Pictures, that was how Killeen thought. Words were just ways to fool people, more often than not.
TWO
A Fog of Flies
They decided to move. For shelter they used high arching trees that led in a curving arc up toward the distant esty walls above. The trees were billowy and tall and Killeen doubted that they truly gave much cover. They went slowly and the light was fitful and it was a long time before they came to the small pyramid.
Killeen looked at it and felt both dismay and a sad pride. “This is . . . wonderful.”
Andro walked around the crudely shaped four-sided stack of stones, twice as tall as Killeen. “Pretty primitive.”
“It’s ours.”
“Snowglade Families? They took the time to build this?”
“It’s for our suredead.”
“Huh? They’re buried in here?”
“It’s our old way. Mechs don’t take the trouble to pull apart rock like this.”
“You had some sort of code with them?”
Killeen walked around the rough sides. He could see where rocks had been hastily wedged into place. “There was a time, ’way back. We had a kind of understanding with the mechs. We didn’t scavenge too much and they let us alone. They were busy with other things, something about herding pulsars.”
“But it did not last.”
“Naysay. My father Abraham said that truces with them never did, really.”
Andro’s mouth curved in perplexed disbelief. “You ground-pounder types had it easy. We never got a break from mechs, ever. They kept trying to punch through, to find the Library or some damn thing.”
Suit cowlings and personal gear were piled a short distance from the pyramid. Another Snowglade tradition. It said to passing mechs that they need not scavenge the pyramid for scrap; here it was, now go away. Reluctantly Killeen poked through them, dreading what he would find.
A faint, buried image came drifting to mind. From his Arthur Aspect . . .
A far grander pyramid slanting up from tawny sands, its point thrusting at a pale scrubbed sky. It dwarfed the puny humans peering up at it. They were smaller than the carved stone blocks that built the enormous steps, a giant’s stairway leading to the sky so blue it seemed solid.
The image wavered before him, floating up unbidden from Arthur’s deep historical storage. Old Earth, came a whisper. The vision faded. It had made him pause with its majestic, silent, and eternal rebuke of the mortality that had struck down even the best, since time immemorial.
His hands scrabbling in the scrap found something and jerked him out of his musing. “Jocelyn!” he cried.
Andro came over. “Somebody you know?”
“My . . . under-officer.”
“I remember her. Damn.”
Again Killeen felt the sensation that had marked his life so often—that in the face of flat facts there was nothing to say. The world was like this and talk could not change it.
Jocelyn’s burnt-blue ankle bracelet hung on her leg shanks. There was a small triangular hole in the shank and blood on the inside. Killeen took the bracelet and remembered how he had once long ago made love to her, a simple thing in an open field while they were on the run. He walked away wearing the bracelet and for a while did not answer any of Andro’s questions.
He estimated which way his Bishops might have gone and went that way. Andro had trouble keeping up and Killeen became restive at the delay. At one point Killeen thought he heard traceries of Bishop talk, but they faded. Andro seized the opportunity to argue for a path through some wrenching timestone. Killeen went along with the man mostly because he was spiraling into a growing sense of futility. He had lost his Family and didn’t know where to turn.
There were plenty of bodies in the fields and among the strange trees. Back in the portal city, at their Restorer, he had learned of mech diseases targeted on humans. And here they were.
Boils that shined tight and purple. They burrowed into yielding flesh and made sores that sloughed and bled foul and yellow. Bodies attended by a fog of flies.
And who carried those from Old Earth? he wondered. He saw no reason for people to bring a pestilence like insects to this fresh new place. Life required balance, he knew that as an act of faith, but sometimes it was hard to accept the implications.
Only later did he recall that to mechs, Bishops were a pestilence.
One woman lay streaked with a rash gray as ashes. Oily pus sleeked her skin. Whirlpools in it squeezed down as he watched. They spooled wetly shut like eyes when he moved. Her head was splitting open in leaves, as though someone had been browsing through her and had left, leaving the book open. Exfoliating, the sheets of brain curled back and made him think of the timestone, like petals of a gray cliff-flower.
“They would work us woe,” Andro said.
They marched on quickly, fearing contagion.
A haze came and Killeen went into it, his mind still on the bodies behind. At least they had not been Bishops.
In the mist they passed through a verge of dizzying forces. It was a transition, Andro explained. A kind of slipping downhill in an esty gradient. Near the portal cities were tricky manifolds where “indeterminate geometries” formed and merged.
“You can think of it as like doorways opening and slamming shut,” Andro said.
“Where does this end?”
“It doesn’t.”
Killeen knew when he was being patronized but he was too busy being sick to mind. The stretching and reforming of the esty meant torturing gravities, swerving accelerations, tidal tensions that jerked his arms and legs in opposite directions and popped his shoulders until he thought he would rip apart.
