Japheth stalked over to Soma, fists clenched white.
“Things are getting clearer and clearer to you, Soma Painter, even if you think things are getting harder and harder to understand. Our motivations will open up things inside you.”
He took Soma’s chin in his left hand and tilted Soma’s face up. He waved his hand to indicate Lowell.
“There’s one of mine. There’s one of my motivations for all of this.”
Slowly, but with loud lactic cracks, Japheth spread his fingers wide.
“I fight her, Soma, in the hope that she’ll not clench up another mind. I fight her so that minds already bound might come unbound.”
In the morning, the dancing Crow boy was dead.
Jenny woke near dark, damp and cold, curled up in the gravel of the parking lot. Her horse nickered. She was dimly aware that the horse had been neighing and otherwise emanating concern for some time now, and it was this that had brought her up to consciousness.
She rolled over and climbed to her feet, spitting to rid her mouth of the metal Operator taste. A dried froth of blood coated her nostrils and upper lip, and she could feel the flaky stuff in her ears as well. She looked toward the garage and saw that she wasn’t the only one rousing.
“Now, you get back to bed,” she told the car.
Soma’s car had risen up on its back wheels and was peering out the open window, its weight resting against the force-grown wall, bulging it outward.
Jenny made a clucking noise, hoping to reassure her horse, and walked up to the car. She was touched by its confusion and concern.
She reached for the aerial. “You should sleep some more,” she said, “and not worry about me. The Operators can tell when you’re being uncooperative is all, even when
Jenny coaxed the car down from the window, wincing a little at the sharp echo pains that flashed in her head and ears. “Don’t tell your owner, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been called to question. Now, to bed.”
The car looked doubtful, but obediently rolled back to the repair bed that grew from the garage floor. It settled in, grumbled a bit, then switched off its headlights.
Jenny walked around to the door and entered. She found that the water sacs were full and chilled and drew a long drink. The water tasted faintly of salt. She took another swallow, then dampened a rag with a bit more of the tangy stuff to wipe away the dried blood. Then she went to work.
The bundle bugs crawled out of the city, crossed Distinguished Opposition Bridge beneath the watching eye of bears floating overhead, then described a right-angle turn along the levy to their dumping grounds. Soma and the Kentuckians lay hidden in the brushy wasteland at the edge of the grounds, waiting.
The Owl placed a hand on Japheth’s shoulder, pointing at a bundle bug just entering the grounds. Then the Owl rose to his knees and began worming his way between the bushes and dead appliances.
“Soma Painter,” whispered Japheth. “I’m going to have to break your jaw in a few minutes and cut out as many of her tentacles as we can get at, but we’ll knit it back up as soon as we cross the river.”
Soma was too far gone in the paste to hold both of the threats in his mind at the same time. A broken jaw, Crows in the capital. He concentrated on the second.
“The bears will scoop you up and drop you in the Salt Lick,” Soma said. “Children will climb on you during Campaign and Legislators will stand on your shoulders to make their stump speeches.”
“The bears will not see us, Soma.”
“The bears watch the river and the bridges, ‘and — ”
“‘ — and their eyes never close,’” finished Japheth. “Yes, we’ve seen the commercials.”
A bundle bug, a large one at forty meters in length, reared up over them, precariously balanced on its rearmost set of legs. Soma said, “They’re very good commercials,” and the bug crashed down over them all.
Athena’s data realm mirrored her physical realm. One-to-one constructs mimicked the buildings and the citizenry, showed who was riding and who was being ridden.
In that numerical space, the Kentuckians’ math found the bridge. The harsh light of the bears floated above. Any bear represented a statistically significant portion of the Governor herself, and from the point of view of the math, the pair above Distinguished Opposition Bridge looked like miniature suns, casting probing rays at the marching bundle bugs, the barges floating along the Cumberland, and even into the waters of the river itself, illuminating the numerical analogs of the dangerous things that lived in the muddy bottom.
Bundle bugs came out of the city, their capacious abdomens distended with the waste they’d ingested along their routes. The math could see that the bug crossing through the bears’ probes right now had a lot of restaurants on its itinerary. The beams pierced the dun-colored carapace and showed a riot of uneaten jellies, crumpled cups, soiled napkins.
The bugs marching in the opposite direction, emptied and ready for reloading, were scanned even more carefully than their outward-bound kin. The beam scans were withering, complete, and exceedingly precise.
The math knew that precision and accuracy are not the same thing.
—
“Lowell’s death has set us back further than we thought,” said Japheth, talking to the four Crows, the Owl, and, Soma guessed, to the bundle bug they inhabited. Japheth had detailed off the rest of the raiding party to carry the dead boy back north, so there was plenty of room where they crouched.
The interior of the bug’s abdomen was larger than Soma’s apartment by a factor of two and smelled of flowers instead of paint thinner. Soma’s apartment, however, was not an alcoholic.
“This is good, though, good good.” The bug’s voice rang from every direction at once. “I’m scheduled down for a rest shift. You-uns was late and missed my last run, and now we can all rest and drink good whiskey. Good good.”
But none of the Kentuckians drank any of the whiskey from the casks they’d cracked once they’d crawled down the bug’s gullet. Instead, every half hour or so, they poured another gallon into one of the damp fissures that ran all through the interior. Bundle bugs’ abdomens weren’t designed for digestion, just evacuation, and it was the circulatory system that was doing the work of carrying the bourbon to the bug’s brain.
Soma dipped a finger into an open cask and touched finger to tongue. “Bourbon burns!” he said, pulling his finger from his mouth.
“Burns good!” said the bug. “Good good.”
“We knew that not all of us were going to be able to actually enter the city — we don’t have enough outfits, for one thing — but six is a bare minimum. And since we’re running behind, we’ll have to wait out tonight’s anthem in our host’s apartment.”
“Printer’s Alley is two miles from the Parthenon,” said the Owl, nodding at Soma.
Japheth nodded. “I know. And I know that those might be the two longest miles in the world. But we expected hard walking.”
He banged the curving gray wall he leaned against with his elbow. “Hey! Bundle bug! How long until you start your shift?”
A vast and disappointed sigh shuddered through the abdomen. “Two more hours, bourbon man,” said the bug.
“Get out your gear, cousin,” Japheth said to the Owl. He stood and stretched, motioned for the rest of the Crows to do the same. He turned toward Soma. “The rest of us will hold him down.”
—
Jenny had gone out midmorning, when the last of the fog was still burning off the bluffs, searching for low moisture organics to feed the garage. She’d run its reserves very low, working on one thing and another until quite late in the night.
As she suspected from the salty taste of the water supply, the filters in the housings between the tap roots
