<None of my feelings for you, be assured.>
“But, but what—” He stopped himself because he was afraid he was going to cry.
<I came with you because I suspected that your protection was of great importance. The Mantis confirms this.>
“Why am I such a big deal?”
<I suspect you are part of a larger pattern.>
“Damn it, that’s just a theory!”
<We must act with imperfect knowledge.>
“What sanctimonious, ridiculous—”
<Your anger is understandable. I understand what it masks. I love you, too.>
“What? I, I, uh . . .” He was stymied.
<Go. You must stay out of their grasp until we all know more.>
“But where’ll I meet you? This place, it’s so big, what’ll I do?”
<You must make your own way now. Go.>
“Damn it! I won’t.”
<You will.>
SIX
Mind Surgery
He holed up in a shaded hollow and the pain started in on him. It had spread into his ribs and he was not surprised to find that three of them were broken too. The electrical energy of the spark had dissipated into tiny shock waves that snapped bone and broke capillaries.
That’s what his diagnostics told him. The facts popped up in his left eye when he keyed in for them. Signifier icons showed bright and clear. Yellow fractures, scarlet blood patches in his arm, 3D blue spaghetti for pain networks.
Solutions popped up too. Making field repairs was not easy. He called up two seldom-used Faces who did the hard work at the back of his skull. They wormed down out of his cerebral cortex and into the basic, shadowy machinery. Most of the brain was circuitry for housekeeping operations. You couldn’t consciously intervene in how your food got digested or control your heartbeat. They ran just fine on their own. And it would be a bad idea to make intervention easy and risk screwing yourself up out of clumsiness. But repairing damage could be accelerated and this was a time when he needed that.
These Faces squirmed down into operating centers that fed stimuli and ferried nutrients. They took over. He knew they were working when his arm started to tingle. It was like being tickled deep inside only it didn’t make you laugh. So he cried for a while and felt better. He wriggled around and broke out in a clammy sweat all along his left side.
More explosions boomed down from the sky but he was a far way beyond that and didn’t care. His systems labored heavily. Bone repair was hard, he knew, and he tried to not let his conscious mind interfere.
But there were a lot of things to think through and he could not keep his mind on them for long. Spikes of pain broke through and startled him. Then his systems would catch the problem and he would be all right for a while. The sweats did not go away though.
The dreams started then.
Only they were not dreams because in between them he had his eyes open. They played on his retina and there was nothing he could do to stop them. He tried closing his eyes but they still ran.
He was riding in something that had wheels but seemed to fly. A woman had offered him a ride in it and somehow they had passed through dissolving air and furious, fast rock, and now were careening down (or maybe up) a steep flat lake. It was smooth and seemed horizontal, with his weight thrusting straight down along his spine. But it was also angled so that they accelerated across it. The jet-dark surface spewed and foamed and muttered to itself like a stormy liquid but the woman rapped it with a stick every few minutes, as if trying it for strength, and the stuff gave back a solid ringing smack, like steel ringing bong bong on granite.
Shibo grinned at him. Her bright sharp teeth laughed out words so mangled he could not catch them and there was no time to smooth them into meaning. They plunged forward.
It went on a long time. She had teeth missing, two ears on her left side and none on the right, and wore only a halter. This had seemed important when he first saw her but such facts were now dwarfed by the blistering wind that raked him, the jolting speed, the lurches of his already aggrieved stomach. “Long live all!” she shouted back to him and took a pull from a vaporizer.
“Long live me, anyway,” Toby answered. He had taken a few hits from the vaporizer and was feeling strange but still scared.
Something big hit the black lake and threw up a dark geyser in snarled fingers.
“We’ll make it!” Shibo shouted.
She had to because other people were trying to talk to him. Their voices came down from the sky, but by the time they reached him they were whispers.
Instead of breaking into droplets the black waters squared out into planes. “Let me do it,” Shibo called. She smashed the panes into showers of glinting mica shards. “See?”
—and he was in the open, rolling down a hill. He cracked his knee on a rock and inhaled dust. Choked. Gasped. This was real, no dream. He looked back up the slope and saw the tall grass mashed down where he had been lying in a bath of his own sweat. Something had made him get up and stumble and fall out here, exposed. He scrambled back up as fast as he could.
On the way up his knee hurt more than his arm or ribs. That was a good sign as long as the knee wasn’t damaged. He found the place where he had been lying. It was damp and smelled bad.
His knee was getting better, though. He walked a little unsteadily to a stream and cleaned himself off for the first time in—two? three?—days. Hard to tell. His inboard monitor told him, 2.46 days in all. Impossible to tell here with the light coming and going like fitful weather. He wondered how all the forest had adjusted to this erratic pace.
For a while he just lay beside the stream without any energy for more. A solid fact sat in front of him and would not let him rest. He knew what had to be done now and that Quath had been right. Shibo had kept him from seeing it. The way she had kept him from registering other things. Amusing him with interior spectacles that got more and more frantic.
The damage and repair had undermined some part of her somehow. At least for now. Which meant he had to do it now or later he would think of something else that needed doing or maybe get distracted by a gimpy joint or a funny itch and then he would never do it. Maybe not for the rest of his life.
He crawled back in a shaded hole and got out his field kit. The tools were not made for this job. They had socket and groove faces, tiny insert arms and variable-geometry drivers, but nothing specialized. And he had to work behind himself. Operating by feel, sitting up when he wanted to lie down.
You do not want to do this.
