Galactic Center - Furious Gulf Part 22

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 s.h.i.+vers 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 I 'ents. Mult.i.tudes 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 k.n.o.bby 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 281.

fury and in it and for that moment he was its conductor. Currents pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+bo'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.

282.

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 were. 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.

Phantoms At first he thought the distant peak was a mountain.He had been walking for a long time. The forest had opened beforehim and seemed to push him out--into rugged terrain where thetimewinds blew and sickened him. He went anyway.The mountain reared up as he went and he did not think about itmuch. Then he saw that its flanks were smooth and firm. It did not fuzz and split off planes like the timestone around him. Its smooth inclines stayed fixed. Its faces met at worked edges. Magnetic field strengths were high, getting higher.A pyramid. Corners of clear design. And events did not swim in itsfaces. The stuff was granite-hard when he touched it at the base. Ordinary matter. A stack of stone so large it seemed to be the landscape. In the silence of it lingered mystery.Going up it he felt better than he had in a long time. He was hungrybut he did not mind that. He put it from his mind, as he had in the years on Snowglade. It was funny what you could get used to. He realized that hunger made him nostalgic and laughed out loud. The bright sound went into a silence so empty and was so completely absorbed that it made him fall silent again.He had come a long way and so had a long time to think. Any humanin this place knew that he was a tiny and forgettable actor on a stage not of his making. The drama of the mechs against the natural lifeforms was playing out, and Toby did not understand it. He longed to talk with Quath again, to see his father's face.Below all the colossal energies of mechs and matter lay the whole longhistory 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.

284.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 s.p.a.ced 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 s.p.a.ced 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."

285.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've 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed through the image.

Killeen did not react. "I know how hard it's been. Look, you can have s.h.i.+bo. 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 s.h.i.+p 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. n.o.body close to us is suredead."

286.Toby felt a joyful release, an eagerness to see them all. "Tell me what ali'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."