a technical matter for the teams which will be sent to interrogate and—”
“Just a second here,” Killeen said. “Toby’s right. You got to handle Quath just so, or you won’t get a used fart out of her.”
The judge blinked. “A used . . . ? I shall assume that was hyperbole, a figure of speech.”
Cermo chuckled and Toby remembered how Quath had built her complex warren, sticking it together with her own feces. “Not entirely,” Toby said, and smiled mysteriously.
The judge regarded Toby skeptically. “Then perhaps we can enlist your aid. Someone who could help us talk with the Myriapod?”
The other Bishops were looking at Toby. He said, “I suppose so. What you do with whatever Quath decides to tell you, that’s your business. But we’re not handing her over to you. She stays with us.”
The judge paused, studying the surface of her desk, then glancing at the others in the back of the room. Mildly, but with a clear threat, she said, “I don’t think you are in a position to dictate terms.”
Killeen turned and gazed steadily at the people behind them. The other Bishops also did an about-face, standing with knees and elbows slightly bent, hands ready to move. A long, silent moment stretched.
Toby saw his father’s point. These people had tech probably beyond theirs, but they were still human. A lot of communication was not talk, but presence, and the Bishops towered over these other men and women. Jocelyn and Toby, the shortest, still were half again the height of these arrogant dwarves.
Killeen let this fact work on the room, and then said, “I expect you to abide by the letter and intent of our agreement.”
The judge paused, sensing the situation. Then she smiled for the first time. “It is pleasant to encounter a visitor who understands the nuances of negotiation.” She held out a hand. “Monisque, I’m called by my friends. My enemies prefer shorter words. Let’s get our terms worked out in detail. Then maybe we can all have a drink.”
Some human rituals were eternal. Toby had no doubt that the drinks would contain a liberal lacing of alcohol.
FIVE
Trans-History
Quath clambered along beside them, clanging and scraping through Andro’s reception area. She had been forced to squeeze through the loading docks and equipment bays of the port, because the personnel areas were hopelessly small. Toby could have sworn that Quath had added some more legs into the bargain, but the knobby steel shanks moved so fast, her pneumatic joints wheezing, that it was hard to tell.
The buildings here glowed like warm butter. Probably part of these people’s security precautions, Toby guessed, but he couldn’t imagine how. Unless somehow the buildings held energies that could flick out, lick away offending Bishops . . .
“How’s that by you, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon?” Killeen asked.
Her angular head swiveled toward Killeen—a politeness she had learned that humans appreciated, though it was completely unnecessary, since her voice came to them through comm. Still, she said nothing.
“C’mon, Quath, don’t worry,” Toby said, making his voice carry a lightness he did not feel, and hoping the alien couldn’t tell that. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be right there.”
Toby was puffing just trying to keep up with her. “How come, eyeball-plucker?”
Killeen said, “To these people you matter. They want you pretty bad.”
“They seem pretty worried about the Myriapodia,” Killeen said.
To Toby his father seemed edgy and intense, eyes darting to the sides as they passed out of the receiving dock and into the city. They picked up more of the “Honor Guard,” as the judge had called it—teams of men and women with long-bore weapons slipping down side streets, quick-eyed and edgy, clearing the way. The streets ahead were deserted bare stone, closed shops, echoing the Bishops’ ringing boot heels. Killeen signaled to Cermo and a dozen others, who formed their own perimeter line. The people of this monotonous city didn’t seem like a threat; they all knew the “Honor Guards” were there to keep the Bishops in line.
Quath followed precepts Toby could never figure out. Sometimes she would reel out endless detail about Myriapodia history. Other times, she would clam up tight, not even acknowledge questions.
“They’re dead anxious for news from out of the Far Black, as they call it,” Toby added.
The guards, their squinty-eyed tautness and all, made him nervous. Even the air here itched with faint striations, as though electricity hummed through it. These people, their funny little stunted city, the sheer incredible but rock-solid fact of it being here at all—they added up to a profound unease. And things were moving so fast, he couldn’t get straight answers to any of the myriad questions this place conjured up.
“If that’s what they’re buying, then that’s what we’re selling,” Killeen said. “Cermo! Heave ass down that alley and sight on those far clouds.”
“What spectrum?”
“Give me a see-through, infra or better.”
Cermo swaggered forward, decked out in full field regalia, clicking and rattling with techno-ornaments. His fine-webbed electronets seethed with energy. Antennas embedded at shoulder, waist, and butt looked every-which-way, in full 3D. His weaponry was polished from long hours of care and repair on ship, but still pitted and burnished from a thousand forays.
Toby recalled the times when such gear was everyday we
ar for all Bishops. They had been on the move, their sensoria stretched out to max perimeter, each Bishop a sentinel. For years after the Calamity they had roamed like that, rising weary, red-eyed, and sore each morning, to a world drawing always dryer, with hunger and mech pursuit the only constants.
Locals peeped at them from around distant corners. They seemed interested and amused. Rats in bow ties.
Cermo clumped down an alleyway and into an open area, where he could get a full sight on the far horizon.
Toby couldn’t figure out the sky here. He knew this wasn’t a planet, not by any stretch, but still there were billowy white clouds drifting not far above the stunted buildings. There had even been a thunderstorm, catching them on the hike back to Argo’s berth. That had startled him—pure, tasty water falling from a sky like God’s gift. He hadn’t seen such a tasty shower since he was a boy, had played for hours in its mud.
—and at once was in a torrent, a downpour, spattering crystal droplets over his face. Her face. Her face. Endless gouts and flurries of blessed clear streaming cold, a waterfall hammering and thundering down a mountainside, she standing gleefully under it, yellow party dress plastered to her slim legs, a young girl getting ecstatically drenched—
The intrusion was sudden, raking across his mind. Shibo. Her rising buttresses, flanked by granite masses. He felt within her Personality a sweeping reach, the sinks and hollows of another’s interior self, a fresh continent spread bone-broad before him. The waterfall faded. Rain fell in the great distance, slanting from troubled clouds, signature of her own sad presence.
You have not summoned me forth for some time.
“I’ve been busy.” Something in the waterfall, the pleasures of it, made him uneasy. He noticed that he had a hard-on, and hoped she wouldn’t.
I know how hard it is to get along with your father. I did, once.
“He’s running the show, sure, but . . . I just don’t feel easy about it.”
He is the man whose sense of opportunity has brought you far, so very far—
“I don’t know what he’s after anymore.”
I believe his goals are as ever. But he is a man who hides his inner self, now. A Cap’n must.
“Not from me, he doesn’t.”
As if from a great distance, she said,
Even from you. You are becoming a man, more than a son.
He coughed to cover the dark seethe within him. His erection would not go away and he was breathing deeply, mind buzzing.
“Clouds’re pretty thick,” Cermo sent back. “Can’t see much. In the far infra the view’s all jiggledy.”
“Now there’s a fine tech word,” Jocelyn joshed him.
“Jiggledy how?” Killeen asked.
“Looks like they reflect the city itself. I mean, stronger I look, more I get wavy pictures of streets, buildings.”
Shibo receded. Toby had focused his attention on the conversation around him and she had faded into the background. He concentrated, to push her further back. Made himself breathe slower. He couldn’t see anything through the clouds.
Cermo sent, “Microwave says it’s solid up there.”
“Solid?” Killeen nodded to himself. “Fits, yeasay.”
“Glad to see you getting humble, ol’ cockroach,” Toby said. He wanted to cheer up the lumbering shape, but Cermo’s discovery made his voice shake a little. A city dangling over him, with nothing at all to hold it, kept up by some invisible law of physics—the thought made him hunch down a little, until he noticed and stood up straight again.
Three arms of ruby shell reached down suddenly and plucked Toby up above the street cobblestones. They swung him playfully to and fro, then dumped him onto the flat yellow carapace behind Quath’s head. “Hey!”
“Whoosh! Not that there’s so much to see. I was already taller than the street signs. Funny names, aren’t they?”
The Bishop party was crossing Peach Boulevard on Pomegranate Camino Real, names Toby had to call up his Isaac Aspect to understand were mouth-watering ancient fruits—but there wasn’t a plant in sight.
“If I take the measure of them right,” Killeen said, “they don’t give anything away free.”
Toby said, “Yeasay—downright nasty.”
“Ummm, maybe both. See, we’re used to people helping each other automatically, no questions asked. These folk don’t think like that—which implies a lot.”
“Simple, really,” Killeen said. “They aren’t under threat all the time. Comfortable people can afford to be choosy.”
Toby thought about that. “Could mean they’re pretty used to strangers, too.”
“Oh? And what’s that?” Toby didn’t have any deeper idea, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge that here, the only kid among adults. You kept your luck to yourself.
“Ummmm.” Killeen watched their guards edgily. “Could be.”
Toby felt edgy, as though some game was going on just beyond his seeing. Killeen was composed, controlled, giving nothing away. As he fretted over this he glanced down an alleyway and saw a building in the distance abruptly seem to melt, windows and arches dissolving, turning a mottled green. “Look!” It reformed itself with a freshly slanted roof, a new line of windows.
Killeen’s eyes narrowed. “That fits, too,” he said distantly.
“Fits what?” Toby watched new doorways pop open, ovals instead of the earlier strait-edged type.
“This city’s a kind of tech we’ve never seen. And I’ll bet it runs itself.”
Cermo sent a puzzled murmur. “Itself? Andro—”
“He’s a clerk.” Killeen gave Andro a bland smile, amused that they could talk this way right next to him. “These people, they’re no higher level than we are, come right down to it.”
“They sure don’t seem like they could build a Chandelier,” Cermo said.
“They didn’t,” Toby said firmly. “Don’t expect them to ever admit it, though.”
He walked past a splashing fountain, ideas tumbling fruitlessly, and felt a tilting, a rising presence—
—She moved lithely, inspired, skipping from stone to stone across the broken road, puddles from the night fogs showing her self and counter-self in the shredding gray light. Playing in the fresh dawn’s ruins. Jagged teeth from a night raid. Stumps of stone. A spider slept within the city, she saw it silver-fine and waiting. Stirring its barbed legs, the razor rub unheard beneath the waking bustle of her loved Citadel, fine and forlorn and always waiting for the next blow. Yet joy seeped from every moment. Shapes swarmed through this morning, the eternal going of people about their busyness, to strive against and fail and strive again. Even though they knew that the spider waited too, rustling in the eyesocket of a bleached skull—
He snapped out of it, panting. Forced his attention back to the street where his boots trod, his eyes caught the liquid dance of water.
Yet Shibo’s world was entrancing, too. It called forth a lightness of being, an airy sense of things merging, yet solidly grounded in a web of interplay, of casual and unspoken delight. These glimpses into her Personality contrasted hugely with the masculine edginess all around him, the holding-back, the control and analysis. Killeen’s blocky, muscular stride ahead of him spoke silently of purpose, precis
ion, separation. Toby respected that, knew Family Bishop had to be led that way.
Yet this was his father, too. In the years since they had fled together across arid, murderous plains, the edges in Killeen had sharpened. Like a knife stroked on stone, Toby thought, a law of nature. And now Killeen expected of his son the same hardness, the same resolute separation that leadership demanded.
Toby lurched, the strife in him like a blow—a clash between the beckoning sense of the world Shibo held forth and the demands he felt radiating from Killeen. Cermo looked at him oddly, one eyebrow raised. Toby realized his face must show his feelings, and tightened it up—only to feel the Shibo Personality laughing gently at him, then fading back into its ghostly berth in him. He marched on.
They wound through twisted streets, across a broad plaza of black stone, and into the most impressive building Toby had seen here—a steep pyramid of hard glaring white. His Isaac Aspect said it was “pearly” and when Toby pressed his hand against the stuff it was shockingly cold. Sticky, too—and then they were being hustled through a wide portal and into seats before a high dais. The chairs were Bishop-sized and Toby’s clasped him with a warm, massaging grip. It was downright insinuating, fitting itself to him all along back and legs. He wondered if it would let him go, if whoever ran this place decided otherwise.
To his surprise, the judge, Monisque, appeared at the dais—this time in blue robes. “I figured she was something more than a judge,” Killeen whispered on closed comm.
“I’m happy to greet you again, far wanderers,” Monisque said lightly. “Now I’m wearing my other hat—Chief Swapper.”
“Sounds to me like you do everything here,” Killeen said.
“Appearances are deceiving. Most people have no interest in visitors, no matter what esty they hail from.” She nodded as dozens of the short people filled the remaining seats, buzzing among themselves. Toby noticed that the seats conformed to the dwarves, too, shrinking as required, and felt a little less paranoid.
“Our friend here, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon, is willing to yield data about any area not proscribed by his own, uh—” Toby could see Killeen struggle to put Myriapodia notions, even approximately understood, into human terms. “Uh, priestly orders. In return we’ve got a whole fistful of questions.”
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