Galactic Center - Furious Gulf Part 5

THE ETER OF.ALL THINGS.

I.

Hard PursuitToby eyed Besen warily. Why couldn't she leave him alone?

Like most women, she a.s.sumed that talking about things that bothered you, getting it all out, made them better. Obviously. Automatically.

Toby's experience was that pretty often that just made them worse.

Bringing vague, smoky feelings into the glaring open daylight, sharpening them up bright and shiny with words, making them more concrete--well, then the problems looked even harder. At least to him.

He sighed. They were eating in the clattering, chattering, communal cafeteria. All around them people were murmuring earnestly, the big room alive with excited speculations about their mission.

It had been a week since Killeen's dramatic speech at the Gathering. A week spent hamm. ering their way in toward the blazing, star-swarming True Center. A week when Argo throbbed and lurched and rumbled in the buffeting plasma winds. A week that people seemed to be enjoying.

Pulse-pounding adventure was better than sitting on your haunches, mulling over matters. Family Bishop was tired of the soft life in Argo. A wonderful ship, a grand inheritance from their distant, time-dimmed ancestors, sure--but in the end just a smart can. In Toby's judgment, Bishops weren't at their best when they were cooped up with nothing better to do than talk. Like right now.

"I appreciate your asking and all," Toby said at last, struggling to be diplomatic. After all, Besen had been trying to cajole him out of his moody silence. "Don't get me started, though."

Besen smiled sympathetically. "Sometimes you close up tight as a vacuum seal."

"There's a lot of adrenaline pumping lately, that's all."

"Why, sure." She looked startled, her lips canted in puzzlement.

"We're leaving those mechs way behind."

70.

"Huh!" He snorted. "A rat in a cage can dash back and forth all it wants.""We're not caught?"I don't see any way out--do you?""Plenty. We haven't even sighted the disk around the black hole yet.

There may be room to hide, then--""The mechs know this place. They've got telltales planted aroundhere, for sure. Smart snoopers.""We don't know that.""It's a good bet. Something at True Center has been a fixation of mechs for a long time--Quath says so.""You believe everything that big collection of pants says?""Sure do." Toby shot back. "At least Quath doesn't try to cheer me up."Besen frowned prettily. "Ummm. You are down in the mouth.""I'm not celebrating, is all." Toby sipped his lotus juice and picked up a grain cube. He rapped it against the table and a small white weevil came squirming out. "Only way to get these bugs out, far as anybody knows,"

he said with disgust, sweeping it away."It was that Erica, she let them get free.""Easy mistake to make when you can't read the directions.""She could've asked her Aspects!"Erica had mistakenly let the self-warming vial of frozen soil-tenders escape years ago, but their daily irritations reminded everybody and brought her name up like a curse.Toby was sympathetic. Who could have known that the ugly squirmers would pop out of their container, all ready to start eating?-which was, after all, their job. They startled poor Erica into droppingethe vial. Who could guess that then they'd get into all the grain crops? The worms belonged among the vegetables and apple trees, just as the inscription said, in some dead language. Just Erica's bad luck--and theirs--that she was in the grain dome when she opened the cylinder. He shrugged. "She'd been working hard seeding.""I think the Cap'n should've whipped her for it.""He doesn't like whipping.""What a Cap'n likes and doesn't like, that doesn't matter," Besen said stiffly. "What's good for the Family, that comes first.""Sure. And a smart Cap'n gets his crew all fired up about what he wants."Besen blinked. "Oh, so you're saying Cap'n's got us dancing hisdance, only we're hearing different music?""Could be.""And you don't want to say anything in public? Out of loyalty?"

"I don't like to go against him."

"Well, you'd sure be unpopular."

71."Yeasay--and I got to admit, everybody's spirits are running pretty high." He gestured around at the cafeteria, jammed with animated faces.

There was an electric smell of skittering excitement. People so long on the run greeted a hard pursuit with elation; the thrill of familiar danger.Besen's lips pursed with concern. "You really don't think this is just a way of getting away from the mechs, do you?""I don't know what it's really about." Toby rapped his grain cube angrily. Another weevil fell out onto the table. With relish he squashed it with his thumb. "Pays to be careful, is all."Besen smiled. "Look twice for weevils?""Weevils can be anywhere."Besen gathered herself visibly and tried to shift their mood. "Let's go up to observation, see if we can spot any.""Great." He tossed aside the grain cube, then thought again, rapped it a third time--no more weevils--and bit in. "Umm, not bad--when you're starving.""You're always starving. And since the sail-snake and the rest, we have plenty to eat.""Let's go." Toby was grateful to her for giving him an exit from an uncomfortable conversation. He didn't like his brooding to color the mood of the ship, not when his father had pulled everybody together so well, had them putting in long hours of grunt labor and smiling about it.They made their way up the broad helical ramp at Argo's core. All crew were working harder now, dealing with the agro domes. The level of radiation from outside was climbing by the hour. Smoldering infrareds, sharp ultraviolets, unseen spectra biting at the crops. They had polarized the domes to the max, but stinging energies still got through. So it was a relief to forget all that, to slump into the netting of an observation chamber and watch the stunning brilliance outside.In the cool, dim core of the ship the observation room was crowded and Toby could not get a good clear view. The field of glowing stars was confusing, crisscrossed by eerie splashes of radiating gas. Then the Bridge switched to a Doppler-shifted frequency, and details leaped out. Going to blue-rich frequencies picked out things moving toward Argo and dimmed everything else.And there they were: brilliant pinpoints of blue, eight of them evenly s.p.a.ced around a circle."Impossible to miss," Toby murmured."The mechs must not care whether we notice," Besen said."Or else they really want us to.""Why would they? More effective to sneak up, I'd think."

"Maybe they want to spook us."

"Into doing what?""Maybe just what we're doing," Toby said grimly.

72.

"Hey, we're gettin' away from them!" a big, hawk-nosed woman protested on Toby's left, gouging him with a sharp elbow. She was an Ace, from the wastelands of Trump. Trained to follow her Family leader.

"Yeasay, throwin' dust in their faces," a man joined in. A River.

"We can outrun any d.a.m.n mech," another woman announced proudly. Her accent was of Family Deuce, so thick Toby could barely understand her.

Toby gritted his teeth. "Yeasay, yeasay. I was just wondering--"

"Not right, Cap'n's son going' on like that." The hawk-nosed woman's elbow poked him again.

"Sorry, brothers and sisters," Toby said, though he was getting irritated. "Uh, 'scuse me."

He got up and worked his way out of the press of bodies. Everybody seemed to be looking at him, sour-faced. Or else avoiding his eyes. Besen followed, whispering, "That old hag, she's a flap-mouthed gossip. All those Trump Families are."

Toby was already feeling bad about the incident, and he stopped before leaving the room to catch another glimpse of the screen. Family Bishop members were murmuring, speculating, even laughing--and not just among the Snowglade folk, either. They argued and elbowed and laughed with tbLe Trump Families, too. An electric smell came from the crowd, a fidgety excitement.

It struck Toby that the room was jammed not so much because they wanted to see the gaudy pictures, but to provide a place to gather, gossip, and grumble. All to sharpen their sense of themselves as a fragile human Family in the face of the abyss outside.

That was essential--holding together. Argo held mostly Bishops, from Snowglade, but also Families of the planet they had just left, which itsnatives called Trump. Those Families had names Toby didn't under-stand--Aces and Deuces, Jacks and Fivers. There were Queens, though, which by logic should have had the same customs and history as the Family Queen of Snowglade. But they didn't.

Killeen called these Trump Families the Cards. They were fiercely loyal and p.r.o.ne to follow hot-eyed leaders. Back on Trump some had obeyed the crazy man who called himself His Supremacy, a fierce-faced type the Bishops had finally had to kill. Somehow this had .meant that the Cards then transferred their loyalty to Killeen.

It made no sense, but then, not much about Trump did. Toby flatly disbelieved the idea that the Cards had gotten their names from some ancient game. Maybe a game had been made up using those names, sure.

But Families were ancient and hallowed and not the stuff of trivial matters.

Still, the Trumps were a bit hard to take, b.u.t.t-headed and ignorant.

But the Snowgladers were no prize, either, when you looked close.

Rooks liked to blow their noses by pinching the bridge of the nose and letting fly into the air. They laughed if anybody was in the way. The hawk-nosed woman was a Rook, true to form.

73.

On the other hand, p.a.w.ns saw nothing wrong with taking a c.r.a.p in full view of anybody who happened by. A perfectly natural function, they said. What's to be embarra.s.sed about?Knights burped and farted at the most formal occasions--they didn't even seem to notice doing it.Bishops spit whenever they felt like it, which was pretty often.Rooks preferred to pee on plants, maintaining that since this was part of the Great Cycle of Life, it must be good for them.And Kings would cough smack in your face, smiling after they did it.

Some said that in the old Citadel days the lost Family of Queens had even made love in public, feet pointed at the ceiling, rumps thrusting in the air free as you please. They had some sort of theory about doing it as a show of demented social solidarity. Toby didn't really believe that, it was utterly fantastic--but who could truly say what people of the deep past had believed and done?Still, the Snowglade Families overlooked these differences, acts that seemed to others like gross social blunders, and held together. And aside from minor incidents, they extended the same hand to the Trumps, even if they were b.u.t.t-stubborn and ate with their mouths open. The Family of Families.Toby knew he had an obligation to keep the social glue in place. Not that he had to like it. He smacked a fist into his palm as he walked away from the jammed room.Concerned, Besen asked, "She really got to you?""Naysay. Forget it." But he knew he wouldn't.

2.

The Shredded Star Toby missed having Quath live outside. Anything that big should be free beneath the stars, not closed in.He was sure of this despite knowing that Quath's kind had evolved out of a burrowing species that liked to dig in snug and tight beneath the ground. How such a race developed intelligence was a riddle. It seemed unlikely that something that wormed into dark, smelly crannies and ventured out to hunt for game would need much in the way of smarts. On the other hand, he reflected, humans had holed up in caves a lot, or so Isaac said. What made a creature develop intelligence was a deep question.

After all, mechs came to have quick minds and n.o.body remembered when or how. Not even Isaac.ToBut the real reason Toby thought Quath should be outside was that by now had no excuse to go hull-walking himself. He felt an itchy,restless energy that he couldn't erase with workouts in zero-grav. At least when he did visit Quath, it was in s.p.a.ces so big that Toby could practice his low-grav skills.At the moment Quath was in the abandoned agro dome. The high arch reflected back Toby's huffing and puffing as he did rebounds off the walls. He would coast across the dome, maybe try to bank a little in the ventilator winds. Zooming toward the opposite wall, he pinwheeled his arms in mid-flight to bring his legs around, so that they could absorb momentum and rebound like coiled springs. A lot more fun than lifting dead weights, like some kind of demented machine.Quath stood at the dome floor's center, eyes swiveling to followToby's ricocheting. She sent a hissing note of derision:"I wouldn't expect a giant c.o.c.kroach to understand." "You eat stuff that would gag any self-respecting pest."

75.This startled Toby. He grabbed a steel strut and clung to it, panting.

"Really?""Were they, well, like us?""Ugh. I'm trying hard to think of you as a buddy, big-bug, but if you go on like this--"Toby could sense the capitals in Quath's hissing mind-voice and decided to not pursue the matter. Quath was serious. Maybe it was common for intelligent beings anywhere to think of themselves as the crown of creation--The People--and everybody else as a smart animal at best. Savvy smarts and egomania went hand in hand. Or pincer in pincer.After all, suppose Quath had been a thousand times smaller. It wouldn't matter that she was supersmart--if Toby shook her out of his bedroll he would step on her without a thought. He certainly wouldn't inquire into what she thought about the nature of life."I think I could pa.s.s up honors like that. Anyway, many-eyes, you seem to have settled in here okay.""So generous of you. Look, I was sent here to see if you can figurewhat your own folks are doing in their ships.""They're still hauling that huge ring. Only it's glowing more, a kind of ivory.""It sure seems to keep them away, all right. But why are your people gaining on us?""Uh, what's a cusp?"

"Oh yeah? Look, I bite into an apple, it tastes real good. Where's the geometry in that?"

76.Toby hated it when Quath said something and then the programs in his head, and in Quath's too, couldn't make enough sense between them to get the job done. All that came through was a fizzy blurt and a bland, flat [untranslatable]. "Okay, then where's the geometry in a kiss, huh?""Oh, glad it's so obvious. How silly of me.""Yeasay, we call it 'sarcasm.'""Let's just call it [untranslatable], bug-boy." "Aaahhh!"This was driving Toby up the wall--literally. He was glad he could work out his frustration by climbing through the struts of the dome, leaping across wide spans, burning calories to clear his mind. It was getting hot in here--hot all through Argo, in fact. The domes were absorbing radiation from the astronomical fireworks outside.Stinging sweat dripped into Toby's eyes. He clambered over struts and beams, swung in the nearly zero-grav, and let go. He spread his arms and beat against the air, flapping like an awkward bird, and slowly fell toward Quath. The alien caught him at the very last moment before hewould have smacked painfully on the deck. "Oooof! Thanks."

"That's part of being human, you o1' giant grub."

"In search of what?"

"Oh no, not again!"Toby scuffed up some dead soil with his boot, sending a shower of gray dust spurting up into the low-grav dome. He still had some irritations to work out, some thinking to do about his father. He leaped and swung upon one of Quath's extended telescoping arms. "Maybe I--"--Toby! Bring Quath to the Bridge, right away.--Killeen's sharp voice cut into his concentration so abruptly that Toby let go of the arm, coasted, and thumped back into the dirt. "Okay. But Quath won't fit in--"--Get moving!-It turned out that Quath could scrunch down in the corridor outside 77.the Bridge, bend two eye-stalks around the entrance, and see most of the wall screens. Quath looked uncomfortable, her steel-jacketed legs c.o.c.ked at odd angles and wedged against bulkheads, though she said nothing.

Killeen wanted Quath to try more communication channels with his own kind, the Myriapodia. "After all, I spent days trapped in her belly, once,"

Killeen said casually.Toby blinked. His misgivings aside, he had to remember that his father had been through horrendous adventures with Quath. Maybe they communicated with each other in ways he didn't fully appreciate.Killeen a.s.signed several Bridge Lieutenants to help the alien with technical problems, using Argo's long-range antennas.The Bridge buzzed, but Killeen kept good ship's discipline, and the excitement remained controlled, visible mostly in pinched faces and narrowed eyes. The great wall screens showed scenes that shifted with dizzying speed. The ivory hoop hung suspended between three strange, angular ships. Somehow their shape--geometry again, Toby thought--would have told him that they were of Quath's kind, if he had not known.The hoop itself flickered and strobed with eerie plays of the spectrum.

Flashes of gold and crimson ran along it, then faded into the milky light, like runny stains sinking in a deep chalky sea.Killeen paced the Command Deck of the Bridge, his boots ringing on steel, hands carefully clasped behind him. Toby knew he did that so n.o.body could read through fidgeting fingers his own anxieties and tensions; it was the kind of thing that a Cap'n had to do.Toby felt an upwelling of concern and love for the controlled disguise this big man struggled to maintain. What was the cost? Would anyone ever know?And there was much to be agitated about, Toby saw. The wall screens flickered. Now they showed a scene so strange it took a long moment to even sort out what he was witnessing. An orange ball hung shimmering against the backdrop of thousands of gemlike stars, not pinpoints crowding the sky. The ball swirled with mottled storms.Toby had decided it was an oddly colored star, nothing exceptional--until it began to bulge on one side. Blue-hot flares rose all along its fiery edge. The bulge extended, grew banana yellow. It was as though the star was turning itself into a giant egg. But to give birth to what?Killeen turned and saw his son. Waving him over, the Cap'n said, "Even stars are prey for it.""Huh? What's happening?""Sorry--! forget, watching this for so long, that the lives of stars are not so gripping to everyone.""I repeat--huh?" Toby was used to his father going off into distracted ramblings."This star is about to be gobbled up. See?"

78.

Killeen's fingers danced on a command plate. The view backed away from the star, whose side kept swelling like a fat man's belly at a feast.

Then, entering the frame came an angry red smear, spreading like a stain across the wall. "The great disk," Killeen said. "There are Family legends of it. Some call it the Eye of the Eater."

"Disk?" The viewpoint kept backing away.

Toby saw that the orange star was just at the edge of an immense plane of festering, smoldering fire. The plane was moving. Streams of blood red and hot, phosph.o.r.escent orange curved away into the distance, slowly circling about some axis far out of view. "Oh--the star's getting sucked in?"

Killeen crossed his arms and watched the doomed sun stretch itself, now rippling with vagrant yellow plumes and dark purple veins. "Yes--but not sucked in by the disk itself. The Eye of the Eater is matter that was sucked in before."

Toby's Isaac Aspect rasped disdainfully,He is copying ancient lore. Not for a moment do I believe that he understands --"Hey, who do you think you are?" Toby shot back in a subvocal whisper. "We all repeat what you Aspects and Faces tell us--we sure don't have time to learn all this techstuffi"Still, if he would credit the cla.s.sical sources who developed the theories, who made the dangerous measurements-"Gimmie a break! We'd be nothing but dry bones if we waited for you if spects to yammer on till you're happy." He stifled Isaac.

Killeen went on, "That ma.s.s, it's stuff flowing inward, getting a bit closer every time it circles. So the disk is a highway, that's all. The villain in all this, him you can't see."

Toby got it now. "The black hole? It's pulling this star apart?"

Killeen nodded. "A rare event, and we're just in time for it. The hole swallows stars--but first it likes to chew 'em up."

The panorama grew, retreating from the star, bringing more of the huge, churning disk into view. The Eye of the Eater was a furious red at its rim, working with gales of burnt orange and fierce yellow. Each flaring pinp.r.i.c.k was like a momentary bonfire--but Toby reminded himself that these bonfires were bigger than whole planets.

As the vista broadened, he saw that the disk got brighter toward its center. Reds shifted into roiling greens and wrathful purples. Even further in, a hard blue glare seethed. He could barely make himself look as the view swung inward toward eye-hurting brilliance. The disk revolved about a white-hot ball sizzling with blistering energy.

"Where's... where's the hole?"

79.Killeen pointed at the white ball. "In there--but we can't see it, because everything's so hot at the inner edge of that disk."Isaac put in, I have conferred with High Chandelier Aspects -- they are getting even harder to understand!--and translated their complaints. I must say, I agree with them. Correct attribution is important! --otherwise we lose our past. Now, all this was discovered in 3045 by Antonella Frazier, who even wrote an epic poem about it. A cosmic irony "that the blackest of places wears a white cloak.'

I can dimly recall hearing of this great work, and...

He let the Aspect run a little, not really paying attention. Isaac and Killeen's tech-Aspect were probably using the two living humans to subtly compete. Did such chip-beings have jealousy, envy, spite? Of course, he and his father were slinging the techtalk around pretty heavy, maybe trying to impress each other, too. The ancient Aspects were nested inside the newer ones, to ease translation. Their ideas and feelings came through as well, an emotion/data stew.Small human motives, all dwarfed by the huge scale of events. All this was beautiful, in a weird way, but hard to understand.Toby jerked himself out of his reverie. "Why's everything so hot?""Friction. All that stuff, orbiting tighter and tighter around the hole, it rubs up against other stuff--gas and dust and whatnot. Heats up."Toby tried to take it all in. The disk glowered, like a red eye with a white bulb smack at the center. A monster's glare. The Eye of the Eater--only you couldn't see the Eater, the blackest thing in the universe. As near as he could understand it, a hole in s.p.a.ce. Things drained into it. "So the hole eats stars, I get that, and likes to chew its food first. The disk is all the stuff it's ripped apart lately.""And it's been eating ever since the galaxy was born.""You mean--that plate of gas--it was once stars?"Killeen nodded distantly, staring at a particularly spectacular eruption.

A blue-green geyser curled up from the disk like a maddened snake, flicking yellow tongues."What better way to serve up food for the Eater, than on a plate?" A grim chuckle.Toby looked around at the strained faces of the Bridge crew. Lieutenant Jocelyn had been waiting to speak, standing off to the side as if she didn't want to interrupt a conversation between father and son, even on the Bridge. She stepped smartly forward, long hair wafting in the warm ship's air, and said, "Cap'n, we're getting more hull heating."Killeen instantly snapped out of his musing. "Near the danger line?"

"Not yet, but--""Coolant circulating to the max?""Yessir."

80.Killeen scowled. "How's our spin?""We've got all the independently moving sections of the ship at their top rotation." Jocelyn's full, muscular frame stayed at strict attention, but Toby could see from her twitching fingers that she was worried.They were spinning parts of Argo to smooth out the heat load. The ferocious rage of that brawling ga could singe their hull, and crisp up the human cargo nicely. Toby recalled Quath's gourmet comments about cracking open carefully cooked primate bones, savoring the marrow. He shuddered.Killeen smacked a fist into his palm, a mom.entary release. "I don't see what more we--" came the fizzy speech of Quath, beamed over general head-comm.The Bridge crew turned as if one. They stared at the half-seen alien who stood absolutely still in the corridor outside.Killeen was the first to speak, with sardonic humor. "I wondered when you would begin to spill your lore."Quath's two eye-stalks rattled against the hatchway. Killeen laughed. "Glad to know you care so much. Those antennas we erected--I suppose your new link with your ships works better?"< p="">

of what it means to converse with others who truly understand.>"Well, we're learning." Killeen grinned. Toby could see his fatherrelish the conversation, his face losing its lined tension.Partially."We don't need all that extra ma.s.s you lug around.""You look like you've grown some more eyes, since I saw you last time."Toby knew the word "Myriapodia" simply meant "many-legged,"

but the funny trilling way Quath sounded the word carried an air of awe and pride, too. Killeen had told Toby to get here in a hurry, then had ignored Quath completely. Toby was beginning to see that Killeen haddifferent ways of dealing with the alien, maybe better ones."This Besik Bay. You want to hide there, many-eyed?"The crew murmured. Toby knew they all suspected that they were being used by the Podia for some murky purpose, and this brought that question close to the surface again. But what choice did they have now?

81.Quath rattled her eye-stalks again. "Ummm--diplomatic of you. But I asked what you think."< p="">

Ancient expeditions of Myriapodia found it so labeled--apparently by humans.>Toby put in, "Besik? No Family of that name."Somehow Quath made the wall screens jump and swivel. They whirled around as the ship's sensors sought a different target--and locked on an inky blob, high above the glowering red disk.Killeen gestured to Lieutenant Jocelyn. "Take us up that way." He had always been one for quick decisions, and the Bridge jumped to comply.

Killeen turned back to Quath, his expression veiled. "What were your ancestors looking for here?""Can't say more than that?""h.e.l.l! Look, for Family Bishop True Center is a legend. Almost a holy place--only we don't know why.""Yeasay?" Killeen frowned. "Whatever we did, way back then, it's lost."Killeen stared moodily at the expanses. "For us, coming here--well, it's like climbing the tallest mountain anybody ever saw."Killeen shrugged, as if sensing when he would learn no more. "Okay, we'll cool our heels a little behind that cloud."Though ordinary crew seldom spoke on the Bridge without the Cap'n's bidding, Toby decided to use his position as Cap'n's son. He could not resist probing further. "Quath, what made your ancestors leave?""Why? It's a h.e.l.lhole." 82."But there aren't any mechs here now.""There are plenty on our tail," Killeen observed mildly.

"So we hide?" Killeen asked, frowning.Toby knew his father did not like to sneak by a challenge unless he absolutely had to. On the other hand, the Families had been running for a long time, learning the elusive crafts, and knew the virtues of being missing.Killeen shrugged again, as if he knew when he wasn't going to get any more out of Quath. He tapped the control board. The screens veered again, coming around to the strange, warped star--which wasn't a star at all any more.While they had been talking, the inflating fat-man's belly had broken open. Now it spewed out white-hot streamers, the tortured sun finally shredding. Erupting gas swirled away from the split star, twisting. It rushed to join the smoldering rim of the great disk. As the view backed away, Toby saw the star as if it were a helpless animal, caught, struggling pointlessly, its life being sucked out. Lumps of it streamed into the disk, setting off fresh orange explosions there.Toby felt a chilling wonder mixed with fear. "How come the hole can rip up a whole star, this far out, and it's so small we can't even see it?"Killeen rea&ed down and patted his son's shoulder, and in his face Toby saw the same mix of emotions. "The way I understand it, that hole is small, sure--but it's got plenty ma.s.s in it. That much, all compressedogether, it makes strong tides. The inner face of that star's trying to orbit ng one curve, see? Its back face, it's a smidgen further out from the hole,so it wants to orbit along a little-bit different orbit.""I guess. So?""Well, they can't both go their separate ways and still hold together and be a star, right?" From Killeen's half-distracted gaze Toby knew he was getting coached by his tech Aspect. "But they can go their own way, if the star tears itself apart. So when the tides get strong enough, that's what it does. The fides just plain shred it, like a rag doll."Toby looked around. The whole Bridge crew was silent, watching their Cap'n. In their upturned faces Toby read hope and need, sobered by the spectacle. Killeen's wary smile reflected the glare of the agonized, dying sun.In the quiet Quath spoke, her words carrying a faint hiss. Killeen's face wrinkled with worry. "So it'll get hotter?" 83.Toby grinned. "I thought your kind looked but didn't run.""Ummm. Sounds like an excuse to me, big-bug."< [untranslatable].=""> 3.

Besik BayToby didn't like to take advantage of his being son of the Cap'n, but there were times when he couldn't resist.

This was one. They were running for their lives now.

Every wall screen in Argo showed how close pursuit was. The mech ships were gaining on them. A narrow gap, getting slimmer. Their boxy, jumbled construction betrayed no concern for line or craft. Indeed, as Jocelyn explained, mech ships weren't like bottles carrying pa.s.sengers.

They were multiple, interlocking machines, without even a single, intact skin of metal. The basic unit of organic forms was the individual. For mechs, single operating systems the size of cities were perfectly ordinary.

nd these ships were huge, misshapen bundles.

I Behind them came the Myriapodia craft with their immense ivory hoop suspended between them. The mechs did not turn to attack the Myriapodia. And Argo now fled into the shadowy tendrils of the immense Besik cloud.

Bravado and loud talk dwindled away. Family spoke quietly in small, worried knots around the cafeteria. Toby didn't want to sit idly and wait for news, so whenever he could fake an excuse, he slipped up to the Bridge. If he stood at the back, the Bridge officers didn't notice him, or else they gave him a wink and pa.s.sed on. Cap'n's son, who needs trouble?

Naturally, Besen wanted to come, too. Toby had yet to master the skills of dealing with women, as opposed to girls--and Besen was most definitely a woman. In the Family, a woman was one who displayed ability at a wide range of practical matters, not just in the kitchen or in bed--though they were no slouches there, either. Girls and boys were just that--but women and men were crew. With appropriate rituals to mark the change. So he found it impossible to not take her along.

They stopped for a moment in the small Legacy chamber. It was really 85.just a cranny tucked into the flowing corridor walls, and Toby came thereoften. Besen had hardly ever been, and said so. He was shocked."But these are the Legacies!""Well, sure," she said half-apologetically--and then her eyes flashed defiantly. "But they're just some slabs with writing on them. Not even writing anybody can read, right?""Of course not. That's why we're keeping them, mounted here, so someday, when we meet someone who can read them--""Yeasay, yeasay--but till then, they're just puzzles, right?"Toby shook off the skeptical twist of her mouth and stood for a long moment just staring at the tall, gray slabs and their strange curly writing.

Cool, solemn. Lines like wriggling snakes. Why did they fill him with longing?Besen was getting restless, so they went on to the Bridge. Slipping in was easy--a nod and a wink. Together they stood in the shadows, watching the screens for long hours.Besik Bay. Mysterious, murky, like the slag from a monstrous furnace.

Somehow this cinder-black place orbited safely around the black hole.

At times its...o...b..t swung through the disk below, where it sucked in matter.

A thicket of magnetic fields, coa.r.s.e-woven like cloth, protected it. Then it broke free of the disk and soared above, slowly circling high above the fury. How it persisted, a dust ball in a skillet of slow-stirred liquid iron, no one knew.Argo now prowled the inky recesses of the immense Besik cloud, awaiting the arrival of the mech ships. Their hull cooled. The ship's lean metal sinews relaxed, shortening, sending loud strums and pops through the corridors. The air lost its p.r.i.c.kly ozone smell. But the banks of grainydust and gas could not protect against sophisticated sensors forever.

"How long you figure we got?" Besen whispered.Toby shrugged, wanting to appear more casual than he was. One thing he had learned early as a boy--no point in loading up tension in your muscles. And no point in showing it even if you did. He casually rolled his shoulders, trying to let go of the tightness there. "Depends on what the mechs can see in here. We've got lots of tech designed to dodge and blind--but who knows what the mechs've got?""How come this cloud has been here so long?" Besen waved at the huge, dense ridges of murk. "How come the black hole doesn't grab it?""Quath said something about it being artificial. A place to shelter ships, left here from ancient days.""But who'd take the trouble to build some dustball like this?"As if in answer, silvery lightning arced from the dust bank ahead.

Besen persisted, "And why?"Toby shrugged again. She insisted, "We ought to find out.""Look, we're rats living in the walls of this place. Ignorant vermin, to the mechs.""That's no reason to stop learning."

86.

"Sure--but a smart rat pays attention to staying alive."