I shall wear my trousers rolled—yes, I know the poem. Get on with it, Nigel!
He nodded and dropped out of the interior space of smooth blankness. It was pleasant to retire to that cool, interior vault. Perhaps the old solidly good point to the augmentations he had gained through centuries; the quietness of a good, old-fashioned library. Where most of the people were books.
Very well, then. Back into the grainy. The real. The deliciously dangerous.
PART ONE
Wondrous Ruins
ONE
Half Vast
An old man sat and told a young man a story. As stories go it was long and angular, with its own momentary graces and clumsy logic, much the way life is.
“What is this place?” Toby asked. “This mountain?”
Nigel Walmsley leaned back in a webbing that shaped itself to him. He was nude, leathery. The lattice of his ribs made him look as though he had a barrel chest, but that was because he was gaunt with age.
He had reached the phase when life reduces a man to the essentials. For packaging, skin like brown butcher’s paper. Muscles like motors, lodged in lumps along the bone-girders. Knobby elbows and knees, so round they seemed to encase oiled ball bearings. Sockets at the shoulder and hip, bulging beneath the dry parchment skin. Eyes blue and quick, glittering like mica in the bare face. A jaw chiseled above a scrawny neck. Cheekbones high and jutting like blades above the thin, pale lips. An oddly tilted smile, playing mischievously.
“It’s popularly termed the Magnetic Mountain, though I have rather a more personal name for it.”
“You’re from a planet near True Center?”
“No no, I’m from Earth.”
“What? You said before that you were Family Brit. I—”
“A jest. In my time there weren’t Families in the way you mean. The Brits were a nation—much bigger.”
“How much bigger?” Toby had heard Earth invoked, of course, but it was a name from far antiquity. Meaningless. Probably just a legend, like Eden and Rome.
“I doubt that all the Families surviving at Galactic Center number a tenth what the Brits did.”
“That many?”
“Hard to estimate, of course. There are layers and folds and hideaways aplenty in the esty.”
“Brits must be powerful.”
Walmsley pursed his lips, bemused. “Um. Alas, through the power of the word, mostly.”
Toby had no idea how many people still lived, after all the death he had seen. He had come here on a long journey, fleeing the mechs. Through it all, to all sides and in his wake, mechs had cut swaths through all the humans they could find. The slaughter reminded him of the retreat from the Calamity, the fall of Citadel Bishop: a landscape of constant dying.
But the butchery was now far greater. Devoting so much energy to hunting vermin humans was unusual for mechs. Mostly they didn’t care; humans were pests, no more. This time they clearly were after Toby in particular. So the deaths behind him weighed on him all the more. He was only slowly coming to feel the meaning of that. It was a thing beyond words or consolations.
“Ummm.” Walmsley seemed pensive, eyes crinkling. “Usually I felt there were too few Brits, too many of everybody else.”
“Family Brit must’ve been huge.”
“We reproduced quickly enough. Didn’t have the radiation you suffer through here.”
“We’re protected from that, my father said.”
“There’s a limit to what genetic tinkering can do. Organic cells fall apart easily. Part of their beauty, really. Makes them evolve quicker.”
“Most of our Citadel was underground, to help—”
“Somewhat useful, of course. But the stillbirths, the deformities . . .” Walmsley’s bony face creased with painful memories.
“Well, sure, that’s life.”
“Life next door to this hell hole, true.”
“The Eater?” Toby had grown up with the Eater, a glowering eye rimmed in angry reds and sullen burnt browns. It had been as bright as Snowglade’s own sun. “Living near it was pretty ordinary.”
Walmsley laughed heartily, not the aged cackle Toby would have expected. “Trust me, there are better neighborhoods.”
“Snowglade was good enough for me,” Toby said defensively.
“Ah yes. We gave the chess families a good world, I recall.”
“Gave? You?”
