Toby nodded, smiling. Abraham had been fond of anything that loosened the tongue without emptying the mind.
A hard gust whipped Walmsley’s hair about his intense face. “Your father said something about that in his self-representation, remember? About Abraham being afoot, wasn’t it?”
“A warning. I didn’t understand. Did you?” Walmsley shook his head, as if listening to the wind. Toby had last seen Abraham in Citadel Bishop, just before the mechs breached their defenses and the Calamity began. Would he still know the man? After years of hard pursuit, in his mind Abraham was nearly as legendary as Earth, a symbol of an earlier, better time.
Walmsley said quietly, “You might ask a higher authority. That’s why I took us outside. A presence is descending.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Here—” Walmsley popped open his wrist and made some adjustment on a small panel. “I can pipe my sensorium into yours, within a few meters’ range.”
At once Toby saw in the yawning spaces around the pyramid-mountain not empty air but fine blue lines. They converged from above like an unseen pipeline of—what?
“Magnetic fields. Pressure’s building.”
Toby sensed some movement down the field lines, though when he looked directly at any group of lines they seemed static. Gazing up into the bowl of sky he saw a constant interplay, field lines rustling and jostling, like wheat blown by autumn breezes.
“That’s your guard?” It made sense. Mechs used circuits. Magnetic fields acted on all electrical currents. Field lines were like stretched rubber bands that could never break, but they could knot off, make smaller loops. They could slam into mech circuitry, scramble and fuse and scorch.
Walmsley nodded. “They were an early form the Old Ones devised. An intermediate step. Now they do . . . chores, I suppose you’d say.”
Striations worked high up. Bright blue-white snarls plunged down, shaping up into something massive.
A heavy voice came into his mind.
We perceive a threat. It has invaded my foot points in the accretion disk. I cannot repel it, as it propagates solely along my field lines. No transverse pressure can block it.
“The Magnetic Mind.” Toby had heard it before, addressing his father.
“Mind?” Walmsley sniffed. “More like a committee.”
We encompass more than a single, authoritarian intelligence such as you can know. I/we swim in copper-tinged brilliances, harvesting the wealth beside the mouth that knows no end. I slide, wrapped rubbery about the accreting disk. Not a mere garment for plasma winds to wear. My feet plow scalding trenches, my head scrapes against stars.
“Ummm,” Nigel said wryly. “And your ego? How big is that?”
The voice strummed up in Toby’s ears like sheets of wires plucked together.
Do not trifle with me.
Walmsley grinned. “Pardon, squire. I get that way with the upper classes.”
Before, his father had always been present to address the Mind. Toby remembered the strange phrases of the Mind, describing Abraham as “whirling somewhere in time-wracked eddies.” When his father had asked more the Mind had said, “The small mind that I can interrogate sends wails of remorse—” and would speak no further.
Toby gathered his resolve and shouted at the shimmering blue forest, “Where is Abraham? And Killeen?”
I do not carry such knowledge.
“Then what the hell are you good for?”
Walmsley said gently, “This.” He adjusted his sensorium and a darting signal sprayed out into the valley on electromagnetic wings. To Toby it looked like a spherical flower blooming for a rosy instant, then withering. In reply came,
Nigel! I so long to press against you. We are shuffling to realign—busy! I am so happy you felt me out here.
It was another presence altogether. Lighter, with a slippery grace.
“This is my wife, Nikka.”
Toby blinked. The resonant voice seemed to come from behind him, close and warmly intimate. Utterly unlike the Magnetic Mind.
“Hullo, luv,” Walmsley said happily.
This is the boy, Toby? He is huge.
