Cermo slapped him on the rear and hugged him and the rest went by in a heady, quick, intense blur. Faces and laughter released into the cooling night air a fervent joy as word spread and shouts went up and answering calls sounded among the converging forms that sprang up from nearby campfires and came running, voices raised in excited and disbelieving celebration. Then Toby was there, his face haggard and gray even in the warming glow of the crackling flames—which someone had already augmented, summoning forth a welcoming rush of heat and crisp radiance—and Killeen lifted his son into the air, swinging him around in a sudden hard blossom of feeling, finding the boy’s hefty weight surprising.

“What, why, how—?” the voices asked, but Killeen shook his head, his throat filled and his world blurred. Toby needed no explanations, just yelped and laughed the way he had in years past, before the protracted processes of coming to age had caught him up. Killeen laughed wildly and turned to see more—glorious clumps of Bishops, a flood where he had only hoped for a trickle—all rushing in, crossing the last faint blades of dusk. His throat hurt, to feel himself again at the center of all he truly cared about—centrifugally spun out into the Family that in turn came streaming inward from the darkness to enclose him. Questions bombarded him and seemed to be not separate ideas but merely the means that the Family used to draw him again back into itself. And then in the brimming firelight, cutting through the mad talk and shouts, he saw her. Hanging back, hands clasped behind her so that they could not betray her emotions, eyes batting furiously as she reflexively contained herself, mouth warped by inner anguish, eyes moist and plaintively wide, Shibo.

She did not plague him with questions, as the others did. 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 sup- pressed 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, 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 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.

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 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.”

“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 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?”