Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

  In a flash Killeen felt something huge and dark settle in his mind, snuffing out Nialdi’s shrill cries.

  “Wait! You can’t destroy an Aspect just ’cause…” His voice trailed away as he felt the absurdity of this. He was embedded in the Mantis’s mathematical spaces. Whatever he felt as real were mere phantoms. His protests were like the tiny squeakings of a mouse caught in a cat’s paw.

  He remembered again the mouse he had seen so long ago, the bright and eager eyes staring fixedly up at him. It had had its desires, too, its dim plans. Its dignity.

  Killeen’s mind spun in dry vacancy, swept by clashing winds of cold despair and brimming hot anger.

  Wonder what is like?

  To be harvested.

  Sadly, we Aspects shall never know. We would doubtless drift away, needless extras, while the actual person was preserved. But the Mantis wishes to show you what its “harvesting” means. Perhaps only by exhibit can we learn.

  Killeen curled his lip in chilly contempt. “Exhibit? I saw a lot back there. Those legs pumping. That awful sex-thing—remember?”

  The Mantis stirred. Its dozen separate chromed spheres shifted on the carbo-rod lattice, crisp and metallic.

  That was not finished work. It is part of a larger project.

  “I could damn sure see what kinda—”

  You—and we—did not understand. The parts of that “sex-thing” were mixed organic and machine. Made for a purpose. Somewhat experimental, yes. As were the other constructions displayed in that room. But what the thing became depended upon who viewed it.

  “What you mean? It was grotesque, ugly—”

  Such constructions assume forms expressing the subconscious of whatever approaches it. The work was intended as a kind of psychodynamic analyzer for mechs. It can display the conflicts and programming malfunctions attendant upon any advanced machine intelligence. What it picked up from you—from us—was a constellation of submerged feelings and needs. Admittedly, the depiction was direct and graphic, but the Mantis says that only through such explicit schemes can mechminds be cleansed, repaired, realigned.

  Killeen paled.

  The Mantis inquires whether you knew that the shutting down of your sexcen would result in the accumulation of these elements elsewhere in your self. Indeed, it understands the practical efficiency of this for the short term, but as a longterm strategy this seems beset with complex—

  “You shut up! Shut up!”

  Killeen heard himself shout as if from a great distance. It was as though he could feel himself being two different people. One was furious at any revelation, while the other yearned to escape from a sticky, clouded net. There was something terribly wrong inside him, something he only vaguely glimpsed. Threads of deep anger and longing shot through him. How could he maintain the fragile reeds of dignity and self against the Mantis when it could penetrate to the quick of him?

  He began shaking. The Mantis extended a long, slender arm. The nub of it articulated into a spindly parody of a five-fingered hand. With it the Mantis waved toward the bushes. Then it pointed.

  You—and we—can understand the fate of the surekilled best by example. The Mantis wishes you to see.

  “See what?”

  Go.

  What else can do?

  Killeen nodded grimly. There was no choice in any of this.

  He strode on wooden legs into the bushes. Most of the vegetation repeated the same hues of brown and singed graygreen. The clumped growths were curiously knotted, as though made by someone who understood the principle of plants but lacked the feel of how lightly leaves clung to branches, of the roughness of bark, of the dense diversity of life. These were bunched and gnarled things, subtly wrong.

  He picked his way among them. Some had thorns and nicked him as he passed. Rarefied mathematical space or not, things still hurt here. The slow swell of the green ocean made the vegetation sway like the lazy breathing of a sleeping thing.

  He could see nothing but these twisted brown plants. He went further, glad to be moving and not standing before the Mantis. Then he rounded a particularly tall and thick-grown plant and saw a human. Or at least it was like a human.

  It stood as though watching something in the distance, its face turned away. The body was spindly, shanks lean and mottled. Killeen had the perception of seeing through the chalk-white skin, into the thick white fibers that bound up muscle and gristle. Yellow tendons stretched, thongs threading between bones. He blinked and the skin was again an opaque, dead white.

  It was a woman. Yet it was not fully human.

  There were deep fissures beneath the one breast he could see. From them whistled long, deep breaths.

  It sensed him. Began to turn. The head swiveled with jerky movements, ratcheting around. Circles of gauzy red enveloped the breasts. The inky patch between the legs seemed to buzz and stir with dark life of its own.

  Ribs jutted out starkly. Below them were patches of translucent skin. These pale spots gave glimpses through to the body within, where blue, pulsing organs swam.

  A woman. Yet a rose burst from her mouth, a beautiful flare of delicate red suspended at the end of a long, thorned green stem. The flower grew from her, stretching the skin tight about its thorny base.

  The rose stem issued from a shallow, toothless mouth… that somehow aped a jagged smile.

  There was no nose.

  The chin was the same sharp angle he remembered.

  The eyes told him everything.

  He whispered in shock and without hope, “Fanny…”

  Arthur paused for a moment before he said:

  When the Mantis surekills, it extracts the essence of the person to create varied forms. Not simple replications, but… differences. This is how humanity can live. In the hands of something far greater than themselves. As an expression of humanity and of their own selves. The Mantis, you see, is an artist.

  SEVEN

  The Fanny-thing stood watching him. He heard the working of metal and saw the Mantis clambering over the tufted brush, coming into view.

  The Fanny-thing could not speak. The rose wagged as it moved its head, tilting its bright eyes in unspoken question.

  The skin—her skin, Killeen thought, but pushed this thought away—was wrinkled and browned. The planes of her face still held an element of her wry wisdom. And the eyes—quick and sparkling, taking in everything with evident intelligence.

  But she could not speak. The rose silenced her.

  Killeen felt his Arthur Aspect struggling with the input from the Mantis. Somehow the Mantis heightened the cool, reflective Arthur voice while overriding it, forcing it to give directly the Mantis’s message. Arthur laced in and out of the flowing mindsurge, reducing it to words Killeen could follow.

  You must understand, this is an artform that the Mantis is pursuing with profound results. There is much excitement in the reaches of the mech community, the Mantis says, for such combinations of plant and, ah, fleshy life.

  Killeen said nothing. Prickly waves swept over his skin like brushfires. He watched the Fanny-thing, judging the distance to it.

  The Mantis believes that with such expressions it can bridge the gap between mech forms and the dwindling, purely organic life—of which we humans are self-aware remnants. It wishes to embody our traits, our inner landscapes. This creation, for example, contrasts the poignancy of the simple rose and its silencing of the jangling mind—a poetic concept, here integrated specifically. What is more, the impact on the mind of the woman-plant is, apparently, satisfying to some aspects of the mech sensibility.

  Killeen took a step toward the Fanny-thing, his face full of wonderment and curiosity. He noticed that her hands ended not in fingers but in small bursting pink rosebuds.

  Understand, this is merely one of the uses to which human minds and forms can be put The gallery we saw earlier was another—complex artforms mingling organic and inorganic themes. They reflect the inner thoughts of whoever views them—interactive, trans-species art.
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br />   “So this isn’t a factory. We were raiding an art gallery….”

  Killeen looked carefully at the Mantis as it stopped, towering over the brambles. Its focused cones watched him.

  The Fanny-thing slowly reached out one bud-tipped hand toward Killeen. Its eyes shone. The hand beckoned.

  The Mantis knows that humans do not comprehend the intention of the mech civilizations regarding them. Humans are interesting precisely because they embody the highest form of the mortal realm. They know they will end. Mechs do not end. When mechs are harvested—as the Crafter was—some fraction of themselves is saved. This is incorporated into later mech forms. No such avenue ever existed for humans, beyond the illusions of religion. That is, until the crude and stunted forms of Aspects and Faces emerged. But we Aspects are shrunken, hollow echoes of our former selves;

  Killeen watched the Fanny-thing take a tentative step toward him. It moved stiffly, its muscles bulging and sliding but giving little net motion. The web of muscles and bones seemed to be working against itself, as though parts of the body resisted the will of the rest.

  The tragedy of human life is this eternal death you face. Here, the Mantis says, it solves this problem for us. To surekill a human is to bestow eternal life. The highest moral act. To harvest is to sow. To preserve. And that, too, is the role of the Mantis. Artist and conservator of the vanishing organic forms.

  On the matted ground lay decaying gray branches from the bushes, gritty sand, even oblong speckled rocks. The details were quite realistic. Killeen carefully studied the ground between himself and the Fanny-thing. The Mantis was too far away to reach them quickly.

  The most grave limitation of organics is their inability to reprogram themselves at will. Knowing that their behavior could be more efficient or productive, they nonetheless are driven by blunt chemical urges and ingrained instructions. The Mantis understands that evolution selected for many of these through Darwinian pressures, and appreciates the role organics thus play in expressing the fundamental underlying laws of the universe. Still, the flaw of organic forms is their locking of their behavior instructions into hardware, when it should properly be in software. Instincts easily date in a mere few thousands of years. The Mantis—

  “Look, what’s this… this thing for?””

  The Fanny-creature took a trembling step. Muscles worked beneath mottled skin. Its arms clenched as though it wanted to use the budded hands and could not.

  It was remarkable how removing the mouth made a face unreadable.

  Still, there are portions of the human sense-world which the mechs cannot penetrate. Some mechs feel this is related to the overly hardwired feature of humans. Others like the Mantis feel this apparent difficulty is in fact rich ground for experiment and art. That is one reason to create sculptures such as the one you saw before, and the one standing here now.

  “This isn’t a goddamn sculpture! This is Fanny.”

  A Fanny whose skin worked with fevered twitches and trembles. As if deep pressures fought within.

  It houses a great deal of the original Fanny. Surely you recognize the features, the body movements?

  “That’s not… She… she was…”

  The Mantis wishes to know what you think the real Fanny was. This is a crucial point. The mech artists—of which the Mantis is supreme—sense something missing in these constructions.

  “Fanny’s dead. This is a, a recording.”

  But it feels itself to be Fanny. When the Mantis attacked, it was careful to pinpoint each feature of her. It devoted its entire recording and perceiving network to extracting Fanny’s nature. That was the principal reason why you were able to wound the Mantis so easily. It was absorbed in its task.

  “Figured we’d killed the damned thing,” Killeen said bitterly. He watched the Fanny-thing struggle to take another conflicted step. He could not take his eyes from it.

  It is impossible to destroy an anthology intelligence, even using the methods of piecemeal destruction you devised later. The true seat of intelligence is spread holistically among outlying mechs, beyond your range.

  “Y’mean like that navvy that zapped Toby and me?”

  Yes, that was a fragment of the Mantis. It wanted to extract you and Toby entirely, but had not enough time. Indeed, that connection is why the Mantis now hopes communication with you will prove easier than with the other humans. The Mantis apologizes for any pain and inconvenience this caused you. It dislikes—indeed, finds immoral—the creation of internal conflicts within beings.

  “What’s that mean?”

  Killeen hoped he could keep the Mantis preoccupied with the task of funneling its communication through the narrow neck of Arthur’s abilities. That would distract it from what Killeen was thinking. Maybe.

  Mechs do not perceive pain as such. The nearest they come to it is a perception of irreducible contradiction in internal states. This it wishes to spare you.

  “Mighty nice of it.” Killeen asked sarcastically, “Is that thing over there feeling ’contradictions’?”

  Apparently. It wishes to unite with you in some way and yet other essences impede this.

  He took a short step toward the Fanny-creature. Its rose wagged in the air. Muscles jumped in its forearms. The eyes crinkled. With pain?

  The Mantis hopes you understand that such a program of preserving a kernel of us—however ungrateful we may be—is carried out for the highest of motives. Art is a primary activity among mech society—though, to be sure, it is an art far different from human attempts. Mechs can construct artful superstructures made of their own programming, for example. But it is in the experimental working of such elements as humans and other races that the freest and greatest work comes. They—

  “You mean like those legs and arms I saw back there? Growing ’em in farms?”

  He edged closer to the Fanny-thing.

  Those are useful in bioparts, yes. But the finest specimens of body parts are kept for artworks. Those you saw were being grown for a drama the Mantis wishes to present. An entire staged reenactment of a human battle against early mechs, perhaps.

  A humming. Killeen was distracted by it as he took another step. Then he saw it was coming from the gouged nostrils under each breast of the thing. Slow, agonizing mmmmmms interspersed with uhhh-hunmms. It seemed to be trying to say something.

  Another step.

  The Aspect’s voice went on, coolly unconcerned:

  The area which the Mantis wishes your help with falls precisely in the zone which the mechs have not been able to penetrate. The most intense human interactions seem to lie beyond their reach. The Mantis attempted to correct this by preferentially recording the oldest humans—

  “That’s why it took Fanny?”

  A halfstep slid his foot under a triangular rock as big as his hand.

  The thing hummed louder, its rhythm laced with anxiety.

  The eyes beseeched him.

  Yes. This matter has been a vexing problem for it, ever since the inception of its career.

  “What …?” Killeen had a sudden suspicion.

  The Mantis began its artistic program with what the Families call the Calamity. Understand, the mech cities would eventually have destroyed the Citadels in any case, as part of their pest-elimination procedures. The Mantis supervised operations so that it could harvest a maximum number of humans, allowing few to die unrecorded. The Mantis preferentially harvested the older, riper humans. Just as it did, you’ll remember, at the meeting of Rooks and -Bishops. But some elements do not accumulate better in the old. Evidently, several categories of human life remain only as dim echoes in the memory. Thus the Mantis wishes to—

  He saw his chance and took it. With one motion he flipped the flat rock into the air and caught it with his right hand.

  Two steps forward.

  The eyes of the Fanny-thing widened but it stood its ground.

  He brought the stone point down heavily. It split the skull with a loud crack.

  Killeen backed
away from the falling form. As it crashed to the sandy mat the Mantis clanked forward, far too late.

  Then it stopped. Killeen looked up at the impassive lenses and antennae and thought carefully, It wanted to die. It needed death.

  The Mantis did not move.

  Arthur said nothing.

  Movement. Killeen turned.

  Toby came running from behind the bristly bushes.

  “Dad!”

  “Run!” was all Killeen could think to say.

  Toby reached out toward his father. His foot caught on a root.

  He crashed facedown. A fine net of cracks spread across Toby’s back. Killeen heard tiny, brittle popping noises.

  The cracks broadened to black lines, racing zigzag all over the boy.

  Before Killeen could move, his son broke crackling into fragments, shattered like glass.

  EIGHT

  He blinked and was awake. His hands and feet were cold. Grimy polymer flooring pressed against his cheek.

  Killeen rolled over, his mind a jumble of disconnected thoughts. He had been reaching for Toby—

  Toby.

  But he had been embedded in the sensorium of the Mantis, he reminded himself. The sensations had been absolutely real, gritty, full-bodied. Far deeper than the dispassionate electrical imagery of the human sensorium.

  Illusion. All illusion.

  Now he was back in the world of stunted, normal human perceptions. Staring upward into harsh lamps that beamed streaming blue light down from an impossibly high ceiling. Breathing not the moist clasp of the Mantis sensorium, but a dry air tainted by acrid flavors.

  He sat up. He was wearing his coveralls, just as he had been when the Mantis came upon them. He patted his pockets automatically. Everything was there.

  Around him Hatchet and Toby and the rest of the party were slowly reviving, shaking their heads, blinking, recovering.

  Toby. Killeen got to his feet and unsteadily walked to where his son sat. Toby, head hung between his knees, gasping for breath.

  “You okay?”