“Sounds… well…”

“Terrible.”

Toby’s mouth was still tight, the lips pulled around strangely. “Yeasay.”

Killeen spread his hands in a gesture he hoped was casual. “Look, things’re running pretty foul right now. Ever’body’s jumpy. Aspects’re people, ’member. Just kind of shrunk, is all.”

“Will they be like that when they ride me?”

“Nobody said they’d ride you.” Killeen spoke this halflie in hopes that it would deflect the building anger he sensed behind the misshapen mouth, but he saw that it was useless.

The words came out of the suddenly loosened lips, each one ejected like a spat tack. “Damn if they will!”

“Can’t,” Killeen said rapidly. “You’re too young.”

“I won’t, I tell you.”

“Nobody’s talkin’ about it, son.” Killeen tried to reassure.

“Soon’s we get situated, they’ll start in. I’m of age, damn near.”

Killeen embraced his son so the boy did not have to struggle to say more. They both knew what he felt and that there was nothing either of them could do about it. Toby was growing fast, even while on the run continually. Soon somebody would notice and the Cap’n would have to answer to the Family as a whole why Toby wasn’t carrying an Aspect. There were many Aspects available, stored in chips that Ledroff toted on his right hip. Each could give the Family access to information or crafts that they might well need in a hurry sometime. And with the Rook woman available the insertion would be pretty easy.

Killeen wished he could tell Toby that he’d stop them, delay the mounting of an Aspect on the boy. But they both knew he would have to obey if the Cap’n decided.

“Look, I—”

“It’s okay, Dad,” Toby said, his watery voice muffled against the rough tightweave of Killeen’s jumpsuit. “I know. I know.”

Killeen sent Toby in after they completed the first wide circuit of the camp. The boy needed sleep, and Killeen needed to think.

To carry an Aspect was of help to the Family but it could hobble a boy, bombard him with brittle confusions, set his fresh ideas among mutiny voices. The Family was in its worst situation ever. They had lived all right for a few years after the Calamity, laying up in Casas and Troughs for long chains of comforte days. Then there had been plenty of time to acquire an Aspect, to reconcile the tiny, disparate souls.

But now they lived on the ragged edge. There was no sure refuge. The Aspects sensed the growing desperation among them all, smelled it in the back corners of the mind. If Toby was mounted, and soon after they had to hardmarch, or were attacked…

Making the next several circuits, Killeen several times shook his head furiously as though to clear it. Each time he had carefully thought through their situation, and had envisioned Toby’s accepting an Aspect. He could not let that happen. Yet even stronger was the injunction to live by the stern rule of the Family. He saw that he would have to find a path between these two unmovable truths. There seemed no way to avoid the boy’s fate.

They had been moving at a good pace the next day when Killeen made his discovery.

He came warily over a hill and saw a cracked valley where a broad slab of stone had resisted the Splash’s upthrust. Small streams cut it.

He called to Jocelyn, “Easy passage to left. Open water! Bear hard by the saddleback when you cross.” He headed fast downslope, across the dimpled valley and up a narrowing pass which promised a quick way through. He drank his fill in a stream. It was cold and sharp-flavored and stung his hands as he scooped it into his mouth. Then, as Family appeared over the ragged ridge-line behind him, he moved on.

It was halfway up the steeply rising slope that he saw the lonely rock slab, tilted over halfway to the ground. It had to be manmade. Mechs polished and laser-cut their rockwork. This was a rough speckled gray granite, seamed with alabaster, crossed by whispery signs. The worn edges and discolored grooves of the lettering spoke of age. Even the Citadel had not held rocks so ornately worked, so old.

He puzzled at it and at last heeded Arthur’s insistence.

It’s quite aged, I’ll grant. Far older than I. Archaic. Not the sort of thing I would ever write, even though I was something of a scribe and bard in my first life.

“Read it.”

Here, I’ll have to give it the form and voice appropriate.

He,

on whose arm fame was inscribed, when, in battle in the vasty countries, he kneaded and turned back the first attack. With his breast he parted the tide of enemies—those hideous ones, mad-mechanical and unmerciful to the fallen.

He,

who crossed in warfare the seven kinds of living-dead. By his victory Snowglade did fall to Humankind.

He,

by the breezes of whose prowess the southern ocean is still perfumed.

He,

whose great zeal utterly consumed the machines by great glowing heat.

He: Like a burned-out fire in a great forest, even now leaves not his treasure, Snowglade.

He: Who led Humankind from the steel palaces aloft.

He: As if wearied, has quitted the obvious life.

We give him now a bodily form in others, so that having won sole supreme sovereignty on this world, he may walk in.

Snowglade: Acquired by his arm.

He: Having the name of Chandra.

He: Who set forth Humanity in the names of the Pieces.

He: Who divided the ice among the Families.

He: Who strides among you as able forefather.

He lies here as well.

By the time Arthur had finished the long, singsong chant, others of the Family had come to stand beside Killeen. He had opened Arthur to their sensoria. The low easy rhythms of it captured the Family. Even though they could not read the words inscribed deeply into the rock they had a sense of the weight of time that pressed against this message.

Mutely, one by one, they touched the slanted stone. In front of it was a slight square depression where Killeen suspected the man Chandra was buried.

He sighed and moved on up the hillside with Toby. They said nothing. Somehow the sentences from a time unimaginably distant seemed to weigh more heavily than the slaughter of yesterday. If Chandra had indeed come here long ago and driven back the mechs, he was a truly great figure.

Was Chandra an Aspect? Try as he might, Killeen could think of no Family member who carried an Aspect so named, or so powerful. But if Aspects of Chandra still lived, and Killeen could fit such an Aspect into himself, perhaps it would make him a better Family member, or better father…

He was walking without truly seeing, which is why Toby glimpsed it first. “Dad. See there? Looks like a mech building.”

In the sensorium no one had noticed it yet. They were talking of the Chandra slab. Voices slurred and nipped, the steady background roundtalk by which humanity sewed up the frame of their experience, smoothed the rub of their world.

He frowned again. They avoided mech places, and this odd thing ahead…

He saw abruptly that it was not one mechwork, but two.

One moved. A Rattler.

It came at them from right flank. The Rattler moved with a coiling and recoiling motion, treads grinding beneath. Killeen could hear its gray ceramo-ribs pop with exertion.

The Family was already running even as the Rattler’s angle of attack fully registered. They could not make the canyon mouth beyond. There was precious little shelter in the dry streambeds nearby.

“Make right!” Ledroff called. The Family vectored immediately, seeing his intention. The mech building would provide some shelter.

They had only moments. Three Rook women used all their boot power to accelerate ahead, then turned to lay down retarding fire.