No, you are not the one. I am enjoined to convey this only to the target human. My feet are mired in plasma, while these arms
extend even unto your bitter-cold zones. Find me the one named Killeen. I speak for his father.
NINE
A tide of rustling disquiet swept across the valley. The ranks of the assembled Families wavered. Feet shuffled nervously, stirring dust that rose like a visible answer. Heads leaned back, trying to make out the shadowed filigree that danced featherlight across the sky.
“What?” His Supremacy’s voice was weak and strained, compared with the full, resonant power that came hammering down from the fretted air. “It is…God? God speaks in this manner?”
I seek a being of the class I perceive is gathered here. I have searched this world far beyond my obligation to do so, and found fair few of you small things. Such low forms are usually numerous, but you are rare among these sheltered enclaves I have examined—these rude, chilly planets of uninteresting, slow matter.
“I speak for all humanity here,” His Supremacy cried.
In Killeen’s sensorium the human voice seemed awash in a lapping fretwork of smoothed waves. The massive swells were gridworks that bulged and slid. He remembered the mathematically generated ocean he had sailed in the grip of the Mantis’s mind.
Are you the one I seek? You emit a pungent reek, similar to his, I see. But your essence is shaped with less angularity, and colored in the deeper hues of frying gases. No, you are not that one. Be gone.
His Supremacy’s mouth twisted with dark rage. “You are not God! You come from the Cybers. You must! Say it! Be gone with you, foul demon!”
Killeen held himself back, unsure. This was the very voice that had called to him years before, on Snowglade. It had advised him to not rebuild the Bishop Citadel, and to seek the Argo. After the Bishops had found Argo buried under a weathered hillside, Killeen had expected further contact with the voice, more orders—but nothing had come in the two years of Argo’s voyaging. He longed to answer it.
But here? The voice would be heard by all, and might reveal what Killeen should do next.
He tried to guess what His Supremacy would make of it, especially since the man’s red face had already knotted with frustration. The act of receiving the message might in turn make it impossible for Killeen to act upon it, if His Supremacy could somehow turn the information to his own ends.
So many of you small things, each with a different aroma and shape. Vexing! Creation is diverse, but trivially so—what need can there be for this variety, these endlessly multiplied shadings and nuances? It is not as though you mites are works of true craft, after all. It simply makes my task more difficult.
“Flee, foul agent!—or we will crush you!” His Supremacy put all his considerable throaty power into the jeering shout.
You venture to clash with me? To crush a being made of the most tenacious fields? My magnetic skirts could sweep you to dust, little worrisome grub. The discharge of my merest idle thought would wreak charring violence through a thousand such as you. But no matter—I cannot be bothered to fathom the mire of vile scents and squashed angles that make up your fledgling race. I cannot rummage through a legion of such, all to deliver a message of muddled meanings. I go.
The roiling seethe began to ebb from the heavens. The pressure in Killeen’s sensorium trickled away.
“No! Wait!”
He leaped in the air, arms flung up as if to grab the retracting lines of blue flux high above them. “I’m Killeen! Here!”
The lacy pattern of radiance paused and rippled. Killeen watched it shoot fresh feelers downward, following the arcing magnetic field lines of the planet.
So you are. I sense your flat odor and slanted self. Good—I tire of this pursuit, this obligation. I received this injunction from a power which sits farther in toward the Eater than do even I. Though my head can reach up into the realm of cool, sluggish worlds such as this, my many feet stand upon a crisply ordered plane of storm-cut plasma, the accretion disk that hotly feeds the appetite of the Eater. From far inside my tossed realm comes this frame of questions which I now ask.
Killeen watched His Supremacy as these words poured down. The man’s anger seemed bottled up, making his eyes bulge and lips protrude. His jaw waggled to the side, back and forth. But he gave no orders. Killeen stepped clear of his Family so his sensorium would be as clean as he could make it.
“Tell me—last time, you said somethin’ calling itself my father was there. What—
The first is a question. How is Toby?
Any doubts Killeen had harbored about the meaning of that strange sentence, years before, now vanished. Who but Abraham would ask first about his grandson?
“He’s fine—growin’ like a weed. Standin’ right here beside me. See if you can pick up his—”
I perceive a weaker aura, yes, somewhat similar to yours. I shall relay it backward, down magnetic lines which spiral into the Center. It shall be refracted into the tangle of geometries where something darkly awaits. There is a spray of antimatter near my footpoint, arising from some artificial means, and thus I cannot guarantee precise transmissions of such flimsy data as your minute auras.
“My father’s there with you? Tell him we need—”
Not here with me, no; all I ken is the assertion that he lived farther in, whirling somewhere in time-racked eddies.
“Lived? Does he live still now?” Killeen’s voice tightened.
Forms such as yourself seem to lurk there, for purposes not revealed to me. I cannot tell if that particular unit persists. The presence there of such inconsequential, primitive entities is a greater mystery than anything in your messages, little mind, but I shall not trouble you with issues you cannot comprehend. Attend you, then: The next message is Apply the Argo ship’s codes to the Legacies.
Killeen shouted, “Legacies? But we’ve lost—”
Silence, small mind.
“Our ship is gone!”
Unconcerned, the electromagnetic entity above stirred as though restless. It cast auroras of shimmering green into the nearby clouds, pressing them back so that the whole vault of the sky opened. The high cirrus banks yawned, as if to bite the somber sky beyond.
The messages I am enjoined to deliver are not simple statements, but rather microscopic intelligences—fragments of the mind that sent them. Thus I must wait for this speck to conjure up some reply to you. It now says, Then you are lost.
“But that’s—”
His Supremacy shouted, “Cap’n of the Bishops! I command you to desist. Converse with this agent of corruption will confuse all our Tribe and bring error to us all.”
Killeen glanced at His Supremacy and waved him away, trying to think. His father—
“I warn you!” His Supremacy’s voice gained menace. “Dealing with—”
“Cermo! Perimeter star!”
