He tossed it aside and stared off into the rumpled hills. Morning mist rose from the great stands of barrel-trunked trees. Their topmost limbs arced evenly out in the characteristic umbrella formation. Birds circled and dove among the pale emerald reaches. And the sluggish presence still sat at his neck.
The circular transponder had probably failed some time ago. Now the Cyber was following him by sniffing out his sensorium.
The thought sent hollow dread through him. But another memory tugged. In the fighting yesterday he had also felt something like this tenuous weight. And it had made clear things that had helped disable and elude Cybers.
The blunt presence did not seem hostile. Still, Killeen became more uneasy as he felt the ponderous wedge waiting, expectant. Images like frescoes of the real world slid through his mind, filigree-thin. They dimly recalled his past voyages in the mind of the Mantis. There had been huge caverns of separate experience, volumes that dwarfed Killeen.
Now he felt himself on the verge of another plunging gray abyss. The sensation made his heart race but gradually fear left him. He got up wearily, leaning on Shibo, and started into the next stand of trees.
Some Family were foraging for food. Small shoots on the bushes were edible, his Ann Aspect told him. The big trees had fungus of deep turquoise circling their lower trunks. A Bishop woman was scraping it off with a laser cutter in one hand, eating with the other. As they went by she gave them some and it was sharp but meaty.
Toby and Besen were too far behind. Besen could walk steadily now though there were still dark circles under her eyes and she moved with rickety care.
They had gone a few steps when the woman behind cried out. The tree was smoking. She stepped back, cutting off the laser pulses, and the tree trunk began jetting a thin, whitehot flame. Blowtorch intensity threw a sudden, welcome heat. The fierce gout of smokeless flame grew rapidly.
The woman stared dumbfounded at the glowing lance. Toby pulled her away. “Run!” he shouted.
Killeen tugged Besen uphill. The Bishops took a moment to register the danger. Then they started off at a determined trot, laboring uphill as the flame grew behind them. Cermo was shouting orders.
“What… what you think… was?” Shibo asked beside him. The best they could manage uphill was a ragged trot.
“Some kind energy resource, maybe,” Killeen answered. “Mechs must’ve grown ’em.”
“Mechs use biotech?”
“Did on Snowglade, some.”
“Just fact’ry stuff. Replacement parts for their own innards.”
“Far as we know, yeasay. Here they did better.”
They stopped at the first shoulder above the broad forest. Toby and Besen struggled up the slope with a wall of billowing smoke behind them. The woman had started a ferocious forest fire.
At least it might slow the Cybers, Killeen thought. He tried to see a way to use the flame trees against them when they came up through the forest. The thought gave him a spurt of energy and he overtook the point party, led by Cermo. He was still mulling over the possibilities when they saw a squad of people on the far ridgeline.
“Tribe!” Cermo called ahead. “Bishops approach.”
—That fire’ll show us up good,—a distant voice answered sardonically.
“You bastards left us back there!” Cermo called.
—Orders. His Supremacy said was only way.—
Cermo said, “Only way of savin’ your asses you mean.”
—Stuff that. His Supremacy says, you do. Lucky you got out.—
To Killeen the Tribe’s attitude was bizarre. As the Bishops came up onto the stark ridgeline they found ranks formed in moving defensive perimeters. The Tribe was making good time toward a high, wooded knoll. Though the Tribe greeted the Bishops with some warmth, many showed no sign of guilt over having left their fellows on the battlefield. Bishops muttered angrily. Some of the Tribe were reticent and moved away. The bulk, though, looked at the struggling Bishop remnants with interest but obviously without for a moment considering that a gross breach of ordinary human morality had occurred.
“Don’t give a damn ’bout us, do they?” Toby said.
“It’s their faith,” Besen said. “His Supremacy says we’re expendable, so be it.”
“None so blind as she who will not see,” Shibo said, her voice soft with fatigue. She had helped Besen up the last rise and her power reserves were gone.
Killeen looked at her quizzically and she said, “One my Aspects fed me that. Old saying from Cap’n Jesus. Figure we need all the wisdom we can get.”
The situation would have been far more tense if the Bishops had not been so tired. They rested along the ridgeline as more Families marched past in open-arrow formation, wedge flanks far out to guard against Cybers.
Oily smoke came rolling up from the spreading fire below. Killeen could see trees catch and spurt out their pencil-thin gouts. Curiously, the trees burned only at regularly spaced points up the trunk. He watched as a tall one caught. The first plume shot out near the base. Then another started farther up the trunk and directly above the first. Soon there were seven whitehot flames evenly spaced along the trunk. The top of the tree began to rock and then it went over, pushed by the thrust of the escaping brilliant gas. He marveled at them in his exhaustion.
The forest fire guttered out into sour smoke as the stand of trees was exhausted. Killeen felt in his mind the persistent weight of what he now thought of as his Cyber, but he could not tell if it was getting closer. Smoke layered the valley like smudged glass and made it impossible to see approaching Cybers. He smelled their fog-dabs at the edges of his sensorium, though.
They lay in the waxing morning sun and let it take some of the ache out of them. Besen was throwing off her dizziness and even made a joke. It was as if they had all agreed to set aside the press of the world and evoke some vestige of earlier Family times. Shibo contended with a riddle: “What’s the best kind pain?”
Killeen murmured, “What’s this, old Pawn Family saying?”
“Yeasay.” Shibo was the only surviving Pawn member.
“No kind pain’s good,” Besen said reasonably.
“I give up,” Toby said.
“Can’t be real pain, right?” Shibo hinted with a slight smile.
“Fake pain?” Toby was puzzled.
“Right,” Shibo said. “Champagne.”
