Galactic Center - Furious Gulf Part 20

Hard as the esty was to open, acoustic tremors could zip it shut again. The stuff had a kind of surface tension.After that he learned to sense the dimples and fluxes in the esty. He could slit one open for a quick look, but it slammed back tight.Which was lucky, most of the time. Some pa.s.sageways led to Lanes of vacuum. Others to stony, chilling landscapes. A few to howling, dusty tornadoes.His systems warned him of openings that brimmed with searing radiation. He closed up fast, but one time something hot and fluid shot out and darted away before the seam shut. It cut a deep streak across the sky.Once he saw a whole city through a momentary slit. Its streets turned and looped around each other. So did the oblong buildings, and traffic of slender tubes teemed in and out of the porous walls. The things inside the tubes looked like boiling white stones. They seemed to take some interest in him and he felt a wave of sudden, solid fear. He let the portal crash shut.After a few dozen times he had learned the feel of it, a kind of craft.

For days he simply fooled and tinkered and forgot about what was probably following him. If he was to ever find the Family or Abraham, he had to master the skills here.The spots where the esty seemed pliable kept moving, restless loci. He as half-nauseous as he worked the stone but that was the price. Finding e moment to strike, the angle, the spectrum--it became more like hunting than craftwork, intuitions unspoken.Most Lanes seemed hostile to human life. Not all. He slipped through one that seemed pleasant, the first time he had tried to wriggle his way in.It worked, barely. He lost some skin and suffered frostbite in his fingers. But he got through into a valley of fractured timestone. At least it was more interesting than where he had been.What's more, experience taught him that the timestone lied. Many times he sat eating whatever he had gathered and blending it in with his rations, and marveled at the formal, clean-lined shapes of distant ranges.

They were elegant, serene, pointed. Then later he met them close up and knew them for what they were--rough, unforgiving.Torsions pulled at him in the broken slides he struggled across, along the jagged ledges he pulled himself over. Torques played along the narrow and s.h.i.+fting shelves he crawled along, afraid to look down or up because those directions were fickle and flickering.

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Paths curled over into tunnels--with him inside. They stretched long and necked down.He had to crawl for his life to get through squeezing-down knotholes.

Some were slow, others brutally fast. He dived through one that groaned, trying to slam shut upon him, and lost a boot heel in the process. The heel sheared off clean, removing any doubts about what it would have meant to be a little slower. He had to limp for a long while before it grew back.And all the while he felt a deepening loneliness. He woke from a sound sleep, calling Quath with a dry throat. He dreamed, and was speaking eternally to Killeen in a hoa.r.s.e voice that couldn't get through the fog around him. He hoped that they were still alive somewhere and at other times he knew with a final, leaden certainty that they were not.Events pa.s.sed. After a while he found that he knew how to read a s.h.i.+fting three-dimensional map, to follow a trail over slick rock, to memorize landmarks no matter what angle he saw them from, to build a fire in misty wind-whipped rain, to treat bites from small wriggly animals, to rappel down a trembling cliff, to glide down a glacier of frozen air, to splint his own broken bone and lie doggo long enough for the two days it took to heal, to find water under gritty sand, to coax and load a burro-beast he found wandering by itself, to bury a body torn into long strings--evidence of mechs, he guessed.He patched up a rubber flyer he found on a saddleback ridge and used it to fly a great long distance on a rough wind. After he crashed, the front caught up with him. A sudden, biting blizzard.No shelter. He started digging back into timestone itself, a chip at a time. As he dug in the sharp cold, events peeled off when he struck them with his field shovel. Cries and odd coughs came from them, as they sheared and broke like crystalline planes.He reached a layer that brimmed with the heat of some past summer.

With some hollowing out he had a cave big enough to curl up in.That lasted out the deep cold. He slept, grateful for warmth, but Killeen was talking to him through the milky fog. Toby, Toby. The next words were just beyond hearing. He strained to catch them and woke up.

Warmth, loneliness. Then he felt that the timestone was warm because it was slowly mas.h.i.+ng him, trying to close in. "d.a.m.n!" He rolled out and staggered away into pale light, the tag end of the blizzard.Besen, the mechs will get her too if they can suck out of me what they want *.. and it'll be because of me and my d.a.m.n fool running.., and if the mechs win here, it's forever, no Bishops ever again, gone to dust and never knowing what all this is, what it means...He found himself muttering as he moved, but there was not much to the thoughts except the aloneness he now had as a kind of companion.A smash-storm came and taught him to dodge falling rock. When it was over the landscape had contorted again and he learned how to climb 252.

out of a slick box canyon, how to slide down a steepening peak before it broke off and sailed on its own across what looked like empty air.After more time pa.s.sed 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.

2.

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 s.e.xes 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 s.e.xes and four genders, with both varieties of h.o.m.os.e.xuals 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 254.

distracting aches in his right arm and ribs, picked up in his long flight, he managed pretty well.Thei,r 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 pa.s.s 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 pastdfuture weren't so easy to separate. They flowed together at places, a dy 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. b.u.ms 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 255.

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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ps that came no more.These people had said that few s.h.i.+ps 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 embarra.s.sed about crying.

He had never thought that before. Wondering about it that way made him suspect a trace of s.h.i.+bo. 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 256.

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 high 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 gra.s.s.He helped with them. The medical people did not seem to want him around. They glared at him and he saw that they suspected. n.o.body 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 blister-buildings. 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 tol[eP from a rumpled ridge up ahead and he saw that he was in a differentrain. There were people clinging to the bare timestone and somethingwas 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 pa.s.sed. 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 swis.h.i.+ng motes, slivers on the wind that would have lifted pieces of his head away with a surgical precision if he had looked.

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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 pa.s.sing 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.

3.

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 s.h.i.+ny sheet that had some medical purpose.

The man reached up and tugged the sheet away. Toby saw what had been aiand now looked like a small hill that had been driven over in the rain 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 259.

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 theman 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 not 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 260.

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.

4.

SalvageHe came down into a long barrel-like valley. It was green and moist, hollowed out between glowing ma.s.sifs 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.

This new Lane was pleasant and he sensed no mechs. He had gotten used to the mild, diffuse light that oozed from juts and plains alike, sometimes casting upward shadows. The stone sent ribbons of light projecting up through the root systems of trees. He could see them like buried blood vessels in the fleshy soil. He loped steadily and came down into the valley. Yellow knots of timefog clung to the peaks on both sides.

Nothing in the sky to alert him. Still, the mechs could come on you faster than his rickety sensorium could register. So he kept to the shadows when he could.

He had once spent a day staying barely ahead of some mech sniffer, a silver-gray flyer that skated just over the trees and shot at him three times.

He had eluded it by jumping into a river and swimming until his reserve air played out. Mechs didn't seem to understand water very well. Or at least couldn't see through it. He had stayed under until a waning came, and crawled out gasping into total blackness.

Besen. Killeen. Of' Cermo-the-Slow. So long ago.

A burnt scent and beneath it something sickly sweet. Down the whole valley grew dense fields of maize. He had not seen any since a boy, and then only a scraggly lot at the edge of the Citadel when he was barely big enough to walk. He walked along a rutted harvesting trail and smelled the soft, milky air.

Maize. He remembered there had been maize planted in the mud of spring; dug into the earth on a plowed hillside, with narrow-eyed women 262.

keeping seed-eating birds just out of gunning range; fine stands of young maize sending a keen aroma into the rainy day; the work of chopping weeds from the base of the stalks, the s.h.i.+ny-bladed hoe churning up fine dry dust; cutting and shocking maize with a thick long knife; the blue-green ears that could turn to follow the sun through the day; ripe ears thrown into a wheelbarrow; tiny insects tech'd up to defend the sweet maize against pests, each loyal to the death to its particular plant; bare stalks in a quiet snowfall; a sister who lost her finger in a shucker, quick as a wink; rattling kernels spewing from a hand-cranked, steel-toothed feeder, the bare cobs shooting out the top and tumbling onto a pyramid pile; a silo crammed with drying husks; whiskey slos.h.i.+ng in a wooden keg, the charcoal staining the spout where it had been strained out; sharp sweet smell of a pat of b.u.t.ter sliding down an ear, skating on its own melt--and Toby staggered, knowing that these memories were not his. But they felt absolutely real, especially the pungent fragrances.

I worked in thefields a lot when I was a girl.

s.h.i.+bo's voice seemed to come down from the yellow sky. Toby gulped, eyes watering. He walked on and let the dry scent of the fields calm him.So he had not got all of her out. And now there was nothing to do. Not even a knife blade could help him now.The burnt stench was stronger and he looked warily into the fields as he pa.s.sed. The standing grain was at its peak, aching to be harvested. He shucked a few ears and ate them as he went on, the kernels popping full and sugary in his mouth. Some of the maize had started to sh.e.l.l out of the eads, overripe.The few trees were splintered and singed as if something inside them had wrecked them trying to get out. There were a few bare spots in the closely planted fields, exactly circular. The maize was pressed flat.He walked on and something stung his nose. He remembered the time he had sat sick in an outhouse at the Citadel, smelling it and afraid to leave even to get a breath of clean air, because of his diarrhea, which gave no warning. The whole Family had gotten sick with it and a while later he had helped his father push the little house over on its side and fill in the hole with the dirt from the next pit. Then a team of men and women had dragged it over and set it up in fresh splendor.He came to the first bodies then. Brambles divided the long fields and irrigation channels. Chunky parts were hung up in the branches. Bodies had exploded and the pieces were split along no anatomical lines Toby knew of. It could not have been very long since it happened because they had not begun to rot, though the blood had long caked into a brown crust on them.His Isaac Aspect fidgeted at not having been allowed out for a while.

263.Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as the ancient saying put it.Toby knew that bodies did just the opposite. They decayed into wet slop, highly attractive to carrion beetles and clouds of flies. How could the ancients get so simple a thing wrong?He touched a few bodies gingerly. Mechs had been known to b.o.o.by-trap bodies back on Snowglade, but apparently they had not taken such trouble here.It seemed wrong to leave the ripped sinews and muscle and bones snagged in brush but he turned away from the sight and moved on. The outhouse smell came from the simple fact that their bowels were spread over the fields, too, wider than the spray of heavier parts.Further on whole bodies dotted the fields. They lay in small clearings where he guessed they had tried to fight something above. They were intact and their skins were smooth and gla.s.sy. He knew the way bodies changed with time. The skin quickly took on a lemon tinge which deepened into yellow-green. If left out for days the flesh went brown, a deeper brown than Cermo's beautiful smooth color.--and left long enough, he suddenly recalled, the flesh thickened to be like coal tar, crusting hard where ripped or torn, and the bodies swelled, too, getting too big for their clothes and bursting out at the cuffs and popping zippers open, people becoming balloons, and the smell of them in the dry heat of midday, a heavy thing that lodged in your throat--He caught himself. Those were not his memories.

I saw much when my Family died that it would be better if youdid not know.

"Then don't let it out!" He probed for s.h.i.+bo but she was elusive, darting away.

I cannot stop. Your memories intersect me and there I am.

"I don't need it."

I am who I am. Or was.

He walked on, keeping his eyes away from the bodies as much as he could. There were only one or two in each field.The bodies showing no damage had probably died from loss of Self.

They were suredead. Without the Self the brain went on running the simple routines that inflated lungs and pumped blood and digested food but very soon something went out of the whole thing. Then the body stopped.n.o.body had ever studied much why this was. There seemed no point 264.

in it. The person was gone in the most profound way possible. An old s.h.i.+p like Argo had techtricks to keep the body alive or at least frozen for future use, but there would be no point with the suredead.He could see scuffed-up dirt and crushed yellowing maize where some of them in their last moments had pounded their boots against the ground, feet drumming and arms flailing though they were already down.

As control slipped from them their bodies had fought in the only way they knew. Their fists were still clenched and their wrists were blue-black. Some had torn away their clothes in a mad frenzy to shuck off the thing that was inside them and eating where hands could not reach.Toby thought about burying them but there were many and the stench was worsening beneath the yellow sky. He caught motion to his left and circled around a thick field of maize just going ripe. The movement registered as human in his sensorium. It would be smart to just keep going away from this place but he felt some need to see a living person so he angled back toward the spot.One person. A lean woman kneeling beside a man's face-down body.

For a moment Toby thought she was praying and he turned to leave.

She held her hand up to the light then. Her little finger reshaped itself into a snub-nosed tool and she jabbed it into the body's lower neck. The skin there was red and puckered up. She twisted her hand this way and that and pulled something from the spine. He recognized a slate-gray Aspect disk. The woman took no notice of Toby though he must have popped up on her sensorium at this range. She slipped the disk into a pouch.Another body lay only a few steps away. She made two of her fingers into probing and unlocking tools and slipped them expertly into the spinal ports of the body. This time she got two disks and a square cartridge which Toby recalled could carry three Faces in Family Bishop. When the woman d them in her pouch, she stood up and looked directly at Toby."You got rights here?"He stepped from behind the rustling maize. "No. You?""Sure. Salvage rights.""They your Family?""Who's asking?""I'm Bishop.""I'm Banshee."Toby eyed her. "I never heard of any Banshees.""I never heard of Bishops. It's a big esty.""Any use taking those Aspects?""Might be.""Suredead usually have Aspects sucked out of them.""Depends on how fast it was done.""Even if some're left, won't they be crazy?""Got to take that chance.""I heard they get all flied out some way.""They're still worth something."

265."What you mean?" Toby edged a little to his right.

"Trim an Aspect down to a Face maybe."

"Might be better to let them go."

"That's Banshee business.""How I know these are Banshee people?"She looked at him square and hard. "You mind your own business."

He stepped back. "Yeasay."

"Yee-sah? Whuzzat?"

"Means I agree."Her lips turned up in a faint derisive smirk. "Your 'yea' rhymes with'see' and your 'say' is like 'ha'? Funny way to talk.""Yeasay, ma'm."He gave a half-salute and turned and walked away. Her sensorium played at his back and set off his micros all the way across the field and down into the stand of trees beyond.He stopped then and let her lose interest. She kept moving among the bodies and doing her work. As he waited he thought about what to do. She scouted out away from him and then drifted back to the left as she searched.He kept his sensorium on the lowest setting to track her and not give himself away. She was busy and had seemed nervous. He stayed behind a big warped brown tree. When she came back into view she was checking the last of the bodies and in a hurry.He knocked her down with a stunner. She was quick and rolled as soon as she hit. He got off another bolt on lowest power and missed.The other side of the big tree burst into flame. He saw her get to her feet and fire again but the shot went high. Through the air wrinkling from heat refraction he fired again.She sat down solidly and rocked backward and struggled to bring her arms up. Her left hand was a weapon of some kind and it winked once. He felt the bolt go by and it was no stunner. His sensorium turned purple-red in warning. It could not defend him against a clean hit.Without thinking but keeping his pull smooth he shot her twice more.

They were medium-level stuns and this time she flopped over and did not get up.He approached on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. She was sprawled out gla.s.sy-eyed.

Carefully he bent down and took the pouch. It was heavy.Her eyeb.a.l.l.s followed him as he checked over her gear. One eyebrow twitched angrily."Banshee, yeasay?"Her indices said she was something called Bahai. He fished an Aspect chip out of the pouch and pressed it against his wrist reader. The tiny hexagonal crystal there was cracked from some old accident but the optical pipe into his bone still worked. It told him that the Aspect was damaged and had been a woman in the Buddha Gathering, which he supposed was some kind of Family.

266."You're a scalp hunter."Her eyeb.a.l.l.s clicked back and forth furiously. He thought about stimming her up so he could hear some more of her lies but she looked pretty quick even like this. And her gear was good. He did not even know what some of it did. She could be dangerous with just a finger or two free."I'll be taking these." He hefted the pouch. "Figured to sell them, yeasay?"Her mouth was coming back a little and her lips twisted. It was interesting to watch. Then he thought about what she had been doing and the fun went out of it."I'll give them to the first Family Buddha I find."He walked away fast. It was better that way, before he gave way to the temptation to make her pay a little more.

5.

The Sea of Sand A long dark time came and the temperature dropped steadily. He was out of food now and there was little to forage. He met few people. The land wrenched and rippled and he was often sick with the gravitational turbulence.In a desert region he came upon a man and a little girl. In the cold somehow the girl had in a moment of play frozen her tongue and upper lip to a pipe that was part of a ruined building. They were camping there. The man did not want to rip the flesh away and yet the girl was getting frantic, shaking from the pain. She crouched next to the pipe and whimpered. Her big eyes looked up at Toby and he had an idea. There was no water nearby.

No fire going for fear of mechs. He explained to the man, who was her father. In the end the only quick way to do it was for the father to urinate on the girl's lip to free it. This worked. The daughter said she could not even taste the urine either but Toby thought she was just being polite.He went on along a sandy slope and could see a thickly wooded region beyond. He loped that way just as his sensorium wrinkled with the characteristic long hollow sound and the gray Wedge. The Mantis.On the bare slumbering timestone he was fully exposed but he went through the usual measures. With a descending whisper his sensorium collapsed. He sprinted and wished for food.The timestone trickled into pebbles and then rubble and finally long slopes of sand. It sucked at his boots as he wallowed through deep drifts.

He went over one dune that came to a tip like a huge breast and then swept down. The slope came at him faster than he had judged and he nearly fell.

Then it bottomed out and he trotted forward on a flat spot. But again sooner than seemed right the slope steepened. He struggled up it and the sand pulled at his legs as though trying to draw him under. The crest rushed at him.For a moment he stood at the peak. Other dunes lay in long ridgelines.

268.The sand became gla.s.sy in the distance and s.h.i.+mmered with small tremblings, like images seen through a heat haze. But the air was cold and getting colder.

His graphite-lubricated servos complained with a thin whine as they worked against the chill. His sensorium gave him not even the muted callback of its lowest ebb. He got only a hollow, droning grayness.

He called for his Aspects and Faces. None answered.

The dunes were moving, he saw. Their long ridges marched slowly in from a curved horizon. He labored down the approaching slope and into the trough and up the next. The wave velocity helped his speed and in another few moments he stood atop the next crest but could see no farther.

No sky above now, just empty speckled dark. A seething world of sand rippled by deep waves.

Though the ma.s.sive undulations pressed into him through his boots the sand did not slide or crumble as it purred past. Tiny grains flowed around his boots and on, following the instructions of something below that rolled on without eddying behind him or otherwise taking note of his presence. Why he did not sink in such sand he could not tell. At the wave's peak some sand broke into a churning tan foam and then subsided. Land like liquid.

On the next wave coming toward him was a patch of white. Long strides took him down the near slope and into the trough. He started up toward the white patch, which looked larger than before--And stopped. Turned and ran back toward the trough.

The white patch was a garden of bones.

Bleached fingers and feet at the edge. Snapped forearms farther up, leading to ranks of smashed pelvises. Thighs arranged in spreading fans around barrel rib cages. A short tower of arms and atop it a circle ofleached human skulls. Grins that would last forever. Staring eye sockets.

Over the crest of the wave came a moving network of spindly rods.

They looked to Toby like carbosteel bones pivoting in chromed sockets.

Cables thin to near invisibility moved it with jerky but quick agility.

It did not move like a creature so much as a framework for something unseen. He had the impression of a jutting, constantly busy maze. A mobile lattice, housing a being that did not need true physical presence.

Not that this place was real. He knew that now.

Somehow he had gone from the bare-baked dryness of timestone to this sand-sea. Without noticing. Which meant that the Mantis before him had arranged this elaborate snare and he had run full tilt into it.

His Isaac Aspect said brightly,It is an anthology intelligence and can speak more directly through us."You're workin' for it?"

269.

You speak as though there were choice involved. We are immersedin it, just as you.