Besen saw Toby’s mood and leaned over to give him a light kiss. “Sorry if I brought you down. Or considering what you’re studying, even further down.”
“Aw, beat it. Go oooh and ahhh at the views of the Chandelier.”
She made a face. “Just for that, I will.”
Family Bishop was approaching the Chandelier slowly, cautiously, using passing small clouds for cover. The chunky, complex mass was sprawling, ornate, larger even than mech cities on Snowglade—but humans had built the Chandeliers, long ago. Humans. The idea seemed impossible to Toby when he studied the distant spiral wings, criss-crossing arms, and noble, sweeping arches.
Nobody in Family Bishop had ever visited one. There was anticipation—and something like fear.
They would go aboard within a day. Argo echoed with a din of preparation. Toby shut it out and reluctantly turned his concentration to his lessons. He could feel his teaching Aspect, Isaac, fidgeting at the back of his mind, eager to have a voice. Aspects were long-dead and liked to get out of the cramped cerebral spaces where they were stored. In one sense they were only alive when Toby talked with them. In another, they were always there, at a very low level, like an oldster dozing lazily in the sun. Whatever the picture Toby used, he figured his Aspects were like laundry—they smelled better if they got aired now and then. Isaac said eagerly,
I’m happy to see you showing some interest in mathematics. Have you finished your problems?
“I did some. They’re so boring, though.”
Isaac said rather sternly,
I scarcely think you should criticize the problems I assign, considering how seldom you even speak to me or—
“Okay, okay—give me something different, though.”
Very well. Suppose you write down all the numbers from one to one hundred. One, two, three . . . and so on, up to one hundred.
“That’s interesting?” This Aspect had been in its box too long.
You will learn faster if you do not interrupt. Now, I want you to find a way to add up all those numbers.
“You mean one plus two plus three—like that?”
That is the brute force way to do it. Crude, unimaginative. I want you to be clever.
“Oh no,” Toby groaned. Being clever on command was about as easy as being funny under orders. Already he ached to be outside, working in the ship, not in his head.
Toby wasn’t much for studying, but he got it done. He fooled around on the writing slate a little, and then something in the numbers began to speak back to him. A pattern. He wrote the numbers as pairs:
1 100
2 99
3 98
* *
* *
49 52
50 51
Each pair added up to 101. There were 50 of them, so that multiplied to 5,050.
Toby blinked. Who would have guessed that the number would be so large and interesting?
There was something strangely stirring in how numbers could hold such simple, supple majesty in them.
Predictably, Isaac liked this trick.
Excellent! The point of exercises is to stretch the mind. To think in new paths. See?
“Seems to me we’re getting pretty stretched already. You saw that sail-snake, right? You Aspects still register data, even though you’re tucked ’way back in there.”
I receive a faint trace of what you do. Yes, that was an interesting creature. I recall a historical record, from the Chandelier Age, which told of expeditions into the molecular clouds. Humanity hunted such vacuum beasts, speeding through spaces as large as whole solar systems, all for recreation.
“Hard to think of people going up against those things for fun.”
Humans like danger. The legends and stories of Family Bishop—what are they, after all, but tales of people in trouble?
“Yeah, but trouble that’s a comfortable distance away from the teller.”
You are rather young to be so cynical.
“Just realistic, Isaac. It’s easy for you to take a cosmic view. After all, anything happens to me, you’re still okay. They just pull your chip out of my spine and you get revived in somebody else.”
I am shocked that you would think me indifferent to your fate. I am a loyal Aspect, devoted to Family Bishop—
“Okay, okay, spare the speech. Let’s get back to work.”
The mathematics got interesting after you really burrowed into it. A kind of elaborate game, really, with some beautiful surprises hidden in the structure. It would be worth doing even if it wasn’t useful, kind of like music. When he told Quath about his little trick, she had rattled with approval, remarking that there were applications of his idea to True Center—and then refused to discuss it further, since she was still digesting this information, fresh in from the illuminates, herself.
But the amazing thing, when Toby took the time to think about it, was that math was practical. The world ran according to the rule of pure Number. Math described the orbits of stars, how circuits worked, even the ways odd features like a funny-shaped nose or red eyes got passed down from one generation to the next in Family Bishop.
What it didn’t help with was Cermo.
The big man hadn’t been any too happy with Toby’s “running off” with Quath, for starters. Then there was the double embarrassment that the red fluid that they fetched back turned out to be packed with useful nutrients. It was even tasty. He and Quath had stolen Cermo’s thunder.
So they had to sit it out while the Family had quickly raided all along the length of the sail-snake, taking the red liquid where they could. Not too much, though; Family Bishop codes would never allow endangering the life of so vast a living thing.
A few Family went deeper into the inky recesses of the molecular cloud. Besen had been with them, and her tales of the exotic lifeforms there had made Toby envious. This molecular mist was one of the smaller ones, yet it abounded in bizarre shapes. Triple-spined things, with spreading panels to soak up sunlight. Big, billowing beasts that looked like fabled sailing ships. Mean-eyed predators with tight, leathery mouths, stingy with their precious internal gases. Blimps with enormous eyes to find food in the shifting starglow. Tangles of wispy grasses growing from watery pouches. Forests of swaying yellow leaves. Helical rod-trees that telescoped out, seeking more starlight. Warty living skins that wrinkled and stretched to wrap around spindly purple trunks, partners in some mysterious life process.
They found a huge, self-propelled, rust-red pyramid that seemed like a peaceful grazer, feeding on enormous gray cobwebs, sucking in strands like delicious spaghetti. These thin nets collected the drifting molecules of the great clouds. They looked appetizing, but nobody in the Family could stand the stuff. Besen thought maybe they needed some sauce.
Worse, the red pyramid-beast didn’t like tiny creatures picking at its feeding grounds, either. It was as big as the sail-snake and hard to argue with. It chased the offenders all the way back to the ship, veering away only when it saw that Argo was not just a fellow giant.
Besen thought it wasn’t at all obvious who would win, if it had come to a fight between the pyramid and Argo. Who knew what tricks a few billion years of evolution could cook up inside a molecular cloud?