He knew this because within seconds he saw it happen. A woman caught in the chin one of the whispering things that streamed over the ground. The tiny things waited for a target, gliding over open ground, then found their prey.
He watched too the attempts by friends to put the head back together again. These people spoke a quick, staccato language that he did not understand. He tried to help even though he could see no point in it, and they paid him no attention. They had faith that human medicine would work on a head carved up into precise slices. It didn’t.
After a while the whispering streams stopped. He wanted to help the people but when he went to find them they were all thoroughly dead.
He had little doubt now that somewhere behind this chaos was something looking for him. Had all these people died because of him? He didn’t want to think about it.
And all he could do was flee, not fight. It grated on his Bishop way of thinking.
He met refugees. Some he could understand. They told of worse places and times but most of them kept plodding past him as if he were an illusion. Or maybe they thought his questions were nonsensical.
He marched a long while. It was easier if he didn’t think much.
The world seemed lighter, as if his head was like a balloon held down by his body. He walked that way enjoying every step. Bright yellow beams burst from exposed timestone far overhead. The light worked with furnace energy.
People passing by smiled. The mood grew until everybody was cheerful and even to Toby the scene seemed so fine that it was on the plain face of it ridiculous that anybody should ever die. At least not him.
With a pang he remembered Quath going on once, long ago, about the irrational optimism of primates, or at least the present version of them. She had said it was a peculiar adaptation, one her species lacked. Toby had just laughed.
He chuckled again, now. Crazy, mindless. It made him feel better. Remembering Quath’s puzzlement, he laughed again. Even the pang of loneliness did not cut into his sudden, absolutely unearned joy. Irrational it might be but it was fun and fun was, in a place and time like this, supremely rational and practical.
THREE
Casualties
“Man over there, he wants to talk to you.”
Toby was surprised. “Me? How come?”
“He knows you.”
“Can’t be.”
“He does, says so. Look, he’s bad hurt.”
Toby frowned but went. He moved among the wounded on the dry plain and gave away what was left of his water.
The man’s face was lined and pale and moaning in an automatic way, regular and with the same drawn-out, low, wet grunting at the end. They had his head covered with a shiny sheet that had some medical purpose. The man reached up and tugged the sheet away. Toby saw what had been a face and now looked like a small hill that had been driven over in the rain with heavy equipment and then let bake out in the sun too long.
“They peeled my old face off and gave me this new one,” a clear, soft voice said. The lips did not move.
“I see, yeasay.” Toby felt useless.
“I’m growing a fresh one now.”
“I can tell,” Toby said. Not looking at the face.
“Want to know how it happened?”
“Sure.”
“We were trying to get one of those snake things that shoot down the axis of the Lane. You seen them?”
Toby had seen a lot of things but he didn’t think of them in terms of animals any more. That just led you to make mistakes, like with the woman he had failed to save. “I think so.”
“Awful, killed plenty of us. So we waited for one and hit it from five different positions. Smacked it pretty square.”
The man’s eyes unfocused and Toby encouraged him with “Yeasay?”
“Uh, sure. Thing jerked around and went to pieces before it crashed on the ridgeline. Near me. Went off something powerful. So pretty. All I knew was a hot whack in the side and then I was here.”
Toby reached out and held the man’s hand and wondered if he should believe much of it. The hand was as soft as the voice, not a hand that had ever been in the field much. The voice was dreamy too. The story did not sound like a real battle. He had learned that the wounded were not good reporters and sometimes mingled their dreams in.
Toby murmured something and slid the sheet back so the face was covered. He was pretty sure the man could not see and was just using his inner sensorium. The man said nothing and Toby left the sheet. Then the man said suddenly, “I heard you were here.”
“Me? How’d anybody know me?”
“We saw you, got a pulse on the gen sensorium.”
“What’d it say?”
“To watch for you. Take care of you.”
“Who sent it?”
“General directive.”
“You guys can send signals from Lane to Lane?”
“Sometimes. Our tech here isn’t the best. But we heard about you.”
“My father have anything to do with it?”
“Mightsay. I don’t remember.”
Toby wondered if this was true either. He had heard men lie about how they were wounded, sometimes right after they were hit and even in front of people who had been there. He did not know why but he had done it himself once years ago so it did not seem so bad.
His left calf had gone out then from a mech bolt and it took a week to get running again. By the time he could walk he had woven a story that was completely different from the reality. Not flattering, just different. He did not know why he had done it and after a while had stopped asking himself the question. All that made it hard to talk to this man whose face was not going to work out.
The man said, “Way I figure, you must be important.”
“Huh? Me?” Toby had been thinking and had nearly lost track of where he was. He was remembering the Family. Killeen.
“Must be. Most directives are weapons stuff, tactics and all.”
“I’m not important.”
“Well you’re sure goddamn big. Where from?”
“Family Bishop.”
He said it half-defiantly, because he never knew how people were going to react. Sometimes they got puzzled. Others would make a sour comment about dirt-huggers, or else just look blank. This man did neither, since he was busy vomiting suddenly into his own hand. Toby helped him clean it up.
“You sure be important.” The man looked a lot worse now, his face yellowing like an old wound, but he clung to his idea. “Gotta be.”
He spoke with a flat accent but his phrasing was like one of the old Bishops Toby had known. Maybe the people around here were Hunker Down Families. Toby patted the man, not knowing what to do. “You sleep.”
“You gotta be. Directive said to look out for you.”
“Then what?”
“Report back. And hang on to you.”
“For who?”
“Dunno. You stay right here, now.”
“Get some sleep.”
“Why you so important? You got something to do with all this?”
The question floated in the dusty air. Though Toby had heard it in his sensorium, the words in a thin whisper went unanswered because Toby was already at the edge of the plain and moving fast.
FOUR
Salvage
He came down into a long barrel-like valley. It was green and moist, hollowed out between glowing massifs of timestone.