Toby took a deep breath, licked his lips. Using his Aspects, he dredged up legalistic lore, rattling jargon he only dimly understood. “Override our customs? How can you? I haven’t even been informed by Family Council of any of this.” He let his peripheral vision drift, sizing up opportunities. “First you have to—”
“I called a special Council. Since you had left Argo without permission of the watch officer, they allowed as how they could pass judgment without your being informed.”
Toby was aghast. He should have suspected when it was so easy to slip away. “You let me leave.”
“I gave orders that you were confined to the ship.”
“Sure, knowing you could turn it this way, and then—”
“The Family demands this.”
“Family? Ha! It’s you who want it.”
“I stood aside during their deliberations.”
“Huh!” Toby spat back, edging to his left. Of course—his father knew how days in that tiny cell would affect him, make him jump ship. So the Cap’n prepared arguments, finished the dealings, then waited for Toby to skip. The shock of seeing how he could be so easily used, his impulses calculated, seethed through Toby like a chilly, clarifying dash of water.
He got control of his voice and said slowly, as mildly as he could, “Dad, Shibo doesn’t want to be ‘restored.’”
Killeen laughed dryly. “Nonsense. An Aspect always wants out.”
“She’s a Personality—bigger, more ample . . .” Toby struggled to say what he felt. “You don’t carry one, you can’t know what it’s like. They’re above all this, the surge of anger and want and fear that we feel—all of it. She likes herself the way she is.”
Killeen was still smiling, shaking his head. “You can’t expect anybody to believe that.”
“I certainly do! No Personality carried in this Family ever had a choice of coming out again. Nobody ever asked the question.”
“Well, we can,” Cermo said carefully. “Just manifest her before the Council.”
“No,” Killeen said abruptly, clenching his fist. “I’ll settle this. Manifest her now, right here.”
“What?” Toby made himself take a deep breath. His mind reeled with harsh, violent imagery. Nausea burned his throat.
“Come on, let her speak.”
“No!”
—fevered skin softly resistant, a cupped rosy breast—
“You’d have to anyway, before the Council,” Cermo said reasonably.
“Any objection she has, I can talk her out of it,” Killeen said affably. “Come on, son.”
—tongue flicking in damp hollows, secret crevices—
“No!”
Killeen’s smile hardened. “Yeasay. Now.”
Shibo said,
If it causes this, I’ll think again. I don’t want to see you two—
No! Toby sent to her in the confines of her imprisonment. No.
Killeen’s mouth hardened. “Now. And I mean it.”
Toby broke to his left. He didn’t have much hope but he dug in, revving his knee-servos to max, feeling their surging whine beneath his skin.
Shouts behind him. They probably could run him down but he would give them a chase anyway. He leaned into it, puffing hard.
Then the shouts became hoarse, shrill. He snapped his head around. Quath was blocking Cermo and Killeen, moving with surprising speed. She shot out a telescoping leg and hooked Cermo’s foot, tripping him. Killeen she stopped with a rude bump, sending him sprawling.
Toby was astounded, but he didn’t let it slow his pounding boots. He got out of the park and plunged into the busy streets beyond.
Escape has two steps: first, separating from the pursuer. Then, distancing yourself from the incident, so nobody suspects the distant hubbub has you as its prey.
Toby cut down alleys where he could, leaped clean over a stubby building—his servos cutting in hard—and dodged his way through three streets, faster than he could think through a plan. People chuckled and shouted at him but they seemed to assume he was a mere oddity, not a thief escaping from a job. He relaxed slightly and had the presence of mind to wave at the curious, smiling broadly, as though this was some stunt. Pretty soon he slowed to a fast walk and nobody seemed much interested in him.
He angled through an open-air market without attracting more than the usual attention paid his size. He made his breathing slow. His antic, popping anxiety faded.
Without thinking he found that he had circled around, always turning right when he could. Ingrained Family training. Coming around on your pursuer let you know where he was, since he was following your trail. You could decide whether to take him by surprise, but you had to do it before the tracker realized what you were doing. Or else you took off in a totally different direction, taking time to cover your tracks.
Only in a city there was no tracking, unless Toby had stirred up a crowd somewhere to mark his passage. But Killeen and Cermo couldn’t talk easily with these dwarves, especially in their mood. So he might have a margin of time.
He had ended up behind the park. A chase moves away from the start and usually nobody thinks to check back there. He had learned that playing in the dusty streets of Citadel Bishop, then later again, dodging mechs. Now he hoped that his own father couldn’t read him that deeply. The thought made him fidgety, glancing around corners before exposing himself on the approach to the park area. After all, Killeen had played him like a penny flute lately.
No sign of Killeen or Cermo. No shouts or unusual hurry. He leaned against a building, eyeing the park a block away.
This was only a temporary victory. The Family would comb this city and pluck him out.
He felt a familiar cool signal in his comm. Quath, apparently, had played the same kind of games as a child—or hatchling, or whatever the Myriapodia were when young. But Toby couldn’t see her anywhere.
The bulky form was above him, clinging somehow to the side of a building, concealed in shadow. Nobody nearby had noticed.
“With Dad acting that way, it had to happen.”
“Freedom starts between the ears, sticky-paws. I had to follow what I know. So did you. Thanks.”
“Really? Do you think I should give Shibo back to him?”
“Come on!”
Toby leaned against a wall, watching Quath clamber down the gray ceramic building—which shuddered and popped with the strain—and said, “I don’t hear much music these days, buggo. Just noise.”
“How would you know?”
“You don’t have unconscious thoughts? I mean, impulses, things that just turn up when you’re not thinking about them?”
“Maybe we like ourselves the way we are.”
“Ummm.” He recalled the sensuous moments, his deep, troubling sweats. “Not really.”
“So I can’t really think about Shibo? That’s why I’m so messed up?” He felt exhausted, and not from his running. He let himself slide down, back to the wall, legs splaying out until he was sitting in the alley.
“That’s . . . why we feel so much . . .”
“And we can’t.”
Toby wondered if he would ever know what stormy emotions tossed him about on the surface of a deep, troubled inner sea. He shrugged. “In that case, maybe I’ll feel a smidge better if I do something more than sit on my fat ass, waitin’ for Cermo to fall over me here.”
“Hey, without you I’d be having my spinal chips picked clean.” Toby got to his feet, feeling lighter, easier in himself.
“Like my grandfather used to say, bug-brain—Cheer up! We’ll live to piss on the graves of our enemies.” It seemed odd to be giving Quath a pep talk.
“Part of the line. We got plenty more like him.” It felt good to say it, even if he didn’t really know if it was true. Maybe no son ever did know.
Quath rustled her legs, then restlessly played her boosters, hovering in air. People in the street nearby looked up, startled, and moved away. They were pretty savvy, but Quath was a bit much.
“Neither do I. We can’t stay here, though. You’re kinda conspicuous and I’m a wanted man.”
“I dunno. We flew Argo in through the grand entrance and they were ready for us. Is there a back door to this place?”
Phase Creatures
Above the disk nothing made of metal or ceramic can survive.
Perpetually the great turning disk grinds down the stuff of stars. Tides suck inward, shredding.
The Eater itself holds eternally captive the gathered masses of a million dead suns. The ancient matter itself vanished in seconds of stretched agony, drawn down the steepening slide of space-time. But the memory of these transient masses lingers in curvature.
To the outside, a ghost warp testifies to the dead. Ten billion years of sacrificed matter—stars and dust, planets and cities, lost civilizations and their records, their hopes—have their single tombstone in the mute remaining distortion. A galaxy’s ancient pain persists as silent gravitation.
Blobs of already incandescent matter spiral in, skating on the curvature at speeds higher than found anywhere else in the galaxy. Incessant pull whirls doomed matter in a final frenzied gyre.
The blobs collide, smash, reform, rub. Magnetic fields mediate the friction. Snarls of plasma stream and whirl. Currents churn.
Magnetic vortices grow. The fields twine and loop through the condemned kernels. In tight collisions, fields themselves annihilate against each other. More energy flares forth.
Above such brutal furnaces skim the phase creatures. They had once been of the mechanicals. Now they exist not in hard circuits or ceramic lattice-intelligences. They have evolved out of self-directed necessity. To drink more energy they have learned to dissolve.
As torrents of hard radiation lance through them, they are plasmas. This gathers in fluxes and stores them in long-range correlations.
When the flood ebbs, the phase creatures change. In the cooler spots above the disk they can condense. Lacy filaments become gaseous discharges. The power so generated they broadcast outward, to lesser ranks who can store it.
The phase creatures themselves use these fluxes to organize themselves into free-floating networks. Circuits without wires. Electrons flowing only in their own self-consistently generated magnetic fields. Pinched currents that snake and flare. Voltages and switches. Light-quick, gossamer-thin.
Lively intelligences dance there. Inductive, silent, invisible.
They enter the discussion that has been teeming above them, in the cooler realms. With silky elegance their thoughts merge with the hard beings who are the cruder, earlier forms of mechanicals.
But the phase creatures still know their origins. They share the thought patterns of the metallic forms. They converse.
I/We do not understand why these odd, primitive primates should be studied at all. And what is this arrival?
You/I summoned |>A<|, who was concluding the elimination of remaining organic life on the planet of these primates’ origin.
This |>A<| is a strange mixture of intelligences.
I/We know. Tolerate it. Here:
Greetings. I employ the single-consciousness approximation. This you may find uncomfortable.
Regard: How narrow.
We/You tried it before and found it stifling.
We should accommodate |>A<|.
Very well. But what a demented limitation!
Bear with |>A<| for a moment.
To plumb the recesses of primate thinking such strictures are necessary.
Why study them, then?
Their sense of beauty is like no other. Variant organics are unique, as well, but these have long duration here at True Center.
Beauty? We are arbiters of that.
I seek to find wholly fresh reaches of grace and flavor. These are species-specific, lavish in lore.
A needless luxury. We face sterner issues now.
Beauty is as vital to our being as any of your raw pursuits.
Is that an insult?
Never—but a fact.
Careful, then.
I intend no offense. I am a specialist intelligence, with my own drivers. Let me point out to you gathered minds what a richness these primates have! These are the creatures who developed the Five-Digit Motif. It grips the perceptual centers as can no other! And then there are their inner, colorful emotion-curtains. Wondrous! Their Subverted-Maximal Abstractions. All wonderful creations!
I/We are more concerned with their possible danger to us. All because of some semi-mythical knowledge they carry.
But without knowing they carry it. That is important. They must not learn what they possess!
I believe they sense some special destiny which they carry. But they do not know its nature, that is clear. Such beings carry deeper knowledge as narratives. To primates, a myth is a deep story which answers the difficult questions of their lives.
I/You thought that myths were simply someone else’s religion.
Of course, but I speak of primates. I have studied them well.
Then you are the one who must enter the Wedge and act for us there.
Why? I have other matters—
You know them best.
But I have never been to the Wedge.
I do not wonder, with your time spent on the beauties of underlife.
The Wedge is treacherous.
Indeed. But we/you have breached it with minor forms. Even now the tiny informants have filtered into their portal city. They are keeping close watch on the primates of the ship—those we allowed to enter.
A move you/I opposed.
It gained us valuable information. This Legacy of theirs—it hints at much we do not know.
We/I would not need to know it if we had expunged the primates.
No! You should not think this way. The primates are a valuable form, approaching extinction. Protect such beings for their last moments.
That is a luxury.
We command you to follow close upon the important primate members which their own Legacy has identified.
The Wedge is perilous. I cannot even be sure, entering it, where I shall be. Or when.
We/I shall give you/I resources.
I could become lost in the chaotics.
A risk we/you must ta
ke.
I have heard that there are agencies in the Wedge which can harm even higher systems such as ourselves.
True. We do not know what they are.
But I am in single-consciousness mode! If I perish, the “I-form” shall vanish!
IWe cannot help that.
You/We elected this state.
Though of course we will archive your present state. A copy of you will carry on.
To venture into such turmoil—I am not qualified.
You/We seem reluctant. Yet youwe have trained in the most important skill—you have dealt with primates. You moved them to their intersection with the quasi-mechanicals. Very adroit.
And we/you have other motivations.
What motivations? To risk so much—
Think of beauty. Of art.
PART FOUR
Gravity’s Gullet
ONE
The Esty Wind
The city of the dwarves slipped away behind them.
Toby and Quath moved quickly, using scattered buildings for cover and then a dense grove of curious spindly trees. These rose to greater and greater heights as they fled into a gorge of arched and tangled rock. Toby’s attention fled as well, veering away from the confrontation with his father, taking refuge in the pure bliss of flight. He ran hard.
“More dangerous to stay back there.”
Dangerous? Toby asked himself. To whom? The word was wrong but he was not going to inspect his inner feelings now. Time to act.
“Great help, those [untranslatable]s.”
“Hey, leave me alone, yeasay?”
“Humans aren’t so easy to figure, you said once.”
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