Yet this was his father, too. In the years since they had fled together across arid, murderous plains, the edges in Killeen had sharpened. Like a knife stroked on stone, Toby thought, a law of nature. And now Killeen expected of his son the same hardness, the same resolute separation that leadership demanded.
Toby lurched, the strife in him like a blow—a clash between the beckoning sense of the world Shibo held forth and the demands he felt radiating from Killeen. Cermo looked at him oddly, one eyebrow raised. Toby realized his face must show his feelings, and tightened it up—only to feel the Shibo Personality laughing gently at him, then fading back into its ghostly berth in him. He marched on.
They wound through twisted streets, across a broad plaza of black stone, and into the most impressive building Toby had seen here—a steep pyramid of hard glaring white. His Isaac Aspect said it was “pearly” and when Toby pressed his hand against the stuff it was shockingly cold. Sticky, too—and then they were being hustled through a wide portal and into seats before a high dais. The chairs were Bishop-sized and Toby’s clasped him with a warm, massaging grip. It was downright insinuating, fitting itself to him all along back and legs. He wondered if it would let him go, if whoever ran this place decided otherwise.
To his surprise, the judge, Monisque, appeared at the dais—this time in blue robes. “I figured she was something more than a judge,” Killeen whispered on closed comm.
“I’m happy to greet you again, far wanderers,” Monisque said lightly. “Now I’m wearing my other hat—Chief Swapper.”
“Sounds to me like you do everything here,” Killeen said.
“Appearances are deceiving. Most people have no interest in visitors, no matter what esty they hail from.” She nodded as dozens of the short people filled the remaining seats, buzzing among themselves. Toby noticed that the seats conformed to the dwarves, too, shrinking as required, and felt a little less paranoid.
“Our friend here, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon, is willing to yield data about any area not proscribed by his own, uh—” Toby could see Killeen struggle to put Myriapodia notions, even approximately understood, into human terms. “Uh, priestly orders. In return we’ve got a whole fistful of questions.”
“I’m not here to give away the whole store, Cap’n,” Monisque said skeptically.
Killeen was in no mood to start haggling right away, and Toby shared his impatience. “First, we want to know what this place is—how it works, its history, who made it. Second—”
“We can tell you what we know. I do not speak for the Lanes, though.”
“Lanes?” Killeen looked blank.
“Other axes of the esty. Didn’t Andro go through this?”
Andro himself stood up, in a crisper, cleaner coverall. “I tried to tell them, but they just don’t have the concepts.”
Toby couldn’t abide that. He shot up and charged, “The entire time you were on board Argo you kept trying to trade us for our gear. I didn’t hear you giving lectures on—”
“Okay, so I shaved a little time off the docket for my hobby. Still, your honor, these rubes don’t grasp a fraction of the topological fathoms necessary to—”
“Sit down, both of you,” Monisque snapped impatiently. “We’ll give you the standard Remedial Intro, no problem.”
“Second,” Killeen said mildly, as though he had a long way to go on his list, “I wish to know the location of my father, Abraham of Bishop.”
“Relative-tracing, huh? My tourist friend, that’s a major cottage industry around here.” Monisque made a notation by passing her hand over the dais top. “You’ll have to commission a search yourself.”
“You must know where your citizens are, who they are.”
“Oh, must we?” She arched an eyebrow. “There are more slippery Lane-vectors than you have hairs on your body, Cap’n—and they curl more than yours, too.”
The audience laughed, but no Bishops. Killeen’s mouth tightened and he sent on closed comm, “She can’t see my really curly ones—and not damn likely she will.”
To this the Bishops answered with a volley of hoots and snickers. The dwarves looked puzzled, as if trying to decide whether they’d been insulted.
Toby grinned. He wondered if these people had the tradition of Ranking, a round-robin of cutting humor, sarcasm, and insults both veiled and naked. On the run, such quicksbot talk could amuse and abuse—ideally, both. Its essential function was to defuse tensions, let grudges out in allowed ways. Toby realized that they had not had a Ranking for a long time. Maybe that was why Killeen seemed distant and awesome to so many of the crew now—they had not seen him humbled with a well-flung jibe.
“I respect the snarled-up way you kinsmen live here.” Killeen was being his affable best. “You can understand that we need to reunite with our forebears.”
She peered at them shrewdly. “You’re sure that’s all?”
“Your tribe’s advanced and all, but some things don’t change,” Killeen said sternly. “Family’s one of them.”
“Fair enough. You should realize that we see a lot of people passing through. We hear stories. Prophecies. Outright lies. We get plenty of hands held out to us—to take, not to give. So we get maybe a little narrow-eyed.”
“Try runnin’ from mechs for a generation or two,” Killeen said, careful and measured. Toby could tell his tone was just a cap on a slow-building inner pressure.
“I bow to your superior experience. Still, my authority goes only so far. We deal with people from trans-history in a fair, just manner. Bartering, that’s fine—we’ll trade square with you. Anything more—”
“We’re from Snowglade, not some ‘trans-history.’”
The judge waved a dismissive arm, her robe flapping. “A term from people out of the wild esty. See, we can’t assume you’re from the place and era you say, because there’s really no way to check that. The esty turbulence blots out all backtracking. If we can, we go on a strictly cash basis—only there’s no cash between trans-histories, so that means plenty of dickering and swapping.”
Killeen dropped his amiable mask. He rose up, shin-servos whirring, using his height to come nearly level with Monisque. “I’ll trade for news of my father and a map to find him with.”
“That’s it? Most visitors want food, fuel, maybe recro-credits.”
Killeen snorted. “We’ll look after ourselves.”
“I suppose I could call it square if we had, say, full rights to interrogate the Myriapod.” Monisque glanced casually at Quath, the first time she had deigned to notice her huge presence.
“That was just openers. We want more. We found an inscription in a dead Chandelier, about ‘we all who plunge inward to the lair and library.’ I want to ask questions about that.”
She shifted in her shimmering blue robes, as though she heard the tension that Toby did behind Killeen’s words. “There were a lot of Chandeliers. I—”
“Are there people here from that era?”
“In some sense, only ‘here’ isn’t a useful word when you’re talking about the esty. If you want, we can offer history data—”
