Toby said, “Things happen and you go on.”
“I’m afraid that’s right. I wish it was different.”
“Not up to us.”
“Yousay yeasay. Just keep saying it the truest way you can and then let things happen. Bishops’re mostly just witnesses here. No way around that. On Old Earth maybe we were kings of the jungle or something, but not here. Not in the galaxy.”
Toby slapped his father on the shoulder. “So you’ll go looking for the Restorer?”
“Soon’s I rest up.”
“Maybe some of the others heard where it is now.”
“Those?” Killeen looked askance at the Bishops, setting up camp and cooking and drinking while every mouth seemed to be open, telling its story. “A man can’t pay attention to the passing wind or to known liars. I’ll find it myself.”
Toby felt something unnamed and huge move in him. He said quietly, through a tight throat, “I’ll come along.”
Killeen grinned and they said nothing for a while and then went to see the others.
FOUR
The Eternal Landscape of the Past
<Your suspicions are correct,> Quath said. <Mechs lose creativity because they overcontrol.>
Nigel nodded. The Bishops were making a lot of noise and he moved away. It was green and pleasant here, thoroughly accommodating to the human instinctive desire to be at the boundary of different spaces. He had always preferred the seashore, but Bishops knew none of that. They were content with the edge of the trees, the border of the savanna. A threat from one direction they could manage with a tactical retreat into the other. Or so the genes thought.
“I’d gathered so,” Nigel said to Quath. “Still, I could never quite fathom the sods.”
<Envision their interior world. Having access to all portions of your mind meant you could literally watch yourself thinking.>
“Not an altogether pleasant mode.” He had done it a short while ago and the echoes still reverberated in him. Good for a month of nightmares, at least.
<That implies policing your own thinking. You see the implications?>
“Not quite.” This huge thing was smarter than it looked.
<Chaos theory teaches us that any well-defined system will show unpredictable behavior if allowed to run long enough, no matter how finely honed the beginning conditions. To avoid chaotic results, control is necessary.>
“Ummm. Compel my mind? I can barely hold my tongue.”
Nigel had never favored arguments for control of himself, but as Nikka had once said brightly, How did your little island make so many eccentrics? He was not the team-effort type, no.
<Mechs could do this; men could not. So humans produced more madmen—and more geniuses. Generally, more dispersion from the mean. That vagrant creativity gave humans—and any similar life-form—vast advantages and disadvantages, alike.>
“Seems a big disadvantage, just being a primate.”
Nigel eyed the Bishops gathered around their crackling campfires. Squint a bit and he was standing on a cliff over a dry canyon in the veldt, dust scenting the heat. Below, primates cracked bones and sucked the marrow out, chippering to each other, getting the last of the good from the game, scratching and squatting and talking, talking, always the voices sounding against the eternal silence of Nature itself.
Quath said, <The disadvantage for you—and for us, the Myriapodia—lay in people who went awry.>
“Ah. The messiahs. The fever-eyed shaman. Bastards.”
<They could cause terrible damage. They did in our history. For you, they were worse. They destroyed whole Families with their lunacy. But the geniuses could wrench humanity away from the precipice it had tread for so long, and thrust it up toward fresh heights.>
“I wonder if the Bishops know why the Hunker Down was essential.” Nigel studied them with a warmness, yet a distance he knew he could never bridge. His species, his strangers.
<You had to make human societies who resisted the memes which the mechs had introduced. They used them very well against you. And us.>
“So we top-dog types—”
<Do not berate yourself. Remember the Earthers.>
Nigel grimaced. “And worse.”
<Worse?>
“A kind of well, uber-Nigel, I called him. Better than me, the Earthers said.” Nigel swept his arms in Wagnerian grandeur. “He bestrode worlds!”
<You did not like him.>
“Like? I was afraid of him. He was me, and he wasn’t. He was like some other copies they made of me, but quicker and smarter and distant. Made my flesh crawl.”
<He did this work with the Earthers?>
“He, and other Walmsleys. There was a shortage of labor, it seemed.”
<These worked in the Chandeliers, the Hunker Down—>
