And Quath stalked among the ruins. Her double-jointed legs worked in their steel sockets as Quath seized a wall of gray bricks. Alarmed, Toby trotted forward, boots clanging heavily.
—What happened? Did a piece of the Chandelier hit it?—
<No, warm-blooded scavenger.>
—But this much, something big—hey!—
Quath jerked powerfully and the entire wall came apart. Bricks of waste and garbage flew everywhere. Then Toby noticed that despite their tumbling and spinning, the bricks all drifted into neat stacks on the hull, following long, curved paths in zero-gravs. They settled nicely into order with impossible, liquid grace.
—How’d you do that?—
<Nourishment-of-maggots, I fashion my mountain-home of your cast off matter—true. But each has iron, and will adhere to the hull.>
—Okay, but how do you get them to fly apart like that, and go into the right stacks?—
<A craft of mechanics.>
Toby squinted up at the huge form as she broke up another part of her own dwelling. He knew enough about Quath to see that he would get no more explanation of how, so he turned to why. Quath answered, <I do not think my mountain will withstand our trajectory.>
—What trajectory? We haven’t decided where to go yet.—
<The soul of a species is best seen from outside. I prepare.>
And then Quath would say no more. She worked quickly and, for her size, with an unlikely deft touch. Toby called to her and got no answer.
He shrugged and walked away, reminding himself not to take this personally. Quath was not a woman in an insect suit. Nor was she an untamed and uncontrollable force of nature. She was just plain alien, and human metaphors didn’t apply. That was the hardest thing to remember, when you’d just been snubbed. Toby turned and called back,—So much for your crap-castle, bug-face!—
Quath stopped and waved two feelers at him but said nothing but <[untranslatable]>. Maybe that was an obscene gesture, for Quath’s race—but Toby would never know.
He stalked away and took out his irritation by working harder, faster. He was pleasantly tired by the time the job was done, and when he cycled back inside he treated himself to a full shower.
This was three days early, but he felt sorely used by life. He thumbed the nozzle on full bore and selected options of suds and an alcohol spray. By pure luck it was the first day in a cycle and the water was fresh. It didn’t smell of other Bishops or of the refilter that never really took away all the odors. He let the wonderful warmth gush over him, tuned the nozzle to pound his muscles and massage his scalp. Back in Citadel Bishop they had lots more water, so much he had even played in a bath of it once. Usually baths were reserved for couples, as part of the wedding ceremony.
He was sorry when his charge was used up and the last dribbles gurgled away. He wouldn’t have another such treat for weeks.
He sighed, dropped into his bunk—and his caller chimed. Cermo’s voice rang in his left ear. “Report to Command, Toby.”
Toby groaned. He and Besen had planned on “resting up” together, which was Family slang for a little mutual bunk time in the free-for-all quarters. Unmarried Family enjoyed a period of complete sexual freedom, before the necessity of childbearing closed in, and Toby had been making the most of it. This feature of shipboard life he liked best—time to indulge the animal within. Well, it would have to wait.
He called Besen and explained. She groaned. “Hey, and I got us time in a zero-grav section, too!”
“Duty calls, my Juliet.”
“So you did check that play. See, it’s parting that’s such sweet sorrow.”
“In this case, it’s staying apart.”
“Hurry it up, Romeo. Maybe we can still use the time I booked.”
To his surprise, only his father and Cermo were in the Command Center. The two figures seemed dwarfed by the enormous ceramic-faced banks of computers, the arrays of sliding phosphorescent data. Cermo said rather stiffly, “We have need of your Shibo Aspect.”
Toby studied his father’s face in the shimmer of blue-white data displays, remembering the last time they had talked about Shibo, but Killeen was wearing his firm Cap’n persona. His dark eyes gave nothing away. “Uh, okay. What’s up?”
“Two things, really.” Killeen was brisk, efficient. “That engraving from the Chandelier, remember? We’re trying to decipher it. Give a squint.”
“Ummm.” Toby was mystified. He summoned up his Shibo Personality. Her cool presence paused a long moment and then said,
This “she” must’ve been quite a woman.
Killeen said, “We can’t make sense of some parts of this.”
Toby frowned. “What’s it mean, that every other line is written backwards?”
Cermo shrugged. “Some kinda code?”
He felt Shibo meshing with his oldest Aspects, calling up shreds of memory. She summed these and reported:
This is an ancient skill. I saw such when I was a girl with Family Knight. This was written to be read digitally. Instead of returning to the left to scan each line, a digital mind simply reads the characters in backwards order as its field of view returns, right to left.
Toby relayed this. Cermo said, “Seems screwy.”
It saves time. Our practice of reading only after returning to the left each time is for simple minds.
Killeen said doubtfully, “Chandelier folk could do such?”
Family Knight did, once. Their ancient scrolls were writ so. I saw some as a girl.
Toby repeated this. He could see by the compression of Killeen’s face that it had great weight for him. It was the burden of all the Families to live out lives of flight and desperation, knowing that once their kind had strode proud and tall at Galactic Center. Chandelier-makers, explorers, hunters of vacuum beasts, riders of great storms. But that was so long ago now that even legends only whispered about the heights of such far antiquity.
