Galactic Center - Furious Gulf Part 14

"They're dead anxious for news from out of the Far Black, as they call it," Toby added.

The guards, their squinty-eyed tautness and all, made him nervous.

Even the air here itched with faint striations, as though electricity hummed through it. These people, their funny little stunted city, the sheer incredible but rock-solid fact of it being here at all--they added up to a profound unease. And things were moving so fast, he couldn't get straight answers to any of the myriad questions this place conjured up.

"If that's what they're buying, then that's what we're selling," Killeen said. "Cermo! Heave a.s.s down that alley and sight on those far clouds."

"What spectrum?"

"Give me a see-through, infra or better."

Cermo swaggered forward, decked out in full field regalia, clicking and rattling with techno-ornaments. His fine-webbed electronets seethed with energy. Antennas embedded at shoulder, waist, and b.u.t.t looked every-which-way, in full 3D. His weaponry was polished from long hours of care and repair on s.h.i.+p, but still pitted and burnished from a thousandorays.

Toby recalled the times when such gear was everyday wear for all Bishops. They had been on the move, their sensoria stretched out to max perimeter, each Bishop a sentinel. For years after the Calamity they had roamed like that, rising weary, red-eyed, and sore each morning, to a world drawing always dryer, with hunger and mech pursuit the only constants.

Locals peeped at them from around distant corners. They seemed interested and amused. Rats in bow ties.

Cermo clumped down an alleyway and into an open area, where he could get a full sight on the far horizon.

Toby couldn't figure out the sky here. He knew this wasn't a planet, not by any stretch, but still there were billowy white clouds drifting not far above the stunted buildings. There had even been a thunderstorm, catching them on the hike back to Argo's berth. That had startled him--pure, tasty water falling from a sky like G.o.d's gift. He hadn't seen such a tasty shower since he was a boy, had played for hours in its mud.

--and at once was in a torrent, a downpour, spattering crystal drop175.lets over his face. Her face. Her face. Endless gouts and flurries of blessed clear streaming cold, a waterfall hammering and thundering down a mountainside, she standing gleefully under it, yellow party dress plastered to her slim legs, a young girl getting ecstatically drenched-- The intrusion was sudden, raking across his mind. s.h.i.+bo.

Her rising b.u.t.tresses, flanked by granite ma.s.ses. He felt within her Personality a sweeping reach, the sinks and hollows of another's interior sell a fresh continent spread bone-broad before him. The waterfall faded.

Rain fell in the great distance, slanting from troubled clouds, signature of her own sad presence.You have not summoned me forth for some time."I've been busy." Something in the waterfall, the pleasures of it, made him uneasy. He noticed that he had a hard-on, and hoped she wouldn't.I know how hard it is to get along with your father. I did, once."He's running the show, sure, but... I just don't feel easy about it."He is the man whose sense of opportunity has brought you far, so very far--"I don't know what he's after anymore."I believe his goals are as ever. But he is a man who hides his inner self, now. A Cap'n must."Not from me, he doesn't."

As if from a great distance, she said,Even from you. You are becoming a man, more than a son.He coughed to cover the dark seethe within him. His erection would not go away and he was breathing deeply, mind buzzing.

"Clouds're pretty thick," Cermo sent back. "Can't see much. In the far infra the view's all jiggledy."

"Now there's a fine tech word," Jocelyn joshed him.

"Jiggledy how?" Killeen asked.

"Looks like they reflect the city itself. I mean, stronger I look, more I get wavy pictures of streets, buildings."

s.h.i.+bo receded. Toby had focused his attention on the conversation around him and she had faded into the background. He concentrated, to push her further back. Made himself breathe slower. He couldn't see anything through the clouds.

Cermo sent, "Microwave says it's solid up there."

176."Solid?" Killeen nodded to himself. "Fits, yeasay.""Glad to see you getting humble, o1' c.o.c.kroach," Toby said. Hewanted to cheer up the lumbering shape, but Cermo's discovery made hisvoice shake a little. A city dangling over him, with nothing at all to hold it,i,..

kept up by some invisible law of physics--the thought made him hunch:.

down a little, until he noticed and stood up straight again.

Three arms of ruby sh.e.l.l reached down suddenly and plucked TobyC.

up above the street cobblestones. They swung him playfully to and fro, then dumped him onto the flat yellow carapace behind Quath's head."Hey!"

," .

"Whoos.h.!.+ Not that there's so much to see. I was already taller than thestreet signs. Funny names, aren't they?"The Bishop party was crossing Peach Boulevard on Pomegranate,.

Camino Real, names Toby had to call up his Isaac Aspect to understandwere mouth-watering ancient fruits--but there wasn't a plant in sight.(i .

"If I take the measure of them right," Killeen said, "they don't giveanything away free."Toby said, "Yeasay--downright nasty.":,,'.,.

"Ummm, maybe both. See, we're used to people helping each otherk I automatically, no questions asked. These folk don't think like that--whichllimplies a lot.

"Simple, really," Killeen said. "They aren't under threat all the time.

Comfortable people can afford to be choosy."

Toby thought about that. "Could mean they're pretty used to strangers, too."

"Oh? And what's that?" Toby didn't have any deeper idea, but he wasn't going to acknowledge that here, the only kid among adults. You kept your luck to yourself.

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Enough to make most be strangers.> "Ummmm." Killeen watched their guards edgily. "Could be."

Toby felt edgy, as though some game was going on just beyond his seeing. Killeen was composed, controlled, giving nothing away. As he fretted over this he glanced down an alleyway and saw a building in the 177.

distance abruptly seem to melt, windows and arches dissolving, turning a mottled green. "Look!" It reformed itself with a freshly slanted roof, a new line of windows.Killeen's eyes narrowed. "That fits, too," he said distantly."Fits what?" Toby watched new doorways pop open, ovals instead of the earlier strait-edged type."This city's a kind of tech we've never seen. And I'll bet it runs itself."

Cermo sent a puzzled murmur. "Itself? Andro--""He's a clerk." Killeen gave Andro a bland smile, amused that they could talk this way right next to him. "These people, they're no higher level than we are, come right down to it.""They sure don't seem like they could build a Chandelier," Cermosaid."They didn't," Toby said firmly. "Don't expect them to ever admit it, though."He walked past a splas.h.i.+ng fountain, ideas tumbling fruitlessly, and felt a tilting, a rising presence----She moved lithely, inspired, skipping from stone to stone across the broken road, puddles from the night fogs showing her self and counter-self in the shredding gray light. Playing in the fresh dawn's ruins. Jagged teeth from a night raid. Stumps of stone. A spider slept within the city, she saw it silver-fine and waiting. Stirring its barbed legs, the razor rub unheard beneath the waking bustle of her loved Citadel, fine and forlorn and always waiting for the next blow. Yet joy seeped from every moment.

Shapes swarmed through this morning, the eternal going of people about their busyness, to strive against and fail and strive again. Even though they knew that the spider waited too, rustling in the eyesocket of a bleached skull--He snapped out of it, panting. Forced his attention back to the street where his boots trod, his eyes caught the liquid dance of water.Yet s.h.i.+bo's world was entrancing, too. It called forth a lightness of being, an airy sense of things merging, yet solidly grounded in a web of interplay, of casual and unspoken delight. These glimpses into her Personality contrasted hugely with the masculine edginess all around him, the holding-back, the control and a.n.a.lysis. Killeen's blocky, muscular stride ahead of him spoke silently of purpose, precision, separation. Toby respected that, knew Family Bishop had to be led that way.Yet this was his father, too. In the years since they had fled together across arid, murderous plains, the edges in Killeen had sharpened. Like a knife stroked on stone, Toby thought, a law of nature. And now Killeen expected of his son the same hardness, the same resolute separation that leaders.h.i.+p demanded.Toby lurched, the strife in him like a blow--a clash between the beckoning sense of the world s.h.i.+bo held forth and the demands he felt radiating from Killeen. Cermo looked at him oddly, one eyebrow raised.

I 78.Toby realized his face must show his feelings, and tightened it up--only to feel the s.h.i.+bo Personality laughing gently at him, then fading back into its ghostly berth in him. He marched on.

They wound through twisted streets, across a broad plaza of black stone, and into the most impressive building Toby had seen here--a steep pyramid of hard, glaring white. His Isaac Aspect said it was "pearly" and when Toby pressed his hand against the stuff it was shockingly cold.

Sticky, too--and then they were being hustled through a wide portal and into seats before a high dais. The chairs were Bishop-sized and Toby's clasped him with a warm, ma.s.saging grip. It was downright insinuating, fitting itself to him all along back and legs. He wondered if it would let him go, if whoever ran this place decided otherwise.

To his surprise, the judge, Monisque, appeared at the dais--this time in blue robes. "I figured she was something more than a judge," Killeen whispered on closed comm.

"I'm happy to greet you again, far wanderers," Monisque said lightly.

"Now I'm wearing my other hat--Chief Swapper."

"Sounds to me like you do everything here," Killeen said.

"Appearances are deceiving. Most people have no interest in visitors, no matter what esty they hail from." She nodded as dozens of the short people filled the remaining seats, buzzing among themselves. Toby noticed that the seats conformed to the dwarves, too, shrinking as required, and felt a little less paranoid.

"Our friend here, Quath'jutt'kkal'thon, is willing to yield data about any area not proscribed by his own, uh--" Toby could see Killeen struggle to put Myriapodia notions, even approximately understood, into human terms. "Uh, priestly orders. In return we've got a whole fistful of questions.''"I'm not here to give away the whole store, Cap'n," Monisque said skeptically.

Killeen was in no mood to start haggling right away, and Toby shared his impatience. "First, we want to know what this place is--how it works, its history, who made it. Second--"

"We can tell you what we know. I do not speak for the Lanes, though."

"Lanes?" Killeen looked blank.

"Other axes of the esty. Didn't Andro go through this?"

Andro himself stood up, in a crisper, cleaner coverall. "I tried to tell them, but they just don't have the concepts."

Toby couldn't abide that. He shot up and charged, "The entire time you were on board Argo you kept trying to trade us for our gear. I didn't hear you giving lectures on--"

"Okay, so I shaved a little time off the docket for my hobby. Still, your honor, these rubes don't grasp a fraction of the topological fathoms necessary to--"

"Sit down, both of you," Monisque snapped impatiently. "We'll give you the standard Remedial Intro, no problem."

179.

"Second," Killeen said mildly, as though he had a long way to go on his list, "I wish to know the location of my father, Abraham of Bishop.""Relative-tracing, huh? My tourist friend, that's a major cottage industry around here." Monisque made a notation by pa.s.sing her hand over the dais top. "You'll have to commission a search yourself.""You must know where your citizens are, who they are.""Oh, must we?" She arched an eyebrow. "There are more slippery Lane-vectors than you have hairs on your body, Cap'n--and they curl more than yours, too."The audience laughed, but no Bishops. Killeen's mouth tightened and he sent on closed comm, "She can't see my really curly ones--and not d.a.m.n likely she will."To this the Bishops answered with a volley of hoots and snickers. The dwarves looked puzzled, as if trying to decide whether they'd been insulted.Toby grinned. He wondered if these people had the tradition of Ranking, a round-robin of cutting humor, sarcasm, and insults both veiled and naked. On the run, such quickshot talk could amuse and abuse--ideally, both. Its essential function was to defuse tensions, let grudges out in allowed ways. Toby realized that they had not had a Ranking for a long time. Maybe that was why Killeen seemed distant and awesome to so many of the crew now--they had not seen him humbled with a well-flung jibe."I respect the snarled-up way you kinsmen live here." Killeen was being his affable best. "You can understand that we need to reunite with our forebears."She peered at them shrewdly. "You're sure that's all?""Your tribe's advanced and all, but some things don't change,"

Killeen said sternly. "Family's one of them.""Fair enough. You should realize that we see a lot of people pa.s.sing through. We hear stories. Prophecies. Outright lies. We get plenty of hands held out to us--to take, not to give. So we get maybe a little narrow-eyed.""Try runnin' from mechs for a generation or two," Killeen said, careful and measured. Toby could tell his tone was just a cap on a slow-building inner pressure."I bow to your superior experience. Still, my authority goes only so far. We deal with people from trans-history in a fair, just manner. Bartering,that's fine--we'll trade square with you. Anything more--""We're from Snowglade, not some 'trans-history.'"The judge waved a dismissive arm, her robe flapping. "A term from people out of the wild esty. See, we can't a.s.sume you're from the place and era you say, because there's really no way to check that. The esty turbulence blots out all backtracking. If we can, we go on a strictly cash basis--only there's no cash between trans-histories, so that means plenty of d.i.c.kering and swapping."

180.Killeen dropped his amiable mask. He rose up, s.h.i.+n-servos whirring, using his height to come nearly level with Monisque. "I'll trade for news of my father and a map to find him with."

"That's it? Most visitors want food, fuel, maybe recro-credits."Killeen snorted. "We'll look after ourselves."

"I suppose I could call it square if we had, say, full rights to interrogate the Myriapod." Monisque glanced casually at Quath, the first time she had deigned to notice her huge presence.

"That was just openers. We want more. We found an inscription in a dead Chandelier, about 'we all who plunge inward to the lair and library.' I want to ask questions about that."

She s.h.i.+fted in her s.h.i.+mmering blue robes, as though she heard the tension that Toby did behind Killeen's words. "There were a lot of Chandeliers.

I--".

"Are there people here from that era?"

"In some sense, only 'here' isn't a useful word when you're talking about the esty. If you want, we can offer history data--"

"No data, no--not now." Killeen swept the air clean with one hand, his voice deepening, the words growled out. "I want to find people." She eyed him skeptically. "Is that 'I want' or 'we want'?"

"We--Family Bishop./--their Cap'n. There is no difference."

"So I gather," Monisque said dryly. "Very well. The 'library and lair'--well, this is one way into the esty, so I suppose this counts as their 'lair.' As for the library--that's not data anybody's ever going to hand you on a platter."

"Why not?"

"Andro--you were right. They truly know nothing." She c.o.c.ked an at the audience, which chuckled. "n.o.body's going to tell you oureye ioreatest secret, even if you are a ground-pounder giant. If you want to talk ancients of the Chandeliers, or this Abraham, I'd recommend the Restorer.

It's a kind of library, too, come to think of it."

Toby didn't follow this at all, but Killeen just nodded curtly, as though hearing confirmation he expected. He said forcefully, "The inscription, it mentioned a heroine, unnamed. 'She is as was and does as did.' Does that refer to this place, this Restorer?"

"I am not an expert in linear history, much less trans-history. This subject smacks of both."

"Then let us know the way to this Restorer, its price--"

"You couldn't afford it."

"I have not taken every jewel from my bag, Lady Justice."

"So I know. I was waiting for the next round."

"You know so much, maybe you can tell me what I'll offer?""Andro? The possibility you mentioned?"

Andro appeared in front and tapped his third fingernail. A wall flashed with sharp light behind the dais--a full, 3D picture of a pa.s.sage181.way in Argo. Toby recognized the spot and gasped. "The Legacy! We let him get near it."

Andro didn't even glance at Toby's outburst. "They're flying a Cla.s.s VI, Judge. Standard deck design, pretty beat up. I couldn't get into the nexus, but from the way they protected it, I figure there's a slab there. This kid"--he jerked a thumb at Toby--"just proved it."

She frowned. "From that'age? I thought few such s.h.i.+ps survived."

"The mechs nabbed most of them. The Bishops say this one was buried on their planet. Mechs must've overlooked it."

"A slab from thatwhen..." Monisque touched her dais, muttered to herself, and seemed to be calculating.

"Yeasay," Killeen said. Toby saw that the Legacy was indeed what Killeen had meant to bargain. His mind spun in a cold, furious vacuum.

Andro, too, had his distracted look. Toby realized they were both communing with some distant intelligence, maybe a data bank. His Isaac Aspect put in,There were such linking abilities in the High Arcology Era. They greatly increased the effective, acting intelligence of all. They also led to data-immersion ailments, and the dissipations such addictions are p.r.o.ne to.Toby shrugged aside this useless history. He watched the judge, who nodded--to herself, or to some far away presence?--and said, "I am prepared to bargain. Services--very limited services--in return for a thorough inspection of your s.h.i.+p."

Several Bishops shouted, "No!" Toby's surprise struck him silent, his throat full of cotton stuffing.

"I will have to know what services you mean," Killeen said, all business. "I have some in mind."

"Dad, we can't!" Toby finally got out. "The Legacies, they're ours. We can't let anybody else have them."

"I'll be the judge of that." Killeen scowled. "We have business here, and these good folk deserve to know of us, just as we want to know of them."

"No!" Toby shouted. "We don't know what the Legacies have in them!

Family Bishop secrets, maybe. History, lineages of all the Bishops there ever were, could be. Even data from the Great Epoch! You--"

"We can't read more than a jot or two of them," Killeen said sharply, turning on his son angrily. "We need help figuring what they mean. This way we'll get it."

"But who knows what they'll do with our secrets?"

"They're old, so old the language doesn't even make sense. Chandelier Age stuff, maybe even older. From a time we know only as legends. All those dots and squiggles." Killeen turned to take in all the Bishops and 182.

Trumps present, and Toby realized that he was silencing any objections before they could arise in the others. He said firmly, "I'll gain us what we need, trading the Legacies--and get them read into the bargain."Murmurs of agreement came from Aces and Fivers and some Bishops,though a few averted eyes hinted that others weren't so sure.Toby said hoa.r.s.ely, "At least wait a while, Dad. Take this 'remedialcourse' of theirs. We'll learn more about this place, get a better idea what our Legacies are really worth, see if Abraham's here, maybe figure a better deal--"Killeen's eyes quickly raked the room. A momentary suggestion of uncertainty in his mouth was swept away by a slight smile, a pleased arching of his eyebrows. Toby, too, saw that he had the backing of the others, the weight of his office and past telling strongly now. He gave Tobya searing glance and turned back to the judge, opened his mouth to speak.

"Dad, we shouldn't just--"

"Cermo--take him outside."