“Why?” Killeen asked. Whisperings, drones.

Why but? What else is worth a glance? I tell you, little Killeen: Not marble, not the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive me.

Fancy language lost him immediately. “Huh?”

Immortal, I am. They say.

“They?” Shibo asked.

The makers of this place, this soft castle that flies on turbulent winds, above the glaring stretched disk of infalling, roiling hot.

To accompany this sharply spoken line, jade-cool glories lit the elegantly curving field lines. Killeen wondered how far those energetic stabs of phosphorescence had come. If the thing that spoke was at the Eater, which lived in the far-off sky…

“You’re in the Eater disk?”

My tangled feet are, aye. My head scrapes against the stars.

They stood in stunned silence. “Were human?” Shibo ventured at last. Along the wispy field-strands flowed yellow, burnt-gold, orange, as though the being was marshaling its resources, or riffling through vast dusty files of magnetic memory.

Again, I do not know. I was some form of being, mortal, awash in entropy’s swamp. Long ago. Something within me hails from long-gone fossil ages.

Killeen struggled with conflicting impulses. There was something horrible about a thing so grotesquely big. But it spoke with a stringy tone that recalled cables under tension, a tight-wound humming. In some way it was human. And it had a message for him.

“What’s an Argo?”

Let a moment pass in reclaiming a distant part of me… yes, here. Not exactly Argo, but Argos, yes. More than one Argo? My phase-memory replies to me that Argos was “an early rival of Sparta.” There you have it.

“What the hell’s Sparta?”

A city.

“Where?” Shibo asked.

The field lines rippled. Crimson flecks shot down them.

I have no data. Hopelessly old, this file. And this language you use! Hobbled, rude, a simpleton’s dull way of herding meaning into linear, boxy cages.

Shibo said, “Good enough for us.”

No doubt. To give you your due, I remark that while scanning its vocabulary I do find there entries oddly artful, even obliging. Seersucker. Sibilant. Straitlaced. Such words! With grace, they hover on the edge of meaninglessness. Argos though is without grace or content. Well, enough. I only bring this message, as was my charge, and now depart.

“Wait!” Killeen called.

Dappled glows retreated up the field lines in a gathering rush. As they dwindled, the customary dovetailing planetary magnetic fibers reappeared, intricately pointing toward the south pole.

They watched for a long time but the presence did not return. Killeen talked about it as they finished his round, with Shibo replying in her usual grudging monosyllables. The entire episode was incomprehensible. Easy enough to obey, at least. No one had hopes of a fresh Citadel. Keeping on the move was a necessity, not a choice.

“What in hell’s an Argos?” Killeen demanded of Shibo, exasperated.

“Ask Aspect.”

Arthur piped in immediately:

I suspect this is a transmission error. Argos was a city in classical Greece, on Earth. Its role in early intellectual—

Killeen cut off the Aspect’s wearying ramble and strode along beside Shibo. Whatever the field-being had meant was of no matter now, for the message was plainly old and pointless. Killeen resolved to do as he usually did, and not trouble himself with the warehouse of dusty data and massing history that the Aspects were forever pressing upon him.

Many of his older Aspects gave less and less information as they aged. A kind of senility set in. The nattering insect voices could recall a party three centuries ago but were vague about mech insignias seen last week. And the fineries they recalled from the Arcologies—opulent, crystal ballrooms the size of hills, sideboards groaning with sweetmeats, gowns translucent yet crisply warm—filled Killeen with a resentful, shamed envy.

The oldest Aspects were the worst, yammering of impossible glories. Other Family members felt the same. Jocelyn could hardly bear to call up hers; they were unusually aged and sent her pictures of wealth she knew had to be faked.

Images of the magnetic being ricocheted in Killeen’s mind, mingling with faint Aspect talk. He shook his head to clear it.

Pay Aspects true attention and they would rob him of the grittiness of the world, its supple rub.

He left Shibo and made back toward camp, letting himself feel the slumbering wealth of the Splash. He never tired of it. So green, he thought. So green, green, green.

FOUR

They marched on amid a sense of greening and convergence. The undulating hills gave their pace a sensual rhythm. Small, squeaking things scampered from underfoot. Verdant wealth and sweet air lulled them. For a full day they saw no sign of mechlife. It was as though the dry, dead world the mechs had made of Snowglade had vanished. From long-slumbering depths seeped out old moist richness.

Ledroff and Fornax had fallen to disagreeing at each rest stop. They kept their steadily running dispute well within Clan bounds, yet could not repress their edgy irri tation with each other. Even the pacing of their march was disputed, seemingly resolved, and disputed still again.

Ledroff urged caution. Fornax wanted to reach the center of the Splash quickly, holding that it would be rich and rife with natural foods. Fornax kept leading the Rooks out ahead of the agreed two-pronged formation. Ledroff swore at Fornax over the comm, and once slammed his own helmet to the ground in exasperation. Since helmets were the hardest piece of mancraft to make, and nobody had spares for most of the chips a full one required, this was an act both striking and impressively crazed.

They navigated by the sky. Both Families had long since lost their global survey gear. Denix gave them a sunset. Night was tempered by the Eater’s wide-cut swath across the sky, making a wan, silvery twilight. Both Families stopped to rest then. This often seemed the only concrete point of agreement between them.

Killeen avoided this evening’s dispute by going on flank patrol. He took Toby with him. They walked in silence, letting their collective sensorium detect the latent caressing strum of hills and gnarled, stubby trees. It was harder here to catch the rippling tenor of distant mech movement, or sniff the oily tang of them. Life interfered. They picked up a scurrying, twittering symphony.

“Dad?” Toby’s throat was raw from the day’s hard skip-walking.

“Hear somethin’?”

“No, nothin’ here. I was wonderin’, though.”

“’Bout what?”

“That woman couple days ago.”

“The Aspect-crazed one.”

“Yeasay.”

Killeen had been expecting Toby to bring it up. “Most aren’t nearly so bad.”

“She be all right?”

“Prob’ly. Can walk now. Her Aspects’re still a li’l scared. Want live some.”

“Crazy dancin’ the way she did? That’s livin’?”

Toby stopped walking and turned toward his father. They stood lean and flat-muscled, shorn of padding and walkwear, stripped down to wrinkled jumpsuits. A wedge of the Eater’s broad disk stuck above the horizon, spattering blue-tinged shadows on Toby’s face and making it hard for Killeen to read. The boy’s mouth was twisted to one side, as though containing words that tasted bad.

“She carries maybe dozen Aspects,” Killeen said. “They all try to run things, they…” He breathed deeply, struggling to explain a sensation beyond words. Of yammering mouse-voices. Of tiny hands pressing. Itching against your inner eyeballs. “They coming at you so fast, you can’t tell you-thinking from they-saying.”