Killeen threw up his hands, swearing, and then drove a fist into the wall. A painful smack.
This shocked Toby more than the abrupt departure of the Magnetic Mind. He realized how much his father had bottled up, how desperate he was beneath his flinty exterior.
“Dad—what did it mean? What—”
“Damned if I know. That thing treats us like bugs.”
“Well, we don’t much like to talk to bugs, either,” Toby pointed out reasonably, hoping to josh Killeen out of his scowling, nasty mood. Then he thought a moment and added to himself, Except Quath.
“I wonder if it could be? My father, Abraham, here?”
“Don’t see how. We never found his body at the Citadel—but we had to run pretty quick then, there wasn’t much time.” He shook his head in a flicker of weariness. “That was a long time ago, a long way off.”
—and Toby felt it all again. Steel stripped from stone, caved-in ceilings, masonry and smashed furniture, lives ripped away. Smoke seething from crackling fires. Intricate warrens squashed into stone and slag. Blood running in gutters. Rivulets of browning red running from beneath collapsed buildings. The strange silence after the mech flyers had left. Wind blowing through snapped-off girders.
—And his father, wandering the ruins. Abraham! he had shouted. Over and over. The name snatched away by a hungry wind, lost in swirls of smoke.
Then he was back from the searing memories. He watched his father blink, face haggard, and then pull himself together.
Killeen said shakily, “I figured he was dead. Had to be.”
In Killeen’s face Toby saw how much his father wanted to believe that somehow Abraham was here, that the Magnetic Mind knew more than they did. But at the same time, the Mind obviously found humans repugnant, and would not lift a finger to help them.
Then Toby reminded himself that the Mind had no fingers, nothing but electromagnetic pressures and waves. But didn’t it say it had feet?
When the Mind had spoken to them before, back on Trump, it had said something about being an intelligence that had slipped free of matter, and lived solely in the states available to magnetic fields. Apparently such states lasted longer. The Mind seemed to think it was immortal. He remembered Killeen chuckling, saying, “Forever’s a long time”—because the Mind might be huge and powerful, but it could sure seem petty and finite, too. Which made it even harder to deal with. A god, at least, wouldn’t be insulting.
“Look, Dad, what are you going to do?” Maybe in a moment of openness like this Killeen would say what he really thought.
“Do?” Killeen looked at Toby as though just noticing him. “Get into that jet. See what it’s like.”
“Why? Can we escape that way?”
Killeen gave him a veiled look. “That gas is movin’ out pretty quick. It’ll give us a boost, maybe even shield us some. Make us hard to pinpoint.”
“We can ride it outward?”
“Could be.”
Toby grinned. “Great. Crew’ll be glad to hear that.”
“Oh? How come?”
“They’re worried, think you just want to go further on in, no matter what.”
Killeen gave nothing away. “I’m not saying the jet idea will work. We’ll just try.”
“Sure, Dad, sure—but there’s hope, right?”
Killeen gazed at his son for a long while, emotions playing across his face so rapidly that Toby could not read them. “Could
be. Could be.”
FIVE
Tiny Minds
When he got really out of sorts, Toby went for a run.
Since nobody could go hull-walking any more, because of the hard radiation that now bombarded Argo, he had to go jogging through lesser-used corridors. Thumping along the same monotonous route, he let his subconscious rummage around among his problems. Maybe his deeper layers could come up with something smart, he thought, though without much hope. Family Bishop was headed for a crisis, for sure.
He had gone to Quath for advice or just some good, reassuring insult-trading—but the alien had brushed him off.
<I cojoin with my own kind.>
She had rattled her enormous telescoping arms, as if for punctuation. There seemed to be several new ones, maybe worked up from other parts of her carcass. Quath had a way of redesigning herself—maybe as the Myriapodia’s equivalent of a fashion statement, Toby thought. Arms waved and clashed with a metallic ring, like a breeze blowing through a forest of steel trees.
“Hey, you old collection of spare parts, listen anyway.”
<I have several minds which could do my listening, but they are engaged.>
“Huh! You think just a fraction of you is enough to talk to me?”
<Listen, not talk. I could perhaps assign one of my monitoring subselves to—>
“Never mind! Sometimes talking to you is like shouting down a well, Quath.”
<I cannot [untranslatable].>
“Well, I can’t either!”
