Furious Gulf (38 page)

He felt uneasy. With a restless spirit he went back and found the sleep shed for casual laborers. Everybody else was already
down and out so he crawled onto his pallet.

He slept well and woke up only when the shed collapsed. A slap in the forehead, grit in his mouth. The ground heaved under
him. Somebody screamed in the dark.

The roof beams had missed him but debris weighed him down. He crawled out from under it while big explosions shook the ground.
When he got out there were mechs in the hovering gloom. Buildings down. Fires licking at a mottled sky.

People running everywhere. Howling ferocities fighting high up above dirty clouds.

The defense screens popped up—he saw them in his sensorium as bright red planes ramped up into the air, with electrical green
snaking along their edges.

Casualties. People with no visible scars but the skin beneath their eyes black from concussion. Some were bleeding from nose
and mouth. Others clutched their bellies and could not speak. Others pitched face forward into the mashed grass.

He helped with them. The medical people did not seem to want him around. They glared at him and he saw that they suspected.
Nobody could know for sure but he had come here and then the mechs had come.

He wasn’t sure if he would hurt more than he helped, so he left the wounded and ran to the outer edge of the blisterbuildings.
He watched there the swift and mysterious play of glare and thump in the surrounding somberness. He wanted to fight but he
did not know what to do. No Family Bishop methods seemed to matter here. And if the forces above were after him there was
nothing he could do about that either.

Finally he fled. If he had brought this here, then the best he could do was to draw it away. For hours he trotted through
the obliterating murk. Alone again.
Quath. Killeen. Besen.
Names.

In his sensorium nothing seemed to follow him. Finally light began to seep from a rumpled ridge up ahead and he saw that he
was in a different terrain. There were people clinging to the bare timestone and something was trying to find them.

Without warning he found himself in the middle of a fight. He kept belly-down and learned quick enough that something—he never
learned what, exactly—was trying to kill a band of people near him. He caught on also to the skill of keeping down low on
the shifting timestone.

A green fog flowed overhead. From a distance it poured down over him and over his own image that he saw in the timestone below.

The image looked up at him. Slow, diluted seconds passed. The figure waved at him. Toby blinked. It grinned. He could not
figure out how the timestone could have a Toby trapped in it, a
him
who cheerfully saluted—but there was no time for figuring anyway, not now.

Or to see what was doing the killing. He started to lift his head far enough to see, then thought better of it. His sensorium
showed nothing dangerous. Still, he heard the small swishing motes, slivers on the wind that would have lifted pieces of his
head away with a surgical precision if he had looked.

He knew this because within seconds he saw it happen. A woman caught in the chin one of the whispering things that streamed
over the ground. The tiny things waited for a target, gliding over open ground, then found their prey.

He watched too the attempts by friends to put the head back together again. These people spoke a quick, staccato language
that he did not understand. He tried to help even though he could see no point in it, and they paid him no attention. They
had faith that human medicine would work on a head carved up into precise slices. It didn’t.

After a while the whispering streams stopped. He wanted to help the people but when he went to find them they were all thoroughly
dead.

He had little doubt now that somewhere behind this chaos was something looking for him. Had all these people died because
of him? He didn’t want to think about it.

And all he could do was flee, not fight. It grated on his Bishop way of thinking.

He met refugees. Some he could understand. They told of worse places and times but most of them kept plodding past him as
if he were an illusion. Or maybe they thought his questions were nonsensical.

He marched a long while. It was easier if he didn’t think much.

The world seemed lighter, as if his head was like a balloon held down by his body. He walked that way enjoying every step.
Bright yellow beams burst from exposed timestone far overhead. The light worked with furnace energy.

People passing by smiled. The mood grew until everybody was cheerful and even to Toby the scene seemed so fine that it was
on the plain face of it ridiculous that anybody should ever die. At least not him.

With a pang he remembered Quath going on once, long ago, about the irrational optimism of primates, or at least the present
version of them. She had said it was a peculiar adaptation, one her species lacked. Toby had just laughed.

He chuckled again, now. Crazy, mindless. It made him feel better. Remembering Quath’s puzzlement, he laughed again. Even the
pang of loneliness did not cut into his sudden, absolutely unearned joy. Irrational it might be but it was fun and fun was,
in a place and time like this, supremely rational and practical.

“
M
an over there, he wants to talk to you.”

Toby was surprised. “Me? How come?”

“He knows you.”

“Can’t be.”

“He does, says so. Look, he’s bad hurt.”

Toby frowned but went. He moved among the wounded on the dry plain and gave away what was left of his water.

The man’s face was lined and pale and moaning in an automatic way, regular and with the same drawn-out, low, wet grunting
at the end. They had his head covered with a shiny sheet that had some medical purpose. The man reached up and tugged the
sheet away. Toby saw what had been a face and now looked like a small hill that had been driven over in the rain with heavy
equipment and then let bake out in the sun too long.

“They peeled my old face off and gave me this new one,” a clear, soft voice said. The lips did not move.

“I see, yeasay.” Toby felt useless.

“I’m growing a fresh one now.”

“I can tell,” Toby said. Not looking at the face.

“Want to know how it happened?”

“Sure.”

“We were trying to get one of those snake things that shoot down the axis of the Lane. You seen them?”

Toby had seen a lot of things but he didn’t think of them in terms of animals any more. That just led you to make mistakes,
like with the woman he had failed to save. “I think so.”

“Awful, killed plenty of us. So we waited for one and hit it from five different positions. Smacked it pretty square.”

The man’s eyes unfocused and Toby encouraged him with “Yeasay?”

“Uh, sure. Thing jerked around and went to pieces before it crashed on the ridgeline. Near me. Went off something powerful.
So pretty. All I knew was a hot whack in the side and then I was here.”

Toby reached out and held the man’s hand and wondered if he should believe much of it. The hand was as soft as the voice,
not a hand that had ever been in the field much. The voice was dreamy too. The story did not sound like a real battle. He
had learned that the wounded were not good reporters and sometimes mingled their dreams in.

Toby murmured something and slid the sheet back so the face was covered. He was pretty sure the man could not see and was
just using his inner sensorium. The man said nothing and Toby left the sheet. Then the man said suddenly, “I heard you were
here.”

“Me? How’d anybody know me?”

“We saw you, got a pulse on the gen sensorium.”

“What’d it say?”

“To watch for you. Take care of you.”

“Who sent it?”

“General directive.”

“You guys can send signals from Lane to Lane?”

“Sometimes. Our tech here isn’t the best. But we heard about you.”

“My father have anything to do with it?”

“Mightsay. I don’t remember.”

Toby wondered if this was true either. He had heard men lie about how they were wounded, sometimes right after they were hit
and even in front of people who had been there. He did not know why but he had done it himself once years ago so it did not
seem so bad.

His left calf had gone out then from a mech bolt and it took a week to get running again. By the time he could walk he had
woven a story that was completely different from the reality. Not flattering, just different. He did not know why he had done
it and after a while had stopped asking himself the question. All that made it hard to talk to this man whose face was not
going to work out.

The man said, “Way I figure, you must be important.”

“Huh? Me?” Toby had been thinking and had nearly lost track of where he was. He was remembering the Family. Killeen.

“Must be. Most directives are weapons stuff, tactics and all.”

“I’m not important.”

“Well you’re sure goddamn big. Where from?”

“Family Bishop.”

He said it half-defiantly, because he never knew how people were going to react. Sometimes they got puzzled. Others would
make a sour comment about dirt-huggers, or else just look blank. This man did neither, since he was busy vomiting suddenly
into his own hand. Toby helped him clean it up.

“You sure be important.” The man looked a lot worse now, his face yellowing like an old wound, but he clung to his idea. “Gotta
be.”

He spoke with a flat accent but his phrasing was like one of the old Bishops Toby had known. Maybe the people around here
were Hunker Down Families. Toby patted the man, not knowing what to do. “You sleep.”

“You gotta be. Directive said to look out for you.”

“Then what?”

“Report back. And hang on to you.”

“For who?”

“Dunno. You stay right here, now.”

“Get some sleep.”

“Why you so important? You got something to do with all this?”

The question floated in the dusty air. Though Toby had heard it in his sensorium, the words in a thin whisper went unanswered
because Toby was already at the edge of the plain and moving fast.

He came down into a long barrel-like valley. It was green and moist, hollowed out between glowing massifs of timestone.

It was hard for him to remember now just when he had started running from the mechs. He had shat his pants a few more times
and no longer felt ashamed of it.
Killeen. Quath.
The names evoked the same emotions now but he had not cried for them in a long while.

This new Lane was pleasant and he sensed no mechs. He had gotten used to the mild, diffuse light that oozed from juts and
plains alike, sometimes casting upward shadows. The stone sent ribbons of light projecting up through the root systems of
trees. He could see them like buried blood vessels in the fleshy soil. He loped steadily and came down into the valley. Yellow
knots of timefog clung to the peaks on both sides.

Nothing in the sky to alert him. Still, the mechs could come on you faster than his rickety sensorium could register. So he
kept to the shadows when he could.

He had once spent a day staying barely ahead of some mech sniffer, a silver-gray flyer that skated just over the trees and
shot at him three times. He had eluded it by jumping into a river and swimming until his reserve air played out. Mechs didn’t
seem to understand water very well. Or at least couldn’t see through it. He had stayed under until a waning came, and crawled
out gasping into total blackness.

Besen. Killeen. Ol’ Cermo-the-Slow. So long ago.

A burnt scent and beneath it something sickly sweet. Down the whole valley grew dense fields of maize. He had not seen any
since a boy, and then only a scraggly lot at the edge of the Citadel when he was barely big enough to walk. He walked along
a rutted harvesting trail and smelled the soft, milky air.

Maize. He remembered there had been maize planted in the mud of spring; dug into the earth on a plowed hillside, with narrow-eyed
women keeping seed-eating birds just out of gunning range; fine stands of young maize sending a keen aroma into the rainy
day; the work of chopping weeds from the base of the stalks, the shiny-bladed hoe churning up fine dry dust; cutting and shocking
maize with a thick long knife; the bluegreen ears that could turn to follow the sun through the day; ripe ears thrown into
a wheelbarrow; tiny insects tech’d up to defend the sweet maize against pests, each loyal to the death to its particular plant;
bare stalks in a quiet snowfall; a sister who lost her finger in a shucker, quick as a wink; rattling kernels spewing from
a hand-cranked, steel-toothed feeder, the bare cobs shooting out the top and tumbling onto a pyramid pile; a silo crammed
with drying husks; whiskey sloshing in a wooden keg, the charcoal staining the spout where it had been strained out; sharp
sweet smell of a pat of butter sliding down an ear, skating on its own melt—

—and Toby staggered, knowing that these memories were not his. But they felt absolutely real, especially the pungent fragrances.

I worked in the fields a lot when I was a girl.

Shibo’s voice seemed to come down from the yellow sky. Toby gulped, eyes watering. He walked on and let the dry scent of the
fields calm him.

So he had not got all of her out. And now there was nothing to do. Not even a knife blade could help him now.

The burnt stench was stronger and he looked warily into the fields as he passed. The standing grain was at its peak, aching
to be harvested. He shucked a few ears and ate them as he went on, the kernels popping full and sugary in his mouth. Some
of the maize had started to shell out of the heads, overripe.

The few trees were splintered and singed as if something inside them had wrecked them trying to get out. There were a few
bare spots in the closely planted fields, exactly circular. The maize was pressed flat.