Authors: Gregory Benford
Killeen let this fact work on the room, and then said, “I expect you to abide by the letter and intent of our agreement.”
The judge paused, sensing the situation. Then she smiled for the first time. “It is pleasant to encounter a visitor who understands
the nuances of negotiation.” She held out a hand. “Monisque, I’m called by my friends. My enemies prefer shorter words. Let’s
get our terms worked out in detail. Then maybe we can all have a drink.”
Some human rituals were eternal. Toby had no doubt that the drinks would contain a liberal lacing of alcohol.
Q
uath clambered along beside them, clanging and scraping through Andro’s reception area. She had been forced to squeeze through
the loading docks and equipment bays of the port, because the personnel areas were hopelessly small. Toby could have sworn
that Quath had added some more legs into the bargain, but the knobby steel shanks moved so fast, her pneumatic joints wheezing,
that it was hard to tell.
The buildings here glowed like warm butter. Probably part of these people’s security precautions, Toby guessed, but he couldn’t
imagine how. Unless somehow the buildings held energies that could flick out, lick away offending Bishops . . .
“How’s that by you, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon?” Killeen asked.
Her angular head swiveled toward Killeen—a politeness she had learned that humans appreciated, though it was completely unnecessary,
since her voice came to them through comm. Still, she said nothing.
“C’mon, Quath, don’t worry,” Toby said, making his voice carry a lightness he did not feel, and hoping the alien couldn’t
tell that. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be right there.”
Toby was puffing just trying to keep up with her. “How come, eyeball-plucker?”
Killeen said, “To these people you matter. They want you pretty bad.”
“They seem pretty worried about the Myriapodia,” Killeen said.
To Toby his father seemed edgy and intense, eyes darting to the sides as they passed out of the receiving dock and into the
city. They picked up more of the “Honor Guard,” as the judge had called it—teams of men and women with long-bore weapons slipping
down side streets, quick-eyed and edgy, clearing the way. The streets ahead were deserted bare stone, closed shops, echoing
the Bishops’ ringing boot heels. Killeen signaled to Cermo and a dozen others, who formed their own perimeter line. The people
of this monotonous city didn’t seem like a threat; they all knew the “Honor Guards” were there to keep the Bishops in line.
Quath followed precepts Toby could never figure out. Sometimes she would reel out endless detail about Myriapodia history.
Other times, she would clam up tight, not even acknowledge questions.
“They’re dead anxious for news from out of the Far Black, as they call it,” Toby added.
The guards, their squinty-eyed tautness and all, made him nervous. Even the air here itched with faint striations, as though
electricity hummed through it. These people, their funny little stunted city, the sheer incredible but rock-solid fact of
it being here at all—they added up to a profound unease. And things were moving so fast, he couldn’t get straight answers
to any of the myriad questions this place conjured up.
“If that’s what they’re buying, then that’s what we’re selling,” Killeen said. “Cermo! Heave ass down that alley and sight
on those far clouds.”
“What spectrum?”
“Give me a see-through, infra or better.”
Cermo swaggered forward, decked out in full field regalia, clicking and rattling with techno-ornaments. His fine-webbed electronets
seethed with energy. Antennas embedded at shoulder, waist, and butt looked every-which-way, in full 3D. His weaponry was polished
from long hours of care and repair on ship, but still pitted and burnished from a thousand forays.
Toby recalled the times when such gear was everyday wear for all Bishops. They had been on the move, their sensoria stretched
out to max perimeter, each Bishop a sentinel. For years after the Calamity they had roamed like that, rising weary, red-eyed,
and sore each morning, to a world drawing always dryer, with hunger and mech pursuit the only constants.
Locals peeped at them from around distant corners. They seemed interested and amused.
Rats in bow ties.
Cermo clumped down an alleyway and into an open area, where he could get a full sight on the far horizon.
Toby couldn’t figure out the sky here. He knew this wasn’t a planet, not by any stretch, but still there were billowy white
clouds drifting not far above the stunted buildings. There had even been a thunderstorm, catching them on the hike back to
Argo
’s berth. That had startled him—pure, tasty water falling from a sky like God’s gift. He hadn’t seen such a tasty shower since
he was a boy, had played for hours in its mud.
—and at once was in a torrent, a downpour, spattering crystal droplets over his face. Her face.
Her
face. Endless gouts and flurries of blessed clear streaming cold, a waterfall hammering and thundering down a mountainside,
she standing gleefully under it, yellow party dress plastered to her slim legs, a young girl getting ecstatically drenched—
The intrusion was sudden, raking across his mind. Shibo. Her rising buttresses, flanked by granite masses. He felt within
her Personality a sweeping reach, the sinks and hollows of another’s interior self, a fresh continent spread bone-broad before
him. The waterfall faded. Rain fell in the great distance, slanting from troubled clouds, signature of her own sad presence.
You have not summoned me forth for some time.
“I’ve been busy.” Something in the waterfall, the pleasures of it, made him uneasy. He noticed that he had a hard-on, and
hoped she wouldn’t.
I know how hard it is to get along with your father. I did, once.
“He’s running the show, sure, but . . . I just don’t feel easy about it.”
He is the man whose sense of opportunity has brought you far, so very far—
“I don’t know what he’s after anymore.”
I believe his goals are as ever. But he is a man who hides his inner self, now. A Cap’n must.
“Not from me, he doesn’t.”
As if from a great distance, she said,
Even from you. You are becoming a man, more than a son.
He coughed to cover the dark seethe within him. His erection would not go away and he was breathing deeply, mind buzzing.
“Clouds’re pretty thick,” Cermo sent back. “Can’t see much. In the far infra the view’s all jiggledy.”
“Now there’s a fine tech word,” Jocelyn joshed him.
“Jiggledy how?” Killeen asked.
“Looks like they reflect the city itself. I mean, stronger I look, more I get wavy pictures of streets, buildings.”
Shibo receded. Toby had focused his attention on the conversation around him and she had faded into the background. He concentrated,
to push her further back. Made himself breathe slower. He couldn’t see anything through the clouds.
Cermo sent, “Microwave says it’s solid up there.”
“Solid?” Killeen nodded to himself. “Fits, yeasay.”
across, we would see more of this city hanging above us. How the rotation is achieved in this puzzling place I do not know.>
“Glad to see you getting humble, ol’ cockroach,” Toby said. He wanted to cheer up the lumbering shape, but Cermo’s discovery
made his voice shake a little. A city dangling over him, with nothing at all to hold it, kept up by some invisible law of
physics—the thought made him hunch down a little, until he noticed and stood up straight again.
Three arms of ruby shell reached down suddenly and plucked Toby up above the street cobblestones. They swung him playfully
to and fro, then dumped him onto the flat yellow carapace behind Quath’s head. “Hey!”
“Whoosh! Not that there’s so much to see. I was already taller than the street signs. Funny names, aren’t they?”
The Bishop party was crossing Peach Boulevard on Pomegranate Camino Real, names Toby had to call up his Isaac Aspect to understand
were mouth-watering ancient fruits—but there wasn’t a plant in sight.
“If I take the measure of them right,” Killeen said, “they don’t give anything away free.”
Toby said, “Yeasay—downright nasty.”
“Ummm, maybe both. See, we’re used to people helping each other automatically, no questions asked. These folk don’t think
like that—which implies a lot.”
“Simple, really,” Killeen said. “They aren’t under threat all the time. Comfortable people can afford to be choosy.”
Toby thought about that. “Could mean they’re pretty used to strangers, too.”
“Oh? And what’s that?” Toby didn’t have any deeper idea, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge that here, the only kid among
adults. You kept your luck to yourself.
“Ummmm.” Killeen watched their guards edgily. “Could be.”
Toby felt edgy, as though some game was going on just beyond his seeing. Killeen was composed, controlled, giving nothing
away. As he fretted over this he glanced down an alleyway and saw a building in the distance abruptly seem to melt, windows
and arches dissolving, turning a mottled green. “Look!” It reformed itself with a freshly slanted roof, a new line of windows.
Killeen’s eyes narrowed. “That fits, too,” he said distantly.
“Fits what?” Toby watched new doorways pop open, ovals instead of the earlier strait-edged type.
“This city’s a kind of tech we’ve never seen. And I’ll bet it runs itself.”
Cermo sent a puzzled murmur. “Itself? Andro—”
“He’s a clerk.” Killeen gave Andro a bland smile, amused that they could talk this way right next to him. “These people, they’re
no higher level than we are, come right down to it.”
“They sure don’t seem like they could build a Chandelier,” Cermo said.
“They didn’t,” Toby said firmly. “Don’t expect them to ever admit it, though.”
He walked past a splashing fountain, ideas tumbling fruitlessly, and felt a tilting, a rising presence—
—She moved lithely, inspired, skipping from stone to stone across the broken road, puddles from the night fogs showing her
self and counter-self in the shredding gray light. Playing in the fresh dawn’s ruins. Jagged teeth from a night raid. Stumps
of stone. A spider slept within the city, she saw it silver-fine and waiting. Stirring its barbed legs, the razor rub unheard
beneath the waking bustle of her loved Citadel, fine and forlorn and always waiting for the next blow. Yet joy seeped from
every moment. Shapes swarmed through this morning, the eternal going of people about their busyness, to strive against and
fail and strive again. Even though they knew that the spider waited too, rustling in the eyesocket of a bleached skull—
He snapped out of it, panting. Forced his attention back to the street where
his
boots trod,
his
eyes caught the liquid dance of water.
Yet Shibo’s world was entrancing, too. It called forth a lightness of being, an airy sense of things merging, yet solidly
grounded in a web of interplay, of casual and unspoken delight. These glimpses into her Personality contrasted hugely with
the masculine edginess all around him, the holding-back, the control and analysis. Killeen’s blocky, muscular stride ahead
of him spoke silently of purpose, precision, separation. Toby respected that, knew Family Bishop had to be led that way.
Yet this was his father, too. In the years since they had fled together across arid, murderous plains, the edges in Killeen
had sharpened. Like a knife stroked on stone, Toby thought, a law of nature. And now Killeen expected of his son the same
hardness, the same resolute separation that leadership demanded.
Toby lurched, the strife in him like a blow—a clash between the beckoning sense of the world Shibo held forth and the demands
he felt radiating from Killeen. Cermo looked at him oddly, one eyebrow raised. Toby realized his face must show his feelings,
and tightened it up—only to feel the Shibo Personality laughing gently at him, then fading back into its ghostly berth in
him. He marched on.
They wound through twisted streets, across a broad plaza of black stone, and into the most impressive building Toby had seen
here—a steep pyramid of hard glaring white. His Isaac Aspect said it was “pearly” and when Toby pressed his hand against the
stuff it was shockingly cold. Sticky, too—and then they were being hustled through a wide portal and into seats before a high
dais. The chairs were Bishop-sized and Toby’s clasped him with a warm, massaging grip. It was downright insinuating, fitting
itself to him all along back and legs. He wondered if it would let him go, if whoever ran this place decided otherwise.
To his surprise, the judge, Monisque, appeared at the dais—this time in blue robes. “I figured she was something more than
a judge,” Killeen whispered on closed comm.
“I’m happy to greet you again, far wanderers,” Monisque said lightly. “Now I’m wearing my other hat—Chief Swapper.”
“Sounds to me like you do everything here,” Killeen said.