“Where are we going in all this?” Besen asked, wonder and fear mingling in her tone.
“I don’t know. I can’t even guess.”
“The disk, it’s like a huge world or something.”
“A world is nothing here, a fly speck.”
“But I can see clouds down there. And that twisty thing, it almost looks like a river.”
“Almost ain’t the same as is. Those clouds are really plasma that would boil away your hand in an eye-blink. That river, my faithful Aspect tells me, is some kind of magnetic knot that’s gotten caught up in the disk as it churns around.”
“But it looks so familiar, somehow.”
Toby’s mouth twisted, eyes distant. “We need to see familiar things here. Otherwise it’s too strange to deal with.”
Besen paused, then nodded soberly. “My teacher Aspect just said that ‘river’ is bigger than a whole planet. Lots bigger. And that the disk is the size of a solar system.”
“Sometimes I wish our Aspects wouldn’t tell us so much.” She nodded, her hair tumbling in the low gravity. “I felt better when I thought that little squiggle was a river. Still, with the Aspects we can get all branches of learning.”
Toby chuckled dryly. “Branches, yeasay. But none of the roots.”
“What do you mean?”
“They can’t tell us what all this means.”
“They know lots of facts and numbers, though.”
“Maybe that’s all we can trust them with. Anyway, this place, it’s big-time stuff.” He had to keep up a casual face, but the approaching disk, swelling, throbbing with seething light, was starting to inspire in him less awe and more plain old fear.
“And it eats stars. We don’t belong here.”
“Yeasay to that, too. Only somebody thinks we do.”
“And your father believes it, too. He decides.”
A note of bitterness had crept into her voice. Around them jaws clenched, eyes whitened as a giant white flare burst across the disk, and a low growl rose. Slowly it dawned on Toby that the entire Assembly Hall murmured with discontent, with dread, with tight-stretched anxiety. The deaths had sobered them, loosened Killeen’s hold. A bitter wind stirred them all.
A band of men and women at the far side of the Hall began shouting. Before Toby could understand what was happening, the crowd began to move. They knocked over tables and squeezed through the outer doorways, pressing on with gathering energy, like a tide sucked forward by an irresistible moon. Sour words flew, boots thumped on the deck, the air rang with harsh accusation.
Toby got up and followed, hardly noticing the twinge in his leg where a metal spike had gouged him in the agro dome. That seemed like an age ago. He didn’t limp; his body had already fixed up most of the gouge.
He and Besen were at the back when the swarming pack reached the Bridge. To Toby there was a ghostlike quality to the rapid swerve of events. Again the officers stopped them. Again Killeen appeared on the balcony. Again he held them back with a stern speech.
This time Toby sensed the deep foreboding in the shuffling, muttering crowd, and now that he knew what to look for, he saw how his father used their fear to bind them to him. They needed to believe in him now, and he played upon that. If he hadn’t, they might easily have worked themselves into a frenzy, have boiled over into mutiny.
Killeen held them in part by sheer physical presence. He was a full chest-length taller than Toby, testament to his greater years. He used that, and the added perspective of the balcony, to cow the louder protestors.
Long ago, in response to the rapacious mechs, humanity had lengthened its life span by tinkering with its own growth pattern. The body given forth by natural evolution, far back on ancient Earth, had matured at about twenty of the Old Earth years. Then even the best body hit a plateau. Gradually it weakened with the years, the erosion of muscle and bone offset by the slow gathering of wisdom and experience.
To counter this, long ago the Family of Families had sculpted humanity. Now, people simply never reached that plateau where decline set in. People died of injury and mech attack, not age. They never stopped growing. Their rate slowed, of course—otherwise, elders would shoot up into sluggish giants. A woman a century old might not gain an extra finger’s width of height in a decade. But she grew. And she would have all the savvy and grit years brought.
This perpetual late youth held in check the inner magics that governed aging. The eldest Bishops were nearly twice as tall as Toby. This meant higher door sills and bigger meals. More important, elders towered over others, their experience given the force of bulk. Toby stood lanky for his eighteen Old Earth years, but he felt small and insignificant compared to Cermo or Killeen. In them, the weight of Family authority had firm physical presence.
This Killeen used with unconscious, telling effect. Still, voices called out protests. Oaths cut the air, strident and ragged with fear.
The only pressure keeping the crew back was the long history that had led them here. More than anyone, Killeen embodied that past. He stood fire-eyed, intimidating in his scowling silence. He had fooled the Mantis, gotten them off Snowglade. He had fallen through a planet and lived. Been swallowed by Quath, then been set free. He had killed mechs and laughed as he did it. And a voice like lightning had sought him out, had led them here. Against that they weighed their own fear.
At that stretched moment Quath came lumbering from the main corridor. There was a strange smell to the alien, a sweetsour aroma in the steadily warming ship. People moved uneasily aside. The alien was an ally, but that did not alter her strangeness.
Quath stopped, her great head turning. Ruby eyes on stalks twisted like vines, slowing to study a nervous upturned face, a bearded man’s hair, a woman’s clutched carrypouch, as if they were museum exhibits.
Then she sent, <I have finished communion with my kind. The great Cosmic Circle is prepared. They come fast upon us, for purpose I do not yet see. They say we must speak again with the magnetic being.>
Somehow, this straight, factual message carried the day. They quieted, looking to Killeen, who said calmly, “I’ll try. They’ll help us? With whatever comes?”
<They must.>
Toby thought it was a little funny that Quath didn’t say “They will” or “They’ll try”—but then the crowd began to drift away, and he realized that this odd, quiet note had gotten Killeen through another crisis.
As officers went back to their jobs, he and Besen managed to slip onto the Bridge. Killeen was talking to Quath, who snaked her neck and head into view. Metallic shanks scraped the walls as she moved, legs clattering with a staccato rhythm Toby found unsettling.
“That’s all they said?” Killeen demanded.
<The noise of transmission mounts. Plasma waves lap and tug at every word.>
“Where you figure we’re headed?”
<The Myriapodia have aged records which are perhaps of some use. They do not believe our goal can be the disk—that way lies chaos and death.>
