Authors: Gregory Benford
In the cool, dim core of the ship the observation room was crowded and Toby could not get a good clear view. The field of
glowing stars was confusing, crisscrossed by eerie splashes of radiating gas. Then the Bridge switched to a Doppler-shifted
frequency, and details leaped out. Going to blue-rich frequencies picked out things moving toward
Argo
and dimmed everything else.
And there they were: brilliant pinpoints of blue, eight of them evenly spaced around a circle.
“Impossible to miss,” Toby murmured.
“The mechs must not care whether we notice,” Besen said.
“Or else they really want us to.”
“Why would they? More effective to sneak up, I’d think.”
“Maybe they want to spook us.”
“Into doing what?”
“Maybe just what we’re doing,” Toby said grimly.
“Hey, we’re gettin’ away from them!” a big, hawk-nosed woman protested on Toby’s left, gouging him with a sharp elbow. She
was an Ace, from the wastelands of Trump. Trained to follow her Family leader.
“Yeasay, throwin’ dust in their faces,” a man joined in. A Fiver.
“We can outrun any damn mech,” another woman announced proudly. Her accent was of Family Deuce, so thick Toby could barely
understand her.
Toby gritted his teeth. “Yeasay, yeasay. I was just wondering—”
“Not right, Cap’n’s
son
goin’ on like that.” The hawk-nosed woman’s elbow poked him again.
“Sorry, brothers and sisters,” Toby said, though he was getting irritated. “Uh, ’scuse me.”
He got up and worked his way out of the press of bodies. Everybody seemed to be looking at him, sour-faced. Or else avoiding
his eyes. Besen followed, whispering, “That old bag, she’s a flap-mouthed gossip. All those Trump Families are.”
Toby was already feeling bad about the incident, and he stopped before leaving the room to catch another glimpse of the screen.
Family Bishop members were murmuring, speculating, even laughing—and not just among the Snowglade folk, either. They argued
and elbowed and laughed with the Trump Families, too. An electric smell came from the crowd, a fidgety excitement.
It struck Toby that the room was jammed not so much because they wanted to see the gaudy pictures, but to provide a place
to gather, gossip, and grumble. All to sharpen their sense of themselves as a fragile human Family in the face of the abyss
outside.
That was essential—holding together.
Argo
held mostly Bishops, from Snowglade, but also Families of the planet they had just left, which its natives called Trump.
Those Families had names Toby didn’t understand—Aces and Deuces, Jacks and Fivers. There were Queens, though, which by logic
should have had the same customs and history as the Family Queen of Snowglade. But they didn’t.
Killeen called these Trump Families the Cards. They were fiercely loyal and prone to follow hot-eyed leaders. Back on Trump
some had obeyed the crazy man who called himself His Supremacy, a fierce-faced type the Bishops had finally had to kill. Somehow
this had meant that the Cards then transferred their loyalty to Killeen.
It made no sense, but then, not much about Trump did. Toby flatly disbelieved the idea that the Cards had gotten their names
from some ancient game. Maybe a game had been made up using those names, sure. But Families were ancient and hallowed and
not the stuff of trivial matters.
Still, the Trumps were a bit hard to take, butt-headed and ignorant. But the Snowgladers were no prize, either, when you looked
close.
Rooks liked to blow their noses by pinching the bridge of the nose and letting fly into the air. They laughed if anybody was
in the way. The hawk-nosed woman was a Rook, true to form.
On the other hand, Pawns saw nothing wrong with taking a crap in full view of anybody who happened by. A perfectly natural
function, they said. What’s to be embarrassed about?
Knights burped and farted at the most formal occasions—they didn’t even seem to notice doing it.
Bishops spit whenever they felt like it, which was pretty often.
Rooks preferred to pee on plants, maintaining that since this was part of the Great Cycle of Life, it must be good for them.
And Kings would cough smack in your face, smiling after they did it. Some said that in the old Citadel days the lost Family
of Queens had even made love in public, feet pointed at the ceiling, rumps thrusting in the air free as you please. They had
some sort of theory about doing it as a show of demented social solidarity. Toby didn’t really believe that, it was utterly
fantastic—but who could truly say what people of the deep past had believed and done?
Still, the Snowglade Families overlooked these differences, acts that seemed to others like gross social blunders, and held
together. And aside from minor incidents, they extended the same hand to the Trumps, even if they were butt-stubborn and ate
with their mouths open. The Family of Families.
Toby knew he had an obligation to keep the social glue in place. Not that he had to like it. He smacked a fist into his palm
as he walked away from the jammed room.
Concerned, Besen asked, “She really got to you?”
“Naysay. Forget it.” But he knew he wouldn’t.
T
oby missed having Quath live outside. Anything that big should be free beneath the stars, not closed in.
He was sure of this despite knowing that Quath’s kind had evolved out of a burrowing species that liked to dig in snug and
tight beneath the ground. How such a race developed intelligence was a riddle. It seemed unlikely that something that wormed
into dark, smelly crannies and ventured out to hunt for game would need much in the way of smarts. On the other hand, he reflected,
humans had holed up in caves a lot, or so Isaac said. What made a creature develop intelligence was a deep question. After
all, mechs came to have quick minds and nobody remembered when or how. Not even Isaac.
But the real reason Toby thought Quath should be outside was that Toby now had no excuse to go hull-walking himself. He felt
an itchy, restless energy that he couldn’t erase with workouts in zero-grav. At least when he did visit Quath, it was in spaces
so big that Toby could practice his low-grav skills.
At the moment Quath was in the abandoned agro dome. The high arch reflected back Toby’s huffing and puffing as he did rebounds
off the walls. He would coast across the dome, maybe try to bank a little in the ventilator winds. Zooming toward the opposite
wall, he pinwheeled his arms in mid-flight to bring his legs around, so that they could absorb momentum and rebound like coiled
springs. A lot more fun than lifting dead weights, like some kind of demented machine.
Quath stood at the dome floor’s center, eyes swiveling to follow Toby’s ricocheting. She sent a hissing note of derision:
“I wouldn’t expect a giant cockroach to understand.”
“You eat stuff that would gag any self-respecting pest.”
This startled Toby. He grabbed a steel strut and clung to it, panting. “Really?”
“Were they, well, like us?”
and their spines, heated long over a fire, snapped open to emit a famous blue odor. To suck the thick, crisp marrow from the
blackened bones was a great delicacy.>
“Ugh. I’m trying hard to think of you as a buddy, big-bug, but if you go on like this—”
Toby could sense the capitals in Quath’s hissing mind-voice and decided to not pursue the matter. Quath was serious. Maybe
it was common for intelligent beings anywhere to think of themselves as the crown of creation—The People—and everybody else
as a smart animal at best. Savvy smarts and egomania went hand in hand. Or pincer in pincer.
After all, suppose Quath had been a thousand times smaller. It wouldn’t matter that she was supersmart—if Toby shook her out
of his bedroll, he would step on her without a thought. He certainly wouldn’t inquire into what she thought about the nature
of life.
“I think I could pass up honors like that. Anyway, many-eyes, you seem to have settled in here okay.”
“So generous of you. Look, I was sent here to see if you can figure what your own folks are doing in their ships.”
“They’re still hauling that huge ring. Only it’s glowing more, a kind of ivory.”
“It sure seems to keep them away, all right. But why are your people gaining on us?”
“Uh, what’s a cusp?”
“More geometry. Between Isaac and his numbers and you with your always using math talk, I don’t know—”
“Oh yeah? Look, I bite into an apple, it tastes real good. Where’s the geometry in that?”
Toby hated it when Quath said something and then the programs in his head, and in Quath’s too, couldn’t make enough sense
between them to get the job done. All that came through was a fizzy blurt and a bland, flat [untranslatable]. “Okay, then
where’s the geometry in a kiss, huh?”
“Oh, glad it’s so obvious. How silly of me.”
“Yeasay, we call it ‘sarcasm.’”
“Let’s just call it [untranslatable], bug-boy.”
“Aaahhh!”
This was driving Toby up the wall—literally. He was glad he could work out his frustration by climbing through the struts
of the dome, leaping across wide spans, burning calories to clear his mind. It was getting hot in here—hot all through
Argo
, in fact. The domes were absorbing radiation from the astronomical fireworks outside.
Stinging sweat dripped into Toby’s eyes. He clambered over struts and beams, swung in the nearly zero-grav, and let go. He
spread his arms and beat against the air, flapping like an awkward bird, and slowly fell toward Quath. The alien caught him
at the very last moment before he would have smacked painfully on the deck. “Oooof! Thanks.”
“That’s part of being human, you ol’ giant grub.”
“In search of what?”
“Oh no, not again!”
Toby scuffed up some dead soil with his boot, sending a shower of gray dust spurting up into the low-gray dome. He still had
some irritations to work out, some thinking to do about his father. He leaped and swung up on one of Quath’s extended telescoping
arms. “Maybe I—”
—Toby! Bring Quath to the Bridge, right away.—
Killeen’s sharp voice cut into his concentration so abruptly that Toby let go of the arm, coasted, and thumped back into the
dirt. “Okay. But Quath won’t fit in—”
—Get moving!—
It turned out that Quath could scrunch down in the corridor outside the Bridge, bend two eye-stalks around the entrance, and
see most of the wall screens. Quath looked uncomfortable, her steel-jacketed legs cocked at odd angles and wedged against
bulkheads, though she said nothing. Killeen wanted Quath to try more communication channels with his own kind, the Myriapodia.
“After all, I spent days trapped in her belly, once,” Killeen said casually.
Toby blinked. His misgivings aside, he had to remember that his father had been through horrendous adventures with Quath.
Maybe they communicated with each other in ways he didn’t fully appreciate.
Killeen assigned several Bridge Lieutenants to help the alien with technical problems, using
Argo
’s long-range antennas.
The Bridge buzzed, but Killeen kept good ship’s discipline, and the excitement remained controlled, visible mostly in pinched
faces and narrowed eyes. The great wall screens showed scenes that shifted with dizzying speed. The ivory hoop hung suspended
between three strange, angular ships. Somehow their shape—geometry again, Toby thought—would have told him that they were
of Quath’s kind, if he had not known.
The hoop itself flickered and strobed with eerie plays of the spectrum. Flashes of gold and crimson ran along it, then faded
into the milky light, like runny stains sinking in a deep chalky sea.
Killeen paced the Command Deck of the Bridge, his boots ringing on steel, hands carefully clasped behind him. Toby knew he
did that so nobody could read through fidgeting fingers his own anxieties and tensions; it was the kind of thing that a Cap’n
had to do.
Toby felt an upwelling of concern and love for the controlled disguise this big man struggled to maintain. What was the cost?
Would anyone ever know?
And there was much to be agitated about, Toby saw. The wall screens flickered. Now they showed a scene so strange it took
a long moment to even sort out what he was witnessing. An orange ball hung shimmering against the backdrop of thousands of
gemlike stars, not pinpoints crowding the sky. The ball swirled with mottled storms.