<I find their reluctance to divulge data about this place suspicious.>
“If I take the measure of them right,” Killeen said, “they don’t give anything away free.”
Toby said, “Yeasay—downright nasty.”
<The Illuminates spoke of your tribal habits, the great variation in custom. They disagree over whether this is a source of your strengths, or a subtle weakness.>
“Ummm, maybe both. See, we’re used to people helping each other automatically, no questions asked. These folk don’t think like that—which implies a lot.”
<Such nuances of primate behavior are beyond my kind.>
“Simple, really,” Killeen said. “They aren’t under threat all the time. Comfortable people can afford to be choosy.”
Toby thought about that. “Could mean they’re pretty used to strangers, too.”
<I see your implication.>
“Oh? And what’s that?” Toby didn’t have any deeper idea, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge that here, the only kid among adults. You kept your luck to yourself.
<There are many more people within this structure than we see. Enough to make most be strangers.>
“Ummmm.” Killeen watched their guards edgily. “Could be.”
Toby felt edgy, as though some game was going on just beyond his seeing. Killeen was composed, controlled, giving nothing away. As he fretted over this he glanced down an alleyway and saw a building in the distance abruptly seem to melt, windows and arches dissolving, turning a mottled green. “Look!” It reformed itself with a freshly slanted roof, a new line of windows.
Killeen’s eyes narrowed. “That fits, too,” he said distantly.
“Fits what?” Toby watched new doorways pop open, ovals instead of the earlier strait-edged type.
“This city’s a kind of tech we’ve never seen. And I’ll bet it runs itself.”
Cermo sent a puzzled murmur. “Itself? Andro—”
“He’s a clerk.” Killeen gave Andro a bland smile, amused that they could talk this way right next to him. “These people, they’re no higher level than we are, come right down to it.”
“They sure don’t seem like they could build a Chandelier,” Cermo said.
“They didn’t,” Toby said firmly. “Don’t expect them to ever admit it, though.”
He walked past a splashing fountain, ideas tumbling fruitlessly, and felt a tilting, a rising presence—
—She moved lithely, inspired, skipping from stone to stone across the broken road, puddles from the night fogs showing her self and counter-self in the shredding gray light. Playing in the fresh dawn’s ruins. Jagged teeth from a night raid. Stumps of stone. A spider slept within the city, she saw it silver-fine and waiting. Stirring its barbed legs, the razor rub unheard beneath the waking bustle of her loved Citadel, fine and forlorn and always waiting for the next blow. Yet joy seeped from every moment. Shapes swarmed through this morning, the eternal going of people about their busyness, to strive against and fail and strive again. Even though they knew that the spider waited too, rustling in the eyesocket of a bleached skull—
He snapped out of it, panting. Forced his attention back to the street where his boots trod, his eyes caught the liquid dance of water.
Yet Shibo’s world was entrancing, too. It called forth a lightness of being, an airy sense of things merging, yet solidly grounded in a web of interplay, of casual and unspoken delight. These glimpses into her Personality contrasted hugely with the masculine edginess all around him, the holding-back, the control and analysis. Killeen’s blocky, muscular stride ahead of him spoke silently of purpose, precision, separation. Toby respected that, knew Family Bishop had to be led that way.
Yet this was his father, too. In the years since they had fled together across arid, murderous plains, the edges in Killeen had sharpened. Like a knife stroked on stone, Toby thought, a law of nature. And now Killeen expected of his son the same hardness, the same resolute separation that leadership demanded.
Toby lurched, the strife in him like a blow—a clash between the beckoning sense of the world Shibo held forth and the demands he felt radiating from Killeen. Cermo looked at him oddly, one eyebrow raised. Toby realized his face must show his feelings, and tightened it up—only to feel the Shibo Personality laughing gently at him, then fading back into its ghostly berth in him. He marched on.
They wound through twisted streets, across a broad plaza of black stone, and into the most impressive building Toby had seen here—a steep pyramid of hard glaring white. His Isaac Aspect said it was “pearly” and when Toby pressed his hand against the stuff it was shockingly cold. Sticky, too—and then they were being hustled through a wide portal and into seats before a high dais. The chairs were Bishop-sized and Toby’s clasped him with a warm, massaging grip. It was downright insinuating, fitting itself to him all along back and legs. He wondered if it would let him go, if whoever ran this place decided otherwise.
To his surprise, the judge, Monisque, appeared at the dais—this time in blue robes. “I figured she was something more than a judge,” Killeen whispered on closed comm.
“I’m happy to greet you again, far wanderers,” Monisque said lightly. “Now I’m wearing my other hat—Chief Swapper.”
“Sounds to me like you do everything here,” Killeen said.
“Appearances are deceiving. Most people have no interest in visitors, no matter what esty they hail from.” She nodded as dozens of the short people filled the remaining seats, buzzing among themselves. Toby noticed that the seats conformed to the dwarves, too, shrinking as required, and felt a little less paranoid.
“Our friend here, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon, is willing to yield data about any area not proscribed by his own, uh—” Toby could see Killeen struggle to put Myriapodia notions, even approximately understood, into human terms. “Uh, priestly orders. In return we’ve got a whole fistful of questions.”
“I’m not here to give away the whole store, Cap’n,” Monisque said skeptically.
Killeen was in no mood to start haggling right away, and Toby shared his impatience. “First, we want to know what this place is—how it works, its history, who made it. Second—”
“We can tell you what we know. I do not speak for the Lanes, though.”
“Lanes?” Killeen looked blank.
“Other axes of the esty. Didn’t Andro go through this?”
Andro himself stood up, in a crisper, cleaner coverall. “I tried to tell them, but they just don’t have the concepts.”
Toby couldn’t abide that. He shot up and charged, “The entire time you were on board Argo you kept trying to trade us for our gear. I didn’t hear you giving lectures on—”
“Okay, so I shaved a little time off the docket for my hobby. Still, your honor, these rubes don’t grasp a fraction of the topological fathoms necessary to—”
“Sit down, both of you,” Monisque snapped impatiently. “We’ll give you the standard Remedial Intro, no problem.”
“Second,” Killeen said mildly, as though he had a long way to go on his list, “I wish to know the location of my father, Abraham of Bishop.”
“Relative-tracing, huh? My tourist friend, that’s a major cottage industry around here.” Monisque made a notation by passing her hand over the dais top. “You’ll have to commission a search yourself.”
“You must know where your citizens are, who they are.”
“Oh, must we?” She arched an eyebrow. “There are more slippery Lane-vectors than you have hairs on your body, Cap’n—and they curl more than yours, too.”
The audience laughed, but no Bishops. Killeen’s mouth tightened and he sent on closed comm, “She can’t see my really curly ones—and not damn likely she will.”
To this the Bishops answered with a volley of hoots and snickers. The dwarves looked puzzled, as if trying to decide whether they’d been insulted.
Toby grinned. He wondered if these people had the tradition of Ranking, a round-robin of cutting humor, sarcasm, and insults both veiled and naked. On the run, such quicksbot talk could amuse and abuse—ideally, both. Its essential function was to defuse tensions, let grudges out in allowed ways. Toby realized that they had not had a Ranking for a long time. Maybe that was why Killeen seemed distant and awesome to so many of the crew now—they had not seen him humbled with a well-flung jibe.