Those were rather obvious. The unconscious differences were more telling. He and Nikka and the others from the TwenOne century—called the “Elders,” soon enough—could not keep up with these Earthers, mentally or physically. The big, almost lazily competent newcomers were very polite about it, of course. They tried to include their Elders as they explored the esty, hammered the mechs, and even made contact with the ghostly Old Ones.
These brave new Earthers retained a certain chimpyness. Hominids, still. Quite courteous to their Elders, but learning quickly from mechs and Old Ones alike. Climbing an evolutionary ladder, trailing clouds of glory, into a fog.
At that point, their thought processes simply escaped comprehension.
The rheumy old-fart Elders could not follow conversations involving the Old Ones. Nigel and Nikka and the others who had come in the hijacked mech starship—a small band, now, called Ancestrals by the Earthers—were adrift. They could not master the blindingly fast tech the Earthers had brought, or later devised in response to the mechs.
Nigel got a glimmering of the Old Ones, when he helped explore portions of the esty Lanes. Those convoluted geometries, sealed away, made excellent petri dishes. In the Lanes, different cultures—alien and human alike—could evolve the diversity needed to counter the mechanicals. All sorts emerged—high-tech, low-tech, even no-tech.
For the Elders, the new perspectives were sobering. The Earthers, though, worked easily with the Old Ones. They countered the mechs, killed many, sometimes even cooperated with them.
The Old Ones dispersed Earthers, out of the Lair. Nigel and the other Elders more or less looked on and did scut work. The news was distant, hard to follow.
A big offensive against mech control of the entire Center. Earthers spread among the planets orbiting stars a bit farther out from True Center.
They learned from mechtech, scavenged mech properties. They built huge constructions in space, the Chandeliers.
For many millennia the Earthers did well. Nigel watched them from the time-slowed pit of the esty. Then came trouble.
Mechs found a way to short-circuit some of the power by which the Old Ones sustained their strange magnetic strands. Tapping that source for their own ends made them enormously more powerful. That’s when they started to grow, to pillage the great orbiting Earther cities.
Nigel had visited their crystal cities, and the even greater structures that he could witness but not fathom. When the mechs began getting the upper hand again, he helped as he could. The very terms of the struggle were difficult to comprehend.
Like listening to a conversation carried out through a drain pipe during a rainstorm, he had said. A very long drain pipe.
As the mechanicals destroyed more and more of the human enterprise at Galactic Center, he found more to do. The conflict was coming down to his level again.
The final, desperate strategy of the Hunker Down—
dividing humanity into separate cultural petri dishes, down on the planets—gave him plenty of grunt work to do. In that era he had spent a time outside the esty.
He could not follow in any detail the ramifications of the Earthermech struggle. He knew it involved alien organic races, other Originals, as well. And the conflict’s main stage was at a level involving the Old Ones and the elusive Highers. Of these he and the other Ancestrals knew nothing.
Except . . . The mechanicals had some grail they sought. They kept utterly secretive about it, but they pursued bands of humans as if searching for something. Nigel once caught the phrases “Trigger Codes” and “First Command” but they went by on the fly, soon lost. And the Earthers gave him a stony-faced nothing in answer. As if there were some secret so subtle that knowledge that there was a secret was a secret.
Also, it had taken him a long time to see how he was being used.
Politely, with the most consideration possible, of course. But used. By Earthers and Highers alike.
He had retired, then, from a struggle beyond his ken. Or thought he had.
THIRTEEN
The Physical Representation
Nigel Walmsley squinted at Toby. “There’s so much to tell—”
“I don’t need to know much! Just enough to keep alive,” Toby said.
“That turns out to be quite a bit. You’re pretty complicated yourself, boy.” Nigel could not resist giving an interior command. Points were often better made by example.
Beside Toby, glimmering points condensed into Shibo. She was a handsome, mature woman, lean and translucent and her legs missing. Her upper body twisted as if stretching from a long confinement. A thin smile. “Hello, my carrier.”
Toby jumped, startled. “You! You’re still buried down in my reserve banks?”
“I insinuated . . . myself.”
“Damn! I wanted you out.”
“I have . . . no place . . . to go.”
The room’s sensorium readers were tuned to excruciating precision and could pick up even diffused Aspects and Personalities and Faces lodged in an individual’s fringing fields. Shibo shimmered, ghostly remnant hiding in Toby’s electro-aura.
Shibo’s face said more than her faltering words. “I am here . . . to help.”
“I’ve got you in chipstore,” Toby said bitterly. “That’s enough.”
“I cannot help . . . being.”
Nigel felt a strange, silky current pass between Toby and the Shibo representation. Toby said, “Killeen, he wants to bring you back. Chips’re enough for that?”
“I prefer . . . to reside . . . here.”
“If Killeen gets your chips, he’ll try to bring you back.”
“I prefer . . . here.”
“I want you out.”
