Furious Gulf (16 page)

“And we sure don’t need more of this Cap’n!”

That was too much for the Trumps. Abruptly individual Aces and Fivers and Jacks shouted down the doubting Bishops. Surly jibes,
angry taunts. Fistfights started, but officers broke them up.

The chaos went on for minutes and Killeen stood silently, watching. His mouth twitched once and Toby guessed.
He’s thinking that it’s pretty damn strange, when your own Family is against you, and Trumps stand by you.

Finally the crowd had settled down to a growing, sour-mouthed mutter. Killeen spread his hands. “I think you folks should
just go back to your tasks and—”

They all felt it at the same time—a compression that boomed into a rolling pulse, as if
Argo
had become a great heart that beat with slow, solemn weight.

I return, enjoined to deliver instructions.

It was like God speaking in a cramped room. The mob rustled. Their eyes raked the walls, searching for the voice, showing
too much white, like panicked sheep.

But Killeen reacted only with a skewed mouth and a skeptical slant to his eyebrows. He crossed his arms over his chest, as
if prepared to hear out the Magnetic Mind before responding. “Yeasay, we are listening.”

It is you and the Toby creature to whom I need transfer this complex of curious meanings.

“I’m here!” Toby called.

People nearby gave him a startled glance and moved hurriedly away, as if they wanted no association with one who would call
down this daunting thing that shook the walls to make speech.

My duty is imposed by encumbered obligations from my far past. I once benefited from the powers who now call on me, and so
stand as messenger to motes such as you—a post requiring humility I do not come to naturally. So I be quick of it—here.

A high-pitched wail filled the ship, reverberating in agonizing harmonics. Sharp, shrill, endless. A cutting pressure, driving
all thought away. For an excruciating moment it held, built—then cut off savagely. The stunned silence that followed seethed
with dread.

Such was your course. Follow it well or you will suffer to be torn to atoms, and then still more.

“Our . . . course?” Killeen croaked.

The trajectory your benefactors instruct you to follow.

Regaining composure, Killeen said sternly. “And which way is that?”

You are to follow my magnetic field lines. Cling close to me, that you do not shear into fragments.

“Why? And where are you, anyway?” a burly man shouted.

Silence, small mind.

“The hell I will. Who are you,
what
are you, to—”

A fist of sound struck them. The colossal thump pulsed through floor, ceiling, walls. People lurched, fell, shrieked.

I do not suffer the attentions of mortals, but for my obliged task. That—and no more.

“That, that sound you sent—” Killeen held out his hands, palms down, to still the throng. “You say it was a course plan along
you
?”

Without me as a guide, you would come to swift wreak and ruin.

“Look, we’re going to head out along the galactic jet. I—”

Such a trajectory would inevitably intersect those who desire your end.

“Mechs? We’ve gotten away from them before.”

There are agencies and physicks here you cannot grasp.

Killeen folded his arms across his chest and scowled. Toby knew that look, had seen it form like a stone wall against opponents.
But there was some other element in his father’s stance, an odd note of staged and studied performance he had not seen before.
He wondered at it, caught a sliver of intuition, but then the Cap’n spoke.

“I want to know the authority by which you—or any other of your ‘agencies’—gives us orders.”

How you strut! I have dwelled here longer than your species has existed. You are as ephemeral as the passing, fraying cloud.
Yet pride often accompanies such infinitesimal durations.

“Maybe it’s that long life of yours that makes you so longwinded?” Killeen winked at the crowd.

I speak to you now only out of obligation—which does not include enduring the slings and errors of toy intelligences. Very
well—your benefactor is the creature Abraham, of whom we spoke.

Joy kindled in Killeen’s eyes. “He
is
alive.”

The warp and slide of space-time here does not allow such easy simplifications.

“But if he sent this just now—”

The very term “now “is as ephemeral as you. Here, worse than meaningless.

Toby could see curiosity overcome his father’s exasperation. Killeen chewed at his lip and called, “That course you sent.
I want to know where it’ll take us.”

Where I live most intensely. The seat of forbidding energies and grand remorse. Where my feet dance on sizzling plasma. Inward,
tiny thing. To your terror.

A
lmost despite himself, Toby was drawn back to the Bridge through the long hours of their descent.

Argo
was using the galactic jet as a shield now, plunging in along it. Ghostly blue filaments twisted and snarled and rushed by
them, fleeing outward. Their streaming made the ship’s flight seem even faster. The deck rumbled with the plasma drive’s effort,
sucking in the blue gas and thrusting it out the back.

And now a puzzling, unspoken question was answered. For days the ship had buzzed with speculations: where were the mechs?

The Eater of All Things had loomed in legend for Family Bishop, and part of that ancient story held that mechs lurked and
labored there. Why, no one knew. They had driven humans from True Center long before the fall of the Chandeliers.

But until now they had seen only fleeting glimpses of mech ships. Now, far up along the jet,
Argo
detected huge, dark mech constructions. They had seen before enormous masses of mechwork, on their passage inward—and had
avoided them. Immense, mysterious, shrouded in energy-collecting panels. All mute, speaking on no channel humans knew.

These mech structures ringed the jet as though taking energy from it. The jet walls were alive with brilliant blue-white flashes.
Here antimatter, made near the black hole, collided with matter in furious, annihilating battle. But most of the jet’s energy
lay in its outward thrust. The mechs did not seem to lessen this as the jet passed. Instead, they seemed to be studying it.

Why were the mechs up there, circling the jet? It occurred to Toby that maybe this was their way of listening to the inner
rumblings of the black hole itself, but he could not imagine how. The jet was eerie and, he was quite convinced, beyond human
comprehension. Its constant turbulence served to hide the
Argo
, Killeen said. And the mech fabrications seemed to ignore such tiny matters as a single ship, anyway.
Argo
scurried like a rat through a palace.

Oddly, the center of the jet was nearly empty, making their flight easier. The gas had been robbed of its heat by the effort
of climbing up from the gravitational pit of the unseen black hole. The thick, cooling gas column around them protected against
the ferocious heat of the disk. It was almost as if someone had planned this tunnel into the innermost realm. To his teacher
Aspect Isaac, of course, it was just a bit of interesting physics.

The spin of the black hole hollows out the gas that it throws up this way. This jet resembles the spools of cotton candy I
got as a boy at the fairgrounds, a spun-out cloud of sheer sugary delight.

“What’s cotton candy?”

I forget how much your people have lost. Have you never been to a fair?

“A fair what?”

A gathering where—never mind. At least this beautiful blue haze around us reminds me of my better days, when high culture
reigned in the Chandelier of Queens, and I went ceiling-skating with my father.

“You were in the Chandeliers?”

Did you think I descended from clod-huggers such as you? We had great powers then, and held our own against the mechs who
now drive you like cattle before them. We regularly ventured into even this region, spying on the mechs who worked their strange
ways here. We—

“Hey, you’re from the Arcology Era!”

Isaac’s Aspect-aura turned peevish.

Well, true—but one of my nested Faces grew up in Wesouqk Chandelier, one of the last great ones. I saw a Chandelier once,
through a telescope, when it was still inhabited, they say. Regrettably, I spent my life in a planet-bound refuge, but—

“That was what you called ‘The Accommodation,’ wasn’t it?”

Well, yes—an unfortunate strategy. Still, my cultural roots—

From far back in Toby’s recesses arose a Face he seldom used, one who knew techstuff galore but not much else. Joe was slow
and stunted, a mere fraction of an Aspect, but he spat out bitterly,

1. You goddamn traitors set us up.

2. Playing along with mechs—real smart.

3. They smashed up your precious Chandeliers soon as they tricked you down to a planet.

4. Played you for chumps!

“That’s pretty much what history says, too,” Toby put in mildly. “Now, you want
real
Chandelier folk—” He pried up the digital lid on an Aspect he rarely used, Zeno. She was so splintered and crabbed that listening
to the wavering, ancient voice was painful.

I deplore . . . sinful bargaining away . . . our Chandelier heritage . . . by your generation. We sought no “accommodation”
. . . no justice . . . possible from mech . . . We had the key to . . . subverting them . . . disembowel their deepest . .
. logics . . . programs . . . They scattered . . . our lore . . . even then . . . we could not unlock the Cryptographs . .
. the Sore Magics . . . left by earliest humans . . . who once even . . . ventured here . . . to True Center . . . and grasped
the Sore Magics in their hands . . .

Her static-filled voice faded, leaving a curious hush in Toby’s mind. Zeno’s broken phrases carried such unspoken freight—sad,
hopeless, ruminating on tattered glories that meant nothing now. After a long moment Joe said,

1. See what you lost, Isaac?

2. “Accommodation”—you mean “sell-out.”

To Toby any notion of compromise with mechs was damnfool stupidity, and Isaac’s generation had escaped the consequences only
by pure luck. The instant he framed this thought, Isaac flared.

Not luck! We assisted the Hunker Down. This was a perfectly rational strategy, to invest in human colonies on the many worlds
on the outskirts of True Center. To make Families which would develop a hybrid vigor of ideas, social norms, and weaponry.
Those were our strengths as a species!

Toby could see how Rooks, say, differed from Knights—and not just in their table manners. But what Isaac might mean by “hybrid
vigor” escaped him—yet another dry, ancient idea discarded as so much surplus baggage by Family Bishop, long before he was
born.

1. Look where it ended up.

2. Mechs got you anyway.

Isaac shot back,

The Chandeliers were untenable! Just big targets, floating in the spaces of high-energy particles and hard vacuum, the mechs’
natural habitat!

A burr of rasping static almost swamped Zeno’s words:

We defended ourselves . . . long as we could . . . unvector the mech Mandates . . . core out their interlocks . . . but you
lost all that . . .

Again the melancholy voice silenced his mind for a moment. Isaac finally rallied in an apologetic tone.

We tried the experiment, granted, and it finally failed. Wesouqk Chandelier—I saw it burning like a hornets’ nest in the sky!
Imagine my sadness. At least we had sheltered our kind beneath the comforting blanket of air and gravity.

Zeno’s reply came sluggishly.

. . . a worthy . . . gamble . . . but so much . . . lost.

Isaac sounded more confident now, though to Toby’s inner ear the tone was hollow.

I at least knew us at our height. The glory—

Zeno cut in with waning energy,

You pretender . . . you did not know the heights . . . they came long before . . . even me . . . the great works . . . skills
you cannot begin to understand . . . pretender . . .

Chastened, Isaac answered,

I am sorry that the mechs later undid our noble Hunker Down. Even you, poor Joe, must realize that we had to strip much cultural
memory from the Hunker Down worlds, to make the experiment work. And you
did
fructify, bursting with fresh ways to win worlds and hamper the mechs. For a while, at least.

Joe stirred angrily but confined himself to:

1. Damn hard down there.

2. I’d sure rather lived in a big sky-city.

Isaac shot back,

I do not have to respond to such vague wanderings.

Toby was irked by Isaac’s haughty manner.
Dinky chip-mind!
“If you’re so great, how come you’re just an Aspect now?”

I had such talents of mind, in compiling and integrating knowledge, that I was saved. What do you think will be
your
fate, boy?

There was real, flinty rage in this retort. Toby had to remember that Isaac and the other Aspects were little miniatures of
whole people, not just books he could open, read, and drop. To keep minds running, they had to have the facets of a balanced
intellect, or else they would go insane. So he shouldn’t expect them to take offhand insults mildly.