Tides of Light (31 page)

“Cybers could plant somethin’ more in the bodies, too,” Killeen said delicately.

Lines furrowed the Cap’n’s already weathered, resigned face. “Like what?”

“Tracers. Find us, usin’ ’ ’em.”

She shook her head. “They don’t care enough. Just shoot our people when they get in the way. Not like mechs—least not yet.”

“You worked for mechs.”

“Sure—only way we’d survive.”

“Where I came from couldn’t trust mechs that much.”

“They got crazy. Started bustin’ up each other.”

Killeen said cautiously, “That question I asked back there…I didn’t understand all he said.”

“Just integrate your people’s electromag-tags, hailing codes, stuff like that.”

“But look, there’s planning—”

“We go in separately, once the team’s penetrated into the tunnels.”

“What about supporting fire?”

“Manage it yourself. Each Family backs up its own.”

Killeen said skeptically, “Seems it’d be better if—”

The Cap’n of the Treys gave him a tired, sardonic look. “I kinda like it this way. His Supremacy says do it this way, fine.
That way I can pull my Family out fast, if things go bad.”

“But coordination—”

“Look, this plan’s the word of God.”

The Cap’n said this in a voice that was suddenly flat, factual. Killeen opened his mouth to reply with a cutting jibe and
saw that behind them walked three officers. When he glanced over his shoulder they seemed to be taking an interest in what
he would say. He shut his mouth and nodded woodenly.

He reached the Bishop formation just before His Supremacy began speaking. The words came to them over general comm, broadcast
by linked capacities of a triangle of officers assembled just below His Supremacy on a small knoll.

Even though Killeen had been told that the Tribe numbered well over two thousand, the sight of so many people turned out in
ranks, nearly crossing the valley with their columns, was impressive. He had not seen so many since a grand holiday at the
Citadel, when he had been a boy younger than Toby was now. Then the occasion had been festive; now a solemn, grim air pervaded
the comm. Hoisted Family flags fluttered and snapped in the wind, patched and sunbleached.

His Supremacy began with a convoluted history of their valiant battles, so filled with names and honorifics that Killeen could
make no sense of it. Certainly it told him nothing of how the Families had fought, and Killeen began to suspect that His Supremacy
in fact cared little for the essential details of maneuver and command. This emerged soon, as the man waved his hands wildly
and described the evils of their enemies, his face congested with rage. The Cybers did not accidentally resemble demons from
the pit, no—and soon they would return there, banished.

“Rebuke and scorn, do they face! Defeat and castigation!”

His Supremacy drew himself up and, even though Killeen kept a cool and skeptical part of himself withdrawn, the force of the
man’s ardor began to penetrate.

“Death comes to us all! But it cannot sting. The grave has no victory! It is where we are rewarded.”

The vast crowd stirred as more long, rolling sentences washed over them. Killeen felt himself moved by the rhythmic, chantlike
sweep. For the first time he understood how
His Supremacy had held together a Tribe that had suffered shattering defeats and now faced an incomprehensible enemy of casual
viciousness.

“—at whose coming, to judge the All that Is, I shall stand upon the right hand—”

The very air seemed to flicker with new intensity, hot filaments running on the breeze.

“—
render
the things of metal and flesh into base matter!
Shatter
these minions of history’s last battle against us! For we arise from the natural substances of the universe, and are at one
with it, and enjoyeth its fruits without artifice or corruption of spirit. We are the product of God’s own evolution. Monsters
shall not fall from the sky and have these holy rewards, not if we hallow the ancients’ names.”

Distant rumblings, as if mountains rubbed a coarse sky.

“—for after the final liberating battle we shall go faring forth. We shall call to the most holy and majestic Skysower and
be fed and brought forth!”

Illuminations shot through the clouds. Something silvery stirred high up.

“—to deliver us from the evil of this place. These devourers of worlds will fall, as the mechs fell before them. Believe in
me—”

A cyclonic churn parted the banks of mottled clouds. Killeen felt the crowd begin to notice.

“—on Earth…as it is…in heaven!”

Striations of blue descended, curving along long arcs. Traceries frenzied the air. A rush of heat beat down from a sky that
seemed emptied. Yet Killeen’s sensorium quivered with pale, swift intricacy.

“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. Malevolence focused by supreme will, we entreat you—”

A gathering presence loomed in Killeen’s sensorium—yet the air showed only translucent, skittering feelers of luminescence.
Killeen remembered suddenly seeing such immense flickerings before. They had lit the distant skies the night after the cyborg
released him.

“What—what?” His Supremacy croaked. His rhythm broken, he gaped at the display above.

And a voice Killeen knew came fluttering, at first almost lost in wind-whisperings:

I seek a particular human. Give sign if you can perceive this. I speak on magnetic wings, and bring tidings from the very
center of this realm
.

His Supremacy’s voice boomed, full of undisguised surprise and joy. “I am here! I have brought your word by sword and daring—”

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
.

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!”

The Bishops broke rank and reformed into a well-spaced, outer-directed phalanx. The air sang as their sensoria focused outward,
crisping the tangled fields of the other Families.

Killeen said levelly, “I’ll brook no interference. This is no devil or God-killer. Leave us be!”

“I command—” But His Supremacy broke off the sentence as he felt the impact of the massed, merged Bishop field.

Weapons came down from shoulders, clicked on, pointed at primary targets—beginning with His Supremacy.

“We Bishops require a moment. Hear me! I invoke the ancient rules, the first and most revered among them being Family privacy.”

The valley buzzed with unease. The other Families made
no move. His Supremacy clenched his fists but only watched as Killeen turned his sensorium back skyward.

I was not to deliver these portents until you were free of the grasp of mechanical intelligences. That was why I did not speak
to you on your ship. It is inhabited by mechanical forms which should not receive the key to the Legacies
.

“Argo’s got mechs aboard?” Killeen had known some small forms still evaded capture after the successful human mutiny on Snowglade,
but he had thought they were powerless and insignificant.