Killeen drew a long breath. “Thank you, son. I needed that. Just a moment with her, that’s all.”
Before Toby could spit out a rebuke, Killeen stepped back, saluted, turned—and strode away, the crisp Cap’n again. Toby felt irritated, used. He tasted sharp, bitter bile in the back of his mouth. Damn him! But in the same moment he could see the anguish in his father, and the turmoil that the man could not let rise to the surface.
It is wise to forget this.
“Yeasay, only wisdom’s not my strong area.”
You are much like your father.
A faint tinkling laughter sounded in his mind. A Personality could take a certain abstract distance from his seething world, Toby saw, and catch the amusement of it. Humor usually invisible to him.
There is an old Family Knight saying, time-honored. Some believe it comes from Old Earth. We say that life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.
“Makes sense. Maybe that just means we shouldn’t look back over our shoulder too much, see what’s gainin’ on us.”
Good advice as well.
Toby leaned against a steel bulkhead and sighed. Shibo towered in his mind, her serene intelligence sifting through what he saw with a finer, more patient hand.
I wonder who else—or what else—wants us to come here?
“I can’t see what makes anybody think people could live in this place. Quath maybe, but not humans. All those old engravings, what were they talking about? Miraculous, sure—” he swept a hand at the view. “But dead.”
The wall screens sputtered with virulent radiance. The disk of inward-orbiting matter drew nearer, revealing more fine-grained whorls of color and glowing violence. Now the doomed star they had seen days before was no longer a lopsided, blazing egg. It had exploded into flares, a storm being sucked greedily into the outer rim of the disk. It was like a tortured, twisted sun setting on the far horizon above a flaming landscape. “Looks like a frying abyss to me.”
With a gut-tightening surge of feeling, Toby knew that they didn’t belong here. The Families were all nomads, in the long run. Only machines could live in this huge, fiery engine. The Families were here now only because of Argo, another mechanism made in the great days of human antiquity. Machines like Argo were a natural extension of the human hand, but mechs were a cancer. Planets were not their home. Let cold space and burning matter be their realm. So what of human scope could lie here?
Perhaps we are being narrow of vision.
“What’s that mean?”
Look there. The threads of green.
The Argo was plunging ever closer to the disk, and now they could see the far rim in profile. Gouts of angry red boiled up from the churning plane where the freshly eaten star was working its way inward. Lumps were being chewed as they rotated in the streams.
“So? Looks like a rat getting digested by a snake.”
True. Not pretty, probably not even if you’re a snake.
“Oh, I see. Those green strands above the plane there?”
Toby could now make out weaving filaments of deep jade that stood above where the star was being devoured. They were like reeds above swamp water, blowing in a breeze.
“It flashes, see?” Blue-green fibers winked with darting yellow. “Like frozen lightning, sort of.”
We might be wrong, that nothing else lives here.
“Ummm. Lightning life?”
The Bridge officers had noticed the threads, too. Some fumbled with ship’s instruments, focusing sensors on them. Knots and furious snarls climbed up the glowing green lines.
“The stuff ripped off the star—looks like it’s fouling up those threads,” Toby said.
Jocelyn had managed to get the Argo’s antennas to narrow in on the threads, despite the turbulent plasma buffeting the ship. The speakers on the Bridge sputtered and buzzed with the fizzing emissions of the disk—and then eerie high wails cut through the mushy wall of sound.
“What’s that?” Jocelyn called. “It sounds terrible.”
Killeen’s mouth twisted at the shrill chorus. Each voice would rise momentarily over the others, peal forth a mournful note, and then subside into the lacing pattern of lament. “Maybe the Magnetic Mind’s not the only thing that knows how to live on electricity.”
Toby said, “Not all of them are making those sounds, though. See?”
Jocelyn nodded. “It’s the ones that are connected to those bright lumps.”
Toby’s Isaac Aspect fluttered for attention, and Toby let him out:
These are the stuff of remote history. I heard of them as a boy. Conferring with Zeno now, I believe I may perceive the essence. They are an early life form composed of magnetic vortices, laced with some hot matter. A primitive mode. They feed on the flares and plumes which jut above the disk, like tasty spring flowers from a lush field.
“Doesn’t look like they’re enjoying dinner much,” Toby said sardonically.
The sudden intrusion of the star’s mass has flooded them, sucking some down into the fierce disk, where they die.
“How come the Magnetic Mind doesn’t die, then?”
It is far greater, larger, finer than these simple, primitive fibers—or so history says. I know little of it. The Mind is vastly old, and reveals no secrets except by necessity. Humans before the Chandelier Era tried to discover some facets of it, and were singed for their trouble.
Toby grimaced. The shrieks and wails were strangely gripping, as each thin voice had its moment, sobbed forth a song beyond understanding, and then faded into the flickering static as the disk plasma reached up, bloated with digesting starmass—and dragged in the delicate jade streamers, swallowing them in fire. They had lived too close to the edge of grand ferocity, and now paid the price. They struggled frantically against the scalding splashes, gaining small and momentary victories, but in the end they slid into blazing oblivion. The star’s shredded mass was plunging inward through the disk, wreaking havoc among the slender, lacy beings.
Toby watched their distant deaths, and despite the gulf separating him from those reedy cries, he felt a strange connection. Such truly alien forms could never be brethren. They were separate nations, but still caught with humans in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of splendor and travail. Beyond matter itself, gifted with extensions of the senses no human could ever comprehend, they none the less shared the veiled dignity of being forever incomplete, of always emerging, a common heritage of being finite and forever wondering.
