Authors: Gregory Benford
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 prickle, his scalp stiffen. The Isaac Aspect squealed but dwindled, swept back
into its mental cell. This was the first time he had ever experienced Shibo’s Personality fully, her essence flooding through
his mind, insistent and powerful. Not a spoken voice, but a memory.
—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, 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 passing 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 massive rapacity.—
Toby staggered with the intensity, the touching fondness for places and people he had never seen. Then Shibo’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 partitions 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 ship—”
Are you?
“Well, he’s under pressure and all, and he comes across as pretty damned 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 ship, after all.
“Ummm. Well, I suppose.”
He took
Argo
into the galactic jet at just that time. Knowing 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 assurance among his ship’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 Cap’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 outside 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.
“Look, Abraham we lost at the Calamity, the fall of Citadel Bishop. That was plenty years back and a hell of a long way from
here.”
Exactly.
“What you mean by that?”
How would some creature not even made of matter at all, this far distant, know his name?
That stopped Toby for a moment. “Okay, I don’t know. But mechs, they make records of everything. Maybe the Magnetic Mind learned
it from them.”
But the Mind seems to be no friend of mechs.
“Who knows, in this craziness?”
I sometimes wonder about the connection between these entities. Remember the Mantis?
“Sure.”
The thought chilled him. The Mantis had pursued Family Bishop, “harvesting” them, killing their bodies and sucking away their
selves so that the Family could extract no chipmemory. These suredead the Mantis fashioned into grotesque contortions that
it termed “art”—and had displayed to Killeen and Toby with a touch of something like pride.
The Mantis stood in awe of the Magnetic Mind. It may have offered up its knowledge of us, of our ways and persons, to the
Mind.
He felt Shibo as though she were sitting before him cross-legged, relaxed and yet ready to move in an instant. “I . . . I
don’t want to think about that now.”
Such memories can hobble us, dear Toby, but they must be faced.
“Hey, some other time, okay?” He felt her somehow shift, pressures adjusting. He sighed with relief and felt better.
It is interesting that now your father has the crew behind him, supporting what he had said all along he wanted—to fly to
the True Center, and find there what the ancient texts said was a miraculous place.
Toby shrugged. “Maybe that’s what a talent for being Cap’n means. You finagle things around until you like them.”
He had let his gaze drift aimlessly, and didn’t notice his father approaching. Killeen asked sharply, “What’re you saying?”
It was the height of impoliteness to intrude into conversation with an Aspect—much less with a Personality, which could absorb
your whole attention. Toby gulped. “I, I was just—”
“I lip-read you saying ‘Cap’n.’ What is it you can’t say to my face?”
“Idle talk, that’s all.”
Killeen licked his lips, hesitated, then plunged on. “It’s Shibo, isn’t it?”
“Well, yeasay, but—”
“I just want to say this. So she hears it straight from me.” Killeen stared deeply into Toby’s eyes, as if somehow he could
see the compact intelligence that Toby felt as a looming wall.
“Dad, I don’t think—”
“Shibo, we’re going to need your judgment up ahead. I’m following my instincts here, and something big is going to happen.”
“Dad, come on, I—”
“Remember how we’d talk over plans, figure the best next move, just you and me? I miss that. I miss that a hell of a lot.
I know I won’t get it back, but if you have any ideas, any guess about what I should do, you speak up, okay?” Killeen’s eyes
were pleading. He blinked furiously, holding back tears. “Through Toby. I’ll understand, I promise I will.”
“Dad . . . you know . . .”
Sensations rose in Toby, strange coursing currents of excitement, desire, hoarse murmurs, smells layering the air, husky urgings,
remembered moments of skin sliding, satiny, a sheen of sweat—
He jerked away, staggered. Then a hand patted his shoulder.
Killeen drew a long breath. “Thank you, son. I needed that. Just a moment with her, that’s all.”
Before Toby could spit out a rebuke, Killeen stepped back, saluted, turned—and strode away, the crisp Cap’n again. Toby felt
irritated, used. He tasted sharp, bitter bile in the back of his mouth.
Damn him!
But in the same moment he could see the anguish in his father, and the turmoil that the man could not let rise to the surface.
It is wise to forget this.
“Yeasay, only wisdom’s not my strong area.”
You are much like your father.
A faint tinkling laughter sounded in his mind. A Personality could take a certain abstract distance from his seething world,
Toby saw, and catch the amusement of it. Humor usually invisible to him.
There is an old Family Knight saying, time-honored. Some believe it comes from Old Earth. We say that life is a tragedy to
those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.
“Makes sense. Maybe that just means we shouldn’t look back over our shoulder too much, see what’s gainin’ on us.”
Good advice as well.
Toby leaned against a steel bulkhead and sighed. Shibo towered in his mind, her serene intelligence sifting through what he
saw with a finer, more patient hand.
I wonder who else—or what else—wants us to come here?
“I can’t see what makes anybody think people could live in this place. Quath maybe, but not humans. All those old engravings,
what were they talking about? Miraculous, sure—” he swept a hand at the view. “But dead.”
The wall screens sputtered with virulent radiance. The disk of inward-orbiting matter drew nearer, revealing more fine-grained
whorls of color and glowing violence. Now the doomed star they had seen days before was no longer a lopsided, blazing egg.
It had exploded into flares, a storm being sucked greedily into the outer rim of the disk. It was like a tortured, twisted
sun setting on the far horizon above a flaming landscape. “Looks like a frying abyss to me.”
With a gut-tightening surge of feeling, Toby knew that they didn’t belong here. The Families were all nomads, in the long
run. Only machines could live in this huge, fiery engine. The Families were here now only because of
Argo
, another mechanism made in the great days of human antiquity. Machines like
Argo
were a natural extension of the human hand, but mechs were a cancer. Planets were not their home. Let cold space and burning
matter be their realm. So what of human scope could lie here?
Perhaps we are being narrow of vision.
“What’s that mean?”
Look there. The threads of green.
The
Argo
was plunging ever closer to the disk, and now they could see the far rim in profile. Gouts of angry red boiled up from the
churning plane where the freshly eaten star was working its way inward. Lumps were being chewed as they rotated in the streams.
“So? Looks like a rat getting digested by a snake.”
True. Not pretty, probably not even if you’re a snake.
“Oh, I see. Those green strands above the plane there?”
Toby could now make out weaving filaments of deep jade that stood above where the star was being devoured. They were like
reeds above swamp water, blowing in a breeze.
“It flashes, see?” Blue-green fibers winked with darting yellow. “Like frozen lightning, sort of.”
We might be wrong, that nothing else lives here.
“Ummm. Lightning life?”
The Bridge officers had noticed the threads, too. Some fumbled with ship’s instruments, focusing sensors on them. Knots and
furious snarls climbed up the glowing green lines.
“The stuff ripped off the star—looks like it’s fouling up those threads,” Toby said.
Jocelyn had managed to get the
Argo
’s antennas to narrow in on the threads, despite the turbulent plasma buffeting the ship. The speakers on the Bridge sputtered
and buzzed with the fizzing emissions of the disk—and then eerie high wails cut through the mushy wall of sound.