The jet walls were alive with brilliant blue-white flashes. Here antimatter, made near the black hole, collided with matter in furious, annihilating battle. But most of the jet's energy lay in its outward thrust. The mechs did not seem to lessen this as the jet pa.s.sed. Instead, they seemed to be studying it.Why were the mechs up there, circling the jet? It occurred to Toby that maybe this was their way of listening to the inner rumblings of the black hole itself, but he could not imagine how. The jet was eerie and, he was quite convinced, beyond human comprehension. Its constant turbulence 107.served to hide the Argo, Killeen said. And the mech fabrications seemed to ignore such tiny matters as a single ship, anyway. Argo scurried like a rat through a palace.

Oddly, the center of the jet was nearly empty, making their flight easier. The gas had been robbed of its heat by the effort of climbing up from the gravitational pit of the unseen black hole. The thick, cooling gas column around them protected against the ferocious heat of the disk. It was almost as if someone had planned this tunnel into the innermost realm. To his teacher Aspect Isaac, of course, it was just a bit of interesting physics.

The spin of the black hole hollows out the gas that it throws up this way. This jet resembles the spools of cotton candy I got as a boy at the fairgrounds, a spun-out cloud of sheer sugary delight.

"What's cotton candy?"

I forget how much your people have lost. Have you never been to a fair?

"A fair what?"

A gathering where-- never mind. At least this beautiful blue haze around us reminds me of my better days, when high culture reigned in the Chandelier of Queens, and I went ceiling-skating with my father.

"You were in the Chandeliers?"

Did you think I descended from clod-huggers such as you? We had great powers then, and held our own against the mechs who now drive you like cattle before them. We regularly ventured into even this region, spying on the mechs who worked their strange ways here. We-- "Hey, you're from the Arcology Era?

Isaac's Aspect-aura turned peevish.

Well, true--but one of my nested Faces grew up in Wesouqk Chandelier, one of the last great ones. I saw a Chandelier once, through a telescope, when it was still inhabited, they say. Regrettably, I spent my life in a planet-bound refuge, but-- "That was what you called 'The Accommodation,' wasn't it?"

Well, yes- an unfortunate strategy. Still, my cultural roots108.From far back in Toby's recesses arose a Face he seldom used, one who knew techstuff galore but not much else. Joe was slow and stunted, a mere fraction of an Aspect, but he spat out bitterly,I.

You G.o.dd.a.m.n traitors set us up.

Playing along with mechs -- real smart.

They smashed up your precious Chandeliers soon as they tricked you down to a planet.

Played you for chumps!"That's pretty much what history says, too," Toby put in mildly.

"Now, you want real Chandelier folk--" He pried up the digital lid on an Aspect he rarely used, Zeno. She was so splintered and crabbed that listening to the wavering, ancient voice was painful.I deplore.., sinful bargaining away.., our Chandelier heritage*.. by your generation. We sought no "accommodation"... nojustice.., possible from mechs . . . We had the key to... subvert :.

ing them.., disembowel their deepest.., logics.., programs...They scattered.. * our lore.., even then.., we could not unlockthe Cryptographs . . . the Sore Magics... left by earliest humans:'.

... who once even ... ventured here ... to True Center ... and'.

grasped the Sore Magics in their hands ...Her static-filled voice faded, leaving a curious hush in Toby's mind.

Zeno's broken phrases carried such unspoken freight--sad, hopeless, ruminating on tattered glories that meant nothing now. After a long molment Joe said, I. See what you lost, Isaac?

2. "Accommodation"-- you mean "sellout."To Toby any notion of compromise with mechs was d.a.m.n-fool stupidity, and Isaac's generation had escaped the consequences only by pure luck. The instant he framed this thought, Isaac flared.Not luck! We a.s.sisted the Hunker Down. This was a perfectly rational strategy, to invest in human colonies on the many worlds on the outskirts of True Center. To make Families which would develop a hybrid vigor of ideas, social norms, and weaponry.

Those were our strengths as a species!Toby could see how Rooks, say, differed from Knights--and not just in their table manners. But what Isaac might mean by "hybrid vigor"

109.escaped him--yet another dry, ancient idea discarded as so much surplus baggage by Family Bishop, long before he was born.I. Look where it ended up.

2. Mechs got you anyway.Isaac shot back,The Chandeliers were untenable! Just big targets, floating in the s.p.a.ces of high-energy particles and hard vacuum, the mechs'

natural habitat!A burr of rasping static almost swamped Zeno's words:We defended ourselves.., long as we could.., unvector the mech Mandates... core out their interlocks.., but you lost all that...Again the melancholy voice silenced his mind for a moment. Isaac finally rallied in an apologetic tone.We tried the experiment, granted, and it finally failed. Wesouqk Chandelier--I saw it burning like a hornet's nest in the sky!

Imagine my sadness. At least we had sheltered our kind beneath the comforting blanket of air and gravity.Zeno's reply came sluggishly.... a worthy.., gamble.., but so much.., lost.Isaac sounded more confident now, though to Toby's inner ear the tone was hollow.I at least knew us at our height. The glory --Zeno cut in with waning energy,You pretender.., you did not know the heights.., they came long before.., even me... the great works.., skills you cannot begin to understand.., pretender...Chastened, Isaac answered,I am sorry that the mechs later undid our n.o.ble Hunker Down.

Even you, poor Joe, must realize that we had to strip much cultural memory from the Hunker Down worlds, to make the 11 0.experiment work. And you did fructify, bursting with fresh ways to win worlds and hamper the mechs. For a while, at least.Joe stirred angrily but confined himself to:I. d.a.m.n hard down there.

2. I'd sure rather lived in a big sky-city.Isaac shot back,I do not have to respond to such vague wanderings.Toby was irked by Isaac's haughty manner. d.i.n.ky chip-mind! "If you're so great, how come you're just an Aspect now?"I had such talents of mind, in compiling and integrating knowledge, that I was saved. What do you think will be your fate, boy?There was real, flinty rage in this retort. Toby had to remember that Isaac and the other Aspects were little miniatures of whole people, not just books he could open, read, and drop. To keep minds running, they had to have the facets of a balanced intellect, or else they would go insane. So he shouldn't expect them to take offhand insults mildly.

He whispered "Sorry" to Isaac and to his surprise felt a burgeoning presence displace the Aspect. A sensation like a swelling, an emergence, swept over him, making his skin p.r.i.c.kle, his scalp stiffen. The Isaac Aspect squealed but dwindled, swept back into its mental cell. This was the first time he had ever experienced Shibo's Personality fully, her essence flood-g through his mind, insistent and powerful. Not a spoken voice, but a emory.

--Her past rose like dusty clockless hours recalled, streets she had known lying black and steaming. Refugees from the mechs had washed up in the lee of walls, in bitter alleys and vacant ruins. In those rank lanes light, wiry shadows walked high-shouldered, armed always, faces grizzled, eyes embedded in them alternately void and wary. Old stone walls of her Family's Citadel yawned and veered in her memories, unplumbed by wearing winds. Marbled obelisks and crosses marked where the dead kept their own small metropolis--a land packed solid with the casketmaker's trade, until urgency stole from them even that refinement, of setting down into ever-drying soil the already rotting clothes and broken bones. Under blue lamplights she had wandered as a girl in the wake of some funerial procession, done at dawn by long custom. Stones leaked back the night's chill, up through her bare feet, pleasurably delicious as the day's heat came spanking into her face and arms with the already stinging dawn. Slow, solemn march. Past corrugated warehouses, across sandy celebrant squares, through warrens of home gardens carefully watered--redpouch, 111.

heather grain, teardroop fruit. Engines labored eternally to make weaponry, coughing like distant vast animals. Past smoking stacks and vagrant ropy vines and patches of hopeful yellow flowers. Buildings sagged and windows were eyeless sockets. Her Citadel was rent with ruin, the slow-sliding calamity of neglect. Wanderers from the plains sat mute, staring, their gaunt profiles stamped against the shredding dawn sky, old purposes lost in coasting eyes. A mongrel madness of defeat infected them, yet they smiled at her pa.s.sing skip-steps. They had slept in their boots beside a generation's furtive fires and gone on, into days of scavenge and pursuit, living beneath a ma.s.sive rapacity.-Toby staggered with the intensity, the touching fondness for places and people he had never seen. Then Shibo's oddly quiet voice solidified.

You have not called on me recently.

"You... you can see what's been going on. I've been busy."

I doubt that is the true reason.

She was right, of course. Toby was new at this, and he couldn't keep very much from a strong presence. It was almost like she was alive again, and he was peering through her skeptical black eyes, eyes that never wavered. But her eyes saw him, too, from inside.Beneath their gaze his feelings leaked through the rubbery, artificial part.i.tions of his mind. "It's been rough going lately."

Your father.

It was not a question.."He's, well, I'm sure he's doing what's best for the ship--"

Are you?

"Well, he's under pressure and all, and he comes across as pretty d.a.m.ned hard-nosed, but ..." His words faded off as he realized that he couldn't bluff even an Aspect, much less a Personality. Not where emotions were concerned.

It did not occur to you that he knew you and the others, the group from around the campfire, were coming? That someone would protest? There are monitoring cameras throughout the ship, after all.

"Ummm. Well, I suppose."

He took Argo into the galactic jet at just that time. Knowing I I 2.that almost certainly the Magnetic Mind would return then, with more to say."You're sure he planned it that careful?"I love your father still. But he has changed. He has hard-learned the sometimes cynical skills of Cap'ncy.Toby had not grasped yet how to look very much ahead of events--things just seemed to rush at him, coming fast and fierce--so this degree of scheming seemed pretty unlikely. On the other hand, adults were more than a little weird. "So did he know what the Magnetic Mind was going to tell us, then?"I doubt that. He looked as shocked as the rest."Well, he sure looks okay now."

Toby was standing at the back of the Bridge, talking in the barely audible whisper that was enough for an Aspect to get but couldn't be overheard. He studied Killeen, who moved with casual a.s.surance among his ship's officers. Since they had turned downward in the jet, his brow was no longer furrowed, his eyes not haunted by uncertainty.

Not that anybody else felt that way. The Lieutenants were jumpy, troubled, sweating--and not just from the increase in hull temperature.

Even the cool blue gas couldn't screen out all the disk radiation. The ventilators labored, wheezing lukewarm air. A thin tension underlay the customary quiet of the Bridge, beneath the muted, orderly ping and chime of computer prompts, reminding officers of tasks needing supervision."So he was ready for our little mob, huh?" He gave the old man a nod of grudging respect.There is more to being CaF'n than giving orders."Yeasay, but a Cap'n better be right."Now he has the authority he wanted."Straight from Abraham." Toby remembered his grandfather as a towering, gray-faced man with a raw-boned look of intense concentration, even when he dozed in front of a hearth fire. That intensity slumbered, then burst into energetic action. Abraham's distracted stare would often split into a broad grin when he saw Toby, and Toby would find himself yanked up into a whirling sky where he seemed to fly in the big man's arms, scooting high over furniture and through corridors, sometimes out113.

side onto a deck where Abraham would make him swoop and dive over the guardrail, Toby shrieking and laughing and screaming when the ground rushed away and he felt as though he really was soaring, somehow set free of weight and care. So long ago. Toby bit his lip at the memories, already fading. "Abraham. Or so that magnetic thing says."

You do not believe it.

"Why should I? Who would, with half a brain?"

Yet strange vectors work here.

"Look, Abraham we lost at the Calamity, the fall of Citadel Bishop.

That was plenty years back and a h.e.l.l of a long way from here."

Exactly.

"What you mean by that?"

How would some creature not even made of matter at all, this far distant, know his name?

That stopped Toby for a moment. "Okay, I don't know. But mechs, they make records of everything. Maybe the Magnetic Mind learned it from them."

But the Mind seems to be no friend of mechs.

"Who knows, in this craziness?"

I sometimes wonder about the connection between these ent.i.ties.

Remember the Mantis?

"Sure."The thought chilled him. The Mantis had pursued Family Bishop, "harvesting" them, killing their bodies and sucking away their selves so that the Family could extract no chip-memory. These suredead the Mantis fashioned into grotesque contortions that it termed "art"--and had displayed to Killeen and Toby with a touch of something like pride.

The Mantis stood in awe of the Magnetic Mind. It may have offered up its knowledge of us, of our ways and persons, to the Mind.

He felt Shibo as though she were sitting before him cross-legged, 114.

relaxed and yet ready to move in an instant. "I... I don't want to think about that now."

Such memories can hobble us, dear Toby, but they must be faced.

"Hey, some other time, okay?" He felt her somehow shift, pressures adjusting. He sighed with relief and felt better.

It is interesting that now your father has the crew behind him, supporting what he had said all along he wanted-- to fly to the True Center, and find there what the ancient texts said was a miraculous place.

Toby shrugged. "Maybe that's what a talent for being Cap'n means.

You finagle things around until you like them."He had let his gaze drift aimlessly, and didn't notice his father approaching.

Killeen asked sharply, "What're you saying?"It was the height of impoliteness to intrude into conversation with an Aspect--much less with a Personality, which could absorb your whole attention. Toby gulped. "I, I was just--""I lip-read you saying 'Cap'n.' What is it you can't say to my face?""Idle talk, that's all."Killeen licked his lips, hesitated, then plunged on. "It's Shibo, isn't it?"

"Well, yeasay, but--""I just want to say this. So she hears it straight from me." Killeen stared deeply into Toby's eyes, as if somehow he could see the compact intelligence that Toby felt as a looming wall."Dad, I don't think--""Shibo, we're going to need your judgment up ahead. I'm followingmy instincts here, and something big is going to happen.""Dad, come on, I--""Remember how we'd talk over plans, figure the best next move, just you and me? I miss that. I miss that a h.e.l.l of a lot. I know I won't get it back, but if you have any ideas, any guess about what I should do, you speak up, okay?" Killeen's eyes were pleading. He blinked furiously, holding backtears. "Through Toby. I'll understand, I promise I will.""Dad... you know..."Sensations rose in Toby, strange coursing currents of excitement, desire, hoa.r.s.e murmurs, smells layering the air, husky urgings, remembered moments of skin sliding, satiny, a sheen of sweat--He jerked away, staggered. Then a hand patted his shoulder.Killeen drew a long breath. "Thank you, son. I needed that. Just a moment with her, that's all."Before Toby could spit out a rebuke, Killeen stepped back, saluted, turned--and strode away, the crisp Cap n again. Toby felt irritated, used.

115.

He tasted sharp, bitter bile in the back of his mouth. d.a.m.n him! But in the same moment he could see the anguish in his father, and the turmoil that the man could not let rise to the surface.

It is wise to forget this.

"Yeasay, only wisdom's not my strong area."

You are much like your father.

A faint tinkling laughter sounded in his mind. A Personality could take a certain abstract distance from his seething world, Toby saw, and catch the amus.e.m.e.nt of it. Humor usually invisible to him.

There is an old Family Knight saying, time-honored. Some believe it comes from Old Earth. We say that life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.

"Makes sense. Maybe that just means we shouldn't look back over our shoulder too much, see what's gainin' on us."

Good advice as well.

Toby leaned against a steel bulkhead and sighed. Shibo towered in his mind, her serene intelligence sifting through what he saw with a finer, more patient hand.

I wonder who else--or what else--wants us to come here?

"I can't see what makes anybody think people could live in this place.

Quath maybe, but not humans. All those old engravings, what were they talking about? Miraculous, sure--" he swept a hand at the view. "But dead."The wall screens sputtered with virulent radiance. The disk of inward-orbiting matter drew nearer, revealing more fine-grained whorls of color and glowing violence. Now the doomed star they had seen days before was no longer a lopsided, blazing egg. It had exploded into flares, a storm being sucked greedily into the outer rim of the disk. It was like a tortured, twisted sun setting on the far horizon above a flaming landscape. "Looks like a frying abyss to me."With a gut-tightening surge of feeling, Toby knew that they didn't belong here. The Families were all nomads, in the long run. Only machines could live in this huge, fiery engine. The Families were here now only because of Argo, another mechanism made in the great days of human antiquity. Machines like Argo were a natural extension of the human hand, but mechs were a cancer. Planets were not their home. Let 11 6.

cold s.p.a.ce and burning matter be their realm. So what of human scope could lie here?

Perhaps we are being narrow of vision.

"What's that mean?"

Look there. The threads of green.

The Argo was plunging ever closer to the disk, and now they could see the far rim in profile. Gouts of angry red boiled up from the churning plane where the freshly eaten star was working its way inward. Lumps were being chewed as they rotated in the streams."So? Looks like a rat getting digested by a snake."

True. Not pretty, probably not even if you're a snake.

"Oh, I see. Those green strands above the plane there?"Toby could now make out weaving filaments of deep jade that stoodi above where the star was being devoured. They were like reeds aboveswamp water, blowing in a breeze.'.

"It flashes, see?" Blue-green fibers winked with darting yellow. "Like".

frozen lightning, sort of."

We might be wrong, that nothing else lives here.

"Ummm. Lightning life?"The Bridge officers had noticed the threads, too. Some fumbled with hip's instruments, focusing sensors on them. Knots and furious snarlsclimbed up the glowing green lines."The stuff ripped off the star--looks like it's fouling up those threads," Toby said.Jocelyn had managed to get the Argo's antennas to narrow in on the threads, despite the turbulent plasma buffeting the ship. The speakers on the Bridge sputtered and buzzed with the fizzing emissions of the disk--and then eerie high wails cut through the mushy wall of sound.

"What's that?" Jocelyn called. "It sounds terrible."Killeen's mouth twisted at the shrill chorus. Each voice would rise momentarily over the others, peal forth a mournful note, and then subside into the lacing pattern of lament. "Maybe the Magnetic Mind's not the only thing that knows how to live on electricity."Toby said, "Not all of them are making those sounds, though. See?"Jocelyn nodded. "It's the ones that are connected to those bright lumps."

117.Toby's Isaac Aspect fluttered for attention, and Toby let him out:These are the stuff of remote history. I heard of them as a boy.

Conferring with Zeno now, I believe I may perceive the essence.

They are an early life form composed of magnetic vortices, laced with some hot matter. A primitive mode. They feed on the flares and plumes which jut above the disk, like tasty spring flowers from a lush field."Doesn't look like they're enjoying dinner much," Toby said sardonically.The sudden intrusion of the star's ma.s.s has flooded them, sucking some down into the fierce disk, where they die."How come the Magnetic Mind doesn't die, then?"It is far greater, larger, finer than these simple, primitive fibers or so history says. I know little of it. The Mind is vastly old, and reveals no secrets except by necessity. Humans before the Chandelier Era tried to discover some facets of it, and were singed for their trouble.Toby grimaced. The shrieks and wails were strangely gripping, as each thin voice had its moment, sobbed forth a song beyond understanding, and then faded into the flickering static as the disk plasma reached up, bloated with digesting star-ma.s.s--and dragged in the delicate jade streamers, swallowing them in fire. They had lived too close to the edge of grand ferocity, and now paid the price. They struggled frantically against the scalding splashes, gaining small and momentary victories, but in the end they slid into blazing oblivion. The star's shredded ma.s.s was plunging inward through the disk, wreaking havoc among the slender, lacy beings.