After more time passed than he could recall, he even got so he could predict the wrenching weather—sort of.
All that had changed him by the time he met the first people.
TWO
Rational Laughter
He found them deep in a savannah, living by cultivating some gnarled yellow grain crops he did not recognize.
They took care of him. He was in worse shape than he thought and yet somehow not being able to understand them helped.
They spoke no language he knew or had chips for. They were small and what they lacked in power and bulk they made up in a compact grace. They were balanced, self-contained. The women were demurely radiant, lithe and with warm, veiled eyes that sparkled as they talked.
Both sexes seemed compressed, with broad shoulders capping the V-shaped rise from their narrow waists. They had a perfect, erect carriage, a swagger-free lightness. Their skins were smooth, glowing golden-brown beneath elaborate confections of blue-black hair.
The Families had taken inordinate care with their hair and for the long years on the run had made that their only fashion indulgence. Here, in contorted gravities that turned like weather, hair could perform miracles—cant into impossible shelves, swirl upward like a frozen black fire, veer and swoop and verge on the comic.
They had the usual two sexes and four genders, with both varieties of homosexuals wearing customary hair, symphonies of oblique provocation. He liked it all. Signs were always more fun than talk and the small vocabulary he mastered cast him agreeably back onto his intuition. He learned to read the unspoken, which was more interesting anyway.
As he rested up—not for long, though, as everyone worked or else didn’t eat—he began to get an idea of how different these people were.
To them, every detail should be dwelt upon, every moment occupied. The task at hand, that was everything. When you worked there was no other world, only the compressed moment of the job. All thought of other jobs, of vexing moments past or future, were banished. Except for some distracting aches in his right arm and ribs, picked up in his long flight, he managed pretty well.
Their community life centered on an elaborate, staged drama. Talk of mechs and the esty bored them. They wanted only to discuss the current play. Toby went to one and found that this was regarded as a great honor to them. The audience stood and applauded him by clapping their lips together as he sat down. Or at least he thought that was what they meant; later, he wondered if he had committed some blunder.
The drama began immediately after he sat so he did not have time to think on the matter. The play depended utterly on concentration. Without the tight control and immersion of the actors, Toby could see how it could be excruciatingly dull.
In practice it wasn’t. He sat riveted as an actor entered the stage and walked with an inhuman slowness around the rim of it, inches from the audience but immeasurably distant in her enveloped presence. She controlled her rhythm and step so utterly that no extraneous finger gesture or eye twitch disturbed movement that was like the surface of a black lake, unrippled, but telling much. To Toby the actor seemed to pass through the air of the theater, clothed in a silence that could cut through a tornado. Then, later, the same scene occurred again. This time microphones amplified each sweep of silky feet across bare boards. A whispery music followed each move, transforming the event utterly, until he could scarcely recognize it.
He found that the drama, which had so little action he could sum it in a sentence, had a strangely soothing effect on him. It seemed to say, Pay attention—that being focused on the moment was more important than playing head games about the past or future.
Odd, once he thought about it. Because this was a place where past and future weren’t so easy to separate. They flowed together at places, a muddy riverrun.
They had already fought mechs here. It took him a while to find out even this simple fact because they spoke so little. Once he came upon a burial ceremony—held not in a ritual place but in the street—which seemed to be for someone taken by mechs. Their homes and workshops were like the intersecting hulls of Argo inverted, so that from a distance they looked like blisters growing together. Burns scarred them and two had big holes punched through.
These people were well organized. They held defense drills and used weapons he could not figure out. They said the latest mech incursion to the esty had been going on as long as it took to raise a girl to half-height—which seemed to be their way of measuring time—and had been worse earlier. Some had missing legs and arms to prove it.
He told them as much as he could of Family Bishop and the long way that had led him here. Still, he was not really one of them because he had done different things for his scarred and burnished armor. Mostly he had just stayed alive. Here they had engaged the mechs and killed them, lured and suckered and defeated them, though taking casualties all down the line of course. Getting banged up like Toby was mostly an accident and they all knew that, quite different from being in a battle because you wanted to be there.
And they did. A small woman told him with great fervor how they were fighting for some big idea. He could not quite get clear what the idea was and after a while gave up pushing on his vocabulary. The woman talked fast and seemed to treat any question as disagreement.
Toby thought about that after watching their slow, grave drama. One performer had carried a drum with a mech brain inside, so that when she hit the drum bottom the brain would bounce around. It struck the top and bottom drumheads while the performer went on clapping the heads. The counterpoint made an eerie echo with the brain-rattle. What that meant he could not tell but it chilled him.
One dark time after he had finished his job he walked back to where he would sleep. A chilling wind rippled the few lights glimmering in the soft mist. He knew somehow that he would never have gone into a battle for some kind of general principle. He had fought and run for the Family—run mostly, and fought only when he had to.
These quiet men and women were different. They had a separate age-old tradition of being holed up here in an esty that they didn’t understand. Or at least they could not explain it to him. Maybe they knew it in a way he could not. Living through things gave you that sometimes.
He remembered the long empty docks where they had berthed the Argo. Big and covered with scratches, chipped and marred. Deserted except for Argo, like arms stretching out to embrace and welcome ships that came no more.
These people had said that few ships came any longer from the worlds beyond, the planets like Snowglade. Many smaller craft slipped between the portals of the esty itself, shortcutting between Lanes. Few planetary Families came into the Lanes any more because they were nearly all dead. Failed.
Their history didn’t square with his own understanding. That fit, too. The Lanes ran on different clocks. Some lay deeper in the steep curvature around the black hole so time ran slower there. And the esty itself mixed and tangled events, so that human memory churned with it.
He gave up on figuring when he found that he had walked too far in the gloom. That was the first time he realized how much he missed his father. He cried for a while in the dark and was glad no one could see him.
Something in him said it was stupid to feel embarrassed about crying. He had never thought that before. Wondering about it that way made him suspect a trace of Shibo. But he could catch no sliver of her anywhere.
He felt uneasy. With a restless spirit he went back and found the sleep shed for casual laborers. Everybody else was already down and out so he crawled onto his pallet.
He slept well and woke up only when the shed collapsed. A slap in the forehead, grit in his mouth. The ground heaved under him. Somebody screamed in the dark.
The roof beams had missed him but debris weighed him down. He crawled out from under it while big explosions shook the ground. When he got out there were mechs in the hovering gloom. Buildings down. Fires licking at a mottled sky.
People running everywhere. Howling ferocities fighting hig
h up above dirty clouds.
The defense screens popped up—he saw them in his sensorium as bright red planes ramped up into the air, with electrical green snaking along their edges.
Casualties. People with no visible scars but the skin beneath their eyes black from concussion. Some were bleeding from nose and mouth. Others clutched their bellies and could not speak. Others pitched face forward into the mashed grass.
He helped with them. The medical people did not seem to want him around. They glared at him and he saw that they suspected. Nobody could know for sure but he had come here and then the mechs had come.
He wasn’t sure if he would hurt more than he helped, so he left the wounded and ran to the outer edge of the blisterbuildings. He watched there the swift and mysterious play of glare and thump in the surrounding somberness. He wanted to fight but he did not know what to do. No Family Bishop methods seemed to matter here. And if the forces above were after him there was nothing he could do about that either.
Finally he fled. If he had brought this here, then the best he could do was to draw it away. For hours he trotted through the obliterating murk. Alone again. Quath. Killeen. Besen. Names.
In his sensorium nothing seemed to follow him. Finally light began to seep from a rumpled ridge up ahead and he saw that he was in a different terrain. There were people clinging to the bare timestone and something was trying to find them.
Without warning he found himself in the middle of a fight. He kept belly-down and learned quick enough that something—he never learned what, exactly—was trying to kill a band of people near him. He caught on also to the skill of keeping down low on the shifting timestone.
A green fog flowed overhead. From a distance it poured down over him and over his own image that he saw in the timestone below.
The image looked up at him. Slow, diluted seconds passed. The figure waved at him. Toby blinked. It grinned. He could not figure out how the timestone could have a Toby trapped in it, a him who cheerfully saluted—but there was no time for figuring anyway, not now.
Or to see what was doing the killing. He started to lift his head far enough to see, then thought better of it. His sensorium showed nothing dangerous. Still, he heard the small swishing motes, slivers on the wind that would have lifted pieces of his head away with a surgical precision if he had looked.
He knew this because within seconds he saw it happen. A woman caught in the chin one of the whispering things that streamed over the ground. The tiny things waited for a target, gliding over open ground, then found their prey.
He watched too the attempts by friends to put the head back together again. These people spoke a quick, staccato language that he did not understand. He tried to help even though he could see no point in it, and they paid him no attention. They had faith that human medicine would work on a head carved up into precise slices. It didn’t.
After a while the whispering streams stopped. He wanted to help the people but when he went to find them they were all thoroughly dead.
He had little doubt now that somewhere behind this chaos was something looking for him. Had all these people died because of him? He didn’t want to think about it.
And all he could do was flee, not fight. It grated on his Bishop way of thinking.
He met refugees. Some he could understand. They told of worse places and times but most of them kept plodding past him as if he were an illusion. Or maybe they thought his questions were nonsensical.
He marched a long while. It was easier if he didn’t think much.
The world seemed lighter, as if his head was like a balloon held down by his body. He walked that way enjoying every step. Bright yellow beams burst from exposed timestone far overhead. The light worked with furnace energy.
People passing by smiled. The mood grew until everybody was cheerful and even to Toby the scene seemed so fine that it was on the plain face of it ridiculous that anybody should ever die. At least not him.
With a pang he remembered Quath going on once, long ago, about the irrational optimism of primates, or at least the present version of them. She had said it was a peculiar adaptation, one her species lacked. Toby had just laughed.
He chuckled again, now. Crazy, mindless. It made him feel better. Remembering Quath’s puzzlement, he laughed again. Even the pang of loneliness did not cut into his sudden, absolutely unearned joy. Irrational it might be but it was fun and fun was, in a place and time like this, supremely rational and practical.
THREE
Casualties
“Man over there, he wants to talk to you.”
Toby was surprised. “Me? How come?”
“He knows you.”
“Can’t be.”
“He does, says so. Look, he’s bad hurt.”
Toby frowned but went. He moved among the wounded on the dry plain and gave away what was left of his water.
The man’s face was lined and pale and moaning in an automatic way, regular and with the same drawn-out, low, wet grunting at the end. They had his head covered with a shiny sheet that had some medical purpose. The man reached up and tugged the sheet away. Toby saw what had been a face and now looked like a small hill that had been driven over in the rain with heavy equipment and then let bake out in the sun too long.
“They peeled my old face off and gave me this new one,” a clear, soft voice said. The lips did not move.
“I see, yeasay.” Toby felt useless.
“I’m growing a fresh one now.”
“I can tell,” Toby said. Not looking at the face.
“Want to know how it happened?”
“Sure.”
“We were trying to get one of those snake things that shoot down the axis of the Lane. You seen them?”
Toby had seen a lot of things but he didn’t think of them in terms of animals any more. That just led you to make mistakes, like with the woman he had failed to save. “I think so.”
“Awful, killed plenty of us. So we waited for one and hit it from five different positions. Smacked it pretty square.”
The man’s eyes unfocused and Toby encouraged him with “Yeasay?”
“Uh, sure. Thing jerked around and went to pieces before it crashed on the ridgeline. Near me. Went off something powerful. So pretty. All I knew was a hot whack in the side and then I was here.”
Toby reached out and held the man’s hand and wondered if he should believe much of it. The hand was as soft as the voice, not a hand that had ever been in the field much. The voice was dreamy too. The story did not sound like a real battle. He had learned that the wounded were not good reporters and sometimes mingled their dreams in.
Toby murmured something and slid the sheet back so the face was covered. He was pretty sure the man could not see and was just using his inner sensorium. The man said nothing and Toby left the sheet. Then the man said suddenly, “I heard you were here.”
“Me? How’d anybody know me?”
“We saw you, got a pulse on the gen sensorium.”
“What’d it say?”
“To watch for you. Take care of you.”
“Who sent it?”
“General directive.”
“You guys can send signals from Lane to Lane?”
“Sometimes. Our tech here isn’t the best. But we heard about you.”
“My father have anything to do with it?”
“Mightsay. I don’t remember.”
Toby wondered if this was true either. He had heard men lie about how they were wounded, sometimes right after they were hit and even in front of people who had been there. He did not know why but he had done it himself once years ago so it did not seem so bad.
His left calf had gone out then from a mech bolt and it took a week to get running again. By the time he could walk he had woven a story that was completely different from the reality. Not flattering, just different. He did not know why he had done it and after a while had stopped asking himself the question. All that made it hard to talk to this man whose face was no
t going to work out.
The man said, “Way I figure, you must be important.”
“Huh? Me?” Toby had been thinking and had nearly lost track of where he was. He was remembering the Family. Killeen.
“Must be. Most directives are weapons stuff, tactics and all.”
“I’m not important.”
“Well you’re sure goddamn big. Where from?”
“Family Bishop.”
He said it half-defiantly, because he never knew how people were going to react. Sometimes they got puzzled. Others would make a sour comment about dirt-huggers, or else just look blank. This man did neither, since he was busy vomiting suddenly into his own hand. Toby helped him clean it up.
“You sure be important.” The man looked a lot worse now, his face yellowing like an old wound, but he clung to his idea. “Gotta be.”
He spoke with a flat accent but his phrasing was like one of the old Bishops Toby had known. Maybe the people around here were Hunker Down Families. Toby patted the man, not knowing what to do. “You sleep.”
“You gotta be. Directive said to look out for you.”
“Then what?”
“Report back. And hang on to you.”
“For who?”
“Dunno. You stay right here, now.”
“Get some sleep.”
“Why you so important? You got something to do with all this?”
The question floated in the dusty air. Though Toby had heard it in his sensorium, the words in a thin whisper went unanswered because Toby was already at the edge of the plain and moving fast.
FOUR
Salvage
He came down into a long barrel-like valley. It was green and moist, hollowed out between glowing massifs of timestone.
It was hard for him to remember now just when he had started running from the mechs. He had shat his pants a few more times and no longer felt ashamed of it. Killeen. Quath. The names evoked the same emotions now but he had not cried for them in a long while.
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