The drama began immediately after he sat so he did not have time to think on the matter. The play depended utterly on concentration. Without the tight control and immersion of the actors, Toby could see how it could be excruciatingly dull.
In practice it wasn’t. He sat riveted as an actor entered the stage and walked with an inhuman slowness around the rim of it, inches from the audience but immeasurably distant in her enveloped presence. She controlled her rhythm and step so utterly that no extraneous finger gesture or eye twitch disturbed movement that was like the surface of a black lake, unrippled, but telling much. To Toby the actor seemed to pass through the air of the theater, clothed in a silence that could cut through a tornado. Then, later, the same scene occurred again. This time microphones amplified each sweep of silky feet across bare boards. A whispery music followed each move, transforming the event utterly, until he could scarcely recognize it.
He found that the drama, which had so little action he could sum it in a sentence, had a strangely soothing effect on him. It seemed to say, Pay attention—that being focused on the moment was more important than playing head games about the past or future.
Odd, once he thought about it. Because this was a place where past and future weren’t so easy to separate. They flowed together at places, a muddy riverrun.
They had already fought mechs here. It took him a while to find out even this simple fact because they spoke so little. Once he came upon a burial ceremony—held not in a ritual place but in the street—which seemed to be for someone taken by mechs. Their homes and workshops were like the intersecting hulls of Argo inverted, so that from a distance they looked like blisters growing together. Burns scarred them and two had big holes punched through.
These people were well organized. They held defense drills and used weapons he could not figure out. They said the latest mech incursion to the esty had been going on as long as it took to raise a girl to half-height—which seemed to be their way of measuring time—and had been worse earlier. Some had missing legs and arms to prove it.
He told them as much as he could of Family Bishop and the long way that had led him here. Still, he was not really one of them because he had done different things for his scarred and burnished armor. Mostly he had just stayed alive. Here they had engaged the mechs and killed them, lured and suckered and defeated them, though taking casualties all down the line of course. Getting banged up like Toby was mostly an accident and they all knew that, quite different from being in a battle because you wanted to be there.
And they did. A small woman told him with great fervor how they were fighting for some big idea. He could not quite get clear what the idea was and after a while gave up pushing on his vocabulary. The woman talked fast and seemed to treat any question as disagreement.
Toby thought about that after watching their slow, grave drama. One performer had carried a drum with a mech brain inside, so that when she hit the drum bottom the brain would bounce around. It struck the top and bottom drumheads while the performer went on clapping the heads. The counterpoint made an eerie echo with the brain-rattle. What that meant he could not tell but it chilled him.
One dark time after he had finished his job he walked back to where he would sleep. A chilling wind rippled the few lights glimmering in the soft mist. He knew somehow that he would never have gone into a battle for some kind of general principle. He had fought and run for the Family—run mostly, and fought only when he had to.
These quiet men and women were different. They had a separate age-old tradition of being holed up here in an esty that they didn’t understand. Or at least they could not explain it to him. Maybe they knew it in a way he could not. Living through things gave you that sometimes.
He remembered the long empty docks where they had berthed the Argo. Big and covered with scratches, chipped and marred. Deserted except for Argo, like arms stretching out to embrace and welcome ships that came no more.
These people had said that few ships came any longer from the worlds beyond, the planets like Snowglade. Many smaller craft slipped between the portals of the esty itself, shortcutting between Lanes. Few planetary Families came into the Lanes any more because they were nearly all dead. Failed.
Their history didn’t square with his own understanding. That fit, too. The Lanes ran on different clocks. Some lay deeper in the steep curvature around the black hole so time ran slower there. And the esty itself mixed and tangled events, so that human memory churned with it.
He gave up on figuring when he found that he had walked too far in the gloom. That was the first time he realized how much he missed his father. He cried for a while in the dark and was glad no one could see him.
Something in him said it was stupid to feel embarrassed about crying. He had never thought that before. Wondering about it that way made him suspect a trace of Shibo. But he could catch no sliver of her anywhere.
He felt uneasy. With a restless spirit he went back and found the sleep shed for casual laborers. Everybody else was already down and out so he crawled onto his pallet.
He slept well and woke up only when the shed collapsed. A slap in the forehead, grit in his mouth. The ground heaved under him. Somebody screamed in the dark.
The roof beams had missed him but debris weighed him down. He crawled out from under it while big explosions shook the ground. When he got out there were mechs in the hovering gloom. Buildings down. Fires licking at a mottled sky.
People running everywhere. Howling ferocities fighting high up above dirty clouds.
The defense screens popped up—he saw them in his sensorium as bright red planes ramped up into the air, with electrical green snaking along their edges.
Casualties. People with no visible scars but the skin beneath their eyes black from concussion. Some were bleeding from nose and mouth. Others clutched their bellies and could not speak. Others pitched face forward into the mashed grass.
He helped with them. The medical people did not seem to want him around. They glared at him and he saw that they suspected. Nobody could know for sure but he had come here and then the mechs had come.
He wasn’t sure if he would hurt more than he helped, so he left the wounded and ran to the outer edge of the blisterbuildings. He watched there the swift and mysterious play of glare and thump in the surrounding somberness. He wanted to fight but he did not know what to do. No Family Bishop methods seemed to matter here. And if the forces above were after him there was nothing he could do about that either.
Finally he fled. If he had brought this here, then the best he could do was to draw it away. For hours he trotted through the obliterating murk. Alone again. Quath. Killeen. Besen. Names.
In his sensorium nothing seemed to follow him. Finally light began to seep from a rumpled ridge up ahead and he saw that he was in a different terrain. There were people clinging to the bare timestone and something was trying to find them.
Without warning he found himself in the middle of a fight. He kept belly-down and learned quick enough that something—he never learned what, exactly—was trying to kill a band of people near him. He caught on also to the skill of keeping down low on the shifting timestone.
A green fog flowed overhead. From a distance it poured down over him and over his own image that he saw in the timestone below.
The image looked up at him. Slow, diluted seconds passed. The figure waved at him. Toby blinked. It grinned. He could not figure out how the timestone could have a Toby trapped in it, a him who cheerfully saluted—but there was no time for figuring anyway, not now.
Or to see what was doing the killing. He started to lift his head far enough to see, then thought better of it. His sensorium showed nothing dangerous. Still, he heard the small swishing motes, slivers on the wind that would have lifted pieces of his head away with a surgical precision if he had looked.
He knew this because within seconds he saw it happen. A woman caught in the chin one of the whispering things that streamed over the ground. The tiny things waited for a target, gliding over open ground, then found their prey.
He watched too the attempts by friends to put the head back together again. These people spoke a quick, staccato language that he did not understand. He tried to help even though he could see no point in it, and they paid him no attention. They had faith that human medicine would work on a head carved up into precise slices. It didn’t.
After a while the whispering streams stopped. He wanted to help the people but when he went to find them they were all thoroughly dead.
He had little doubt now that somewhere behind this chaos was something looking for him. Had all these people died because of him? He didn’t want to think about it.
And all he could do was flee, not fight. It grated on his Bishop way of thinking.
He met refugees. Some he could understand. They told of worse places and times but most of them kept plodding past him as if he were an illusion. Or maybe they thought his questions were nonsensical.
He marched a long while. It was easier if he didn’t think much.
The world seemed lighter, as if his head was like a balloon held down by his body. He walked that way enjoying every step. Bright yellow beams burst from exposed timestone far overhead. The light worked with furnace energy.
People passing by smiled. The mood grew until everybody was cheerful and even to Toby the scene seemed so fine that it was on the plain face of it ridiculous that anybody should ever die. At least not him.
With a pang he remembered Quath going on once, long ago, about the irrational optimism of primates, or at least the present version of them. She had said it was a peculiar adaptation, one her species lacked. Toby had just laughed.
