Killeen smiled without humor. “I guess it is, in a way. Vital lightning, the same as you and I are really walking heaps of controlled burning. That’s what keeps us going, thinking, doing. Oxygen burns our food, one of my Aspects says. This thing uses electricity, generated by that disk down below.”
“How?”
“I dunno. But energy is energy, and the way I figure it, this thing has learned how to stack magnetic fields, build them up into something like a body.”
Toby liked to appear capable and savvy in front of ship’s officers, but the striations before Argo didn’t look like anything he remembered. “Huh?”
Killeen shrugged. “I’ve been getting prickly feelings, like something probing at me.” He shook his head. “Hard to explain, but it’s like before. The Magnetic Mind glues itself together with magnetic fields. Or maybe it just is magnetic fields, period. And it lives somewhere here, so . . .”
A deep strumming came up through Toby’s heels. At first he thought it was the ship’s acceleration as it fought against the lurking gravitational pulls here in this riot of mass and light. Then he noticed that the quivering came and went with a slow rhythm. He felt it through his ears and hands, too. Pulses. Then the odd vibration climbed into the massive walls and filled the air of the Bridge with a heavy presence.
Give sign if you perceive.
The voice was gritty, granite-hard, immense.
“Not like before,” Killeen whispered. “Then it used our sensoria. Now—look, the whole room is shivering.”
I am charged with a task of discernment. If you be of the tribe of Bishop, give voice.
The Bridge was acting as a giant amplifier for the hollow, lordly voice, the walls ringing and shaking like a loudspeaker. Toby wondered how a thing that was just magnetic fields, with no weight or substance, could do that.
Killeen looked cornered, surrounded by the voice. Then he barked out, “Bishops we are. I’m Killeen. Remember?”
So you are. I forget nothing, and store tidings of times ancient beyond your imaginings in the curls and knots of my being. I recall your particular flat odor and squashed, slanted self. Good—I have been enjoined to inspect you.
“By who?” Killeen called. The Bridge crew stood transfixed, and the voice ignored him.
I seek another as well. It is termed “Toby” and must be with you if you are to receive further attentions from the inner realm.
“I’m here,” Toby shouted.
Are you? Let me taste . . . Each of you tiny things has a different aroma, an angularity. Such pointless profusion!
“We’re different people!” Toby protested.
Skittering spokes shot through him, electric-quick and bristling with points of pain. Probing. Then they were gone.
You are the flavor termed “Toby”—your animal signatures match the genetic inventory, crude though it is. Creation is so trivially diverse, endowing each of you with oblique gene-scents and dusky shadings. Such a waste of natural craft! Detail and artful turns, needlessly multiplied, throwing reason to ruination.
“We like ourselves pretty well,” Toby said, tight-lipped.
So you do. All is illusion. Still, I must report that you are here. Then I hope to be quit of this obligation and irritant.
“Wait!” Toby cried. “What’s this about? Who wants to know?”
A power which sits further inward.
“Well, what is it?”
It is not of the cold, dead flecks of matter such as you inhabit. The power which presses me to this task speaks to me through my feet, which rest in the warm hearth of the plasma disk.
“Yeasay,” Toby persisted, “so it’s a, a plasma cloud?” Whatever that was.
It dwells somewhere below me, in storm-cut majesty, but is unknowable to as large an entity as I.
Killeen called, “You said last time, years ago, that my father had something to do with this.”
Years? I do not know such terms . . .
Killeen said, “A major part of our present lifetimes. I—”
But which “present” do you reside in? Duration, distance—these are primitive terms.
Killeen was visibly puzzled. “Look, was my father—”
Tiny forms such as yourselves are impossible to resolve in the warp of energies at my feet. But such terms and names come rippling up to me, along the cables of myself. When such information was loaded onto my eternal tangle of knowledge-knots, and thus the age of this clotted cognizance, I cannot know. Forms such as yourself were once there, yes—squalid primitives. Their persistence in the realm of immense clashes-imponderable is quite unlikely.
“You’re saying he’s dead?” Killeen asked sharply.
Tiny lives wink like flames beneath my footpoints. My whole motivation to assume this field-form is to rise above mortality and its minute matters. I cannot register small endings, any more than animals like you sense grains of sand as you trod them.
“Is he—”
I go. If the power below desires more, I shall touch you further.
“Wait! We need to know what to do here, how to escape—”
The vibration of the Bridge walls cut off, leaving a hush.
