“Let’s…let’s go.”
She shook her head, the coils of her black hair wrestling like living ropes. “We leave now, it’d be disrespec’ful.”
Bodies pressed against him, their mute momentum carrying him toward the bonfire. In the wake of the cart the slow grave swell of the Eight of Hearts’ mourning song rose. He watched as gloved hands drew the dirty, stiffening bodies from the cart. The corpses were laid out gently, the man still in the center and face down, and a single red heart made of cloth laid upon the head of each. Then a tall woman wearing a Cap’n’s signifiers spoke, her voice well modulated and practiced and strong.
Killeen did not follow the words. He was watching the bodies. As the corpses stiffened further their legs and arms jerked and trembled slightly, as though the rhythms that defined a Family’s way—running, the endless succession of nomad flight—carried on remorselessly across the divide of death.
Then the Cap’n approached the first woman, made a ritual pass with a long knife, and plunged it hard and sure into the glassy blister. The shiny dome broke with an audible pop. Milky fluids gushed all down it, over the corpse’s face, running into the open rictus, covering the still-staring eyes, trickling down over the legs. There seemed an impossible quantity of the stuff and when it drained away the yawning husk of the blister cracked and broke under the Cap’n’s repeated thrusts.
She probed deeper. The point of the knife burrowed in and abruptly the body shook within, shuddering with a wet sucking noise. Something struggled inside, rocking the body from side to side, jerking, pushing the broken ribs farther out. A spasm, a last convulsion, and then the body went completely still. Snapped ribs collapsed inward.
The dead woman looked shrunken, emptied. In final rest her face now resembled those of her Family hemming in the spectacle, a blade of a nose between prominent cheekbones. Her eyes seemed to sink beneath the darkened lids. A tiny insect crawled out of one nostril and lingered on a bloodless lip.
The Cap’n pulled out her blade. Pinned on its sharp point was a thing hard and brown and chitinous that still wriggled with frantic energy. It was tough but somehow unformed, as though legs and head had still to push their way out of the moist, interlocking brown segments. It fought the knife, twisting. Then suddenly the life drained out of it and the thing went limp.
The crowd backed away. The Cap’n threw the brown mass to the ground. Instantly a woman leaped forward and crushed it with both boots. She cried out something Killeen could not understand, a shout of anger and sorrow and despair. Then she backed into the crowd again. Men and women nearby clasped her, passing her among them, hugging and sheltering her with soft murmurings.
The Cap’n did the second woman the same way. Killeen watched numbly. This time a man crushed the brown thing. It snapped like the joints of a hand being crushed. The man sobbed as he did it and stamped the thing again and again before going back into the crowd.
The blister on the man’s back was larger than the women’s. The bulge was thinning, growing translucent. In tiny movements the skin pulsed—a convexity here, a concavity there, until the whole back and chest of the man was alive with purpose. The trunk of the body was unrecognizable now, save for the parentheses of ribs that yawned aside to frame the quaking fleshy hill that rose and throbbed.
The Cap’n of the Eight of Hearts quickly brought her blade up, calling out some ritual words. Before she could plunge it into the man’s back the blister began to split. Milky ooze gushed out. Dark cracks ran down from the summit.
Something crabbed and small pushed itself out into the flickering firelight. It scuttled away. The Cap’n did not hesitate. She slammed the knife into the thing as it ran down the corpse’s leg. Small legs fought and scraped their way up the blade. But the knife made its point.
A collective sigh rose from the crowd. The three bodies were flaccid and spent now. Their nearest relatives—for all present were related, however distantly—came forward to accept the honor of burial.
Killeen made his way on wooden legs away from the roaring, snapping bonfire. Regaining the path, he said hoarsely to the Sebens’ Cap’n, “That’s what the Cybers do? Plant their, their seeds in us? They don’t even let us die straight and clean?”
The sunburned woman answered, “Yeasay. Only those li’l things, they’re not Cybers.”
“What, then?”
“Some kinda li’l scrabblers. I seen ’em doin’ small jobs, followin’ Cybers. Sometimes climb up on Cybers, pick at their joints ’n’ stuff.”
“Like fleas?”
“I’d guess.”
Killeen said disbelievingly, “Just use us for hatching out fleas.”
“They leave us lyin’, few hours later out comes those things. Or they’ll kill clean from the distance, if they ain’t got the time.”
“What they use mechs for?”
“Dunno. Parts, maybe.”
Killeen sucked at his lip to hide his queasiness. The woman said, “Cybers’re worse ’n mechs, plenty worse.”
The woman who had said nothing until now put in bitterly, “Damn sure, but we’ll triumph. ’S God’s way, givin’ us a trial.”
They moved on through gathering murk lit by oily fires. Above them the sky yawned and flexed.
FIVE
To Killeen the look on Jocelyn’s face was abruptly, immensely funny. She gaped, eyes and mouth making big round Os.
They embraced, then, and the other Bishops squatting near a small sheltered fire leaped up loudly and were all around him.
Cermo slapped him on the rear and hugged him and the rest went by in a heady, quick, intense blur. Faces and laughter released into the cooling night air a fervent joy as word spread and shouts went up and answering calls sounded among the converging forms that sprang up from nearby campfires and came running, voices raised in excited and disbelieving celebration. Then Toby was there, his face haggard and gray even in the warming glow of the crackling flames—which someone had already augmented, summoning forth a welcoming rush of heat and crisp radiance—and Killeen lifted his son into the air, swinging him around in a sudden hard blossom of feeling, finding the boy’s hefty weight surprising.
“What, why, how—?” the voices asked, but Killeen shook his head, his throat filled and his world blurred. Toby needed no explanations, just yelped and laughed the way he had in years past, before the protracted processes of coming to age had caught him up. Killeen laughed wildly and turned to see more—glorious clumps of Bishops, a flood where he had only hoped for a trickle—all rushing in, crossing the last faint blades of dusk. His throat hurt, to feel himself again at the center of all he truly cared about—centrifugally spun out into the Family that in turn came streaming inward from the darkness to enclose him. Questions bombarded him and seemed to be not separate ideas but merely the means that the Family used to draw him again back into itself. And then in the brimming firelight, cutting through the mad talk and shouts, he saw her. Hanging back, hands clasped behind her so that they could not betray her emotions, eyes batting furiously as she reflexively contained herself, mouth warped by inner anguish, eyes moist and plaintively wide, Shibo.
She did not plague him with questions, as the others did. Shibo invoked a time-honored Bishop custom, whereby a woman may withdraw her man from Family matters if he is wounded or distraught. Never had Killeen heard of such privilege used for a Cap’n, but he raised no objections. He let Shibo guide him to a boxy tent of odd design, and there seemed to fall into a musky warm pit.
He ached everywhere. The fear and anguish he had sup- pressed were lodged in tight muscle complexes, gnarled deposits in his sensorium like granite nuggets in a bed of sand. Each stored increment awaited only a release of control in order to speak its pain. Shibo said little, simply began singing a high, drifting song of ancient deeds, as his clothes slid from him and a tracery of warmth crept across his filthy skin. She applied the heavy scented oils and scraped them away with a honed stone blade. His skin shrieked at the cleansing and then simmered into a tingling glow.
She moved over him, gauzy and ghostly and light, and seemed to pluck words out of his throat, so that the story seeped from him involuntarily, oozing through his skin as it answered her hands. His sensorium trembled and snagged on her moist breath, on the quickness of her. He could feel her own despair and bleak days, lacing the air between them and merging with their desire. They were together in a new place, a zone they had never penetrated before because for years now life between them had been mild and calm and incapable of reaching deeply in. They pressed, pressed. Sank into each other, bone into bone. Killeen felt angered by the stubborn flesh that resisted with its mulish weight their blending; he wrestled with the sheer lazy obdurance of their bodies. Shibo bit and pulled and strained and they became thin wedges driven into each other. Their bodies were left behind. Together they glided in sailing, recessional spaces.
There was a long interval without a tick of time.
Then, casually, Killeen heard a distant muttered conversation. The ringing clatter of someone fumbling with metal. Crackling of fires. Children’s weary giggles.
The world had started up again.
“Ah,” Shibo said, eyes heavy-lidded. “Here.”
They lay together in each other’s arms and laughed. Killeen felt a whisper of ache in his lower back and knew he had not banished all the past, never would.
