“More mechs!”
“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.”
