Tides of Light (46 page)

He sat letting the cold seep away and watched the plume of spray towering nearby. Glassy-smooth water shot by into empty space.
Trees and bushes bobbed in the slick, brown surface—and then lurched into oblivion.

He walked through the roaring and watched the great white column crash down with dazed fascination. The water had such a quixotic
spirit, going from placid muddy flow to harsh, beautiful froth in the space of a heartbeat. He wondered if in some sense it
was truly alive, as much entitled to the sovereignty owed to all life as were the plants and small creatures and humanity.

Then something pricked at his weak, collapsed sensorium. He started, suddenly afraid that the Cybers had caught up to him
already.

But no—it was a faint voice. A gathering call on Bishop comm.

It fell silent but he had gotten a fix. He followed it for a while toward a range of slumped, ruined hills. The jagged stones
of shattered strata seemed to snatch at his boots. He stumbled and nearly fell.

—This way,—Shibo sent.

He could not use his searching sensorium for fear that Cybers would detect him—if they hadn’t already.

—Dad!—Toby’s quick spike was enough to give him a fresh directional.

He ran down a crumpled hill into the seeming shelter of a thick forest. The same umbrella trees stood stately and serene in
the faint promise of dawn. Beneath them he felt safer, cloaked in the remnants of life in this battered place.

His power reserves ebbed. He slumped against a tree. The woods were silent and brooding, and then without transition Shibo
was walking steadily toward him and the weight of the night lifted away, insubstantial.

“You… you…” He could not shape any words that expressed what he felt. Then Toby was there and it was like his return to camp
before, the Family enclosing him in an unspoken clasp.

He simply let go, sinking to the ground. Time meant nothing. The world was immediate, without past or future. Every tree and
bristly bush attained a sharp, stark clarity. Faces loomed, split by immense grins. Crisp light poured through them all, illuminating
everything with an even, eternal glow. A mouthful of water drenched his throat in pure coolness. The snap and bite of rations
burst in his mouth like explosions of unendurable pleasure. His muscles sang with release. The brush of Shibo’s hand, Toby’s
arm about his neck—these framed each moment, lending a halo of incandescent immediacy.

He had no idea how long he spent like that, but the moment came when the ordinary world snapped back solidly.

“On your feet,” Jocelyn called. She stood among the scattered party of Bishops, looking tired, her jaw set stiffly. “I located
His Supremacy. They’re headed down, followin’ that ridgeline up there.”

“What about Cybers?” Toby asked.

“We’ll deal with ’em better if we got the Tribe with us,” Jocelyn said.

“Besen can’t make good time,” Toby insisted.

Besen leaned against a tree. Her eyes were hollow and her face was drawn.

Jocelyn nodded. “We’ll take turns helpin’ with the wounded.”

“Not good for ’em,” Toby said. “Wear ’em out.”

“We got no choice.”

“Howcome we should hook up again with those son-bitches?” Toby demanded.

“’Cause when the Cybers run us down, I want help.”

There was no good answer to that. Killeen was proud of the way Toby had stood up for Besen but he knew Jocelyn had to keep
them moving.

Nobody said anything as they got up and wearily made ready to march. There was no time for the Family to gather and count
the dead or to mourn them. Desperation hung in the dry silence.

Killeen discovered that his feet were sore. His boots had kept their water seal intact but his leggings were still damp from
the night. It was a simple fact of life in the field that such a discovery quickly banishes whatever joy or pain the previous
day brought. Every fresh pain demands its own audience. Every joint protested. As he got up Killeen swore he could hear himself
creak.

He helped Toby reset the bandage around the boy’s hand. They said little. Toby spent all his time caring for Besen, who was
dazed and weak. The boy seemed far more energetic and focused than he had been before.

Killeen moved down the line cajoling a few Bishops who were simply staring into space. There were always those who could not
forget the losses of one battle and carried them into the next. Years on the run had taught Killeen that
people would put aside emotional weight when action came first. Their resilience was surprising, even noble. But if they had
time to brood, or if someone belabored them about it, they could crack completely. He chided a few onto their feet and got
them started. It helped him forget how many faces he did not see in the marching column and never would again.

Everyone was low on power now. Some had a little more and they started out strongly, taking long strides and getting out in
front. Killeen smiled at that. It was stupid to waste your reserves when you were still fresh. Jocelyn barked at this vanguard
and made them take flank and point positions.

Sunrise sent yellow blades cutting through the upper cloud decks. Killeen thought of all the activity above the misty overcast—the
huge warrens abuilding, the cosmic ring orbiting as it waited to be used again, the Skysower that churned on, planting its
seeds. For what? All these immense structures seemed without human implication, as natural and inevitable as the weather—and
equally beyond human hope of changing.

The Family line straggled out along the slopes as they worked up into the hills. Cermo had taken a tech hit in the waist;
no bodily wound, and he could still walk. He fussed with his equipment and got most of his upper shocks working again. Then
he went up and down the line, joshing and giving sympathy and pulling together Family elements that seemed most discouraged.
Jocelyn did the same toward the front of the column.

Killeen watched all this with approval, curiously calm. Up ahead lay the Tribe and the supply train. Behind came the Cybers.
If they were to survive this day the Family would have to be swift and lucky.

Having turned the matter over in his mind for a while, he put it aside. There was nothing more to do but enjoy what
was probably his last glimpse of morning. He walked with his arm across Shibo’s shoulders, resting on her exoskeleton. It
was charging from her solar panels and helped her up the steepening slope. Its catlike purr seemed to waft on the warming
air. The slow, lazy sound floated through his mind. It was a long while before he realized it was not sound at all.

A dry cool weight rested in the space just behind the nape of his neck. That was the way it felt when he had just taken on
a new Aspect—a lumpy wedge tugging at the back of his brain. But this was stronger, as though air had twisted and condensed
into a hanging dark syrup. Traceries of half-sensed ideas flapped through the ball of blotchy air. Killeen labored up the
gravelly slopes, keeping march speed with the others, saying nothing, his attention sucked toward the presence that seemed
to hover like buttery heat. He felt his arms and legs moving as though in thick oil. His lungs contained a patient, gurgling
fluid. Air tasted like metallic blood.

“It’s here,” he whispered.

Shibo looked at him quizzically. He stumbled, caught himself.

The massive, deliberate movements were unmistakable. It was the Cyber who had captured him. And it was behind them.

No wonder the Cybers had stuck to them so well, he thought. They undoubtedly had a tracer of some kind planted on him. Nothing
complex, just a transponder which could reflect a keyed signal. It could be no thicker than a thumbnail.

At the next rest break Killeen inspected his equipment. It would have been put somewhere he was unlikely to see it….

In only a few moments he found the small circle stuck to the inside of his left upper shocks. But it was cracked and
pitted, probably from the spills he had taken. When he tried some sounding signals it failed to respond.

He tossed it aside and stared off into the rumpled hills. Morning mist rose from the great stands of barrel-trunked trees.
Their topmost limbs arced evenly out in the characteristic umbrella formation. Birds circled and dove among the pale emerald
reaches. And the sluggish presence still sat at his neck.

The circular transponder had probably failed some time ago. Now the Cyber was following him by sniffing out his sensorium.

The thought sent hollow dread through him. But another memory tugged. In the fighting yesterday he had also felt something
like this tenuous weight. And it had made clear things that had helped disable and elude Cybers.

The blunt presence did not seem hostile. Still, Killeen became more uneasy as he felt the ponderous wedge waiting, expectant.
Images like frescoes of the real world slid through his mind, filigree-thin. They dimly recalled his past voyages in the mind
of the Mantis. There had been huge caverns of separate experience, volumes that dwarfed Killeen.

Now he felt himself on the verge of another plunging gray abyss. The sensation made his heart race but gradually fear left
him. He got up wearily, leaning on Shibo, and started into the next stand of trees.

Some Family were foraging for food. Small shoots on the bushes were edible, his Ann Aspect told him. The big trees had fungus
of deep turquoise circling their lower trunks. A Bishop woman was scraping it off with a laser cutter in one hand, eating
with the other. As they went by she gave them some and it was sharp but meaty.

Toby and Besen were too far behind. Besen could walk
steadily now though there were still dark circles under her eyes and she moved with rickety care.

They had gone a few steps when the woman behind cried out. The tree was smoking. She stepped back, cutting off the laser pulses,
and the tree trunk began jetting a thin, whitehot flame. Blowtorch intensity threw a sudden, welcome heat. The fierce gout
of smokeless flame grew rapidly.

The woman stared dumbfounded at the glowing lance. Toby pulled her away. “Run!” he shouted.

Killeen tugged Besen uphill. The Bishops took a moment to register the danger. Then they started off at a determined trot,
laboring uphill as the flame grew behind them. Cermo was shouting orders.

“What… what you think… was?” Shibo asked beside him. The best they could manage uphill was a ragged trot.

“Some kind energy resource, maybe,” Killeen answered. “Mechs must’ve grown ’em.”

“Mechs use biotech?”

“Did on Snowglade, some.”

“Just fact’ry stuff. Replacement parts for their own innards.”

“Far as we know, yeasay. Here they did better.”

They stopped at the first shoulder above the broad forest. Toby and Besen struggled up the slope with a wall of billowing
smoke behind them. The woman had started a ferocious forest fire.

At least it might slow the Cybers, Killeen thought. He tried to see a way to use the flame trees against them when they came
up through the forest. The thought gave him a spurt of energy and he overtook the point party, led by Cermo. He was still
mulling over the possibilities when they saw a squad of people on the far ridgeline.

“Tribe!” Cermo called ahead. “Bishops approach.”

—That fire’ll show us up good,—a distant voice answered sardonically.

“You bastards left us back there!” Cermo called.

—Orders. His Supremacy said was only way.—

Cermo said, “Only way of savin’ your asses you mean.”

—Stuff that. His Supremacy says, you do. Lucky you got out.—

To Killeen the Tribe’s attitude was bizarre. As the Bishops came up onto the stark ridgeline they found ranks formed in moving
defensive perimeters. The Tribe was making good time toward a high, wooded knoll. Though the Tribe greeted the Bishops with
some warmth, many showed no sign of guilt over having left their fellows on the battlefield. Bishops muttered angrily. Some
of the Tribe were reticent and moved away. The bulk, though, looked at the struggling Bishop remnants with interest but obviously
without for a moment considering that a gross breach of ordinary human morality had occurred.

“Don’t give a damn ’bout us, do they?” Toby said.

“It’s their faith,” Besen said. “His Supremacy says we’re expendable, so be it.”

“None so blind as she who will not see,” Shibo said, her voice soft with fatigue. She had helped Besen up the last rise and
her power reserves were gone.

Killeen looked at her quizzically and she said, “One my Aspects fed me that. Old saying from Cap’n Jesus. Figure we need all
the wisdom we can get.”

The situation would have been far more tense if the Bishops had not been so tired. They rested along the ridgeline as more
Families marched past in open-arrow formation, wedge flanks far out to guard against Cybers.

Oily smoke came rolling up from the spreading fire below. Killeen could see trees catch and spurt out their pencil-thin gouts.
Curiously, the trees burned only at regularly
spaced points up the trunk. He watched as a tall one caught. The first plume shot out near the base. Then another started
farther up the trunk and directly above the first. Soon there were seven whitehot flames evenly spaced along the trunk. The
top of the tree began to rock and then it went over, pushed by the thrust of the escaping brilliant gas. He marveled at them
in his exhaustion.

The forest fire guttered out into sour smoke as the stand of trees was exhausted. Killeen felt in his mind the persistent
weight of what he now thought of as his Cyber, but he could not tell if it was getting closer. Smoke layered the valley like
smudged glass and made it impossible to see approaching Cybers. He smelled their fog-dabs at the edges of his sensorium, though.

They lay in the waxing morning sun and let it take some of the ache out of them. Besen was throwing off her dizziness and
even made a joke. It was as if they had all agreed to set aside the press of the world and evoke some vestige of earlier Family
times. Shibo contended with a riddle: “What’s the best kind pain?”

Killeen murmured, “What’s this, old Pawn Family saying?”