Furious Gulf (39 page)

He walked on and something stung his nose. He remembered the time he had sat sick in an outhouse at the Citadel, smelling
it and afraid to leave even to get a breath of clean air, because of his diarrhea, which gave no warning. The whole Family
had gotten sick with it and a while later he had helped his father push the little house over on its side and fill in the
hole with the dirt from the next pit. Then a team of men and women had dragged it over and set it up in fresh splendor.

He came to the first bodies then. Brambles divided the long fields and irrigation channels. Chunky parts were hung up in the
branches. Bodies had exploded and the pieces were split along no anatomical lines Toby knew of. It could not have been very
long since it happened because they had not begun to rot, though the blood had long caked into a brown crust on them.

His Isaac Aspect fidgeted at not having been allowed out for a while.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as the ancient saying put it.

Toby knew that bodies did just the opposite. They decayed into wet slop, highly attractive to carrion beetles and clouds of
flies. How could the ancients get so simple a thing wrong?

He touched a few bodies gingerly. Mechs had been known to booby-trap bodies back on Snowglade, but apparently they had not
taken such trouble here.

It seemed wrong to leave the ripped sinews and muscle and bones snagged in brush but he turned away from the sight and moved
on. The outhouse smell came from the simple fact that their bowels were spread over the fields, too, wider than the spray
of heavier parts.

Further on whole bodies dotted the fields. They lay in small clearings where he guessed they had tried to fight something
above. They were intact and their skins were smooth and glassy. He knew the way bodies changed with time. The skin quickly
took on a lemon tinge which deepened into yellow-green. If left out for days the flesh went brown, a deeper brown than Cermo’s
beautiful smooth color.

—and left long enough, he suddenly recalled, the flesh thickened to be like coal tar, crusting hard where ripped or torn,
and the bodies swelled, too, getting too big for their clothes and bursting out at the cuffs and popping zippers open, people
becoming balloons, and the smell of them in the dry heat of midday, a heavy thing that lodged in your throat—

He caught himself. Those were not his memories.

I saw much when my Family died that it would be better if you did not know.

“Then don’t let it out!” He probed for Shibo but she was elusive, darting away.

I cannot stop. Your memories intersect me and there I am.

“I don’t need it.”

I am who I am. Or was.

He walked on, keeping his eyes away from the bodies as much as he could. There were only one or two in each field.

The bodies showing no damage had probably died from loss of Self. They were suredead. Without the Self the brain went on running
the simple routines that inflated lungs and pumped blood and digested food but very soon something went out of the whole thing.
Then the body stopped.

Nobody had ever studied much why this was. There seemed no point in it. The person was gone in the most profound way possible.
An old ship like
Argo
had techtricks to keep the body alive or at least frozen for future use, but there would be no point with the suredead.

He could see scuffed-up dirt and crushed yellowing maize where some of them in their last moments had pounded their boots
against the ground, feet drumming and arms flailing though they were already down. As control slipped from them their bodies
had fought in the only way they knew. Their fists were still clenched and their wrists were blue-black. Some had torn away
their clothes in a mad frenzy to shuck off the thing that was inside them and eating where hands could not reach.

Toby thought about burying them but there were many and the stench was worsening beneath the yellow sky. He caught motion
to his left and circled around a thick field of maize just going ripe. The movement registered as human in his sensorium.
It would be smart to just keep going away from this place but he felt some need to see a living person so he angled back toward
the spot.

One person. A lean woman kneeling beside a man’s face-down body.

For a moment Toby thought she was praying and he turned to leave. She held her hand up to the light then. Her little finger
reshaped itself into a snub-nosed tool and she jabbed it into the body’s lower neck. The skin there was red and puckered up.
She twisted her hand this way and that and pulled something from the spine. He recognized a slate-gray Aspect disk. The woman
took no notice of Toby though he must have popped up on her sensorium at this range. She slipped the disk into a pouch.

Another body lay only a few steps away. She made two of her fingers into probing and unlocking tools and slipped them expertly
into the spinal ports of the body. This time she got two disks and a square cartridge which Toby recalled could carry three
Faces in Family Bishop. When the woman had them in her pouch, she stood up and looked directly at Toby.

“You got rights here?”

He stepped from behind the rustling maize. “No. You?”

“Sure. Salvage rights.”

“They your Family?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m Bishop.”

“I’m Banshee.”

Toby eyed her. “I never heard of any Banshees.”

“I never heard of Bishops. It’s a big esty.”

“Any use taking those Aspects?”

“Might be.”

“Suredead usually have Aspects sucked out of them.”

“Depends on how fast it was done.”

“Even if some’re left, won’t they be crazy?”

“Got to take that chance.”

“I heard they get all fried out some way.”

“They’re still worth something.”

“What you mean?” Toby edged a little to his right.

“Trim an Aspect down to a Face maybe.”

“Might be better to let them go.”

“That’s Banshee business.”

“How I know these are Banshee people?”

She looked at him square and hard. “You mind your own business.”

He stepped back. “Yeasay.”

“Yee-sah? Whuzzat?”

“Means I agree.”

Her lips turned up in a faint derisive smirk. “Your ‘yea’ rhymes with ‘see’ and your ‘say’ is like ‘ha’? Funny way to talk.”

“Yeasay, ma’m.”

He gave a half-salute and turned and walked away. Her sensorium played at his back and set off his micros all the way across
the field and down into the stand of trees beyond.

He stopped then and let her lose interest. She kept moving among the bodies and doing her work. As he waited he thought about
what to do. She scouted out away from him and then drifted back to the left as she searched.

He kept his sensorium on the lowest setting to track her and not give himself away. She was busy and had seemed nervous. He
stayed behind a big warped brown tree. When she came back into view she was checking the last of the bodies and in a hurry.

He knocked her down with a stunner. She was quick and rolled as soon as she hit. He got off another bolt on lowest power and
missed.

The other side of the big tree burst into flame. He saw her get to her feet and fire again but the shot went high. Through
the air wrinkling from heat refraction he fired again.

She sat down solidly and rocked backward and struggled to bring her arms up. Her left hand was a weapon of some kind and it
winked once. He felt the bolt go by and it was no stunner. His sensorium turned purple-red in warning. It could not defend
him against a clean hit.

Without thinking but keeping his pull smooth he shot her twice more. They were medium-level stuns and this time she flopped
over and did not get up.

He approached on the balls of his feet. She was sprawled out glassy-eyed. Carefully he bent down and took the pouch. It was
heavy.

Her eyeballs followed him as he checked over her gear. One eyebrow twitched angrily.

“Banshee, yeasay?”

Her indices said she was something called Bahai. He fished an Aspect chip out of the pouch and pressed it against his wrist
reader. The tiny hexagonal crystal there was cracked from some old accident but the optical pipe into his bone still worked.
It told him that the Aspect was damaged and had been a woman in the Buddha Gathering, which he supposed was some kind of Family.

“You’re a scalp hunter.”

Her eyeballs clicked back and forth furiously. He thought about stimming her up so he could hear some more of her lies but
she looked pretty quick even like this. And her gear was good. He did not even know what some of it did. She could be dangerous
with just a finger or two free.

“I’ll be taking these.” He hefted the pouch. “Figured to sell them, yeasay?”

Her mouth was coming back a little and her lips twisted. It was interesting to watch. Then he thought about what she had been
doing and the fun went out of it.

“I’ll give them to the first Family Buddha I find.”

He walked away fast. It was better that way, before he gave way to the temptation to make her pay a little more.

A
long dark time came and the temperature dropped steadily. He was out of food now and there was little to forage. He met few
people. The land wrenched and rippled and he was often sick with the gravitational turbulence.

In a desert region he came upon a man and a little girl. In the cold somehow the girl had in a moment of play frozen her tongue
and upper lip to a pipe that was part of a ruined building. They were camping there. The man did not want to rip the flesh
away and yet the girl was getting frantic, shaking from the pain. She crouched next to the pipe and whimpered. Her big eyes
looked up at Toby and he had an idea. There was no water nearby. No fire going for fear of mechs. He explained to the man,
who was her father. In the end the only quick way to do it was for the father to urinate on the girl’s lip to free it. This
worked. The daughter said she could not even taste the urine either but Toby thought she was just being polite.

He went on along a sandy slope and could see a thickly wooded region beyond. He loped that way just as his sensorium wrinkled
with the characteristic long hollow sound and the gray Wedge. The Mantis.

On the bare slumbering timestone he was fully exposed but he went through the usual measures. With a descending whisper his
sensorium collapsed. He sprinted and wished for food.

The timestone trickled into pebbles and then rubble and finally long slopes of sand. It sucked at his boots as he wallowed
through deep drifts. He went over one dune that came to a tip like a huge breast and then swept down. The slope came at him
faster than he had judged and he nearly fell. Then it bottomed out and he trotted forward on a flat spot. But again sooner
than seemed right the slope steepened. He struggled up it and the sand pulled at his legs as though trying to draw him under.
The crest rushed at him.

For a moment he stood at the peak. Other dunes lay in long ridgelines. The sand became glassy in the distance and shimmered
with small tremblings, like images seen through a heat haze. But the air was cold and getting colder.

His graphite-lubricated servos complained with a thin whine as they worked against the chill. His sensorium gave him not even
the muted call-back of its lowest ebb. He got only a hollow, droning grayness.

He called for his Aspects and Faces. None answered.

The dunes were moving, he saw. Their long ridges marched slowly in from a curved horizon. He labored down the approaching
slope and into the trough and up the next. The wave velocity helped his speed and in another few moments he stood atop the
next crest but could see no farther. No sky above now, just empty speckled dark. A seething world of sand rippled by deep
waves.

Though the massive undulations pressed into him through his boots the sand did not slide or crumble as it purred past. Tiny
grains flowed around his boots and on, following the instructions of something below that rolled on without eddying behind
him or otherwise taking note of his presence. Why he did not sink in such sand he could not tell. At the wave’s peak some
sand broke into a churning tan foam and then subsided. Land like liquid.

On the next wave coming toward him was a patch of white. Long strides took him down the near slope and into the trough. He
started up toward the white patch, which looked larger than before—

And stopped. Turned and ran back toward the trough.

The white patch was a garden of bones.

Bleached fingers and feet at the edge. Snapped forearms farther up, leading to ranks of smashed pelvises. Thighs arranged
in spreading fans around barrel rib cages. A short tower of arms and atop it a circle of bleached human skulls. Grins that
would last forever. Staring eye sockets.

Over the crest of the wave came a moving network of spindly rods. They looked to Toby like carbosteel bones pivoting in chromed
sockets. Cables thin to near invisibility moved it with jerky but quick agility.

It did not move like a creature so much as a framework for something unseen. He had the impression of a jutting, constantly
busy maze. A mobile lattice, housing a being that did not need true physical presence.

Not that this place was real. He knew that now.

Somehow he had gone from the bare-baked dryness of timestone to this sand-sea. Without noticing. Which meant that the Mantis
before him had arranged this elaborate snare and he had run full tilt into it.

His Isaac Aspect said brightly,

It is an anthology intelligence and can speak more directly through us.

“You’re workin’ for it?”

You speak as though there were choice involved. We are immersed in it, just as you.

He needed help. Someone, anyone. Desperately he rummaged for traces of Shibo. None.

“What’s it want? Or is this just what it feels like to be killed suredead?”