A burr of rasping static almost swamped Zeno’s words:
We defended ourselves . . . long as we could . . . unvector the mech Mandates . . . core out their interlocks . . . but you lost all that . . .
Again the melancholy voice silenced his mind for a moment. Isaac finally rallied in an apologetic tone.
We tried the experiment, granted, and it finally failed. Wesouqk Chandelier—I saw it burning like a hornets’ nest in the sky! Imagine my sadness. At least we had sheltered our kind beneath the comforting blanket of air and gravity.
Zeno’s reply came sluggishly.
. . . a worthy . . . gamble . . . but so much . . . lost.
Isaac sounded more confident now, though to Toby’s inner ear the tone was hollow.
I at least knew us at our height. The glory—
Zeno cut in with waning energy,
You pretender . . . you did not know the heights . . . they came long before . . . even me . . . the great works . . . skills you cannot begin to understand . . . pretender . . .
Chastened, Isaac answered,
I am sorry that the mechs later undid our noble Hunker Down. Even you, poor Joe, must realize that we had to strip much cultural memory from the Hunker Down worlds, to make the experiment work. And you did fructify, bursting with fresh ways to win worlds and hamper the mechs. For a while, at least.
Joe stirred angrily but confined himself to:
1. Damn hard down there.
2. I’d sure rather lived in a big sky-city.
Isaac shot back,
I do not have to respond to such vague wanderings.
Toby was irked by Isaac’s haughty manner. Dinky chip-mind! “If you’re so great, how come you’re just an Aspect now?”
I had such talents of mind, in compiling and integrating knowledge, that I was saved. What do you think will be your fate, boy?
There was real, flinty rage in this retort. Toby had to remember that Isaac and the other Aspects were little miniatures of whole people, not just books he could open, read, and drop. To keep minds running, they had to have the facets of a balanced intellect, or else they would go insane. So he shouldn’t expect them to take offhand insults mildly.
He whispered “Sorry” to Isaac and to his surprise felt a burgeoning presence displace the Aspect. A sensation like a swelling, an emergence, swept over him, making his skin prickle, his scalp stiffen. The Isaac Aspect squealed but dwindled, swept back into its mental cell. This was the first time he had ever experienced Shibo’s Personality fully, her essence flooding through his mind, insistent and powerful. Not a spoken voice, but a memory.
—Her past rose like dusty clockless hours recalled, streets she had known lying black and steaming. Refugees from the mechs had washed up in the lee of walls, in bitter alleys and vacant ruins. In those rank lanes light, wiry shadows walked high-shouldered, armed always, faces grizzled, eyes embedded in them alternately void and wary. Old stone walls of her Family’s Citadel yawned and veered in her memories, unplumbed by wearing winds. Marbled obelisks and crosses marked where the dead kept their own small metropolis—a land packed solid with the casketmaker’s trade, until urgency stole from them even that refinement, of setting down into ever-drying soil the already rotting clothes and broken bones. Under blue lamplights she had wandered as a girl in the wake of some funerial procession, done at dawn by long custom. Stones leaked back the night’s chill, up through her bare feet, pleasurably delicious as the day’s heat came spanking into her face and arms with the already stinging dawn. Slow, solemn march. Past corrugated warehouses, across sandy celebrant squares, through warrens of home gardens carefully watered—redpouch, heather grain, teardroop fruit. Engines labored eternally to make weaponry, coughing like distant vast animals. Past smoking stacks and vagrant ropy vines and patches of hopeful yellow flowers. Buildings sagged and windows were eyeless sockets. Her Citadel was rent with ruin, the slow-sliding calamity of neglect. Wanderers from the plains sat mute, staring, their gaunt profiles stamped against the shredding dawn sky, old purposes lost in coasting eyes. A mongrel madness of defeat infected them, yet they smiled at her passing skip-steps. They had slept in their boots beside a generation’s furtive fires and gone on, into days of scavenge and pursuit, living beneath a massive rapacity.—
Toby staggered with the intensity, the touching fondness for places and people he had never seen. Then Shibo’s oddly quiet voice solidified.
You have not called on me recently.
“You . . . you can see what’s been going on. I’ve been busy.”
I doubt that is the true reason.
She was right, of course. Toby was new at this, and he couldn’t keep very much from a strong presence. It was almost like she was alive again, and he was peering through her skeptical black eyes, eyes that never wavered. But her eyes saw him, too, from inside.
Beneath their gaze his feelings leaked through the rubbery, artificial partitions of his mind. “It’s been rough going lately.”
Your father.
It was not a question. “He’s, well, I’m sure he’s doing what’s best for the ship—”
Are you?
“Well, he’s under pressure and all, and he comes across as pretty damned hard-nosed, but . . .” His words faded off as he realized that he couldn’t bluff even an Aspect, much less a Personality. Not where emotions were concerned.
It did not occur to you that he knew you and the others, the group from around the campfire, were coming? That someone would protest? There are monitoring cameras throughout the ship, after all.
“Ummm. Well, I suppose.”
He took Argo into the galactic jet at just that time. Knowing that almost certainly the Magnetic Mind would return then, with more to say.
“You’re sure he planned it that careful?”
I love your father still. But he has changed. He has hard-learned the sometimes cynical skills of Cap’ncy.
Toby had not grasped yet how to look very much ahead of events—things just seemed to rush at him, coming fast and fierce—so this degree of scheming seemed pretty unlikely. On the other hand, adults were more than a little weird. “So did he know what the Magnetic Mind was going to tell us, then?”
I doubt that. He looked as shocked as the rest.
“Well, he sure looks okay now.”
