Yet when he had first seen the Chandelier as a boy the world had seemed safe and humanity capable. Now he knew the truth.

Killeen sensed a seething unease in the back of his mind. He studied the Chandelier again, its glinting crystalline finery hanging dry and cool against a flat blackness. Scattershot emotions echoed through his sensorium. It was a lovely jewellike place among so much swimming nothing, so much an affirmation against the eternal denying blank.

But in him this provoked a sudden cry.

His Aspects sent smothered yelps of glee and pride and fervent desolated ache. They yearned outward from their recesses.

Bubbling voices washed over him. He gasped.

“You all right?”

Killeen realized his face must reflect some of the swarming frenzy that blew red and roiling within him. “Ah, yeasay. Just… let me look a… li’ 1 longer….”

Nialdi cried:

How lovely it is! Beauty! Humanmade!

Arthur shouted:

—If I had simply followed the advice of my good friends, in a timely manner, I would have gotten promoted enough. My turn would have come up. I certainly could have gained at least a temporary appointment to the Crewboard in the Drake Chandelier. And if I had—no matter how much you hoot, Nialdi, don’t think I can’t hear you, even if you do encode your insults!—I would have stayed in the Chandelier. And would still be there!

Mechs hit the Chandeliers too last I heard.

Even in my day nobody knew if they were working.

No signals from them.

Just hanging in the sky like Christmas tree ornaments.

You stayed there you’d likely be suredead.

You refer lightly to such great tragedy? When the devilworked hordes engulfed all that was left of life-giving reason and judgment in this foul abyss?

Really, Nialdi, you must stop giving us sermons. I don’t care if you are an ordained philosopher. Can’t you just gaze upon the Chandelier, man, and revel in it? The mechs haven’t devoured it! Think what that might mean.

Isympathize with you, Arthur. No one wants more than I do the return of humanity—of all trueliving things!—to our original station. Yeasay verily!

Then stop jawing so much.

Got to find a way out of here right now.

Stick to business.

—So of course the Chandelier era saw a tragic end. We had assumed too much about machines, their rapacity. But that is no reason to indulge in your fevered nightmares about the mechs. We—

You deny that they chewed most of our original ships? Killed most of our expedition?

Naturally I—

—Then later returned, devoured our works again? Leaving—praise God!—this lone Chandelier. Merciful—

Stop this cheap religious hokum! You won’t win me over with that. No one will be taken in by your—

See Killeen!

I know we’re overheated but look, it’s bothering him.

He reels! He’s caught some of our feelings.

Your hothouse mind, that’s what’s done it Your blind unreasoning hatred has—watch out!—

Killeen knew he was undergoing Aspect storm, but he could do little to stop it. He could not control his own body. It was like the woman days ago, her Aspects running hot and wild.

He felt silver teeth saw through his skull.

Rasping hornets filled the dusky air.

He fell on his leaden arm.

Snow pelted his nostrils.

Insects ate at his eyes.

NINE

The next morning there was what would have been in the old Citadel days a Confluence of Families. Today it was three lean, stringy-muscled men with straggly beards sitting in organiweave chairs inside a dullorange mud hut.

Killeen heard of it from Shibo, who was taking care of him. It came as thickly spaced words, acoustic wedges, propagating solidly through silted silences.

He knew they were ruminating on matters he was in no mood to consider. Some thought they should integrate the Families in what was both the fresh new Citadel and also, for the more somber souls, humankind, tenuous redoubt. Others felt there was no real in numbers and they should burrow underground, or disperse into separate villages, or even go back on march.

Killeen didn’t care. His world had narrowed down to a simple set of intersecting forces, all hinged on definite objects.

Toby’s legs.

Shibo’s filmy eyes.

His own swaying cordwood left arm.

All solid and specific. He had to concentrate on them to bring back his full sensorium.

His Aspects had overloaded him. Now they cowered in the remote back shelves of his reverberating, honeycombed self.

He would heal, yes. A day, two.

One day passed without his much noticing it except as a bar of Denixlight that slid across the floor and up the far wall. He ate and seemed to sleep for a moment and then the solid yellow-white bar was back on the rough clay floor.

He sat and thought.

If the Marauders attacked Metropolis, Killeen would not be of much use in the defense. Even when he recovered, he would not be able to cradle a projector or gun accurately. And if Metropolis fell and there was another in the long series of humiliating retreats, the Family would leave Toby behind.

His sputtering Aspect voices called him, their thin whispers resounding when he gave them the least chance.

But they had little useful to say. He had to get his arm function back, they said. Forget Toby.

Killeen sat in the cramped soil-damp hut, watching Toby sleep. He knew that Fornax and Hatchet and Ledroff were talking only a short distance away about what were for him and Toby matters of life itself. Yet he did not stir.

Every parent, he realized, knows at some point that his own grip on the future is slippery and must eventually fail. That comes with the weathering of age. In a way children were life’s answer to mortality. Their small but persistent presence was a constant reminder that you were no longer in the frontier generation. That history was preparing to move on beyond you. That for them to flower, their parents finally and justly had to wither and give ground.

This was natural and proper and came without discussion or even clear thought. Killeen felt it in the pressing quiet of the hut. The random sounds of Metropolis came through the window as from a distant and filmy place, the mumble of activity like a voice that could be heard but never understood. He watched his son and knew he had to do something, but the hinge that would set him in motion refused to budge. It would not deliver him into clear action. He felt this as a sullen knot in him.

He did not mind giving ground himself. His own life carried as little weight as his own frugal backpack. Years of death and steady retreat had not diminished his opinion of the valor and dignity of humanity, but it had impressed him with the random and uncaring way of things. That he could be obliterated by a casual blow from a passing machine which knew neither pain nor remorse—that was the central fact of the world. But that this world could now so easily annihilate his legacy, Toby—that was a truth he could not allow

Killeen watched the slow, grave heave of his son’s chest beneath rough tightweave blankets. A fly droned in through the sunstruck window. The tiny circling saw inspected the bare necessities of the hut and then lit on Toby’s hand and wandered busily on it. Killeen let the fly go. It was alive and so carried its own rights. His father had taught him his burden and duty to all lifeforms, as their greatest representative. Humankind spoke for the kingdoms of doomed life. It could not transgress against forms lesser and unknowing. Killeen tolerated the fly until it started to crawl on Toby’s face. Then he scooped it up and carried it to the window and set it upon a passing breeze.