Furious Gulf (18 page)

“What’s that?” Jocelyn called. “It sounds terrible.”

Killeen’s mouth twisted at the shrill chorus. Each voice would rise momentarily over the others, peal forth a mournful note,
and then subside into the lacing pattern of lament. “Maybe the Magnetic Mind’s not the only thing that knows how to live on
electricity.”

Toby said, “Not all of them are making those sounds, though. See?”

Jocelyn nodded. “It’s the ones that are connected to those bright lumps.”

Toby’s Isaac Aspect fluttered for attention, and Toby let him out:

These are the stuff of remote history. I heard of them as a boy. Conferring with Zeno now, I believe I may perceive the essence.
They are an early life form composed of magnetic vortices, laced with some hot matter. A primitive mode. They feed on the
flares and plumes which jut above the disk, like tasty spring flowers from a lush field.

“Doesn’t look like they’re enjoying dinner much,” Toby said sardonically.

The sudden intrusion of the star’s mass has flooded them, sucking some down into the fierce disk, where they die.

“How come the Magnetic Mind doesn’t die, then?”

It is far greater, larger, finer than these simple, primitive fibers—or so history says. I know little of it. The Mind is
vastly old, and reveals no secrets except by necessity. Humans before the Chandelier Era tried to discover some facets of
it, and were singed for their trouble.

Toby grimaced. The shrieks and wails were strangely gripping, as each thin voice had its moment, sobbed forth a song beyond
understanding, and then faded into the flickering static as the disk plasma reached up, bloated with digesting starmass—and
dragged in the delicate jade streamers, swallowing them in fire. They had lived too close to the edge of grand ferocity, and
now paid the price. They struggled frantically against the scalding splashes, gaining small and momentary victories, but in
the end they slid into blazing oblivion. The star’s shredded mass was plunging inward through the disk, wreaking havoc among
the slender, lacy beings.

Toby watched their distant deaths, and despite the gulf separating him from those reedy cries, he felt a strange connection.
Such truly alien forms could never be brethren. They were separate nations, but still caught with humans in the net of life
and time, fellow prisoners of splendor and travail. Beyond matter itself, gifted with extensions of the senses no human could
ever comprehend, they none the less shared the veiled dignity of being forever incomplete, of always emerging, a common heritage
of being finite and forever wondering.

But the rest of the Bridge was staring beyond the splashes of color from the disk. Now visible, coming toward them, was the
hexagonal of ships flown by the Myriapodia. Once more they held between them the shimmering pearly hoop, a weapon bigger than
worlds.

“What’s going on?” Killeen wondered out loud. “Where’s Quath?”

Jocelyn added, “Even that cosmic string seems small here.”

The Myriapodia ships bore down upon the
Argo
relentlessly. They accelerated along the magnetic field lines, invisible slopes that steepened by the minute, pitching down
toward the inner edge of the blazing accretion disk.

Into the pit of hell. The air brimmed with hard, dry heat. Toby gulped and wondered if he would live out the next day.

A
s Toby heard them recounted later, the next hours on the Bridge were electrifying. He wasn’t there to see them, though. On
a ship, chores have to be done on time—no excuses. Not even battle releases all of a crew to gape and thrill.

His assignment was seeding one of the seared agro domes. A team of five sweated beneath the blue-white violence in the dome’s
sky, glowing from near the Eater of All Things. They had to keep the complex biodiversity here limping along, so plants that
had perished under the sting of radiation had to be replaced, and new ones watered, nurtured, sheltered. Hard, ground-grubbing
work.

It was a relief, in a way, after the tension of the Bridge. Using your muscles was sometimes easier than using your overstretched
mind. He felt the ship moving under him as he toted and dug and fetched, knew that something was happening.

More mechs, he later learned. On the Bridge screens they appeared as flickering images, barely detectable by
Argo
’s systems. The earlier mech craft had been simple compared with these. It stood to reason. Some higher-order mech-tech had
driven humanity from space. These were probably the type—surprisingly small, quick, elusive. They plunged down the jet after
Argo
and dispersed.
Argo
’s detectors lost them entirely.

They attacked from several angles, using strategies Killeen and the others could not even understand. Toby heard only a brief
rattle of strange static in his sensorium, and then a
whoosh
as the dome above him vanished.

The hit took the dome’s air in a howling, hollow rush. Toby gasped for air and got nothing. He went spinning up, away from
the soil, which rose after him in a dirty storm.

The wailing gale ebbed as he windmilled his arms, rotating to face upward. A huge hole in the dome swelled before him. He
snatched at a broken strut, got it, hung on.

I’m dead,
he thought quite clearly. Already his lungs heaved, wanting to breathe.

A painful jab in his leg. A sharp sliver stuck from it, flung by the whistling air. He swung by one arm from the strut, smacked
into another.

Angry shouts in his ear—on comm, but no time to listen.

Ears throbbed with pain. Then no more sounds. Air all gone.

He launched himself downward. There was a self-sealing airlock there, already closed. That kept the whole ship from vac’ing
out from a single breech.

But it was a long way down and purple flecks danced at the corners of his eyes. They made crazy, enticing patterns and he
spent some time trying to figure out what they were trying to say. The dirt below looked no closer and his arms in front of
him flapped fruitlessly, like clothes drying in a warm breeze.

In his mouth a metallic, flat bite. The taste of the void.

Purple flies filled his vision. Then a sharp spark of yellow.

Lightning. Playing in the bowl. Licking at bodies as if tasting them.

He dodged away from the slender fire. It missed him and seared the bulkhead beyond.

Ears drumming, fighting to keep his throat closed, chest searing. The soil was closer, in fact very close, and then it hit
him in the face. His lungs convulsed but he refused to open his mouth, let his last ball of breath escape into the emptiness.

Scrambling, tumbling, off balance but going on anyway. Across the powdery dirt. Streamers of vapor bursting from the ground,
a gray fog.

Ears pounding, hammering his head. In his sinuses, spikes of agony.

The square lock, wobbling. Hard to keep it in focus, stand it upright by tilting his head. While his legs plunged and worked,
pounding him forward.

Hands out in front. They hit the lock door and punched a big red plate. The emergency entry dilated. He dived through it.

The first sound he heard was a whisper, then a high-pressure roaring. His ears popped. Only then did he wonder about the others
in the dome.

By the time he got his bearings back, it was too late. The other four in the dome never made it to the lock.

Two went through the big hole in the dome and were forever lost. The lightning had fried two more.

Nobody knew whether the lightning was a mech weapon or just natural. Despite the damage to their internal electrocoupling,
Argo
’s tech recorded the two selves in enough detail to provide Aspects in future chip-life.

Small consolation, Toby thought. He felt guilty for not thinking of the other four, for not helping them.

Not much time for guilt. Cermo pressed him into a gang to repair the dome, to slap on pressure patches, to secure ship’s atmosphere
for the next attack.

But there wasn’t any attack. The mechs had taken severe losses from
Argo
’s automatic defenses. She was an old ship but still pretty agile.

People celebrated like it was a victory. Toby wondered if maybe the mechs had just decided to let
Argo
go on, into more dangerous territory. Let the Eater do their job for them.

The thought gave him a sinking sensation, like stepping off into a metallic-tasting chasm. Into the void.

“
W
hat’s your favorite dish?” Besen asked.

“Huh? Oh—the nearest.” Toby noticed that he was shoveling in cauliflower with yellow cheese melted over it. Not his favorite
dish, but then he hadn’t been tasting it anyway.

“Some gourmet you are.” She wrinkled her nose at him.

“Look, I don’t want to have good taste, I just want things that taste good.”

He finished the cauliflower and looked for anything that might be left. The best thing about communal eating was that at the
end of the meal extras got passed around. A quick eater got more, and Toby was always hungry. Even when they were zooming
down toward a huge disk of white-hot fire, he responded to the rumble in his stomach.

“You don’t look concerned,” Besen said.

Toby studied her face. The deaths only hours before had been acknowledged in a ship-wide ceremony. Now, by necessity, they
got back to business, teams repairing the damage, a bustle of purpose. Besen was not one to give a lot away, but he could
read the tightening around the edges of her mouth, the slight high-strung cant of her head.

“No point in worrying.” He took her hand across the table and squeezed. “Bigger heads than ours are working on this thing.”

Besen bit nervously at her lip. He leaned across the table and gave her a light kiss on the brow. “Ummmm,” she said, but didn’t
stop chewing.

“We’re going to make it. I can feel it in my bones.” He could do no such thing, but he had to cheer her up.

“Do you really think so?”

“Sure. Uh, could you reach me those potatoes?”

“What an animal! Facing death, and he wants to eat.”

“Only smart thing to do, seems to me.”

“My stomach feels tight. I can’t get anything down.” She lifted a pea pod with her chopsticks, bit off a fraction, and put
it back.

“Well, maybe some other recreation will take your mind off things.” He gave her a blank face.

“Some other—oh. You beast!”

“I hear it’s good for the circulation.”

“First food, then—no, I will not jump into the sack with you while we are flying into the teeth of, of—”

“No need to throw a duck fit.”

“Well—I mean—it’s so totally inappropriate.”

He pretended to consider the question deeply, complete with a profound scowl. “Ummm. What’s a better way to vote in favor
of there being a future? That’s what the whole thing points toward, after all.”

She snorted. “
I
thought it was about love.”

“That, too. But when we’re all candidates for the bone orchard—only who’s going to bury us here, when there’s no dirt for
a cemetery anyway?—the oldest human ritual is a, well, a gesture of faith. Faith in the future.”

“So sex is faith now?” She was starting to grin, which had been his aim. “You have an odd religion.”

“I worship at the altar of my choosing,” he said with a staged haughty air.

“And what’s that about the oldest ritual? I can think of some more uplifting ones.”

Toby consulted with Isaac, who was a gold mine of ancient terms, in the space of a heartbeat. “They used to call it ‘the beast
with two backs’—so maybe you have a point.”

Besen gave him a grin that began wickedly and slid into a tentative shyness. “You were really just joshing me out of my mood,
weren’t you?”

“Um.”

“You don’t like to admit it, but you are very kind, in your own way, behind that fake toughness.”

“You have unmasked me, madam.”

“Ummm.” She eyed him speculatively. “How much time is it, until we get really close to the disk?”

“I can’t tell. The Bridge is too busy to give out details, and we’re swooping in along a complicated kind of spiral, so—say,
why do you want to know?”

“Well, if there really is enough time . . .”

“You hussy! Here I was just trying to cheer you up—”

“Oh, forget it. You can’t take a little ribbing yourself.” She poked him in the chest with a finger. “Come on, Romeo, let’s
see what the wall screens tell us. I guess you’ve used up your supply of romance for the week.”

“Then I’ll have to stop off and pick up my next allotment. Where do I go?”

“Don’t think I can’t tell you where to go—get moving.”

He had managed to kid her out of her jittery depression, but the raging cauldron visible on the big Assembly Hall screen was
enough to bring it all back. He put his arm around her as they stood with a large crowd of the Family, watching the harsh
glare of the disk seem to spread and wriggle as they drew nearer.

“Where are we going in all this?” Besen asked, wonder and fear mingling in her tone.

“I don’t know. I can’t even guess.”

“The disk, it’s like a huge world or something.”

“A world is nothing here, a fly speck.”

“But I can see clouds down there. And that twisty thing, it almost looks like a river.”

“Almost ain’t the same as is. Those clouds are really plasma that would boil away your hand in an eye-blink. That river, my
faithful Aspect tells me, is some kind of magnetic knot that’s gotten caught up in the disk as it churns around.”

“But it looks so familiar, somehow.”

Toby’s mouth twisted, eyes distant. “We need to see familiar things here. Otherwise it’s too strange to deal with.”

Besen paused, then nodded soberly. “My teacher Aspect just said that ‘river’ is bigger than a whole planet. Lots bigger. And
that the disk is the size of a solar system.”

“Sometimes I wish our Aspects wouldn’t tell us so much.” She nodded, her hair tumbling in the low gravity. “I felt better
when I thought that little squiggle was a river. Still, with the Aspects we can get all branches of learning.”