—Let ’em eat shit!—Cermo yelled.
“And so they have,” Killeen said grimly. “Shibo?”
—No damage reports.—
“It went off where it thought we were. Couldn’t find its way through all our crap.”
Laughter pealed through the comm. Killeen could not help himself; he joined in.
“Quath?”
We detect no further missiles. Perhaps this deception of yours has worked. The radiant cloud is emitting signature frequencies typical of heated organic compounds.
“No surprise,” Killeen said. “That’s what it is.”
However, the pursuing vessel will interpret such emissions as evidence of a ruptured hull. A clever ruse.
“Think they’ll break off followin’ us?”
It seems so.
“You sure these are the last enemy Cybers?”
We have been assured by the Tukar’ramin. Our victory is now complete. The rightful Illuminates now prevail.
“Damn glad to hear it.” Killeen was still rankled to think that his Family had gone through so much because of a factional dispute among distant beings he would never know.
He let the spike of irritation pass. It was irrational to harbor resentments against beings whose motivations and meanings were so alien. He thought he caught glimpses of Quath, but he was sure the deeper essence eluded him. Who could have guessed, for example, that the Legacies aboard Argo would mean something to a Cyber—when simple spoken sentences often did not? The Illuminates had commanded that they be ferried up from New Bishop and returned to Argo. That had been done just as Argo cast off from the station. Cyber craft had tried to destroy the Flitter carrying the Legacies and the Illuminates had expended ship after ship defending it.
Why?
Killeen shook his head.
Standing beneath the roiling sky of incandescent majesty soothed his spirits. He walked the hull as their radiant wake dispersed. A few more moments out here would settle him and make the coming tasks of Cap’ncy easier.
Raucous laughter streamed through the comm. Let them celebrate. The Family needed some release. And they would still have to watch the pursuing craft carefully.
He allowed himself a grin. Maybe, just maybe, they were going to escape.
To what? He looked ahead at the yawning bluehot majesty of the disk that surrounded the Eater. It was a long voyage away. They would have to prepare for whatever lurked there.
The Family… So much had changed since Fanny had led a scrap of Bishops away from Abraham’s wrecked Citadel, into Snowglade’s bleakness. That remnant had joined with dregs of Knights and Rooks. They had slipped free of their world and had seen it as a speck in an ocean of night.
Now, here, the Family had been seared again… only to cleave anew with new members who brought their own scarred heritage. A new whole. A greater sum, perhaps.
He turned and walked back along the hull, boots thumping down on magnetic anchors. The slowly expanding cloud thinned and let in a little light. He could just make out the small golden circle that lay far behind. It was more distant than the enemy, but Quath said it was accelerating strongly. It would catch up with Argo soon.
Killeen tried to imagine what vessels could transport the enormous mass of the cosmic string. Well, he would see. All in good time.
That great scythe would follow them toward the Eater, Quath said. So the Illuminates had decreed. They had stopped the gutting of a world to send the ring along with Argo. Halted the building of their gray warrens. Interrupted the labors of millions of Cybers. For what, no one yet knew.
And after? There was still the enigma of the electromagnetic being. Somewhere ahead it lurked, tied to the disk of the Eater.
His brushing contact with that mind, back on New Bishop, had implied much while explaining nothing. It had spoken of his father. Maybe Killeen had tempted fate by naming the star that waned behind them for Abraham. But perhaps Abraham was a key to all this. Yet how could his father, lost at the fall of the Citadel, figure in the deliberations of a tenuous magnetic mind? Could such a being revive those long dead?
His Grey Aspect droned for attention. Her voice came slowly, as though working across the abyss of time that separated Killeen from the High Arcology Era.
There were records… I once saw… incomplete… from a time long gone… Some said… before the Chandeliers… before even the First Comers…from… a culture of legendary origin… called Earth. That too was a time… when men lived… beneath the will… of beings vaster. Gods moved the heavens… determined… fate of men… and beasts… In those times… humanity scratched out its destiny… in soil… under tortured skies… where huge things… in comfort… dwelled. Some thought these superior beings… were gods. Yet men lived lives of meaning still… despite their small stature… in the scheme of things. So do not despair… Humanity has found zest and verve… before… in the shadows of vastness… in a place called Greece.
Killeen nodded. So even this was not new. Humanity’s most heartfelt joys and crushing defeats had been mere sideshows, small dramas acted out at the feet of greater entities.
It did not matter whether one termed these forces gods or the products of further evolution. Enormity defied definitions. Skysower was a living thing, but Killeen could not tell whether it even thought. Perhaps the distinction itself did not make sense at that level of grandeur.
He looked up into the colossal sky. Fingers of knotted fire worked in molecular clouds. Storms frayed against the stars. Tides of light ebbed and flowed with ponderous majesty. Amid it all, Argo sailed on, a mote.
“Shibo,” he whispered. “I love you.”
It seemed as though the words were new, and that he said them for the first time.
Chronology of Human Species
(Dreaming Vertebrates)
at Galactic Center
This summary was prepared at your request, in order to make intelligible the human point of view. I must confess that this is fundamentally impossible even to anthology-class minds such as myself, and probably to any entity which does not arise from an initial organic base. However, as much as is possible I shall take the cramped human version of their own history, however distorted or inadequate this may be.
These matters were of no concern to us until the strange events at the collapse of Citadel Bishop (see appendix 1). Some effort to understand that engagement led to my involvement with the humans who escaped our extermination.
