Only in a city there was no tracking, unless Toby had stirred up a crowd somewhere to mark his passage. But Killeen and Cermo couldn’t talk easily with these dwarves, especially in their mood. So he might have a margin of time.
He had ended up behind the park. A chase moves away from the start and usually nobody thinks to check back there. He had learned that playing in the dusty streets of Citadel Bishop, then later again, dodging mechs. Now he hoped that his own father couldn’t read him that deeply. The thought made him fidgety, glancing around corners before exposing himself on the approach to the park area. After all, Killeen had played him like a penny flute lately.
No sign of Killeen or Cermo. No shouts or unusual hurry. He leaned against a building, eyeing the park a block away.
This was only a temporary victory. The Family would comb this city and pluck him out.
He felt a familiar cool signal in his comm. Quath, apparently, had played the same kind of games as a child—or hatchling, or whatever the Myriapodia were when young. But Toby couldn’t see her anywhere.
<I have offended your father. I am sad that matters have come to this.>
The bulky form was above him, clinging somehow to the side of a building, concealed in shadow. Nobody nearby had noticed.
“With Dad acting that way, it had to happen.”
<Still, it brings acrid currents flowing among us.>
“Freedom starts between the ears, sticky-paws. I had to follow what I know. So did you. Thanks.”
<I acted to preserve the possibilities for both of you.>
“Really? Do you think I should give Shibo back to him?”
<I have no views on so species-specific a question.>
“Come on!”
<My qualifications do not extend to your own, individual, cerebral symphonies.>
Toby leaned against a wall, watching Quath clamber down the gray ceramic building—which shuddered and popped with the strain—and said, “I don’t hear much music these days, buggo. Just noise.”
<It is your unconscious, trying to speak.>
“How would you know?”
<Only creatures who lack such mental architectures can see them clearly.>
“You don’t have unconscious thoughts? I mean, impulses, things that just turn up when you’re not thinking about them?”
<All aspects of myself are delegated to subminds. For your species, the mind is made by adding segments atop older elements. Not I. Your makeshift construction is typical of a phylum which has not reshaped itself fundamentally.>
“Maybe we like ourselves the way we are.”
<A matter of taste. To me, an [untranslatable], your relation to Shibo is understandable. I delegate to my under-selves. Is it that way for you?>
“Ummm.” He recalled the sensuous moments, his deep, troubling sweats. “Not really.”
<You are too close, too (untranslatable] for judgment.>
“So I can’t really think about Shibo? That’s why I’m so messed up?” He felt exhausted, and not from his running. He let himself slide down, back to the wall, legs splaying out until he was sitting in the alley.
<Myriad impulses scurry and clash across the single, open stage of your mind. Factions hide offstage and shout from the wings. They are your suppressed, accomplice minds, and you cannot consult them directly, as can I.>
“That’s . . . why we feel so much . . .”
<Pain? In a way—but do not conclude that such as I do not also know inner bloodknot clash. I can speak to all my subminds, which does relieve some of the tough, sinewy agonies.>
“And we can’t.”
<You find yourselves through action. Through your bodies the deeper cellars of your layered mind can speak.>
Toby wondered if he would ever know what stormy emotions tossed him about on the surface of a deep, troubled inner sea. He shrugged. “In that case, maybe I’ll feel a smidge better if I do something more than sit on my fat ass, waitin’ for Cermo to fall over me here.”
<I admit I have no idea what you can do. I acted perhaps hastily, blocking them. I may have merely worsened your position in this grave matter.>
“Hey, without you I’d be having my spinal chips picked clean.” Toby got to his feet, feeling lighter, easier in himself.
<Still, when they seize you, I cannot—>
“Like my grandfather used to say, bug-brain—Cheer up! We’ll live to piss on the graves of our enemies.” It seemed odd to be giving Quath a pep talk.
<He must have been a strong man.>
“Part of the line. We got plenty more like him.” It felt good to say it, even if he didn’t really know if it was true. Maybe no son ever did know.
<I do not know where this course leads.>
Quath rustled her legs, then restlessly played her boosters, hovering in air. People in the street nearby looked up, startled, and moved away. They were pretty savvy, but Quath was a bit much.
“Neither do I. We can’t stay here, though. You’re kinda conspicuous and I’m a wanted man.”
<What then?>
“I dunno. We flew Argo in through the grand entrance and they were ready for us. Is there a back door to this place?”
Phase Creatures
Above the disk nothing made of metal or ceramic can survive.
Perpetually the great turning disk grinds down the stuff of stars. Tides suck inward, shredding.
The Eater itself holds eternally captive the gathered masses of a million dead suns. The ancient matter itself vanished in seconds of stretched agony, drawn down the steepening slide of space-time. But the memory of these transient masses lingers in curvature.
To the outside, a ghost warp testifies to the dead. Ten billion years of sacrificed matter—stars and dust, planets and cities, lost civilizations and their records, their hopes—have their single tombstone in the mute remaining distortion. A galaxy’s ancient pain persists as silent gravitation.
Blobs of already incandescent matter spiral in, skating on the curvature at speeds higher than found anywhere else in the galaxy. Incessant pull whirls doomed matter in a final frenzied gyre.
The blobs collide, smash, reform, rub. Magnetic fields mediate the friction. Snarls of plasma stream and whirl. Currents churn.
Magnetic vortices grow. The fields twine and loop through the condemned kernels. In tight collisions, fields themselves annihilate against each other. More energy flares forth.
Above such brutal furnaces skim the phase creatures. They had once been of the mechanicals. Now they exist not in hard circuits or ceramic lattice-intelligences. They have evolved out of self-directed necessity. To drink more energy they have learned to dissolve.
As torrents of hard radiation lance through them, they are plasmas. This gathers in fluxes and stores them in long-range correlations.
When the flood ebbs, the phase creatures change. In the cooler spots above the disk they can condense. Lacy filaments become gaseous discharges. The power so generated they broadcast outward, to lesser ranks who can store it.
The phase creatures themselves use these fluxes to organize themselves into free-floating networks. Circuits without wires. Electrons flowing only in their own self-consistently generated magnetic fields. Pinched currents that snake and flare. Voltages and switches. Light-quick, gossamer-thin.
Lively intelligences dance there. Inductive, silent, invisible.
They enter the discussion that has been teeming above them, in the cooler realms. With silky elegance their thoughts merge with the hard beings who are the cruder, earlier forms of mechanicals.
But the phase creatures still know their origins. They share the thought patterns of the metallic forms. They converse.
I/We do not understand why these odd, primitive primates should be studied at all. And what is this arrival?
You/I summoned |>A<|, who was concluding the elimination of remaining organic life on the planet of these primates’ origin.
This |>A<| is a strange mixture of intelligences.