Killeen stood at the center of the Bridge. Activity revolved around him with officers coming and going, dealing with the many strains on Argo's systems. Toby knew his father's skills were being tested to the limit, but what troubled him more was Killeen's stiff, almost glazed look. He wished he could guess what was going on behind those flinty eyes.

And then such matters seemed soft and small and trivial, as the first mech ship burst into view. Boxy. Ribbed struts. Machined gray angles. It jetted straight out of a towering, gloomy ma.s.s--and began to turn toward Argo.

The Bridge stirred uneasily. The mech ship was under high magnification and Toby could not tell if it was even armed--until it launched a stubby missile at them.

Argo went on full alert. Wall screens displayed collision time estimates, defense options, maneuver possibilities. And then the missile was gone, evaporated by a defensive bolt from Argo. The Bridge crew cheered, but Killeen did not even smile. Toby found he was holding Besen's hand tightly.

Other mech ships burst into view. They approached Argo on complex paths, designed to make it hard to shoot at more than one at a time. Even though Killeen ordered the ship to maximum acceleration, they drew nearer.

Long moments ticked by. The mechs did not fire. Officers on the Bridge speculated that the mech ships did not want to waste fire power on Argo's defenses until they got overpoweringly close. But that made little sense, Toby thought, since the humans were so outnumbered.

Ships darted and swooped. They seemed eager to force Argo out of the cloud, down a long lane of cindery dust. Toby could feel Argo's straining engines as a steady trembling in the bulkhead behind him. Killeen gave orders quietly, stone-faced.

Then something quick and glowing swept past Argo, coming into view as a brilliant white line, like a vibrant, moving scratch on the wall screens. The Bridge crew gasped. It was the Cosmic Circle, as the Myriapodia called it--and now Toby saw its true scale.

This close, the segment seemed straight. Toby called up his Isaac Aspect as the luminous line slowly drew away toward the mech ships. He had seen this hoop before, at the last world they visited, but he had never understood it. "What is that thing?"I would have been happy to instruct you at any time, if you had only inquired--"Come on, spill--and make it quick and simple."Very well, though you will miss much very interesting material.

These were called "cosmic strings" by the ancients, though as 87.you see they are really loops. My older, nested Faces do not resolve this oddity."What're they for?"They are not for anything--they are natural. They formed early in the universe, as compact folds in s.p.a.ce-time. Like the wrinkles that form in the ice ora frozen pond. They are only a few atoms wide, but very long. Think of them as a natural resource, born of the Big Bang."A few atoms wide? Come on! This one blazes away like a star."

That is because it pa.s.ses through the strong magnetic fields here, which drives electric current through the string, lighting it up."I don't get it," Toby mind-whispered to his Aspect. "Must be hard to carry, even if it's thin. Why haul it around?"In many ways, the most useful of all tools is the knife. This is a blade the size ora world. Imagine what you can cut with it.Toby did not have to imagine. He had seen it core a whole planet.

Now the hoop sped toward the mech ships, escorted by the spiky-shaped ships of the Myriapodia. The hoop ebbed and flowed with latent energies.Suddenly the Myriapodia released it and the great scythe shot forward.

It wriggled and looped, so fast the eye could hardly follow. Quick knots formed, raced around the rim, and dispersed in flashes of amber and blue. The mechs tried to flee, to dodge.Too slow. The vibrating hoop pa.s.sed through them, snaking and looping to catch each ship as it sped by. After its pa.s.sage, the mech ships looked the same, even under high mags. But then as Toby watched a mech ship began growing, getting longer. It had been cut in half. It was trying to hold itself together, using the supple, shiny metals mechs preferred.They could not hold. The ship split in two, scattering fragments and exhaling a plume of orange gas. Shards spun away.Toby thought of the strangeness of nature which left thin, glowing hoops, like a signature of whatever had made the whole universe. And how life taught itself to use the signatures, to its own ends.Then he realized that everyone around him was shouting and laughing with glee. Besen was hugging him. He ignored his Isaac Aspect, whowas still trying to lecture him, and joined in the celebration.Their joy did not last long.Before they had even quieted down, more mech ships appeared.

These kept their distance, as if afraid. But the cosmic string was gone. It had plunged into a vast shadowy dust plume and the ships of the Myr- 88.iapodia had followed, to rein it in again--Isaac said, with magnetic grapplers.The mechs edged closer. Again Argo had to flee. Soon they were forced back, back, back--and out of Besik Bay entirely, by the gliding, steady mechs. Again virulent radiation from the churning disk far below began to cook Argo's skin. Looking at the seethe and flare of the disk, Toby remembered that it was digesting its new meal, the doomed orange star.

He could almost feel its baking heat.Something caught his eye, a thin column of cool blue. It rose out of the very hottest center of the disk, the great white ball of blinding light. As he watched, small bright whorls raced around inside the column. He realized the whole thing was moving, pencil-straight. Fleeing the central h.e.l.l.Eerie, beautiful, a shimmering blue. Like a flowing river, cool and welcoming, he thought.

One of the galactic jets. There is another on the other side of the disk, pointing in the opposite direction. Both are ejected by the black hole.

Resplendent, graceful, its ever-changing elegance seemed violated by the Aspect's ho-hum description. Toby was about to thrust Isaac back into its digital hole, then paused. "How come a black hole lets out anything?"

The hole spins, because it acquires the rotation of all that has ever fallen into it, in all its billions of years. Matter comes falling in from the inner edge of the disk. But the hole's strong magnetic fields seize that ma.s.s. They fiing it around, faster and faster. The spin makes hot matter corkscrew up around the polesand then out. As it cools it emits the soft blue radiance.

To Toby it seemed that a hole was a hole, and things fell in, period. But he pulled his attention away from the immense spectacle on the wall screens, whose vivid colors lit the haggard faces of the Bridge officers.Especially his father. Killeen watched the mech ships behind them, more all the time--small, quick, drawing into a complex pattern. His eyes flitted with caged energy over the views, and a leaden pallor came over his brooding features.They were trapped. Argo had fled the Besik cloud in the direction toward the inner edge of the disk. Killeen had turned up, to escape--and more mechs had come speeding in to block that way."These small craft--they're probably suicide mechs," Killeen muttered.

He glanced at Toby. A fleeting smile. "Smart ones. Same principle as that bomb back in the Chandelier.""Can't we get by them?" Toby asked earnestly. His father was a genius at slipping out of tight spots.Killeen shook his head soberly. "Too many. Too many."

89.Lieutenant Jocelyn had been working at the control panels and now she stepped back, looking at the trajectory options their computer presented.

Webs of three-dimensional curves, swoops and dodges and artful evasions. Her intense eyes searched the screen, at first hopefull and finally, slowly, coming to rest on one curve. "A single option, Cap'n. We have to go inward. The mechs don't have that covered.""Of course they wouldn't," Killeen said. "It's death that way."

"There's no other path. In all this, not a single--"

Killeen nodded. "So that's where we head."Jocelyn stared at Killeen in disbelief. The entire Bridge became very quiet, the only sound a faint buzz of an open comm line. "We can't. The heat--"Killeen turned slowly, moving with a deceptive quiet. Yet the air around him seemed to steam and seethe with energy, purpose, granite resolve, as he looked each officer in the eye. With a slight, tilted smile he nodded to Besen, who shouldn't have been there--letting the silence build, his gaze sweeping every corner of the Bridge, and finally coming to Toby."We must. That Besik cloud was there for some reason. A place to cool off, maybe, a way station. But not the final destination, no--it's just a ma.s.s of drifting dark gas. The ancient writing from the Chandelier--it spoke of someplace here, at the True Center. There's nothing out here but mechs and death. That place must be somewhere further in.""No!" Jocelyn cried. "We can't last a day at these--""Quiet!" Killeen barked.Again silence fell. The Cap'n pointed to the glimmering, ghostlike blue of the galactic jet. "I take that as a sign. A pointer. And we will follow it."Toby realized he had been holding his breath. He finally gasped for air. The crew stirred restlessly, murmuring, stunned. Jocelyn asked Toby's question before he could get up the courage.Her eyes seemed to drill through the intense air of the Bridge. "The jet goes outward. We follow it?"Killeen stiffened. "The mechs will block us.""Where, then?""Into the jet. Maybe there's a way."

4.

Motes Such As YouToby was pa.s.sing by a minor side corridor when he caught the tang of smoke. He blinked, sniffed--and followed the acrid stink at a trot.

The corridor was unlit, the phosphors deliberately off. Ahead he saw dancing flames. There was nothing worse on a starship than fire--burning the very air they needed, while threatening to breech the hull and let in swallowing vacuum. He hurried--and stumbled over a man squatting near the fire.

When he picked himself up he saw by the orange flames that people were huddled around a big pile of smoky corn husks and popping dried branches. But the blaze was young, under control. Bright eyes danced with reflected firelight and they all laughed at his surprise. "Siddown! Take a I.

oad off," someone called.

He knew the fire would leave sooty stains on the ceiling, as others had in innumerable nooks of the ship, but he saw the need. The Families were vagabonds. A communal fire took them back to the one shelter they trusted, even when surrounded by a threatening night.

He let himself slide into it, too. It was restful, remembering the long treks of his boyhood, the biting cold nights beneath a brilliant sky. Smoke licked at his eyes. The crackling yellow spirits danced. Shadows played on faces staring moodily into the unending mystery of flame.

"You look tired, Toby-lad," Cermo said from nearby.

Toby was surprised to see Cermo here, and even closer, Jocelyn.

Usually the highest ship's officers kept a certain distance from the others.

But here Cermo was settled onto his beefy haunches, the age-old posture.

It left you always ready to jump and move, if surprised. Useless here, of course, but a warming reminder of their shared past, their wary vulnerability.

"Been working the fields," Toby answered.

"Good crop?"

91.

"Asparagus. Lost most of it."

Jocelyn said mildly, "Time was, we just picked the food and moved on."

Cermo nodded sadly. "We hunted, we gathered, hit the mech centers for whatever extra we wanted."

Answering murmurs came from around the shadowy circle. Toby grinned. "Come on--I was there. It was living by our wits, the mechs on our backs every minute. It could be worth your life to take a breather."

Cermo shook his head, thick muscles working in his neck, catching the gleam of the snapping flames. "At least we didn't just dig in the dirt.

Sure, some gardening in Citadel Bishop--but we weren't hardscrabble clod-busters. We were free. Nature was the only farmer, and we just picked."

Toby knew where this was coming from. People were forever getting nostalgic for a rosy past they made better than it ever was. And they did it when the present was tough and tight. "Jocelyn, you remember--always looking over our shoulder for mechs, eating sc.r.a.ps, on the run morning to night--"

"How's it different now?" she shot back.

Another woman's voice called from the murk, "Mechs got us trapped." A River accent.

Toby nodded. "But we're in a human ship, fighting our way through them."

"We're running," Jocelyn said. "Those big bugs, they did the fighting.

But now they're way behind us, holding off some of the mech ships--and we're running."

Toby snapped, "Hey now, that's what the Myriapodia want. Quath's in touch with them, and she says they're fighting a rearguard. So we can figure out what's so important in here. Just give us a little time and--"

"Time's what we don't have," Cermo said solemnly, his eyes tortured.

"We're heatin' up already, and we haven't even reached that galactic jet."

"Give the Cap'n a break, huh?" Toby said. "Maybe the jet's what we want."

Jocelyn laughed dryly. "That? It's just a column of cooling gas. Refugee junk that got away from the black hole."

Toby didn't like to argue his father's case, but something made him speak out against this aimless, hang-mouth talk. "Hey, give him time.

We're moving, we're in good shape, and--"

"He brought us here with no more idea of what we were getting into than a camp rat."

An older man snickered. "I'd say he don't know enough to pour p.i.s.s outta a boot with a hole in the toe and directions writ on the heel."

This got a good hearty laugh.

"Look, we all like to air our lungs," a Trump-accented voice said. "But where I come from, we had to stick with the Cap'n."

92.

Toby nodded vigorously. "I won't honeyfuggle you about how tightthings are. But yeasay--we got to keep true."Voices came pelting in from all directions now, some objecting, othersbacking him up. Trump Families for Killeen, firm as steel. Bishops dog-mouthing the Cap'n, even though he was one of their own.The sooty flavor of the air and the brooding dark made it easy forpeople to speak out, let fly with a few hard-edged words, sharpen the air.The corncobs gave forth their sweeter smoke, cracking and fizzing. Slowlytheir talk turned more meditative, lost its harshness as people got theirinner fears out, saw them for what they were, and stuffed them back intothe mental pouches where everyone had to keep the dark moments. So thefire did its work, and its spreading blue fog made the nook a warmer, morehuman place.When a call came on comm for Toby, he was reluctant to leave. But itwas the Bridge, and he hurried.He pa.s.sed by a wall screen on his way. The soft blue jet hung beforethem now, its shimmer working upward, away and against the iron redsand burnt golds of the virulent disk, far below. Dry heat stirred the air. Anodd humming sounded through the ship, like a ba.s.s note sounded faraway. It made Toby jittery. By the time he reached the Bridge he was notsurprised to see his father looking weary and gray, his uniform wrinkledfrom long hours."Toby! You're needed.""Uh, why?" Everybody seemed worked up, but there was nothingnew on the wall screens."That." Killeen gestured at long filaments of rosy gas that trailedalongside the jet. The Argo was cruising hard through the immense, glow ing filigrees. They had pa.s.sed through such "weather" before, thoughthese luminous strands twisted with restless energy."So? More fireworks.""Not quite. I've spoken with these before.""Spoken?" His father had been on duty too long."Not for years, and maybe you don't remember. The voice fromthe sky.""Huh?" Toby shook his head. So much had happened, and theyunderstood so little of it."The Magnetic Mind. This is it."Now Toby remembered.--Years before, standing in a rocky valley while skittering veins ofgreen and yellow played through the sky like searching fingers. Striationsthat worked the furious air and finally had found them. Hot filaments hadvibrated like angry breezes, speaking through the sensorium input eachperson carried in the back of the skull.An intelligence that lived, somehow, in silvery radiances. It hadspoken to Killeen--though the entire Family could overhear, witnesses as 93.

a colossal intellect delivered a message in the sky. Toby recalled that childhood memory in an instant, the way a warm kitchen smell can bring a vibrant mother's voice to life long after...

He shook himself. The memories of far childhood, back in the happy closeness of the Citadel, could come flooding through him at any time.

But this was not the right moment. Those were a boy's recollections, and he had to stop thinking like a boy.

He refocused on the huge, stringy luminescence that grew steadily before the Argo, and made himself ask, "How do you know? I mean, this could be just some kind of lightning or something."

Killeen smiled without humor. "I guess it is, in a way. Vital lightning, the same as you and I are really walking heaps of controlled burning.

That's what keeps us going, thinking, doing. Oxygen burns our food, one of my Aspects says. This thing uses electricity, generated by that disk down below."

"How?"

"I dunno. But energy is energy, and the way I figure it, this thing has learned how to stack magnetic fields, build them up into something like a body."

Toby liked to appear capable and savvy in front of ship's officers, but the striations before Argo didn't look like anything he remembered.

"Huh?"

Killeen shrugged. "I've been getting p.r.i.c.kly feelings, like something probing at me." He shook his head. "Hard to explain, but it's like before.

The Magnetic Mind glues itself together with magnetic fields. Or maybe it just is magnetic fields, period. And it lives somewhere here, so..."

A deep strumming came up through Toby's heels. At first he thought it was the ship's acceleration as it fought against the lurking gravitational pulls here in this riot of ma.s.s and light. Then he noticed that the quivering came and went with a slow rhythm. He felt it through his ears and hands, too. Pulses. Then the odd vibration climbed into the ma.s.sive walls and filled the air of the Bridge with a heavy presence.Give sign if you perceive.The voice was gritty, granite-hard, immense.

"Not like before," Killeen whispered. "Then it used our sensoria.

Now--look, the whole room is shivering."I am charged with a task of discernment. If you be of the tribe of Bishop, give voice.The Bridge was acting as a giant amplifier for the hollow, lordly voice, the walls ringing and shaking like a loudspeaker. Toby wondered how a 94.

thing that was just magnetic fields, with no weight or substance, could do that.

Killeen looked cornered, surrounded by the voice. Then he barked out, "Bishops we are. I'm Killeen. Remember?"So you are. I forget nothing, and store tidings of times ancient beyond your imaginings in the curls and knots of my being. I recall your particular flat odor and squashed, slanted self. Good--I have been enjoined to inspect you."By who?" Killeen called. The Bridge crew stood transfixed, and the voice ignored him.I seek another as well. It is termed "Toby" and must be with you if you are to receive further attentions from the inner realm."I'm here," Toby shouted.Are you? Let me taste... Each of you tiny things has a different aroma, an angularity. Such pointless profusion!"We're different people!" Toby protested.

Skittering spokes shot through him, electric-quick and bristling with points of pain. Probing. Then they were gone.You are the flavor termed "Toby"--your animal signatures match the genetic inventory, crude though it is.

Creation is so trivially diverse, endowing each of you with oblique gene-scents and dusky shadings. Such a waste of natural craft! Detail and artful turns, needlessly multiplied, throwing reason to ruination."We like ourselves pretty well," Toby said, tightlipped.So you do. All is illusion. Still, I must report that you are here. Then I hope to be quit of this obligation and irritant."'Wait!" Toby cried. "What's this about? Who wants to know?"A power which sits further inward."Well, what is it?"It is not of the cold, dead flecks of matter such as you inhabit. The power which presses me to this task speaks 95.to me through my feet, which rest in the warm hearth ofthe plasma disk.

"Yeasay," Toby persisted, "so it's a, a plasma cloud?" Whatever that was.

It dwells somewhere below me, in storm-cut majesty, butis unknowable to as large an ent.i.ty as I.

Killeen called, "You said last time, years ago, that my father had something to do with this."

Years? I do not know such terms...

Killeen said, "A major part of our present lifetimes. I--"

But which "present" do you reside in? Duration, distanceBthese are primitive terms.

Killeen was visibly puzzled. "Look, was my father--"

Tiny forms such as yourselves are impossible to resolve in the warp of energies at my feet. But such terms and names come rippling up to me, along the cables of myself.

When such information was loaded onto my eternal tangle of knowledge-knots, and thus the age of this clotted cognizance, I cannot know. Forms such as yourself were once there, yes--squalid primitives. Their persistence in the realm of immense clashes-imponderable is quite unlikely.

"You're saying he's dead?" Killeen asked sharply.

Tiny lives wink like flames beneath my footpoints. My whole motivation to a.s.sume this field-form is to rise above mortality and its minute matters. I cannot register small endings, any more than animals like you sense grains of sand as you trod them.

"Is he--"

I go. If the power below desires more, I shall touch you further.

"Wait! We need to know what to do here, how to escape--"The vibration of the Bridge walls cut off, leaving a hush.

96.Killeen threw up his hands, swearing, and then drove a fist into the wall. A painful smack.This shocked Toby more than the abrupt departure of the Magnetic Mind. He realized how much his father had bottled up, how desperate he was beneath his flinty exterior."Dad--what did it mean? What--""d.a.m.ned if I know. That thing treats us like bugs.""Well, we don't much like to talk to bugs, either," Toby pointed out reasonably, hoping to josh Killeen out of his scowling, nasty mood. Thenhe thought a moment and added to himself, Except Quath."I wonder if it could be? My father, Abraham, here?""Don't see how. We never found his body at the Citadel--but we had to run pretty quick then, there wasn't much time." He shook his head in a flicker of weariness. "That was a long time ago, a long way off."--and Toby felt it all again. Steel stripped from stone, caved-in ceilings, masonry and smashed furniture, lives ripped away. Smoke seething from crackling fires. Intricate warrens squashed into stone and slag. Blood running in gutters. Rivulets of browning red running from beneath collapsed buildings. The strange silence after the mech flyers had left. Wind blowing through snapped-off girders.--And his father, wandering the ruins. Abraham.t he had shouted.

Over and over. The name s.n.a.t.c.hed away by a hungry wind, lost in swirls of smoke.Then he was back from the searing memories. He watched his father blink, face haggard, and then pull himself together.Killeen said shakily, "I figured he was dead. Had to be."In Killeen's face Toby saw how much his father wanted to believe thatsomehow Abraham was here, that the Magnetic Mind knew more than ']haeY did. But at the same time, the Mind obviously found humans repug-nt, and would not lift a finger to help them.Then Toby reminded himself that the Mind had no fingers, nothing but electromagnetic pressures and waves. But didn't it say it had feet?When the Mind had spoken to them before, back on Trump, it had said something about being an intelligence that had slipped free of matter, and lived solely in the states available to magnetic fields. Apparently such states lasted longer. The Mind seemed to think it was immortal. He remembered Killeen chuckling, saying, "Forever's a long time"--because the Mind might be huge and powerful, but it could sure seem petty and finite, too. Which made it even harder to deal with. A G.o.d, at least, wouldn't be insulting."Look, Dad, what are you going to do?" Maybe in a moment of openness like this Killeen would say what he really thought."Do?" Killeen looked at Toby as though just noticing him. "Get into that jet. See what it's like.""Why? Can we escape that way?"Killeen gave him a veiled look. "That gas is movin' out pretty quick.

97.It'll give us a boost, maybe even shield us some. Make us hard to pinpoint.""We can ride it outward?""Could be."Toby grinned. "Great. Crew'll be glad to hear that.""Oh? How come?""They're worried, think you just want to go further on in, no matter what."Killeen gave nothing away. "I'm not saying the jet idea will work.