Toby saw his father’s point. These people had tech probably beyond theirs, but they were still human. A lot of communication was not talk, but presence, and the Bishops towered over these other men and women. Jocelyn and Toby, the shortest, still were half again the height of these arrogant dwarves.
Killeen let this fact work on the room, and then said, “I expect you to abide by the letter and intent of our agreement.”
The judge paused, sensing the situation. Then she smiled for the first time. “It is pleasant to encounter a visitor who understands the nuances of negotiation.” She held out a hand. “Monisque, I’m called by my friends. My enemies prefer shorter words. Let’s get our terms worked out in detail. Then maybe we can all have a drink.”
Some human rituals were eternal. Toby had no doubt that the drinks would contain a liberal lacing of alcohol.
FIVE
Trans-History
Quath clambered along beside them, clanging and scraping through Andro’s reception area. She had been forced to squeeze through the loading docks and equipment bays of the port, because the personnel areas were hopelessly small. Toby could have sworn that Quath had added some more legs into the bargain, but the knobby steel shanks moved so fast, her pneumatic joints wheezing, that it was hard to tell.
The buildings here glowed like warm butter. Probably part of these people’s security precautions, Toby guessed, but he couldn’t imagine how. Unless somehow the buildings held energies that could flick out, lick away offending Bishops . . .
“How’s that by you, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon?” Killeen asked.
Her angular head swiveled toward Killeen—a politeness she had learned that humans appreciated, though it was completely unnecessary, since her voice came to them through comm. Still, she said nothing.
“C’mon, Quath, don’t worry,” Toby said, making his voice carry a lightness he did not feel, and hoping the alien couldn’t tell that. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be right there.”
<Quath’jutt’kkal’thon neither minds nor matters.>
Toby was puffing just trying to keep up with her. “How come, eyeball-plucker?”
<I do not mind. And now that we have reached this strange place, I do not matter.>
Killeen said, “To these people you matter. They want you pretty bad.”
<For their own ends. Perhaps when all purposes are known, they shall prove to be our ends as well.>
“They seem pretty worried about the Myriapodia,” Killeen said.
To Toby his father seemed edgy and intense, eyes darting to the sides as they passed out of the receiving dock and into the city. They picked up more of the “Honor Guard,” as the judge had called it—teams of men and women with long-bore weapons slipping down side streets, quick-eyed and edgy, clearing the way. The streets ahead were deserted bare stone, closed shops, echoing the Bishops’ ringing boot heels. Killeen signaled to Cermo and a dozen others, who formed their own perimeter line. The people of this monotonous city didn’t seem like a threat; they all knew the “Honor Guards” were there to keep the Bishops in line.
<I will tell them only what the Code of Philosophs allows.>
Quath followed precepts Toby could never figure out. Sometimes she would reel out endless detail about Myriapodia history. Other times, she would clam up tight, not even acknowledge questions.
“They’re dead anxious for news from out of the Far Black, as they call it,” Toby added.
The guards, their squinty-eyed tautness and all, made him nervous. Even the air here itched with faint striations, as though electricity hummed through it. These people, their funny little stunted city, the sheer incredible but rock-solid fact of it being here at all—they added up to a profound unease. And things were moving so fast, he couldn’t get straight answers to any of the myriad questions this place conjured up.
“If that’s what they’re buying, then that’s what we’re selling,” Killeen said. “Cermo! Heave ass down that alley and sight on those far clouds.”
“What spectrum?”
“Give me a see-through, infra or better.”
Cermo swaggered forward, decked out in full field regalia, clicking and rattling with techno-ornaments. His fine-webbed electronets seethed with energy. Antennas embedded at shoulder, waist, and butt looked every-which-way, in full 3D. His weaponry was polished from long hours of care and repair on ship, but still pitted and burnished from a thousand forays.
Toby recalled the times when such gear was everyday wear for all Bishops. They had been on the move, their sensoria stretched out to max perimeter, each Bishop a sentinel. For years after the Calamity they had roamed like that, rising weary, red-eyed, and sore each morning, to a world drawing always dryer, with hunger and mech pursuit the only constants.
Locals peeped at them from around distant corners. They seemed interested and amused. Rats in bow ties.
Cermo clumped down an alleyway and into an open area, where he could get a full sight on the far horizon.
Toby couldn’t figure out the sky here. He knew this wasn’t a planet, not by any stretch, but still there were billowy white clouds drifting not far above the stunted buildings. There had even been a thunderstorm, catching them on the hike back to Argo’s berth. That had startled him—pure, tasty water falling from a sky like God’s gift. He hadn’t seen such a tasty shower since he was a boy, had played for hours in its mud.
—and at once was in a torrent, a downpour, spattering crystal droplets over his face. Her face. Her face. Endless gouts and flurries of blessed clear streaming cold, a waterfall hammering and thundering down a mountainside, she standing gleefully under it, yellow party dress plastered to her slim legs, a young girl getting ecstatically drenched—
The intrusion was sudden, raking across his mind. Shibo. Her rising buttresses, flanked by granite masses. He felt within her Personality a sweeping reach, the sinks and hollows of another’s interior self, a fresh continent spread bone-broad before him. The waterfall faded. Rain fell in the great distance, slanting from troubled clouds, signature of her own sad presence.
You have not summoned me forth for some time.
“I’ve been busy.” Something in the waterfall, the pleasures of it, made him uneasy. He noticed that he had a hard-on, and hoped she wouldn’t.
I know how hard it is to get along with your father. I did, once.
“He’s running the show, sure, but . . . I just don’t feel easy about it.”
He is the man whose sense of opportunity has brought you far, so very far—
“I don’t know what he’s after anymore.”
I believe his goals are as ever. But he is a man who hides his inner self, now. A Cap’n must.
“Not from me, he doesn’t.”
