Tides of Light (24 page)

Your eyes saw the cylinder as pointing toward us, because of the cast of shadows. Grey points out that the human eye has evolved
to see by light from the sky, remember, and reads shadows with that bias. Here the glow comes from the floor, and more weakly
from the walls. The shadows are therefore reversed, and mean the opposite of what your automatic reactions assume.

“Can you change that?”

No—such matters are buried deep in the brain. The cyborg sees by infrared, I gather. On a perpetually cloudy planet, the ground
would often be warmer than the sky, and thus more luminous in the infrared. Such an evolutionary aspect would explain why
these tunnels are floor-illuminated. Since we are receiving this cyborg’s raw data, we process it with our bias and get exactly
the upside-down result. To see as it does we would have to invert your accustomed perception patterns.

“Look, how can I get quit of this?”

Consider—such an ability probably implies that the original species, which has now cyborged itself, often lived underground.
It no doubt foraged above ground, but infrared vision would allow it to see from the warmed walls of its burrows. Once occupied,
their own body heat would allow them some dim wall radiance. Such ecological niches stress skills at construction and three-dimensional
spatial abilities. Perhaps this explains why they are building the huge things in orbit.

“Guttin’ this planet, just so they can build bigger anthills?”

Perhaps so; evolution is destiny, I’ve always believed. But there are other implications.

“Somethin’ we can use?” Killeen had listened to enough empty talk.

My first conclusion is that we’re underground, doubtless. If we leave this pouch we’re in, we’ll wander quite blindly through
a maze of tunnels. Hopeless to escape, I fear.

Killeen grunted sourly.

I advise caution.

“Don’t see it much matters what I do.”

Until we know why it brought you here we should remain flexible.

Killeen tried to distance himself from the sensations that washed through him, tried to think. Despairing, he wondered
what had happened to the Family. He had gotten a distant impression, as the cyborg ship reeled him in, of other craft moving
swiftly in the sky. His comm had squawked twice with human voices, faint and unintelligible.

Has anyone survived? It was one thing for a Cap’n to die in a chance encounter with a mech, or with a thing like this huge
assembly of living and mechlike parts, and quite another to be cut off from your command, still alive while everyone you loved
and honored was dead, killed by your own incompetence.

He made himself envision possibilities. The cyborgs might not have bothered to get Jocelyn from the Flitter. But unless she
got to the surface, the Cap’ncy would go to Cermo automatically. He wasn’t quick to lead in a crisis. The man would try, of
course, but Shibo would probably have to make the hard decisions. She and Cermo could hold the Family together on alien soil.

If any of them still lived…

PART FOUR

Such Men Are Dangerous

T
he pouch clenched and split and spewed him out.

Killeen gasped for breath, as though he had been holding a single lungful the entire time—days? weeks?—he was enclosed. The
featherlight emulsifying fluid that had held him somehow managed to bring air and food in through his lungs, for he felt no
hunger.

He got to his knees, expecting to see tunnels in the cyborg warren. Instead a fresh, sharp breeze brought him smells of fragrant
mold and dusty hills. His eyes cleared. Fuzzy patterns telescoped into crisp images, the world seeming to stretch and draw
closer to him.

He stood in a field of crumpled stone, weaving unsteadily. His ankles ached with the memory of slamming into the cosmic string’s
sheen of magnetic pressures.

The cyborg rose like an unlikely natural encrustation behind him. Its double-jointed arms smoothed a fast-healing seam.

Useless to run
, he thought. He shook himself dry—though the moisture he felt seemed to be beneath his skin, not on it—while the cyborg clicked
and hummed and watched him. They were alone together in a blasted landscape. In the distance Killeen could see what appeared
to be a malformed hill but he instantly knew it was an entrance to
some mech structure. Craters pocked it. It had the empty, defeated look of a skull.

He felt a tickling throughout his body, like cold wires drawn slickly out of him, letting his arms and legs relax into smooth
sausages of muscle. He wobbled.

Images cascaded in his mind—silent, meditative, embroidered. Section views of
Argo
. A striking picture of something large and sticky-white, attached to descending, puffy-pale strands.

Then, like a swift slap in the face out of nowhere, it let him go. His mind lost its pervasive, leaden fog. He felt a grimy
wind stir his hair.

The cyborg’s massive bulk moved away. It had a long, lizardy tail that ended in an antenna, like the bulb of a leathery flower.

The cyborg simply walked away, moving with surprising speed. Its many legs clacked and hummed.

Killeen limped away across the broken land, sore and tired. Slanting sunlight brought a twilight glow to a far rumpled ridgeline
of tawny hills.

He stopped and leaned over to shake his head. Some milky stuff oozed from his ear and his hearing sharpened. Slime dripped
from his suit.

The cutting yet spongy-sweet smell of the cyborg’s interior spaces clung to him. He began trotting. Soon his own sweat washed
away the alien scent.

For hours he made his way down a crushed valley. The cosmic string hung just above the horizon, its dull ruby-hued curve cutting
across the shimmering of a frayed molecular cloud. Killeen remembered the perceptions he had gotten (accidentally?) from the
cyborg—something about a temporary halt, stilling the cosmic string, to allow construction to catch up with the supply of
vacuum-formed nickeliron.
Now magnetic fingers held the loop steady, a smoldering cut in the sky.

Without its bright golden glow the slow coming of sunset allowed the far reaches around Abraham’s Star to display their fitful
life. Faint flashes wriggled deep within the glowering banks that hung beyond this cramped solar system. Quick bursts of saffron
yellow seethed against a slowly gathering wash of blue. Vibrant pink discharged energies within a cloak of sullen brown dust.
Spidery scarlet filaments formed and died and swelled again, as though beads of blood caught the setting sun and glinted with
evil beauty.

Killeen wondered if these momentary effervescences that washed through dark sinews of dust were mechworks, or natural storms
and tossings brought forth by the constant whirl of matter in the Galactic Center. Or could unimaginable tools like the cosmic
string be at work there?

He moved cautiously, using natural cover. There was plenty of it among the upturned stone slabs and jutting hummocks. The
cyborg had returned to him all his equipment, even his shortarm rifle. His shanks were fully fueled. His Arthur Aspect commented:

Indeed, they have far greater capacity. Your suit reading says there is more than one hundred kiloJoules stored in each fuel
gram—far higher than anything Snowglade tech achieved. The cyborg has outfitted us well.

Killeen moved cautiously, ignoring the tiny pleadings of his Aspects. In this strange world he relied on the instincts of
his youth. His hunting senses were still tuned to the subtle graces of Snowglade. Here each detail was slightly skewed. He
automatically searched each gully for a trap, sniffed the breeze for oily clues. A distant cone-shaped
mountain gave the air an acidic tinge with a long, charcoal plume.

The land needed rest. Everywhere once-proud cliffs had slumped. Layers of rock splayed out like decks of cards tossed aside
by a bored gargantuan. Dust covered every ledge and narrow, and fat dirty clouds of it drifted lazily on the horizon.

Yet here and there tinkling springs leaped into the air, frivolous fountains among ancient upturned strata. He stopped by
one and let the stream play over his hands. Scooping some into his face, he tasted a distant, rusty echo of waters he had
drunk on Snowglade so long ago.

The internal heat liberated from the infall has worked outward from the core. I suspect deep-buried ice deposits are melting,
providing this water.

“Uh-huh.”

Killeen was not in a mood for techtalk from Arthur. Still less welcome was the piping voice of Ling. He needed to flee the
clogged, solemn pockets of his mind; the cyborg had left a damp, musty smell there.

It was time also to let go the control he had sustained for so long, while the cyborg rummaged through him.

All that while he had run his mind from the top down, keeping consciousness in the foreground, a hard layer which his lower
minds could not penetrate. Now he let his inner self emerge and relax, beginning to digest his wrenching experience and make
his mind’s peace with them. The simple fact of living, of survival, was a continuous miracle. He gave himself over to it.
From Snowglade’s raw battles he knew the sensation well, and relished it. Pain, grief, fear, rage—all had to flourish and
ebb and find their places.

Bemused, be released his Aspects—Ling, Grey, Arthur,
even the lesser Faces like Bud—and allowed them to play joyfully in a cloistered pocket of him, but without letting their
squeaky voices snag his attention. They frolicked as they tasted the chilling air of New Bishop, caught the dusty fragrances.
They talked to and through one another, minute presences strumming through his sensory net, streaming by integrating nodes
and causative factor points.

So much had happened to him! To avoid crippling disorder, he had to enlist his Aspects and Faces in at least a partial integration
of his torments. Without the Family he was an odd scrap wandering this smashed world…but he did not know if the Family lived.
He had to keep himself together until he knew, even if that meant years of questing.

So he focused on the crushed forests that he picked his way through, on the gutted plains and ruptured ridgelines that swept
beneath his fast-flying boots. The limp was gone, his servos responded again, and now he was gnawingly hungry.

Family Bishop had always been deft foragers, and he called up an old woman’s Face to help him locate edible berries and leaves.
She was a cranky sort, full of curt advice. Much of her lore did not apply to this strange world. She found tasty roots but
squawked with alarm at the acidic leaves and ellipsoidal fruit he found. Tentative bites told him they were suitable.

He prowled the wrecked forest. Trees had been slapped and mangled by a vastly casual malice. They slanted crazily, exposing
their bowls of snaky roots. Leaves of exact, pale green circles piled high in streambeds, and small things skittered deep
in them. Damp flats were covered with tracks: three-toed, seven-toed, split-wedged, with some broad smooth pads. Killeen had
never seen traces of such large creatures, and they filled him with respect for the past wealth of this place. His Arthur
Aspect put in:

All the cyborgs’ work, of course. They emptied the tube we fell through. That kilometer-wide shaft caused the land to fall
only the length of a finger here.

“Huh? Take that much rock and metal out, seems like there’d be a big drop here, too.”

Not at all; it is a property of simple geometry. The loss is spread over the much larger surface area of the planet. Watch—

The three-color diagram that sprung into Killeen’s right eye made sense, once he studied it, but even so—“Droppin’ a finger’s
length did all
this?
”

All layers felt it. Seismic adjustments occur unevenly.

“I’ll say.”

Killeen was crossing a clearing. Suddenly a tan fountain sprayed up, showering water and sand on him.

Ah yes. Hydrostatic forces still being released. The vibrations have made the soil here more like a slurry.

Rolling, sea-swell tremors drove Killeen to make for more solid ground, drowning out the Aspect voice in his own panting.
He found edible leaves and chewed them down with relish. The ground continued shaking and bucking, as if trying to throw off
the scum of persistent life.

Filled for the first time in what seemed like days, he began to feel better once he broke into a steady, loping trot. Over
the next line of hills lay a mech city. It had been torn to pieces. Explosions had ripped apart immense factories.
Much of the destruction seemed to have come from charges planted inside, as though someone had smuggled in bombs.

Brown mech carapaces lay strewn everywhere. Something had scavenged the bodies for parts. Cyborgs, he guessed.

He wandered in the hush of the ruined streets. No mechs labored to put this right. Nothing moved. At some intersections towers
of ornately worked alloys rose. Killeen remembered the art of the Mantis and could not tell if these spindly things had some
function or were intended to ornament the city.

He felt uneasy in the mechworks and did not try to find food among the ruins. At sundown he still had not crossed the sprawling
mechplex. That night he hid in a parts shed and slept. He awoke several times, pursued by fevered dreams. His time inside
the alien returned and he strangled in jellied air, vainly swimming upward, his lungs scalded. Each awakening left his arms
and legs clenched tight as though he had been fighting in his sleep. And then he would doze off and again the dream would
come.