Toby was standing at the back of the Bridge, talking in the barely audible whisper that was enough for an Aspect to get but couldn’t be overheard. He studied Killeen, who moved with casual assurance among his ship’s officers. Since they had turned downward in the jet, his brow was no longer furrowed, his eyes not haunted by uncertainty.
Not that anybody else felt that way. The Lieutenants were jumpy, troubled, sweating—and not just from the increase in hull temperature. Even the cool blue gas couldn’t screen out all the disk radiation. The ventilators labored, wheezing lukewarm air. A thin tension underlay the customary quiet of the Bridge, beneath the muted, orderly ping and chime of computer prompts, reminding officers of tasks needing supervision.
“So he was ready for our little mob, huh?” He gave the old man a nod of grudging respect.
There is more to being Cap’n than giving orders.
“Yeasay, but a Cap’n better be right.”
Now he has the authority he wanted.
“Straight from Abraham.” Toby remembered his grandfather as a towering, gray-faced man with a raw-boned look of intense concentration, even when he dozed in front of a hearth fire. That intensity slumbered, then burst into energetic action. Abraham’s distracted stare would often split into a broad grin when he saw Toby, and Toby would find himself yanked up into a whirling sky where he seemed to fly in the big man’s arms, scooting high over furniture and through corridors, sometimes outside onto a deck where Abraham would make him swoop and dive over the guardrail, Toby shrieking and laughing and screaming when the ground rushed away and he felt as though he really was soaring, somehow set free of weight and care. So long ago. Toby bit his lip at the memories, already fading. “Abraham. Or so that magnetic thing says.”
You do not believe it.
“Why should I? Who would, with half a brain?”
Yet strange vectors work here.
“Look, Abraham we lost at the Calamity, the fall of Citadel Bishop. That was plenty years back and a hell of a long way from here.”
Exactly.
“What you mean by that?”
How would some creature not even made of matter at all, this far distant, know his name?
That stopped Toby for a moment. “Okay, I don’t know. But mechs, they make records of everything. Maybe the Magnetic Mind learned it from them.”
But the Mind seems to be no friend of mechs.
“Who knows, in this craziness?”
I sometimes wonder about the connection between these entities. Remember the Mantis?
“Sure.”
The thought chilled him. The Mantis had pursued Family Bishop, “harvesting” them, killing their bodies and sucking away their selves so that the Family could extract no chipmemory. These suredead the Mantis fashioned into grotesque contortions that it termed “art”—and had displayed to Killeen and Toby with a touch of something like pride.
The Mantis stood in awe of the Magnetic Mind. It may have offered up its knowledge of us, of our ways and persons, to the Mind.
He felt Shibo as though she were sitting before him cross-legged, relaxed and yet ready to move in an instant. “I . . . I don’t want to think about that now.”
Such memories can hobble us, dear Toby, but they must be faced.
“Hey, some other time, okay?” He felt her somehow shift, pressures adjusting. He sighed with relief and felt better.
It is interesting that now your father has the crew behind him, supporting what he had said all along he wanted—to fly to the True Center, and find there what the ancient texts said was a miraculous place.
Toby shrugged. “Maybe that’s what a talent for being Cap’n means. You finagle things around until you like them.”
He had let his gaze drift aimlessly, and didn’t notice his father approaching. Killeen asked sharply, “What’re you saying?”
It was the height of impoliteness to intrude into conversation with an Aspect—much less with a Personality, which could absorb your whole attention. Toby gulped. “I, I was just—”
“I lip-read you saying ‘Cap’n.’ What is it you can’t say to my face?”
“Idle talk, that’s all.”
Killeen licked his lips, hesitated, then plunged on. “It’s Shibo, isn’t it?”
“Well, yeasay, but—”
“I just want to say this. So she hears it straight from me.” Killeen stared deeply into Toby’s eyes, as if somehow he could see the compact intelligence that Toby felt as a looming wall.
“Dad, I don’t think—”
“Shibo, we’re going to need your judgment up ahead. I’m following my instincts here, and something big is going to happen.”
“Dad, come on, I—”
“Remember how we’d talk over plans, figure the best next move, just you and me? I miss that. I miss that a hell of a lot. I know I won’t get it back, but if you have any ideas, any guess about what I should do, you speak up, okay?” Killeen’s eyes were pleading. He blinked furiously, holding back tears. “Through Toby. I’ll understand, I promise I will.”
“Dad . . . you know . . .”
Sensations rose in Toby, strange coursing currents of excitement, desire, hoarse murmurs, smells layering the air, husky urgings, remembered moments of skin sliding, satiny, a sheen of sweat—
He jerked away, staggered. Then a hand patted his shoulder.