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Shibo invoked a time-honored Bishop custom, whereby a woman may withdraw her
man from Family matters if he is wounded or distraught. Never had Killeen
heard of such privilege used for a
Cap'n, but he raised no objections. He let Shibo guide him to a boxy tent of
odd design, and there seemed to fall into a musky warm pit.
He ached everywhere. The fear and anguish he had suppressed were lodged in
tight muscle complexes, gnarled deposits in his sensorium like granite nuggets
in a bed of sand. Each stored increment awaited only a release of control in
order to speak its pain. Shibo said little, simply began singing a high,
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drifting song of ancient deeds, as his clothes slid from him and a tracery of
warmth crept across his filthy skin. She applied the heavy scented oils and
scraped them away with a honed stone blade. His skin
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xt shrieked at the cleansing and then simmered into a tingling glow.
She moved over him, gauzy and ghostly and light, and seemed to pluck words out
of his throat, so that the story seeped from him involuntarily, oozing through
his skin as it answered her hands.
His sensorium trembled and snagged on her moist breath, on the quickness of
her. He could feel her own despair and bleak days, lacing the air between them
and merging with their desire. They were together in a new place, a zone they
had never penetrated before because for years now life between them had been
mild and calm and incapable of reaching deeply in. They pressed, pressed. Sank
into each other, bone into bone. Killeen felt angered by the stubborn flesh
that resisted with its mulish weight their blending; he wrestled with the
sheer lazy obdurance of their bodies. Shibo bit and pulled and strained and
they became thin wedges driven into each other. Their bodies were left behind.
Together they glided in sailing, recessional spaces.
There was a long interval without a tick of time.
Then, casually, Killeen heard a distant muttered conversation.
The ringing clatter of someone fumbling with metal. Crackling of fires.
Children's weary giggles.
The world had started up again.
"Ah," Shibo said, eyes heavy-lidded. "Here."
They lay together in each other's arms and laughed. Killeen felt a whisper of
ache in his lower back and knew he had not banished all the past, never would.
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Gregory Benford
They had come back from the silent spaces. A blank and yet expectant pressure
came upon him.
Facts, facts, yes. Always the blunt mass of facts.
They were stranded in a ruined land, besieged by two breeds of hostility. The
Family dwelled in the close embrace of a strange strain of humanity.
His plans for New Bishop were dashed forever. Escape seemed the only solution,
yet--if he understood the mottled, warping time he had spent in the bowels of
the alien--the Argo was captured, lost.
Killeen curled up against Shibo and let himself seep into the musk of her,
seeking a moment more of forgetting.
SIX
Plips and plops of rain dampened his spirits. Pale morning cut through a mass
of purple cloud. Killeen huddled under a lean-to, sheltered by a tarp that
flapped in a cold wind that seemed to be racing to catch the storm front.
"Looks like clearing," he said to Jocelyn, who squatted nearby.
She surveyed the low, jumbled valley where dozens of breakfast fires sent
threads of smoke slanting up the sky, blown by the wind. "Hope so. I'd hate
running in this mud."
"I been thinkin' the same. How come they camp like this, a whole Tribe rubbin'
elbows?"
"His Supremacy says so." Her face was blank, eyes giving nothing away.
He bit into a grain bar. There were weevils in it. Well, there had been
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weevils in the Argo, too; pests were eternal. But here humans themselves were
pests.
"Mechs'd smash this place," he said, "if they knew they'd catch so many."
"Near as I can tell, mechs don't matter. They've got 'nuff trouble with
Cybers," Jocelyn said.
"Okay, how 'bout the Cybers? Those campfires last night give us away. Howcome
they don't hit a big crowd like this?"
"Not their style."
"Who says?"
"His Supremacy."
"And what's he? He put on a show last night, was all I could manage keepin' a
straight face."
Jocelyn's brow creased with a disapproving frown. "Don't make even small fun."
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"Everybody crazy as he is?"
"Come look."
Killeen didn't feel like creaking over the muddy terrain but something in
Jocelyn's voice made him follow. He felt every joint
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194
Gregory Benford and servo like heavy damp wedges moving in his legs. He had
run a fair distance yesterday, and hiked some of the night with the party that
brought him in. Along with the crew he had exercised in the g-decks of Argo to
keep muscle fiber. Optimistically, he had expected that the lesser gravity of
this world would help. Not so.
The rain brought a special dull ache into his calves and lower back, making
him hobble around all tight and gimpy, hunching over the way old men did. He
was mulling this over as he grunted up a steep hogback ridge behind Jocelyn,
and wasn't ready for what he saw on the other side.
A large steel girder was stuck into the ground so that it stood nearly
upright. A woman was tied to it, head down. Her purple tongue stuck out
between clenched teeth and her eyes protruded.
"Ah, ah, pl-please . , ." she croaked.
Killeen stepped toward her, unsheathing his knife.
"No." Jocelyn put a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Touch her and you'll be
in trouble. We'll all be."
"Ah, please . . . hands . . . God..."
Killeen saw that the woman's hands were swollen and blue where wire tied them
to the girder. At her ankles wire cut into grossly large feet, dark with
congested blood. "I can't let--"
"We've all kept clear. His Supremacy says anyone who helps them gets the
same." Jocelyn's voice was careful, controlled.
"Why's she up there?"
"She's an 'unbeliever,' as they put it around here."
"An unbeliever in what?"
"In His Supremacy. And their inevitable victory, ! guess."
"This is . . ." Killeen's voice trailed off as he looked beyond the woman's
pleading, reddened face. In the narrow gully three more girders had been
jammed into the soil and kept nearly upright with stones. Each held an
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