FIVE

Tiny Minds

When he got really out of sorts, Toby went for a run.

Since nobody could go hull-walking any more, because of the hard radiation that now bombarded Argo, he had to go jogging through lesser-used corridors. Thumping along the same monotonous route, he let his subconscious rummage around among his problems. Maybe his deeper layers could come up with something smart, he thought, though without much hope. Family Bishop was headed for a crisis, for sure.

He had gone to Quath for advice or just some good, reassuring insult-trading—but the alien had brushed him off.

<I cojoin with my own kind.>

She had rattled her enormous telescoping arms, as if for punctuation. There seemed to be several new ones, maybe worked up from other parts of her carcass. Quath had a way of redesigning herself—maybe as the Myriapodia’s equivalent of a fashion statement, Toby thought. Arms waved and clashed with a metallic ring, like a breeze blowing through a forest of steel trees.

“Hey, you old collection of spare parts, listen anyway.”

<I have several minds which could do my listening, but they are engaged.>

“Huh! You think just a fraction of you is enough to talk to me?”

<Listen, not talk. I could perhaps assign one of my monitoring subselves to—>

“Never mind! Sometimes talking to you is like shouting down a well, Quath.”

<I cannot [untranslatable].>

“Well, I can’t either!”

Toby was finally, truly irked. Without meaning to—maybe—Quath actually had insulted him. Or so he felt. So he stormed out of the big bowl where Quath stood, transfixed by distant conversations with her own kind.

So now Toby loped through vacant ship corridors, fretting to himself, hoping to release through his muscles what he could not resolve in his own feelings. Most of Family Bishop was jammed into the cafeterias, talking and eating and forming the communal consolations that had always before gotten them through a crisis. Maybe it would this time, too, but Toby didn’t like the drift of events. And jogging didn’t clear his mind much today; it just made him even hotter, sweat collecting in his eyebrows and stinging his eyes. An itchy heat laced the air. The usual well-being that came from a workout did not settle upon him.

So he slowed his step when he rounded a long curve and saw the same small side passage, caught the acrid scent of smoke. With a certain eagerness he walked puffing to the edge of the group—larger this time—around a flickering corn husk fire.

He settled in, exchanging ceremonial nods with the others, accepting a passed flask of fruity liquor that rasped in his throat but sent a warm, welcome pulse through his body. The Family talk was amiable and he sat and soaked it up for a while, but then an edge came into it and eyes drifted his way. He had defended his father the last time here, and now voices arose among the huddled figures that voiced outright fear. It slid quickly into anger at Killeen, and Toby began to feel uncomfortable.

Jocelyn said, “Our hull temperature, it’s goin’ up and up and up.”

A voice muttered, “Can feel it ever’where. Hot as a clam at a clambake.”

Toby had never seen a clambake or a clam, didn’t know what they were, had never even seen a body of water he couldn’t pitch a stone across—but the term remained in the Family tongue. “Lemme have some of that,” Toby whispered to a bald woman sitting nearby.

She passed him a flask of ripe apricot brandy that made his nose sting when he swigged some into the back of his throat. But it was good to feel the spin of it steal up into him, lighten his head just a tad and smooth the world off a bit. His body would quickly enough metabolize the alcohol into burnable fuel—the Family had long ago been engineered to turn every possible food into usable energy—but it gave a momentary glow. And he needed that now. A prickly irritability ran through this crowd of huddled shapes, snappish remarks lancing through the gloom, and even the ancient consolation of the dancing flames did little to deflect the mood.

“We got how long before we roast?” an engineer asked, flicking her long mane of tawny hair with a jerk of her neck.

Jocelyn shrugged, glanced at Cermo. “A day? Two?”

Cermo looked uncomfortable. Ship’s officers had to be the lubricant between the Cap’n and the Family, and they got rubbed raw sometimes. “The computers are tellin’ us there’s ’bout a day left before the cooling runs out. Then we go to backup.”

“What’s that?” a man’s slurred voice called out. “We peel down naked and get in the food freezers?”

This got a sour laugh all around but Cermo didn’t join in. “You can strip if you want. Looks to me like we’re not wearing all that much now.”

He was right. Toby was in shorts, like most around the smoky fire. A few wore loose robes. Family liked to dress up whenever possible, a holdover of the era when a fine cloth jacket or silky shirt was a precious treasure, a last emblem they had salvaged from the Calamity, the loss of Citadel Bishop.

A few small jokes circulated, mostly about the skinny flanks, pink beer-bellies, and pale pencil-arms exposed, for the Family still liked to josh and chivy and rank each other. Toby thought this was a good sign; when they couldn’t laugh any more, they’d be in deep trouble. Then Cermo said, “Backup plan is to fall back into ship’s core. All of us.”

“What for?” an angry woman asked.

“The outer zones will get pretty bad,” Cermo said reasonably. “The cooling systems can handle us if we’re packed into the inner areas.”

“Leave the growing domes?” a woman cried with disbelief.

The crowd dissolved into discordant voices, piling in.

“Without us tending ’em, they’ll all die, for sure.”

“We’ll never get them back to harvest.”

“That’s death, right there!”

“Whose idea’s that?”

“Those damn computers, is who.”

“Yeah, what do they know? They’re not Family computers.”

“So what? Our systems, the ones back in the Citadel, they were small-fry kin to these computers.”

“Can’t trust ’em, I say.”

“Well, I say different. We—”

“Nobody can save us if we lose all the crops at once.”

“She’s right. We’ll never reseed if the soil gets baked.”

“Hey, might get rid of those weevils for good.”

“Yeasay, and all the earthworms that do the real soil work.”

“Cermo, you can’t mean that.”

“We won’t just crawl back in our holes and give up!”

“We’re Bishops!”

“Yeasay, we’re meant to move and search and shoot anything gets in our way—not turn into moles.”

“Who says we should? You know who—the Cap’n!”

“Yeasay, this idea smells like him.”

“Got his whiff, all right.”

“Too big for his britches.”

“Never trusted that one, never did. I used to say—”

“Followin’ this damn fool course, it was his idea.”

“Got us into a goddamn trap.”

“Any fool would naysay flying into this hellhole!”

“But no, Cap’n says we got to go, well we just roll over and wag our tails and off we go.”

“While he flumdiddles on the Bridge!”

“Yeasay, nice and cool!”

“Bridge is right in the center of the ship, it’ll be frosty.”

“I say we go get cool ourselves. Whatsay you?”

“Good idea!”

“Enough hunkerin’ down here.”

“Let’s move!”

The crowd had swollen in the gloom without Toby noticing and now it rose as one, yammering and elbowing and smelling of sweaty irritation. With the zigzag logic of a mob they set out to do what they had just been protesting, moving click-step quick inward. It cooled a bit as they wound down the central helical ramp.

Toby followed. A kind of rolling-stone energy grew in them, gathering the moss of the undecided from side corridors. Bishops liked action a lot more than mulling matters over.