Part 8 (1/2)

The jet walls were alive with brilliant blue-white flashes. Here antimatter, made near the black hole, collided with matter in furious, annihilating battle. But most of the jet's energy lay in its outward thrust. The mechs did not seem to lessen this as the jet pa.s.sed. Instead, they seemed to be studying it.Why were the mechs up there, circling the jet? It occurred to Toby that maybe this was their way of listening to the inner rumblings of the black hole itself, but he could not imagine how. The jet was eerie and, he was quite convinced, beyond human comprehension. Its constant turbulence 107.served to hide the Argo, Killeen said. And the mech fabrications seemed to ignore such tiny matters as a single s.h.i.+p, anyway. Argo scurried like a rat through a palace.

Oddly, the center of the jet was nearly empty, making their flight easier. The gas had been robbed of its heat by the effort of climbing up from the gravitational pit of the unseen black hole. The thick, cooling gas column around them protected against the ferocious heat of the disk. It was almost as if someone had planned this tunnel into the innermost realm. To his teacher Aspect Isaac, of course, it was just a bit of interesting physics.

The spin of the black hole hollows out the gas that it throws up this way. This jet resembles the spools of cotton candy I got as a boy at the fairgrounds, a spun-out cloud of sheer sugary delight.

”What's cotton candy?”

I forget how much your people have lost. Have you never been to a fair?

”A fair what?”

A gathering where-- never mind. At least this beautiful blue haze around us reminds me of my better days, when high culture reigned in the Chandelier of Queens, and I went ceiling-skating with my father.

”You were in the Chandeliers?”

Did you think I descended from clod-huggers such as you? We had great powers then, and held our own against the mechs who now drive you like cattle before them. We regularly ventured into even this region, spying on the mechs who worked their strange ways here. We-- ”Hey, you're from the Arcology Era?

Isaac's Aspect-aura turned peevish.

Well, true--but one of my nested Faces grew up in Wesouqk Chandelier, one of the last great ones. I saw a Chandelier once, through a telescope, when it was still inhabited, they say. Regrettably, I spent my life in a planet-bound refuge, but-- ”That was what you called 'The Accommodation,' wasn't it?”

Well, yes- an unfortunate strategy. Still, my cultural roots108.From far back in Toby's recesses arose a Face he seldom used, one who knew techstuff galore but not much else. Joe was slow and stunted, a mere fraction of an Aspect, but he spat out bitterly,I.

You G.o.dd.a.m.n traitors set us up.

Playing along with mechs -- real smart.

They smashed up your precious Chandeliers soon as they tricked you down to a planet.

Played you for chumps!”That's pretty much what history says, too,” Toby put in mildly.

”Now, you want real Chandelier folk--” He pried up the digital lid on an Aspect he rarely used, Zeno. She was so splintered and crabbed that listening to the wavering, ancient voice was painful.I deplore.., sinful bargaining away.., our Chandelier heritage*.. by your generation. We sought no ”accommodation”... nojustice.., possible from mechs . . . We had the key to... subvert :.

ing them.., disembowel their deepest.., logics.., programs...They scattered.. * our lore.., even then.., we could not unlockthe Cryptographs . . . the Sore Magics... left by earliest humans:'.

... who once even ... ventured here ... to True Center ... and'.

grasped the Sore Magics in their hands ...Her static-filled voice faded, leaving a curious hush in Toby's mind.

Zeno's broken phrases carried such unspoken freight--sad, hopeless, ruminating on tattered glories that meant nothing now. After a long molment Joe said, I. See what you lost, Isaac?

2. ”Accommodation”-- you mean ”sellout.”To Toby any notion of compromise with mechs was d.a.m.n-fool stupidity, and Isaac's generation had escaped the consequences only by pure luck. The instant he framed this thought, Isaac flared.Not luck! We a.s.sisted the Hunker Down. This was a perfectly rational strategy, to invest in human colonies on the many worlds on the outskirts of True Center. To make Families which would develop a hybrid vigor of ideas, social norms, and weaponry.

Those were our strengths as a species!Toby could see how Rooks, say, differed from Knights--and not just in their table manners. But what Isaac might mean by ”hybrid vigor”

109.escaped him--yet another dry, ancient idea discarded as so much surplus baggage by Family Bishop, long before he was born.I. Look where it ended up.

2. Mechs got you anyway.Isaac shot back,The Chandeliers were untenable! Just big targets, floating in the s.p.a.ces of high-energy particles and hard vacuum, the mechs'

natural habitat!A burr of rasping static almost swamped Zeno's words:We defended ourselves.., long as we could.., unvector the mech Mandates... core out their interlocks.., but you lost all that...Again the melancholy voice silenced his mind for a moment. Isaac finally rallied in an apologetic tone.We tried the experiment, granted, and it finally failed. Wesouqk Chandelier--I saw it burning like a hornet's nest in the sky!

Imagine my sadness. At least we had sheltered our kind beneath the comforting blanket of air and gravity.Zeno's reply came sluggishly.... a worthy.., gamble.., but so much.., lost.Isaac sounded more confident now, though to Toby's inner ear the tone was hollow.I at least knew us at our height. The glory --Zeno cut in with waning energy,You pretender.., you did not know the heights.., they came long before.., even me... the great works.., skills you cannot begin to understand.., pretender...Chastened, Isaac answered,I am sorry that the mechs later undid our n.o.ble Hunker Down.

Even you, poor Joe, must realize that we had to strip much cultural memory from the Hunker Down worlds, to make the 11 0.experiment work. And you did fructify, bursting with fresh ways to win worlds and hamper the mechs. For a while, at least.Joe stirred angrily but confined himself to:I. d.a.m.n hard down there.

2. I'd sure rather lived in a big sky-city.Isaac shot back,I do not have to respond to such vague wanderings.Toby was irked by Isaac's haughty manner. d.i.n.ky chip-mind! ”If you're so great, how come you're just an Aspect now?”I had such talents of mind, in compiling and integrating knowledge, that I was saved. What do you think will be your fate, boy?There was real, flinty rage in this retort. Toby had to remember that Isaac and the other Aspects were little miniatures of whole people, not just books he could open, read, and drop. To keep minds running, they had to have the facets of a balanced intellect, or else they would go insane. So he shouldn't expect them to take offhand insults mildly.

He whispered ”Sorry” to Isaac and to his surprise felt a burgeoning presence displace the Aspect. A sensation like a swelling, an emergence, swept over him, making his skin p.r.i.c.kle, his scalp stiffen. The Isaac Aspect squealed but dwindled, swept back into its mental cell. This was the first time he had ever experienced s.h.i.+bo's Personality fully, her essence flood-g through his mind, insistent and powerful. Not a spoken voice, but a emory.

--Her past rose like dusty clockless hours recalled, streets she had known lying black and steaming. Refugees from the mechs had washed up in the lee of walls, in bitter alleys and vacant ruins. In those rank lanes light, wiry shadows walked high-shouldered, armed always, faces grizzled, eyes embedded in them alternately void and wary. Old stone walls of her Family's Citadel yawned and veered in her memories, unplumbed by wearing winds. Marbled obelisks and crosses marked where the dead kept their own small metropolis--a land packed solid with the casketmaker's trade, until urgency stole from them even that refinement, of setting down into ever-drying soil the already rotting clothes and broken bones. Under blue lamplights she had wandered as a girl in the wake of some funerial procession, done at dawn by long custom. Stones leaked back the night's chill, up through her bare feet, pleasurably delicious as the day's heat came spanking into her face and arms with the already stinging dawn. Slow, solemn march. Past corrugated warehouses, across sandy celebrant squares, through warrens of home gardens carefully watered--redpouch, 111.

heather grain, teardroop fruit. Engines labored eternally to make weaponry, coughing like distant vast animals. Past smoking stacks and vagrant ropy vines and patches of hopeful yellow flowers. Buildings sagged and windows were eyeless sockets. Her Citadel was rent with ruin, the slow-sliding calamity of neglect. Wanderers from the plains sat mute, staring, their gaunt profiles stamped against the shredding dawn sky, old purposes lost in coasting eyes. A mongrel madness of defeat infected them, yet they smiled at her pa.s.sing skip-steps. They had slept in their boots beside a generation's furtive fires and gone on, into days of scavenge and pursuit, living beneath a ma.s.sive rapacity.-Toby staggered with the intensity, the touching fondness for places and people he had never seen. Then s.h.i.+bo's oddly quiet voice solidified.

You have not called on me recently.

”You... you can see what's been going on. I've been busy.”

I doubt that is the true reason.

She was right, of course. Toby was new at this, and he couldn't keep very much from a strong presence. It was almost like she was alive again, and he was peering through her skeptical black eyes, eyes that never wavered. But her eyes saw him, too, from inside.Beneath their gaze his feelings leaked through the rubbery, artificial part.i.tions of his mind. ”It's been rough going lately.”

Your father.

It was not a question..”He's, well, I'm sure he's doing what's best for the s.h.i.+p--”

Are you?

”Well, he's under pressure and all, and he comes across as pretty d.a.m.ned hard-nosed, but ...” His words faded off as he realized that he couldn't bluff even an Aspect, much less a Personality. Not where emotions were concerned.

It did not occur to you that he knew you and the others, the group from around the campfire, were coming? That someone would protest? There are monitoring cameras throughout the s.h.i.+p, after all.

”Ummm. Well, I suppose.”

He took Argo into the galactic jet at just that time. Knowing I I 2.that almost certainly the Magnetic Mind would return then, with more to say.”You're sure he planned it that careful?”I love your father still. But he has changed. He has hard-learned the sometimes cynical skills of Cap'ncy.Toby had not grasped yet how to look very much ahead of events--things just seemed to rush at him, coming fast and fierce--so this degree of scheming seemed pretty unlikely. On the other hand, adults were more than a little weird. ”So did he know what the Magnetic Mind was going to tell us, then?”I doubt that. He looked as shocked as the rest.”Well, he sure looks okay now.”

Toby was standing at the back of the Bridge, talking in the barely audible whisper that was enough for an Aspect to get but couldn't be overheard. He studied Killeen, who moved with casual a.s.surance among his s.h.i.+p's officers. Since they had turned downward in the jet, his brow was no longer furrowed, his eyes not haunted by uncertainty.

Not that anybody else felt that way. The Lieutenants were jumpy, troubled, sweating--and not just from the increase in hull temperature.

Even the cool blue gas couldn't screen out all the disk radiation. The ventilators labored, wheezing lukewarm air. A thin tension underlay the customary quiet of the Bridge, beneath the muted, orderly ping and chime of computer prompts, reminding officers of tasks needing supervision.”So he was ready for our little mob, huh?” He gave the old man a nod of grudging respect.There is more to being CaF'n than giving orders.”Yeasay, but a Cap'n better be right.”Now he has the authority he wanted.”Straight from Abraham.” Toby remembered his grandfather as a towering, gray-faced man with a raw-boned look of intense concentration, even when he dozed in front of a hearth fire. That intensity slumbered, then burst into energetic action. Abraham's distracted stare would often split into a broad grin when he saw Toby, and Toby would find himself yanked up into a whirling sky where he seemed to fly in the big man's arms, scooting high over furniture and through corridors, sometimes out113.

side onto a deck where Abraham would make him swoop and dive over the guardrail, Toby shrieking and laughing and screaming when the ground rushed away and he felt as though he really was soaring, somehow set free of weight and care. So long ago. Toby bit his lip at the memories, already fading. ”Abraham. Or so that magnetic thing says.”

You do not believe it.

”Why should I? Who would, with half a brain?”

Yet strange vectors work here.