A sheet of yellow lightning rose. A reply.
Before he could move he felt the ground warm. A harsh pulse of infrared energy. Walls of hard heat.
Water fizzing forth. Pools filling. Streamers of cool vapor. Humidity flooded the congealing atmosphere. Lime-hot fungi on a nearby tree trunk rippled, fluoresced, shuddered.
Charged vehemence slammed into the axis of the Lane. Brilliance blared down.
Toby slapped hands over his head. A rock slammed into his ribs. A thunderclap of pressure flattened him.
He knew in the flashing instant that the true violence was happening all down the Lane—not physically at all, but furies inside minds, intelligences great and small, chained together.
And the fury erupted through them all, bringing death and bliss alike.
SEVEN
Passing Currents
Later—lying under a matted crush of vegetation, aching in every joint, letting his ribs stitch themselves back together—he understood a fragment of what had happened.
Life here was diverse in its defenses. Many-layered, silent, worn by time and seasoned by something more than natural forces. Odd bits that Quath had told him now converged, made sense.
Life struck down could still spring back. Opportunistic organisms, each part of intricately forged links, absorbed the brutal pounding and gave it back. For the forest was not merely a growth clinging to the shifting bedrock of the esty. It incorporated the esty into itself.
Countless slivers of esty, knitted into trees and shrubs and layered soil, brought electrical strengths. The interacting parts of the natural world now had circuits evolved from folded space-time. The forest had a diffused intelligence—or perhaps “intelligence” was a term that meant little here.
In some fashion it had worked beyond the categories of natural evolution that Toby understood. It echoed the far-spread links of the Mantis and its kind. And this intimate connectivity was wired into the genetic heritage of this whole vast esty.
Such a tapestry could eat a storm, fold it into its genes.
Learn from its punishment. Prepare.
It had been doing this for uncountable years. Buried in the deepest hiding place in the entire galaxy, the diffused self had learned far longer than a man could.
He had journeyed through the Lanes, thinking of them as corridors in some huge esty building. A false analogy.
The woven life here threaded realms he could not see. Only in scattered passing moments could his sensorium catch the deep, slow conversations of such a being.
Always the sense of being watched. But more than that—the feel of being part of a hazy whole.
This gnarled world held steady because it held true, swallowing its rivals. And he was now digested into it. He knew this without knowing how he could be so sure.
He had opened a door, that was all. Used his knack of ripping a momentary hole in the esty. To let in forces that would not have been able to arrive so swiftly—or at all.
Maybe he had made a difference. Or maybe he was finally old enough to know that asking whether you made a difference or not was really not the point. You had to try, was all.
Do not think we are neglectful of you. We do hope you live to help. No guarantees, though.
Later, his sole hard and lasting memory came from what happened when the discharge flattened him. It had been only a passing shred of the larger events above.
The explosion must have occurred inside him, for the canopy he checked later was undamaged. But he had witnessed the immensity of the passing presence and had for a slim moment taken part in what it had to do.
Somehow he had been the switch. Opening the door meant he was in the circuit. But electrons don’t know much about radio, even though they swim like fish among resistances, capacities, seas of potential.
Whatever fed the ferocity had used him, the consciousness he carried, to focus itself.
To be part of it was something he could scarcely think about without getting the shivers and fidgets.
He had felt the indifferent powers at work. Worse, he had sensed the many lives that flared, hurt, and died. They were at least equal in their torments. Multitudes joined in and the weight from above crushed them without even noticing their pains.
He did. Not as distant news, but as immediate experience. More than anything he remembered the agony.
For that split moment his teeth sang in their sockets. The calcium rib-rods that framed his chest became chromed and knobby bones, slick and sliding. Swift metallic grace. Purpling storms raced down squeezed veins, up shuddering ligaments. His toes rattled, strumming, talking hard to the ground. His ankles danced on their own, click click of bones trying so hard they would soon fracture.
Head thrown back, neck stretched. Skin feathered and frayed and electric-sharp in polarized light. His spine was parabolic, crackling. Hurricane hallways yawned in him, the lockjawed agony-song screeching.
It raced through him. It sought its true enemy and he did not know if the voltage-fire was from the mechs or if it came forth from imponderable discharges deep in the frying forest. And it did not matter. He was of the fury and in it and for that moment he was its conductor. Currents passed without knowing him.
The rage plunged down through hip sockets polished by blue-green, hungry worms. Snakes of luminous frenzy swarmed hungrily over bone lattices, eating.
And for him it was enough. All he could remember clearly later was the pain. Pain blissful and complete. Plenty of it.
He awoke lying in gray ash. Silence, soft rain. An air mouse coasted by.
No need to move. Just think.
He saw what it was about the mechs, the high up ones, that was different. They had an awful beauty in their detachment. A hard concentration on the business of dealing in death without being in any danger of it. They did not die in the way that people had to. Maybe that was a true advance. He did not know. He could envy them or hate them but it would be better to do neither.
He was alone now in a way he had never been. The strangeness of the mechs had made him see that. Family Bishop, his father, even Quath—when they were close they made a world for him. Without them he was alone finally against the firm facts. He knew things now that he could not have known any other way. He had fled from his father out of confusion and principle and a bitter anger, all mixed together. He had not known he carried all that until now and now it was too late.
Maybe that was how it had to be and you never learned anything well unless you learned it backward, looking down a long channel of experience at it. You had to bring what you had along with you. Your courage and failures and resentment and all the rest of it.
Then the universe would try to fit you in and if you did not fit it broke you. Some people fit all right after that. Toby understood that something had broken in him and that all he could hope for was that maybe afterward he would be stronger where he had broken.
He had grown up believing that the universe was hostile to people and in a way that made them important. They were locked in a grand struggle with a great enemy.
The truth was a lot worse. The universe did not care at all.
The mechs were like that. Implacable but not concerned with people as people, seeing them only as another element in a flat, meaningless landscape. Just doing their tasks and not even feeling their own strange phony deaths.
He found the bird that had talked to him. It lay blackened and crushed, eyes swelling with dried blood. He buried it.
In the end all this was about the Self. Killeen had made it hard for Toby to be himself, though maybe that was something that had to happen with all sons and fathers. And he would never know how much of that had come from Shibo’s silent diffusion into him.
In a strange way the Mantis wanted the same thing. The one commodity that Toby would never give. The Self.
He remembered the joy and pace of commerce, back in that portal city. But there the trading enhanced the Self. Giving fair value meant trading true. It helped define who you w
ere. Same with the Family, which was a kind of machine for the making of Self through action.
It would never have happened this way if he had been with the Family or even with Quath. Family kept the sharp edges away. Family was a fiction, he knew that now. A fiction defending against the furious gulf that yawned in all directions.
But a truthful fiction, too, because the story Families told by their example made it possible to go on. The gulf was always there and you would see it again, certainly for one last time, but there was no special haste in getting to that moment. After you had seen the gulf you spent the rest of your time knowing that it was there waiting and would come again. In knowing this he was now free.
Below all the colossal energies of mechs and matter lay the whole long history of the human Hunker Down. Who had made that happen? Why had Bishops and all the rest of the Families been condemned to the hard-scrabble skin of planets, when a refuge like the Wedge was here? While dwarves like that Andro got to enjoy it.
Below that riddle were the Bishops, still alive when plenty of other Families were dead. Just luck, Toby thought. But it made you wonder.
And finally there was the Calamity. He had fled from that catastrophe long ago, back when he was a boy but did not know what a boy was. He and his father had lost Abraham that day. But now Abraham was here somewhere. Somehow.
To understand even a little piece of all this, Toby would have to find Abraham. In a place where direction meant nothing and time was a place.
Partway up he heard footsteps. He was sure they were steps and coming from above. He hurried up the slope. There were level walkways spaced at even intervals as he went up.
The walkways went off to left and right and he presumed they led all the way around the structure. They curved into the distance and he could see no one on the ones below. He labored against a steepening incline and reached the next walkway.
No one on it. But the footsteps came slower now. As he climbed farther the footsteps got fainter as though he had left them behind. They spaced farther and farther apart.
Dopplering in time. Going away into a future or a past, borderlands of the real. As if the walker were slowing, hesitating, getting sluggish from fatigue. Toby himself began to tire but he could still hear the steps coming in long low notes and so kept on.
The top was not what he expected. Broad and flat and smooth, the surface flecked with gray dabs. Magnetic field very strong.
No one. He could not hear the footsteps any longer.
He looked down. The walkways were so far away he could not tell if anyone was on them or not. Featureless and unmarred, the great structure stretched away. In the hazy distance he could make out the endless wrestling forms of the timescape, esty fighting against itself, Lanes intersecting in wrenching turbulence.
He turned away from the edge as he thought about resting for a while before going back down.
“Where’ve you been?”
The pale-skinned man before him was short and compact. The same size as Andro and the other dwarfs, but wrinkled and completely nude.
“Understand, do you?”
Toby looked around and could not see where the man had come from.
“Look, we haven’t much time. You’re a Bishop, right?”
Toby’s tongue felt thick and useless. “Uh, yeasay.”
“Good. Latest generation, I’d judge.”
“Yeasay. Who—”
“Come on, get back inside where it’s safer. And warmer.”
The dwarf showed Toby his leathery back as he marched quickly across the smooth plain. As Toby caught up the stone split. A clean rectangle opened and there was a ramp leading down. “Come on.”
Toby stopped at the head of the ramp. “In my Family you don’t walk into a place till you know what it is.”
“Oh? It’s an operations center.” The dwarf turned to go down.
“Whose?”
“Um? Mine. Ours. Human, if that’s what you mean.”
“And who’re you?”
“Oh. Sorry.” The dwarf walked over and held out a hand. “Walmsley. Nigel Walmsley.”
“What Family’s that?”
“The Brits.”
“How do you know who I am?”
“History. I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”
“How long?”
Walmsley looked as though he were calculating. “I make it about twenty-eight thousand years. Your time frame, of course.” To Toby’s blank look he volunteered, “Approximately.”
“How come? What for?”
“Come have some tea. You Bishops kept alive that tradition at least, didn’t you?”
“Uh, yeasay.” Toby had not tasted tea since he was a boy. “At the Citadel.”
“I see, the Citadel. Good then. You’re Killeen’s son?”
Startled, Toby gaped. Walmsley nodded. “So I see. Message for you.” He moved his hands quickly and for a flicker one of his arms seemed to be transparent, showing intricate webs beneath the skin.
Killeen was standing between them both.
His father looked worn, haggard. He was in Family Bishop field suiting, not ship gear. He glanced around and saw Toby. “Son, I need you.”
Toby did not know what to say. He reached out to touch his father and his hand passed through the image.
Killeen did not react. “I know how hard it’s been. You can have Shibo. I was, well, wrong. I’ve put that aside.”
Toby’s voice was dry, cracked. “You’re sure?”
“Yeasay. I . . . got outside myself.”
“Where are you?”
“No way to tell. I don’t know when you’ll get this.”
Toby frowned and Walmsley said, “He issued this some time ago, local frame.”
Killeen stepped to the side and regarded Toby. “You seem all right. A little thin.”
Toby smiled. “All that ship fat got run off.”
“The mechs have everybody on the run. Plenty dead. Some Bishops, too. They—”
“Besen? Cermo? How—”
“They’re here, still in one piece. Nobody close to us is suredead.”
Toby felt a joyful release, an eagerness to see them all. “Tell me what all’s gone on. Have you seen Quath? Did—”
“Listen, the mechs have scrambled up the Lanes something fierce. Ruptured some. I don’t know where you’ll find this, but we can patrol for you if you send out a singsay beacon.”
“I will.” Toby whispered to Walmsley, “Is he receiving this?”
“No, only this manifestation reacts to you. This is a Killeen, not the Killeen. I don’t know where the real article is now. Or then, for that matter.”
“No need to whisper,” the Killeen said. “I’m a limited representation and not ashamed of it.”
“What’re the mechs after? All the time I’ve been running, they’ve been on my heels.”
The Killeen hesitated, started again. “They want you and me both. Dunno why.”
“Want to surekill us?”
“Something more than that. Something funny’s going on with Abraham, but I don’t know what. Watch out for him.”
“Isn’t there a place where we can meet?”
Killeen shook his head. “Remember, I’m on the move same as you. Have to keep looking, is all.”
“The Mantis, it was after me.”
“Us, too.”
“Then we must be close to each other.”
“Naysay. More than one Mantis, I think.”
“The Mantis is a whole class of mechs?”
“It’s like dividing up water. Can’t keep the lines drawn.”
Toby felt a sense of comfort in the simple way his father talked, at the sound of his voice.“Dad, I—”
“Son, I need you.” Killeen said it exactly as he had said it before, same posture and tone. “I don’t know how much more I can tell you. Just . . . let’s try.”
“Yeasay.” Toby felt an immense relief. “Yeasay.”
“I know how hard it’s been
. Look, you can have Shibo. I was—”
“Dad, I . . .” Toby stood mute. It was strange, speaking to a recording and wanting to force more out of it. But he had to tell the truth. “I had to pull Shibo.”
The Killeen was startled. It shimmied in the air for a moment, as if this news shook the entire representation. “You . . . don’t have the tools.”
“I know. Did the best I could.”
“She . . . was too much?”
“I couldn’t manage her.”
The Killeen nodded somberly. “She wasn’t easy in the flesh, either.”
“I think I got—”
Beside Killeen, condensing out of the air, was Shibo. She was translucent and her legs were gone but the upper body moved naturally. Head turning, first to Killeen, then to Toby. A thin smile.
“I . . . am still . . . partially . . . in . . . here . . .”
Walmsley said to Toby, “The reader is picking up fringing fields from you. She must be integrated into your perceptors.”
Toby nodded. “Yeasay, and wants to talk.”
Shibo’s face pleaded. her words sounded faintly in Toby’s sensotium. “I will be here . . . to help. I had to come out. My dear . . . Killeen . . .”
With small jerky movements and a wrenched face she turned to the Killeen. Toby felt an eerie current between the two. Valences moved, blunt and blind. They peered at each other a long time in silent, still air. Toby sensed a stuttering, hesitant sensation pass between them. Small signals across a furious gulf.
Then Shibo lifted one hand, as if in salute—and vanished. Toby did not understand any of it.
The Killeen shook his head and turned to look off into the distance. His face seemed carved with deep, dry ravines.
“Good then,” Walmsley said crisply. “You’ve sucked most of the juice out, I gather. Hurry along—we have work to do.”
When Toby looked back to see his father’s reaction, the Killeen was gone.
The suddenness of loss staggered him. He closed his eyes, steadied himself.
Walmsley waved him on. “I know all this is a bit quick, but there really is pressing business.”
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