“Toby—how, what—” Besen began, then burst into frightened tears.
Sobs escaped from Toby’s strained throat. His mouth contorted but he could not speak.
Killeen braced himself. He concentrated and with one movement pulled the knife cleanly from the tree.
Toby collapsed. The women lowered him to the dusty gravel nearby, avoiding the puddle of brown-crusted blood.
Killeen threw the knife aside and found his carrypack a short distance away. He found some organiform cloth tucked in a pocket and cut it into slices with his own knife. Toby was thrashing under the women’s hands, moaning, gulping, shouting incoherently. Other Bishops came running.
Killeen made a tourniquet and bound up the hand while the women continued to hold Toby down. Then Shibo untied it and did the job again, better.
Toby gasped fast and shallowly, face ashen.
“Son—son,” Killeen said. The boy stared up at the night, where ruddy light seeped from distant molecular clouds between the stars. “Son, what…?”
Besen had stopped crying while the three of them worked on the hand and now she started again, sobbing softly. Killeen’s mouth was dry and he could not get the coppery tang of blood out of his nostrils.
“I… Somethin’… Had an idea. Do that.” Toby got the words out between chapped, white lips.
“Your idea?” Shibo asked.
“I… dunno.”
“What was it like?”
“A big… Slick. Shiny, almost.”
“What did it look like?” Besen asked, choking back her tears.
“I… Big, pressin’ in on me. Look…?” Toby frowned, staring into space.
“Oh, why, why—” Besen began.
Killeen held up a hand to cut her off. He nodded to Toby. “Yeasay, son. What did it look like?”
“Looked so… so shiny. And… no face. No face at all.”
SIX
The jut and tumble of these ragged mountains snagged Quath as she fled. Sharp stone teeth nipped at her. She stumbled several times, barely catching herself. Fresh outcroppings had flowered into spreading black fans, liberated by the last quake. They rasped on her undercarriage. Her minds rattled with percussive confusion and her only reaction was to move, run, escape.
It had been a near thing. She had almost been caught and pinned, drawn into the Nought mind she had invaded.
Yet that was impossible. Hers was a well-ordered, multiple mind, capable of calling up enormous volumes of knowledge, of marshaling mental resources in a microsecond, of overwhelming with layered mass any simple, linear Nought mind. When she had carried her own Nought inside herself she had merely verged on its mind. Preoccupied, she had made only glancing contact. Occupying her second Nought had been equally simple. And, she now saw, each time some unsuspected barrier had fallen.
All her wrenchings and lacerating blows had not gained her freedom from this latest, apparently minor intelligence. Trying to extricate herself, she had found her self-aura immersed in a swampy, sucking underlayer. It was cloying and thick, a muddy sludge of clotted, unconscious impulses, memories, gnarled subsystems.
Here was where this Nought truly lived. Quath had sensed its raw, sticky pull in a jolting instant of profound surprise. The mind’s upper layers were mild and obliging, like cool, smooth corridors beneath the linear engagements of the conscious—while far below, in chambers walled and ramified with bony purpose, lurked a complex, ropy labyrinth of strange power.
Or minds. Quath was not even sure the Nought was a single intelligence.
Its highest echelons had seemed to be more like a passive stage than a directing entity. There, on a broad, level area above the syrupy seethe, factions of the undermind warred. An abyss yawned.
Instincts spoke quietly, effectively, never falling silent. Emotions flared prickly hot—heckling, yearning, always calling the higher intelligence away from its deliberations.
Zesty hormones surged—not to carry wedges of information or holistic images, as in Quath, but to flood the bloodstream with urgent demands.
Organs far from the brain answered these chemical heralds, pumping other hormones into the thumping flow, adding alkaline voices to the babble.
Ideas rose like crystalline towers from this swamp, glimmering coolly—but soon were spattered with the aromatic chemical murk, blood on glass.
These elements merged and wrestled, struggling armies rushing together in flurries, fermenting, spinning away into wild skirmishes. Lurid splashes festooned the brittle ramparts of analytical thought. A churning mire lapped hungrily at the stern bulwarks of reason, eroding worn salients even as fresh ones were built.
Yet somehow this interior battle did not yield mere confusion and scattered indecision. Somehow a single coherent view emerged, holding the vital, fervent factions in check. Its actions sampled of all the myriad influences, letting none dominate for long.
Quath marveled at the sheer energy behind the incessant clashings, and at the same time felt a mixture of recognition laced by repulsion.
This Nought’s inner landscape was far more complex than it should be. No wonder it had not attained the technological sophistication of the podia!—it labored forward in a howling storm, its every sharp perception blunted by fraying winds of passion.
But by the same stroke, it had a curious way of skating on the surface of these choppy, alchemical crosscurrents. Some balance and uncanny steadiness came from that. It was much like the way they walked—falling forward, then rescuing themselves by catching the plunge with the other leg. This yielded a rocking cadence that echoed the precarious nature of the being itself.
Not a single mind… and not multiple, interlocking intelligences, such as Quath.
She should inform the Tukar’ramin, she knew. This discovery came as a complete surprise, with implications Quath could not fathom. But for now she was unable to think clearly. Her smaller minds urged different courses, yelping and squirming. She silenced them and imposed a stony resolve: keep far enough away from the Noughts to escape detection. She had to learn more of what they were.
Cobwebs of the Nought mind still clung to Quath. They brushed across her field of vision, shimmering traceries of doubt. The very air clamored with skeptic winds.
In rattled confusion Quath stumbled on.
