He was eating some delicious purple fruit when he felt a twinge in his sensorium. Not much, just a wrinkle. Then a pale ghostly wedge shot through his senses. Blunt inspection. Not the earlier subtle sense of eyes just beyond view.
He looked up. Something long and tapered came gliding high up in the brassy sky.
He had felt such cool, remorseless force before.
Quath called, <Quick!> and was off, moving fast.
Toby followed. To watch Quath go up a slope was to see the job reduced to its essentials. They got under some dense trees. He was running and trying to identify the skittering sensorium traces when a massive boom hammered down through the forest.
It flattened them both. His sensorium rang. Limbs crashed nearby. Helical fronds rained down.
<Keep low. I shall spread a deceptive screen.>
“Mechs. They’re high up.”
<Some small figures. One large.>
“Damn!”
<Not mere reconnaissance, as with the bird.>
“Double dog damn!”
<It is ominous that the mechanicals have invaded the Lanes.>
“They must’ve broken in.”
<Yes, but why now? Observe their patterns. Clearly they are searching.>
“I remember some of these patterns and—” Something in his sensorium, coming fast.
<I am a disadvantage to you now. I am far easier to find.>
“Quath . . . It’s the Mantis.”
A long silence. Striations moved at the edge of his sensorium.
<I heard of this form from Killeen. A higher order of mech.>
“Dangerous as hell, too.”
The Mantis shape moved in a strange zigzag way. One moment it was shrinking, seeming to go further down the Lane—and next he caught its movement along a ridgeline nearby, half hidden by the glowing rock.
<Others.>
Smaller forms flitted among puffball clouds. One skimmed whispering over the canopy, veered, was gone.
“We thought we killed the Mantis back on Snowglade.”
<I wonder if the higher orders of mechs die at all.>
“We blew it to pieces with Argo’s exhaust!”
<We think of selves bound up in bodies. The mechs may not.>
“Well, slicing them up seemed to work pretty well.”
<Think of this manifestation, if you must, as a kind of cousin to the Mantis you knew.>
Toby laughed. “Mechs with relatives?” Family was so human; mechs had no need of the concept. “So you figure it’s coming here, snooping around . . .”
<I agree. This implies an unsettling revision of our ideas.>
“My Family’s escape from Snowglade . . .”
<Perhaps it was not as it appeared.>
“Maybe it was a setup?”
<It brought you to the world where I captured Killeen.>
“You figure the Mantis meant for that to happen?”
Quath settled down on her many legs. Their shared sensoria contracted further and her sensors, better than his, scanned the sky. <If so, to what end? With the Illuminates and Philosophs to guide, I helped you reach this eerie place.>
“So? Why’d any mech want us here?”
<You assume the mechanicals act with one vision, one cause.>
“I never saw them do any different.”
<For the lower mechanical orders, perhaps.>
“Lower?”
<The types you could kill.>
“We did all right. Stayed alive.”
<I suspect the higher ones would be impossible to kill.>
“Umm. Like the Mantis.” Shadowy shapes came nearer, slipping over hills like sheets of gliding oil.
<If we have come here as part of some larger aim—>
“Doesn’t make all the work and danger look so damn glorious, does it?”
<I suspect that is too narrow a view. Very primate.> Quath had an antiseptic tone, a polite disdain for such animal excesses.
“Look, what’s this Mantis after?”
<Certainly not merely to kill us.>
“Suredead us, then.”
<It probably could have done that before now.>
“Then what’s it want?”
<You, I suspect. All of you.>
Toby’s brow wrinkled. A shadow fell over the thick canopy. He squeezed down his sensorium. With acoustic suppressors even the wheeze of breathing could not leak out. He lay covered by the loops of spiral blue-green that had showered down. He raised his head slightly and was just in time to see a thin yellow spark come caroming among the trees. It struck some and bounced off, humming as if it were talking to itself. About the size of his head. The spark turned darker and orange-tinged with each collision. It came nearer—and moved faster than he could follow.
It hit Quath. Angry red embers shot over Quath’s carapace. One leaped off her and chewed at Toby’s left side. He rolled automatically, trying to get away from the pain. “Ah!” The embers fizzled away.
Toby lay absolutely still. Nothing changed. The shadow had passed on and with it the pale wedge in his sensorium. Aches hardened into swift, shooting pain in his arm. “Q . . . Quath?”
No signal. “Quath!”
<Quiet.>
They lay that way for a long time as winds whipped through the high spiral folds above. Toby probed at himself. He flinched when he moved his left arm a certain way and found out that the arm was broken. He blocked most of the nerves from there but could not get all of them. To stop all the hurt would have meant losing motor control of the arm.
Quath moved. Slow, tentative.
He had been thinking of himself and felt guilty when he saw how much damage she had taken. It was all on the far side of her. “Hurt bad?” The words sounded stupid. Three legs shattered. Spokes of white metal jutting through the carapace. Brown fluid everywhere.
<I have tapered down the pain centers.>
“Can you walk?”
<Marginally.>
“Can I help?”
<Yes. Leave.>
“Huh?” Toby stood, staggered, and picked up one of her splintered shanks. “No way!”
<I will only draw fire to us. You should leave. Escape this Lane. Your only protection is to immerse yourself among humans. The Mantis will have more difficulty finding you that way.>
Toby scowled. “What’s changed. Quath?”
<None of my feelings for you, be assured.>
“But, but what—” He stopped himself because he was afraid he was going to cry.
<I came with you because I suspected that your protection was of great importance. The Mantis confirms this.>
“Why am I such a big deal?”
<I suspect you are part of a larger pattern.>
“Damn it, that’s just a theory!”
<We must act with imperfect knowledge.>
“What sanctimonious, ridiculous—”
<Your anger is understandable. I understand what it masks. I love you, too.>
“What? I, I, uh . . .” He was stymied.
<Go. You must stay out of their grasp until we all know more.>
“But where’ll I meet you? This place, it’s so big, what’ll I do?”
<You must make your own way now. Go.>
“Damn it! I won’t.”
<You will.>
SIX
Mind Surgery
He holed up in a shaded hollow and the pain started in on him. It had spread into his ribs and he was not surprised to find that three of them were broken too. The electrical energy of the spark had dissipated into tiny shock waves that snapped bone and broke capillaries.
That’s what his diagnostics told him. The facts popped up in his left eye when he keyed in for them. Signifier icons showed bright and clear. Yellow fractures, scarlet blood patches in his arm, 3D blue spaghetti for pain networks.
Solutions popped up too. Making field repairs was not easy. He called up two seldom-used Faces who did the hard work at the back of his skull. They wormed down out of his cerebral cortex and into the basic, shadowy machinery. Most of the brain was circuitry for housekeeping operations. You couldn’t consciously intervene in how your food got digested or control your heartbeat. They ran just fine on their own. And it would be a bad idea to make intervention easy and risk screwing yourself up out of clumsiness. But repairing damage could be accelerated and this was a time when he needed that.