On the next wave coming toward him was a patch of white. Long strides took him down the near slope and into the trough. He started up toward the white patch, which looked larger than before—
And stopped. Turned and ran back toward the trough.
The white patch was a garden of bones.
Bleached fingers and feet at the edge. Snapped forearms farther up, leading to ranks of smashed pelvises. Thighs arranged in spreading fans around barrel rib cages. A short tower of arms and atop it a circle of bleached human skulls. Grins that would last forever. Staring eye sockets.
Over the crest of the wave came a moving network of spindly rods. They looked to Toby like carbosteel bones pivoting in chromed sockets. Cables thin to near invisibility moved it with jerky but quick agility.
It did not move like a creature so much as a framework for something unseen. He had the impression of a jutting, constantly busy maze. A mobile lattice, housing a being that did not need true physical presence.
Not that this place was real. He knew that now.
Somehow he had gone from the bare-baked dryness of timestone to this sand-sea. Without noticing. Which meant that the Mantis before him had arranged this elaborate snare and he had run full tilt into it.
His Isaac Aspect said brightly,
It is an anthology intelligence and can speak more directly through us.
“You’re workin’ for it?”
You speak as though there were choice involved. We are immersed in it, just as you.
He needed help. Someone, anyone. Desperately he rummaged for traces of Shibo. None.
“What’s it want? Or is this just what it feels like to be killed suredead?”
We are not suredead.
“Not yet you mean.”
We Aspects are more like this Mantis than you. Not ruled by elements of chemistry or by cumbersome, layered minds. Aspects can better perceive the holographic speech of the Mantis and have been learning it in this time of captivity.
“How much time’s that?”
There was a blocky tone to Isaac’s presence that put him on guard. A sullen weight.
An Aspect corrupted from outside.
The Mantis came forward slowly. Its broad padded feet broke bones as it stepped. Though it seemed light its weight smashed skulls and thighs easily. But of course all this was a digital landscape anyway and he would have to remember that physical movements were only analogies.
Isaac said in his lecturing tone,
This place is a wave-transform of real space and of the Mantis-mind. Intelligences engage best in this kind of intersecting mathematical space. So much more clean and sure. Exact partitioning of ideas. Here the total sum of an intelligence remains the same, though any subsum can vary greatly.
“Yeasay—and you all add up to a hundred, right?”
I do not follow.
“Forget it.”
The Mantis-mind has expended much effort to find you. Its allied intelligences—great minds, which of course cannot in truth be fully separated from itself—demanded your capture.
“How come?”
You harbor information of great importance.
“Oh, sure,” Toby said sarcastically.
But he recalled the dying man and the thin, reedy voice: Why you so important? You got something to do with all this?
—and he was somehow still running over a broken landscape. Sweating. The thick green forest was closer—
He sat down on the silky sand. It slid away to shape a comfortable, cupping seat. If none of this was real he might as well be comfortable. He was hungry and thirsty and as he thought about that some oddly shaped food of maize and flowery buds appeared. It lay neatly on sand that shaped up into a little table and then sprouted a transparent glass.
He picked up the glass. It was warm, as though just formed out of melted sand, and there was ice-cold water in it. He drank eagerly. The condemned man ate a hearty though nonexistent meal.
You do not know what this information is?
“Damn right.” If he did, this thing could force it out of him, he was pretty sure of that.
Isaac’s voice lost its tone, going flat and distant as the Mantis spoke more directly through the Aspect. Isaac was now a puppet.
I calculated this from my prior knowledge of you and of Killeen. Yet buried somewhere in your minds there must be a key which will lead to the message. The difficulty for forms such as myself lies in your mental organization. Much of your selves you cannot access.
“Sorry I can’t help you. My memory isn’t so good these days.”
He finished eating. His sarcasm went right by the Mantis again. It used a stilted form of Isaac’s voice to reply.
These tiers of your selves make it quite difficult for me. I am an anthology intelligence which can find any fragment of my own thought processes quicker than you can blink your eye. Though I am obliged to attempt such discoveries, my true interests lie elsewhere within you.
—its words reached him through the flickering of two conflicting images. He was sitting on the sand and he could feel the fine grains cupping around him. And he was trotting steadily toward the green, keeping on against a massive weight that wanted to drag him down. Hunger rumbled in his stomach. Breath rasped.—
Back on the sand. Heart thumping, lead-heavy.
There was probably no way out of this place, this Mantis-space, if “out” meant anything here. But so long as he didn’t know for sure, he had to try. “I got wind of that back on Snowglade. Your ‘creations,’ right?”
My work proceeds from higher purposes. It is understandable that you cannot entirely fathom this.
“You killed plenty Bishops. Herded us, fooled us, played with us until you got bored and—”
Not at all. Earlier I “ambushed” you to lessen the pain of dissolution as I gathered in your Bishop components.
“Took Fanny and my mother and, and—without even givin’ us the chance to preserve an Aspect.”
Isaac surfaced, like a breaking froth on the curl of a slow undulation. Its voice was plaintive and congested.
Do not believe that my trimmed life in here is enough. We Aspects are like your pets, no better. We were men and women once! We kick against the walls at times—did you think we were merely being childish? We are shadows! I once commanded vast audiences, walked proud hallways with supplicants trailing in attendance, supped fine wines and knew—
“Can it.”
But this time he did not have to suppress the Aspect. The slow swell in his mind blended with the undulating sand. Uncountable torrents of infinitesimal grains flowed, eddied—and smothered Isaac. Then the Aspect’s voice returned, humble and stiff.
I regret that such small matters intrude.
“He’s just worried some.” Toby rose to Isaac’s defense without knowing why. “You surekill me, what happens to my Aspects?”
They would be discarded with the harvesting.
“So it’s ‘harvesting,’ huh?” Like shucks peeled away from the rich maize kernels. And tossed aside.