Furious Gulf (19 page)

Toby chuckled dryly. “Branches, yeasay. But none of the roots.”

“What do you mean?”

“They can’t tell us what all this means.”

“They know lots of facts and numbers, though.”

“Maybe that’s all we can trust them with. Anyway, this place, it’s big-time stuff.” He had to keep up a casual face, but the
approaching disk, swelling, throbbing with seething light, was starting to inspire in him less awe and more plain old fear.

“And it eats
stars
. We don’t belong here.”

“Yeasay to that, too. Only somebody thinks we do.”

“And your father believes it, too. He decides.”

A note of bitterness had crept into her voice. Around them jaws clenched, eyes whitened as a giant white flare burst across
the disk, and a low growl rose. Slowly it dawned on Toby that the entire Assembly Hall murmured with discontent, with dread,
with tight-stretched anxiety. The deaths had sobered them, loosened Killeen’s hold. A bitter wind stirred them all.

A band of men and women at the far side of the Hall began shouting. Before Toby could understand what was happening, the crowd
began to move. They knocked over tables and squeezed through the outer doorways, pressing on with gathering energy, like a
tide sucked forward by an irresistible moon. Sour words flew, boots thumped on the deck, the air rang with harsh accusation.

Toby got up and followed, hardly noticing the twinge in his leg where a metal spike had gouged him in the agro dome. That
seemed like an age ago. He didn’t limp; his body had already fixed up most of the gouge.

He and Besen were at the back when the swarming pack reached the Bridge. To Toby there was a ghostlike quality to the rapid
swerve of events. Again the officers stopped them. Again Killeen appeared on the balcony. Again he held them back with a stern
speech.

This time Toby sensed the deep foreboding in the shuffling, muttering crowd, and now that he knew what to look for, he saw
how his father used their fear to bind them to him. They
needed
to believe in him now, and he played upon that. If he hadn’t, they might easily have worked themselves into a frenzy, have
boiled over into mutiny.

Killeen held them in part by sheer physical presence. He was a full chest-length taller than Toby, testament to his greater
years. He used that, and the added perspective of the balcony, to cow the louder protestors.

Long ago, in response to the rapacious mechs, humanity had lengthened its life span by tinkering with its own growth pattern.
The body given forth by natural evolution, far back on ancient Earth, had matured at about twenty of the Old Earth years.
Then even the best body hit a plateau. Gradually it weakened with the years, the erosion of muscle and bone offset by the
slow gathering of wisdom and experience.

To counter this, long ago the Family of Families had sculpted humanity. Now, people simply never reached that plateau where
decline set in. People died of injury and mech attack, not age. They never stopped growing. Their rate slowed, of course—otherwise,
elders would shoot up into sluggish giants. A woman a century old might not gain an extra finger’s width of height in a decade.
But she grew. And she would have all the savvy and grit years brought.

This perpetual late youth held in check the inner magics that governed aging. The eldest Bishops were nearly twice as tall
as Toby. This meant higher door sills and bigger meals. More important, elders towered over others, their experience given
the force of bulk. Toby stood lanky for his eighteen Old Earth years, but he felt small and insignificant compared to Cermo
or Killeen. In them, the weight of Family authority had firm physical presence.

This Killeen used with unconscious, telling effect. Still, voices called out protests. Oaths cut the air, strident and ragged
with fear.

The only pressure keeping the crew back was the long history that had led them here. More than anyone, Killeen embodied that
past. He stood fire-eyed, intimidating in his scowling silence. He had fooled the Mantis, gotten them off Snowglade. He had
fallen through a planet and lived. Been swallowed by Quath, then been set free. He had killed mechs and laughed as he did
it. And a voice like lightning had sought him out, had led them here. Against that they weighed their own fear.

At that stretched moment Quath came lumbering from the main corridor. There was a strange smell to the alien, a sweetsour
aroma in the steadily warming ship. People moved uneasily aside. The alien was an ally, but that did not alter her strangeness.

Quath stopped, her great head turning. Ruby eyes on stalks twisted like vines, slowing to study a nervous upturned face, a
bearded man’s hair, a woman’s clutched carrypouch, as if they were museum exhibits.

Then she sent, I do not yet see. They say we must speak again with the magnetic being.>

Somehow, this straight, factual message carried the day. They quieted, looking to Killeen, who said calmly, “I’ll try. They’ll
help us? With whatever comes?”

Toby thought it was a little funny that Quath didn’t say “They will” or “They’ll try”—but then the crowd began to drift away,
and he realized that this odd, quiet note had gotten Killeen through another crisis.

As officers went back to their jobs, he and Besen managed to slip onto the Bridge. Killeen was talking to Quath, who snaked
her neck and head into view. Metallic shanks scraped the walls as she moved, legs clattering with a staccato rhythm Toby found
unsettling.

“That’s all they said?” Killeen demanded.

“Where you figure we’re headed?”

chaos and death.>

Killeen chuckled without mirth. “Yeasay squared.”

“Portals to what?”

“Here? What could survive?”

structures than does the sphere of flame further in.>

Killeen paced, hands at the small of his back, shoulders set square and rigid. “We can’t last long, getting this close. We’re
heating up, the jet is getting tighter around us—”

“That’ll just hang us out to dry. I want to be movin’, able to jet out of here as soon as—”

“Why?”

“Damn it! To helm this ship I have to know—”

Quath had caught it before the humans, but now Toby felt the prickly gathering of electrostatic charges along his scalp, the
humming beneath his boots.

You have penetrated to my deep regions. You are at the edge of the jet. Now is the time to render farewells.

Killeen scowled. “What? You brought us here, you can’t—”

I feel the growing roll and stress of the disk at my feet. It sends devouring plumes of eating matter up, deep into my field
lines. These erosions I must fight. I have little time for you.

“You said you were anchored in that stuff. All that talk about being immortal—”

Immortality is an aim, not a fact. Matter’s rub can erase even such as I. I am doomed to struggle, just as are you, though
on scales of time and length you cannot know. I am far grander and share little else but this base property.

“So you abandon us, huh? Just when—”

I have final words for you, then I withdraw my store of complex waveforms from your region. By retreating to other parts of
myself, the weave of fields far above the disk, I can preserve my sense of self, my remembrances of my long span, the essence
of me.

“Damn it, we’re going to need help just to survive the next hour, never mind—”

I send a map, simple and misleading, but enough for you. I am lodged for the moment in the field lines which taper into the
disk. You are riding down one of my flanks. You depart me in a moment, at the location marked.

Killeen shouted, “Damn you, you can’t—”

Small beings such as you should remember who they are.

“I’ll remember real well, thank you,” Killeen said sardonically.

Toby had never seen his father struggle so hard to control his temper, teeth gritted and eyes narrowed, flinty.

Toby opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment the wall screens all filled with the same figure. It was colored
and three-dimensional, a tangle of lines and moving dots and splattered yellows and greens and reds.

Complexity, confusion. Toby felt awed by it and repelled at the same time. There were levels of meaning and motion here he
knew he could not comprehend.

Then, as if the Magnetic Mind could tell how hard this was to understand, the figure simplified, became flat, two-dimensional.
Geometry he could understand. The clarity of mathematics shaped to a human mind.

Toby saw that a long thick swath was a side view of half the disk, the wrath and roil of it replaced by a single shading.
Thin lines sloped down into the disk—from above and below, where the jet formed. These were the magnetic lines of the Mind
itself—part of its huge structure, stretching beyond the disk and into the leagues between the stars. But these magnetic feet
mired in the disk were important, for here the Mind fed itself from the furious energies released in the disk. Toby felt,
for reasons he could not name, that even these sloping lines, far larger than solar systems, were as insignificant on the
scale of the Mind as the curling hairs on his own legs.

And along the innermost magnetic line lay an orange dashed trail that lengthened as he watched—
Argo
’s path.

Then the dashed trail raced ahead, switched from orange to blue, and left the field line. It arced inward—and the figure expanded,
bringing into view the disk’s inner edge, which tapered down to a point. Beyond that, even further in, Toby had expected to
see the glowing white-hot ball that he saw on the view screens.

But the intense radiance appeared on the figure as only an insubstantial shimmer. Apparently the Magnetic Mind did not consider
those searing energies important.
Argo
’s dashed trail led through the radiance, moving more and more swiftly. Then it arced up slightly. At the very center of the
white ball lay something utterly dark, though winking with small energies as he watched.

You will depart from me. I withdraw. I send now details of your trajectory to come.

“Wait!” Toby saw real fear haunt Killeen’s eyes. “Where are we going?”

The star that has died at the outer rim now sends its shattered self inward through the disk. A swirl and plunge of massive
lumps come lashing through the disk. They stress and deform me. This I suffer—and for you. Such wrenching mass yields up the
conditions the Abraham-thing appears to want—and predicted. You shall embrace it. Move quickly now, for a cusp season approaches.

“What?” Killeen shouted, balling his fists. “What’s coming?”

The aperture moment.