Authors: Gregory Benford
“But I’m dead on target?”
“Let him. After he’s bargained away the Legacies, why be choosy?”
“Fashion, huh?”
“Hey, you stick on an extra eye or leg fast as I can change my shirt.”
“Hey! I forget, sure, but—”
Toby didn’t see why, but he felt something in Quath’s manner that made him uneasy. “Why come looking for me, mother of all
cockroaches?”
Toby kicked at a fallen branch. “Should I care? Let him sell his teeth for it.”
“Me? I haven’t got anything.”
“Sure, but—say, what’s my dad been negotiating?”
Toby felt cold, sharp horror strike into him. “Shibo.”
“I don’t like that.”
Toby blushed. He tottered, reeled—and sat down abruptly, head swimming. The air swarmed with blue-white dots. His chest heaved
to drag in thick, moist gasps. He knew what Killeen wanted was wrong in some dark, terrible way, but he could not muster arguments.
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“They’ll confer with her?”
“Sure, it’ll have to be through me.”
His head pounded and his hands clenched, strangely cold, but he made himself think. He had only to turn his attention inward
and Shibo’s Personality rose like a massive stony wedge inside his mind.
It is tempting to go back into all that. I will have to think about it.
“What?” he asked her soundlessly. “But we’re so close. I’ve hardly even started to learn what you’re really like. Your memories,
I love them.”
They are digital dust.
“They’re just as real as, as this grass, those trees.”
You do not believe that. Remember the ones who fought the fake animals? They embraced the simulated over the real. You laughed
at them.
“But your
self
, it’ll last forever in chipstore.” He was grasping at straws of logic and hoped she could not sense that.
Nothing replaces life. Still, there are flavors here that you do not taste. Hard to describe, gray and cool and restful.
Craftily he said to her, “Let’s get through this trouble, then talk about this so-called Restorer.”
There is some sense to that, I admit.
“Good. Just let me straighten things out with my dad, just you and me, and—”
I have been thinking. Such a transformation might not make for happiness in myself or in Killeen. He is changed. Harder.
“He is that.”
I treasure this remove. Here I am free of the coarse and momentary, of jars and needs.
Toby caught a sliver of pale spaces, strangely delicious, of smooth surfaces flowing in a timeless place. “I see.”
You cannot. But I thank you for trying.
He gulped, his hands trembling, and gazed defiantly up into Quath’s hovering head. “I . . . I won’t let Killeen have her chip.”
“I have rights!”
He jerked angrily to his feet. “That’s not Family custom!”
“Humanity must’ve had this, sometime ’way back, or else these people here wouldn’t have it. But our customs, they’re ancient—and
they don’t say anything about bringing Personalities back.”
So simply put, the brutality of it was unanswerable. “Look, I still won’t give her up.”
“Exploration?” Toby could not get his mind off the prospect before him. And something more dried his mouth, tightened his
throat—the strange currents running like searing rivulets when he thought of Shibo.
“I need to think this over.” Toby got up unsteadily. Shibo herself was not causing this seethe inside him. It was something
he felt, something about him and Shibo together, that he could not voice. Each time he tried, he felt a sickening churn, a
whirlpool of coming nausea.
“I won’t go back.”
“Oh yeasay—you will,” his father said.
Toby whirled. “No!”
Killeen and Cermo emerged from the nearby trees, fully suited. His father’s face was lined and drawn, as though he had gone
sleepless all these days. “I knew Quath would be better at searching than we are,” he said with a tight smile. “You stepped-down
your sensorium so much we couldn’t pick you up on the grid.”
“Dad, don’t do this.”
“I have to.”
“I’m carrying the chip, so Family law says I decide for the Personality.”
“Except when Family survival demands. That’s the law, too.”
Toby thought fast. He had never paid much attention to the endless wranglings of Family law and custom, the adults’ yack-yack
and breezy bluster, and now regretted it. “We’re safe here. Nothing’s threatening our survival.”
“Not so. But look, son—I want Shibo back. I think you can understand why.”
“I don’t think it’s for the best,” Toby temporized.
“Nonsense. We’ll be together again, the three of us, a real family.”
Toby shook his head violently. “Not the same, not the same.”
“Sure it will. Shibo, in the flesh—just think of it.” For the first time Toby could remember Killeen’s face lit with joy.
“That’s not why we came here, Dad, and anyway—” He stopped. “No—this
was
why you came, wasn’t it?”
Wariness swallowed Killeen’s brief delight. “Not the main reason, no, but—sure, I guessed there was something like the Restorer
here. The message in that Chandelier, remember? And other old sayings, myths. You should see the real thing, son! Magnificent,
huge, flexible glass and metal you can see through, tech that can restore anybody, given enough data. You’ll be—”
“You don’t need her
now,
Dad. Later, maybe, when we’ve found Abraham, gone—”
“Abraham!” Killeen’s sunny elation returned. “I got his message. He sent coordinates of where he is. They’re not reliable,
Andro says, but they’ll get us to the neighborhood. Abraham is alive—here! Somehow he got away from the Citadel. Said to bring
you for sure and—”
“Shibo can come after that. She’s personal business, Dad. Abraham, all the rest—that’s Family Bishop business. First deal
with that.”
“There’s more beyond to discover, I can smell it. I need Shibo. She was my, my
core,
son. You can’t understand that, I know, but . . .”
In Killeen’s face unease and uncertainty warred with his set-piece Cap’n’s hard-mouthed mask. Toby realized suddenly how much
a shield that calm, resolute image had been, for years now.
“I need her. I want to have her back before we go searching for Abraham. It’s an emergency, so I’m setting aside the usual
Family customs—”
“We’re safe! No mechs here, even. You can’t invoke some—”
“I already have.” Killeen’s mask had returned at Toby’s outburst, the window between them closing in an eye-blink. Killeen
and Cermo stood together, tall and certain, Cermo chunky and giving away his apprehension with elbows cocked, knees loose.
The crevices in Killeen’s face seemed deep, shadowed, hiding something. Yet the voice was mild, calming as he argued further.
Toby had heard him use the same tones on a crewman who had stepped out of line and needed herding back in.
Toby took a deep breath, licked his lips. Using his Aspects, he dredged up legalistic lore, rattling jargon he only dimly
understood. “Override our customs? How can you? I haven’t even been informed by Family Council of any of this.” He let his
peripheral vision drift, sizing up opportunities. “First you have to—”
“I called a special Council. Since you had left
Argo
without permission of the watch officer, they allowed as how they could pass judgment without your being informed.”
Toby was aghast. He should have suspected when it was so easy to slip away. “You
let
me leave.”
“I gave orders that you were confined to the ship.”
“Sure, knowing you could turn it this way, and then—”
“The Family demands this.”
“Family? Ha! It’s
you
who want it.”
“I stood aside during their deliberations.”
“Huh!” Toby spat back, edging to his left. Of course—his father knew how days in that tiny cell would affect him, make him
jump ship. So the Cap’n prepared arguments, finished the dealings, then waited for Toby to skip. The shock of seeing how he
could be so easily used, his impulses calculated, seethed through Toby like a chilly, clarifying dash of water.
He got control of his voice and said slowly, as mildly as he could, “Dad, Shibo doesn’t
want
to be ‘restored.’”
Killeen laughed dryly. “Nonsense. An Aspect always wants out.”
“She’s a Personality—bigger, more ample . . .” Toby struggled to say what he felt. “You don’t carry one, you can’t know what
it’s like. They’re above all this, the surge of anger and want and fear that we feel—all of it. She likes herself the way
she is.”
Killeen was still smiling, shaking his head. “You can’t expect anybody to believe that.”
“I certainly do! No Personality carried in this Family ever had a choice of coming out again. Nobody ever asked the question.”
“Well, we can,” Cermo said carefully. “Just manifest her before the Council.”
“No,” Killeen said abruptly, clenching his fist. “I’ll settle this. Manifest her now, right here.”
“What?” Toby made himself take a deep breath. His mind reeled with harsh, violent imagery. Nausea burned his throat.
“Come on, let her speak.”
“No!”
—fevered skin softly resistant, a cupped rosy breast—
“You’d have to anyway, before the Council,” Cermo said reasonably.
“Any objection she has, I can talk her out of it,” Killeen said affably. “Come on, son.”
—tongue flicking in damp hollows, secret crevices—
“No!”
Killeen’s smile hardened. “Yeasay. Now.”
Shibo said,
If it causes this, I’ll think again. I don’t want to see you two—
No!
Toby sent to her in the confines of her imprisonment.
No.
Killeen’s mouth hardened. “Now. And I mean it.”
Toby broke to his left. He didn’t have much hope but he dug in, revving his knee-servos to max, feeling their surging whine
beneath his skin.
Shouts behind him. They probably could run him down but he would give them a chase anyway. He leaned into it, puffing hard.
Then the shouts became hoarse, shrill. He snapped his head around. Quath was blocking Cermo and Killeen, moving with surprising
speed. She shot out a telescoping leg and hooked Cermo’s foot, tripping him. Killeen she stopped with a rude bump, sending
him sprawling.
Toby was astounded, but he didn’t let it slow his pounding boots. He got out of the park and plunged into the busy streets
beyond.
Escape has two steps: first, separating from the pursuer. Then, distancing yourself from the incident, so nobody suspects
the distant hubbub has you as its prey.
Toby cut down alleys where he could, leaped clean over a stubby building—his servos cutting in hard—and dodged his way through
three streets, faster than he could think through a plan. People chuckled and shouted at him but they seemed to assume he
was a mere oddity, not a thief escaping from a job. He relaxed slightly and had the presence of mind to wave at the curious,
smiling broadly, as though this was some stunt. Pretty soon he slowed to a fast walk and nobody seemed much interested in
him.
He angled through an open-air market without attracting more than the usual attention paid his size. He made his breathing
slow. His antic, popping anxiety faded.
Without thinking he found that he had circled around, always turning right when he could. Ingrained Family training. Coming
around on your pursuer let you know where he was, since he was following your trail. You could decide whether to take him
by surprise, but you had to do it before the tracker realized what you were doing. Or else you took off in a totally different
direction, taking time to cover your tracks.
Only in a city there was no tracking, unless Toby had stirred up a crowd somewhere to mark his passage. But Killeen and Cermo
couldn’t talk easily with these dwarves, especially in their mood. So he might have a margin of time.
He had ended up behind the park. A chase moves away from the start and usually nobody thinks to check back there. He had learned
that playing in the dusty streets of Citadel Bishop, then later again, dodging mechs. Now he hoped that his own father couldn’t
read him that deeply. The thought made him fidgety, glancing around corners before exposing himself on the approach to the
park area. After all, Killeen had played him like a penny flute lately.