Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  The three of them circled around and reached the rutted path just as a small cart emerged from the gathering amber dusk, drawn by six women. Killeen stepped aside for them to pass and at that moment the crowd saw the cart and a collective sigh rose. Twisted, anguished cries filled the gloom.

  An honor guard flanked the cart, weapons at port arms. People swarmed around, pressing Killeen against the cart. He saw three bodies arranged formally on the flatbed, their arms at their sides. Each stared open-eyed at the night above, faces unlined and dispassionate above bodies that belied their calm. Two were women—scrawny, their skins puckered and lacerated. And each bore a massive bruise that spread down from her prominent collarbone to her belly.

  But it was not truly a bruise, he saw. The purpling had spread up into the women’s breasts, pushing up ridges of yellowing flesh. The edge of the wound was crinkled and warped, as though something inside had tried to escape by prying off the chest of each woman, and finally had failed, and so was still lurking within them, the pressure of it forcing the ribs apart and making of their bellies and lungs a great swollen blister that peaked in a watery, transparent sac.

  The male corpse between them lay face down; ragged hair covering his head entirely. A bulge split the back of his uniform. Another glossy, stretched dome. His was ringed by a crusted brown scab like dried mud.

  The three were laid close together, just fitting into the width of the cart, so that the bodies could not roll and burst the tight, shiny, grotesquely bloated wounds.

  Killeen felt his mouth water with incipient nausea. He turned away, sucking the air through his teeth to take away the sudden foul taste that came through the air like a slap. Pushing out against the press of bodies, looking directly into the eyes that stared past him without seeing, he made his way back to the path. The two women were waiting. He whispered, “What…what caused…”

  “Cybers,” the talkative woman said. “They do that sometimes, when they can get in close.”

  “But…what…”

  “Infested, that’s what those people are. His Supremacy says they must be cleaned, purified. Dealt with right.”

  “Let’s…let’s go.”

  She shook her head, the coils of her black hair wrestling like living ropes. “We leave now, it’d be disrespec’ful.”

  Bodies pressed against him, their mute momentum carrying him toward the bonfire. In the wake of the cart the slow grave swell of the Eight of Hearts’ mourning song rose. He watched as gloved hands drew the dirty, stiffening bodies from the cart. The corpses were laid out gently, the man still in the center and face down, and a single red heart made of cloth laid upon the head of each. Then a tall woman wearing a Cap’n’s signifiers spoke, her voice well modulated and practiced and strong.

  Killeen did not follow the words. He was watching the bodies. As the corpses stiffened further their legs and arms jerked and trembled slightly, as though the rhythms that defined a Family’s way—running, the endless succession of nomad flight—carried on remorselessly across the divide of death.

  Then the Cap’n approached the first woman, made a ritual pass with a long knife, and plunged it hard and sure into the glassy blister. The shiny dome broke with an audible pop. Milky fluids gushed all down it, over the corpse’s face, running into the open rictus, covering the still-staring eyes, trickling down over the legs. There seemed an impossible quantity of the stuff and when it drained away the yawning husk of the blister cracked and broke under the Cap’n’s repeated thrusts.

  She probed deeper. The point of the knife burrowed in and abruptly the body shook within, shuddering with a wet sucking noise. Something struggled inside, rocking the body from side to side, jerking, pushing the broken ribs farther out. A spasm, a last convulsion, and then the body went completely still. Snapped ribs collapsed inward.

  The dead woman looked shrunken, emptied. In final rest her face now resembled those of her Family hemming in the spectacle, a blade of a nose between prominent cheekbones. Her eyes seemed to sink beneath the darkened lids. A tiny insect crawled out of one nostril and lingered on a bloodless lip.

  The Cap’n pulled out her blade. Pinned on its sharp point was a thing hard and brown and chitinous that still wriggled with frantic energy. It was tough but somehow unformed, as though legs and head had still to push their way out of the moist, interlocking brown segments. It fought the knife, twisting. Then suddenly the life drained out of it and the thing went limp.

  The crowd backed away. The Cap’n threw the brown mass to the ground. Instantly a woman leaped forward and crushed it with both boots. She cried out something Killeen could not understand, a shout of anger and sorrow and despair. Then she backed into the crowd again. Men and women nearby clasped her, passing her among them, hugging and sheltering her with soft murmurings.

  The Cap’n did the second woman the same way. Killeen watched numbly. This time a man crushed the brown thing. It snapped like the joints of a hand being crushed. The man sobbed as he did it and stamped the thing again and again before going back into the crowd.

  The blister on the man’s back was larger than the women’s. The bulge was thinning, growing translucent. In tiny movements the skin pulsed—a convexity here, a concavity there, until the whole back and chest of the man was alive with purpose. The trunk of the body was unrecognizable now, save for the parentheses of ribs that yawned aside to frame the quaking fleshy hill that rose and throbbed.

  The Cap’n of the Eight of Hearts quickly brought her blade up, calling out some ritual words. Before she could plunge it into the man’s back the blister began to split. Milky ooze gushed out. Dark cracks ran down from the summit.

  Something crabbed and small pushed itself out into the flickering firelight. It scuttled away. The Cap’n did not hesitate. She slammed the knife into the thing as it ran down the corpse’s leg. Small legs fought and scraped their way up the blade. But the knife made its point.

  A collective sigh rose from the crowd. The three bodies were flaccid and spent now. Their nearest relatives—for all present were related, however distantly—came forward to accept the honor of burial.

  Killeen made his way on wooden legs away from the roaring, snapping bonfire. Regaining the path, he said hoarsely to the Sebens’ Cap’n, “That’s what the Cybers do? Plant their, their seeds in us? They don’t even let us die straight and clean?”

  The sunburned woman answered, “Yeasay. Only those li’l things, they’re not Cybers.”

  “What, then?”

  “Some kinda li’l scrabblers. I seen ’em doin’ small jobs, followin’ Cybers. Sometimes climb up on Cybers, pick at their joints ’n’ stuff.”

  “Like fleas?”

  “I’d guess.”

  Killeen said disbelievingly, “Just use us for hatching out fleas.”

  “They leave us lyin’, few hours later out comes those things. Or they’ll kill clean from the distance, if they ain’t got the time.”

  “What they use mechs for?”

  “Dunno. Parts, maybe.”

  Killeen sucked at his lip to hide his queasiness. The woman said, “Cybers’re worse ’n mechs, plenty worse.”

  The woman who had said nothing until now put in bitterly, “Damn sure, but we’ll triumph. ’S God’s way, givin’ us a trial.”

  They moved on through gathering murk lit by oily fires. Above them the sky yawned and flexed.

  FIVE

  To Killeen the look on Jocelyn’s face was abruptly, immensely funny. She gaped, eyes and mouth making big round Os.

  They embraced, then, and the other Bishops squatting near a small sheltered fire leaped up loudly and were all around him.

  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 w
as 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?”

  “In His Supremacy. And their inevitable victory, I guess.”

  “This is…” Killeen’ s voice trailed off as he looked beyond the woman’s pleading, reddened face. In the narrow gully three more girders had been jammed into the soil and kept nearly upright with stones. Each held an upside-down body. He remembered suddenly the “art” that the Mantis had displayed years ago. Human artworks. These crude monuments to human evil had a strangely similar quality.

  He took a few steps toward them before he saw the cloud of insects that whispered and buzzed around each. He approached the nearest on wooden legs, scarcely believing the sight of hundreds of mites swarming over the inverted body. They buzzed angrily as he came near and stooped to see the c
ongested, blood-black face.

  “This is Anedlos!” Killeen cried.

  Jocelyn tugged him away. “Don’t look. They put him up days ago. Yes’day he died. Other two are Tribe—from Card Suit.”

  Stunned, Killeen stammered, “Anedlos—Anedlos was a good crafter. He…he…”

  “He wouldn’t take part in their religious service. He argued with His Supremacy.”

  “And for that—” Killeen made himself stop, try to think. “What did you do?”

  “His Supremacy? I pleaded, but—”

  “Pleaded? That’s all?”

  “What could I do?” Jocelyn asked defiantly.

  “Tell that maniac that nobody hands out justice in Family Bishop ’cept Family Bishop.”

  “That’s…that’s not the way things work here.”

  “No decision by the Tribe can set aside a Family’s justice, you know that.”

  Jocelyn spread her hands in a gesture of futility. “Old rules don’t work here. His Supremacy says he’s God’s embodiment and what he says is law.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “Yeasay, but he has many, many Families who think he’s God.”

  “Killing mechs doesn’t make you God.”

  Jocelyn shrugged. “These Families, they always had Gods and stuff. His Supremacy pulled it all together some way.”

  Killeen remembered the Nialdi Aspect he had earned years before, an ardently religious man Nialdi was never any real use, though the Aspect had given guidance to Cap’ns down through the ages. As soon as he became Cap’n, with power over Aspect assignments, he had put Nialdi in chip-store.