Where I live most intensely. The seat of forbidding energies and grand remorse. Where my feet dance on sizzling plasma. Inward, tiny thing. To your terror.

SIX

Lightning Life

Almost despite himself, Toby was drawn back to the Bridge through the long hours of their descent.

Argo was using the galactic jet as a shield now, plunging in along it. Ghostly blue filaments twisted and snarled and rushed by them, fleeing outward. Their streaming made the ship’s flight seem even faster. The deck rumbled with the plasma drive’s effort, sucking in the blue gas and thrusting it out the back.

And now a puzzling, unspoken question was answered. For days the ship had buzzed with speculations: where were the mechs?

The Eater of All Things had loomed in legend for Family Bishop, and part of that ancient story held that mechs lurked and labored there. Why, no one knew. They had driven humans from True Center long before the fall of the Chandeliers.

But until now they had seen only fleeting glimpses of mech ships. Now, far up along the jet, Argo detected huge, dark mech constructions. They had seen before enormous masses of mechwork, on their passage inward—and had avoided them. Immense, mysterious, shrouded in energy-collecting panels. All mute, speaking on no channel humans knew.

These mech structures ringed the jet as though taking energy from it. 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 passed. 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 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 roots—

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,

1. You goddamn traitors set us up.

2. Playing along with mechs—real smart.

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

4. 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” . . . no justice . . . possible from mech . . . We had the key to . . . subverting them . . . disembowel their deepest . . . logics . . . programs . . . They scattered . . . our lore . . . even then . . . we could not unlock the 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 moment Joe said,

1. See what you lost, Isaac?

2. “Accommodation”—you mean “sell-out.”

To Toby any notion of compromise with mechs was damnfool stupidity, and Isaac’s generation had escaped the consequences only by pure luck. The instant he framed this thought, Isaac flared.

Not luck! We assisted 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” escaped him—yet another dry, ancient idea discarded as so much surplus baggage by Family Bishop, long before he was born.

1. Look where it ended up.

2. Mechs got you anyway.

Isaac shot back,

The Chandeliers were untenable! Just big targets, floating in the spaces 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 hornets’ 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.