Your father did not like this term either. An interesting similarity.
“Listen, nobody’s going to like it. My father told me about talkin’ to you this way, inside this place you’ve made. I can’t see as how you’ve learned any more since then. ‘Harvesting’ isn’t it, not for us.”
Yet it is a correct description. You embody a high form of the organic realm, with the characteristic feature: you know that you shall end. When we anthology beings are harvested—as all must be, in time, by chance or plan—some fraction of oneself is saved, to be used in further advanced forms. You have this now in the stunted Aspects and Faces and Personalities.
—running harder now. Fear like ice shards in his spine. The green coming, closer—
“Pretty talk, but it still means you’re killin’ us.”
In harvesting, yes. In a sense. I use your reaped selves to construct new mixed life forms. They blend the two facets of organic life, the lowly plant and the high-animal, such as yourselves.
With the words came images, flicker-fast:
A green mat that bristled with extended organs. It crawled swiftly over a rutted plain and raised slick, snaky organs in a kind of salute.
Tubular knots that thrust into each other with demented fury. Slit-mouths bit deep and from the wounds blue blossoms sprouted.
A fog that made a greater being, its vapor rivulets shaping up and melting with bewildering speed. Only when a tapered arm reached up did Toby see the scale: it clasped a passing thunderstorm and shredded it with playful glee.
Through such constructions, equally plant and fleshy, we probe the aesthetic levels of your kind. I include possibilities not admitted by the random forces of your evolution. It is interacting, transphylum art.
“Killeen told me that once. You’re an artist.” Toby laughed.
True. Thus you shall live in the hands of greater forces. Only I, artist and conservator, can make this possible for you, through timely harvesting.
“We’d like to keep ourselves the way we are. Getting planted in your art, well, that’s not what I had in mind.” He said this mildly so as not to tip off the Mantis, and because something was happening to his sensorium and he did not understand it.
To harvest is to sow.
“And that’s what you’ve got in mind for me?”
—like logs his legs thumped against the timestone. Cold air rasped in his throat and he could not get enough to make the legs move faster, faster—
Not yet. This little discourse has aided me in my plans for future projects, but for now I am carrying out the precepts embodied by my allied intelligences. I must help in the gathering of enough Bishop primates to test for this buried knowledge.
“What’s that mean?”
I must bring you to a spot where we collect your lineage. We shall assemble your generations.
He thought fast. He could feel his legs pumping harder and they were real, not the intricately slick touch of the sand-sea.
One part of him was plunging ahead. Gasps rasped in his throat.
Another fraction bent over and studied the sand. Picked up a handful. Grains. Mica winked at him. Between the grains a blur. Not quite defined. As he noticed the slight smearing, the image sharpened. The Mantis had increased definition. Now its world was a bit more distinct. Even the smallest grain now had clear edges.
An artist, tidying up its work.
Running. Chest heaving, a thumping in his ears.
He knew he had to find some way to deflect the moment.
The jerky lattice of rods had an eerie, hovering presence as the Mantis paced among the garden of bleached bones. It had smashed the grinning skulls flat. Along the sand dune wave played strange shadows of the mind behind all this.
Toby struggled between two worlds. He could not sort out his own senses.
—so hard to move his legs now, arms pumping strong to keep himself going against a blunt pressure that wanted to stop him from reaching the green moistness. Close now but the pain—
I am sure you understand the necessity. I assure you that when my allied minds have made proper use of you to clear up this ancient and bothersome matter, I shall harvest you with the attention to detail and genuine concern which characterize my best work. Though I have my critics among these same allies, they do not question my reverence for the ancient and lesser forms such as yourself. Rest secure that—
—he reached the inky line of tall trees. Cool, moist.
No phony sand waves. No mech made of rods.
He remembered the kids playing with their fake digital worlds so long ago back in the marketplace and laughed, out of control as he crashed into the shadowy recesses—
Solid. Real. He reached out tentatively. Touched.
The canopy of trees and cabled, spreading parasite-webs was thick, so that the air was damp and dim. He went into a silence impermeable. It was made thicker and not broken by the soft bell notes of birds and flying rats. By the tick of descending fronds. By the soft thump of falling fruit. By the high caterwaul of vine-dogs.
He did catch from far above the ratcheting squawks of something big and angry, heard it hopping and thrashing among lofty limbs. He was uneasy at his own intrusion, moving more quietly so as not to wake the spirits of this place. Dust spun in cathedral light, long yellow light shafts that cut down from on high. He found underfoot a silent procession of something like ants, except that they had tiny tails. When he studied them they formed a curling pattern and held it, a dark ribbon. Slowly it dawned on him that they were signaling him, writing a message with themselves—but he did not know how to answer. He waved helplessly and went on, careful to not step on them.
Somehow the Mantis was not here. He had escaped into a wedge of time that might end at any instant. Why?
He slipped by huge, taut webs, wondering what got caught there. And what came to harvest the prey. Bright fruit swelled in the chinks of the canopy, dabs of color congealing like blobs, in air so thick it looked green.
—and back came the Mantis, rushing hard against his mind.
I lost you. Something—I do not know—something—is making it difficult—
In Toby’s sensorium he now sensed the Mantis far above in the esty tube of this Lane. He felt also around him the stresses that cut and frayed the Mantis’s speech.
Vagrant tensions working, blunt and voiceless. Converging.
SIX
Eating the Storm
The violence began as a flicker.
Down the long bore of the tube eased a sun-yellow trickle. At the vanishing point where the green tunnel narrowed into misty confusion the ray ebbed, flowed, seemed to Toby like a distant campfire. Yet something prickly crept into his mind.
He stood in pale darkness. No good to run anymore.
Clouds thinned above and showed the naked other side of the Lane. A bowl of clay-red timestone suddenly beamed down remorseless heat. Spirits seemed to edge forth from the green around him. Snaps and wriggling noises.
His sensorium jumped, alert, sweeping the area.
Nothing. The silence was empty. He probed the thick, moist forest to his right. It curved up into a misty distance, curling into the sky. When it became simply a filmy green it broke at last on outjuts of brown rock halfway up.