* * *
“Must be dull.”
* * *
That too is a category without application in us.
* * *
Cermo whispered, “If I go left—”
“Stay still. It’s a damnsight bigger than we know,” Killeen said.
Toby nodded. “The Mantis we saw on Snowglade, it was a sort of stripped-down version of this.”
* * *
If you imply that I am simply more terms in a linear sequence, the issue has eluded you.
* * *
Killeen remembered how it had killed Andro, Fanny, and so many others. Killed, used, then discarded like so many materials expended in a hobby.
* * *
Again I speak as conduit for the Exalteds. They cannot express in serial order, as your acoustic modes do.
* * *
“Sounds pretty limited to me,” Killeen said. As long as it was still talking they were still alive.
* * *
They delegate such cramped tasks. Do not presume, or I shall make your termination painful.
* * *
“Mean-hearted of you,” Toby said. His voice was thin with the same exhaustion Killeen recognized in himself. The worst kind, a bone-deep mental weariness.
* * *
It would be a variation on an earlier experiment. Do not think that the concept of compassion is a possession of your species. But surely you must acknowledge that it has bounds among species, Phyla, and certainly between Kingdoms. The Exalteds are a higher Kingdom, indeed, the highest. You cannot expect your notions to extend to your betters.
* * *
Killeen snorted derision. “They—and you—left us to die when you broke open the esty.”
* * *
I had to return the sample of Toby’s genetic record. It was nearly enough.
* * *
“I thought you needed three generations, plus the data buried in the Legacies.” Killeen addressed the empty air. He felt the Mantis only as fitful, patchy blanknesses in his sensorium.
* * *
There is a small code which releases the pleasures we seek. It is said to be carried socially.
* * *
Toby asked, “You mean memorized?”
* * *
As nearly as we can surmise, it was given as a precaution when the Trigger Codes were implanted in the genetic helices. I wish you to deliver it up.
* * *
Killeen laughed. “Don’t know it.”
* * *
Attempts to shield it will merely mean that I will ransack each of you in turn. There is little time and my methods will be destructive. Your selves will not survive my search.
* * *
As if for an example, Killeen felt something spike into his mind, forking up memories from his past—agonies and ecstasies, sharp, eye-blink-quick. Painful and barbed in a way he had never felt. He staggered. The flooding jab of the past was a blow, stopping his lungs, tightening his throat around a hoarse cry.
His wife, Veronica, rocking Toby in buttery candlelight.
Ruddy-faced Fanny calling orders on a scarred plain.
Abraham grimly grinning on a parapet above the Citadel.
All compacted slices, instants sprayed against the walls of his mind.
He recalled events in the pace of his own thinking; the Mantis “harvested” them with an instantaneous readout.
“How’d we supposedly get this code?”
* * *
It must be passed down acoustically.
* * *
“We get told it?” Toby asked.
Cermo shook his head. “Nobody told me anything like that.”
* * *
Then you are lying. There is no other possibility. It is a species-specific instruction. The Exalteds have read in your own helices that it exists.
* * *
Killeen shook his head. “Well, we lost it, then.”
* * *
That cannot be. Human continuity is unusual among the lower orders. Great traditions pass on. This is deeply entwined with your individual senses of self-worth—a common “natural” social tool.
* * *
Toby said, “Maybe you should try some other Families.”
* * *
No! The Rooks, Knights, and others do not have it. There is a clear genetic difference.
* * *
Maybe they didn’t have what they called emotions, but this Mantis manifestation betrayed more than it knew. It longed for the lost trigger, he saw suddenly. Maybe even the Exalteds craved the exotic pleasures that mere mammals were heir to.
Killeen said cautiously, “How come Bishops got it?”
* * *
You have undergone less genetic drift than the others. Such is the luck of the draw.
* * *
Killeen could see no way out of this. They weren’t lying; matters were far past that now. They just didn’t know. But the Mantis would rip open their minds, just to be sure. All he could think to do was the oldest maneuver: stall. “So we’re nothing special, yeasay?”
* * *
There are several theories about why the humans spontaneously sent colonies out from their “Chandeliers.” None seemed specially favored, and indeed the Bishops were one of the smaller Families.
* * *
“Tougher, though,” Toby said. “Right?” From his tone Killeen saw that he was trying to get the Mantis into its lecture mode, delay it by tempting the scholar facet of the many-sided intelligence.
* * *
You are now, perhaps, but your history is not particularly distinguished. Even on Snowglade, Rooks and Pawns were more troublesome to the enterprises we conducted.
* * *
“But we have a warrior name. Bishops swoop down and strike, moving fast.” Toby was intent now, not just passing time. “We, we—” sputtering, Toby launched into warbling voice—
We cut across Rooks,
angle in on Knights,
put the fatto Kings to check—
* * *
You quote from an olden Bishop chant, I see. A “cheerlead” I once witnessed in your Citadel. Admirable, I suppose, how you pit one tribe against another. A wasteful way of selecting those which deserve to propagate.
* * *
We’re better’n they are. Our name—
* * *
Was chosen from a board game. Just as the Sox and Dodgers in an adjacent Lane gained theirs from a lost art performed with the body. The Aces and Eights and Jacks of the planet you once visited—Trump, I believe you named it—came from a pastime involving pasteboards. Similar cultural detritus accounts for the tribal divisions—all quite artificial, believe me. And you can believe such as me; I have seen more human history worked out here at the Center than you can remember.
* * *
Killeen shot back, “Those games and such, they were named for us.”
Cermo said, “Damn rightside!”
“You ask me,” Toby said triumphantly, “those Yankees and all, they weren’t so much. Their word for war was ‘pitch.’ Some fighters they were!”
* * *
You are amusing in your finitudes. Do not mistake my indulgence of you for more than it is, however.
* * *
Killeen knew the stalling was over when the crisp outline of the Mantis solidified against the distant hills. It was large and kept changing so he could not get the shape of it. “Now just wait, I—”
* * *
Waiting is done. If you refuse to yield up the acoustic trigger, I must interrogate you separately and in detail. Your selves will not survive this. I shall harvest as I inspect.
* * *
The matter-of-fact way the Mantis said it made Killeen certain this was no bluff. He breathed shallowly and thought and his mind went nowhere. The Mantis had been promising that eventually it would suck them up into itself, as part of its “preserving mission,” and there was no way to stop it.
“I’ll go first,” Killeen said. “I’m Ca
p’n, stands to reason I know more than these.”
* * *
True. Perhaps it is buried lore and you do not know you carry it. The unkempt manner of your interior, with its subconscious and other swamps, would allow that. Very well, then. This will be easier if you will walk into a recess and position yourself for an erasing execution.
* * *
A pale rectangle of blue-green opened in the air a few steps away. Killeen saw that the Mantis was in fact very close, simulating the entire countryside with absolute fidelity. He had not even known it was so close and now the door into that reality hung like a painting against the twilight hills. But the hills were the illusion, the doorway real. And here at last was his end.
FIVE
An Abyss of Squashed Duration
Nigel Walmsley landed on his ass.
Quath had warned him that it was safer to go through separately but when he looked up Quath was standing erect as if nothing had happened and he was covered with dirt, aching in every joint, his clothes ripped.
“You said this—”
“Quite so.” They had gotten scooped up, all right, but Nigel had never seen the bird. Instead, the hills seemed to roll up like a brown sheet and whirl them into a weightless limbo. Quath had been transmitting, talking to entities Nigel could not see. All very fast. Then he had thumped down here.
“Slow down!”
He dangled like a leftover idea on her right side. The hills around them wavered, as if in a heat wave. Or maybe he was getting tired. He blinked and the hills rippled again and suddenly he saw that they were not hills at all. It was something enormous and somber and he caught an old, familiar sensorium stink.
“The Mantis.”
He saw some Bishops against the sensed scenery. Killeen, yes, Toby, and an officer. Quath sent glad salutes, in the age-old manner of the Myriapodia; Nigel tried to think.
The bird was still in the game, to be sure, else they wouldn’t have been so quickly slipped through the warpage of the esty to precisely this spot. It was bringing matters to a boil, but to what end? The Mantis could still slaughter them all in a microsecond. Their only defense lay in the hope that at the moment it didn’t seem to want to.
No one paid him much attention as he climbed down from Quath’s side shelf. He was to these giants a scrawny mass of wrinkles, scarcely the stuff of legends.
He finally worked out that they were babbling about an acoustic Trigger Code. The Mantis-mind skated across the conversation, sampling each human consciousness in turn. Like an aloof connoisseur at a wine tasting, Nigel thought, but beneath that slept a floating anxiety. The clock was running on the Mantis, too.
All this he got from his sensorium. It was rather more sensitive and tricky than the Bishops’, but a toy compared with that of the Mantis. He could feel the machine minds dipping into him, flitting back to the Bishops for species comparison, then back again to grill his cerebrum a bit more. He supposed he should get used to it, but he never did.
* * *
I will inspect you as well, Myriapodia. The acoustics could be carried in such an intelligence.
* * *
Quath answered.
“I’m certain she does not, in fact,” Nigel said mildly.
Gratifyingly, they all turned to look at him. Except the Mantis, of course, which was still only a slight dissonance in the apparent world.
“Who’re you?” Killeen asked warily.
“Tell you later,” Toby whispered to his father.
“I believe Quath does contain the secret, however,” Nigel said.
Quath’s side belly opened then, a synthesis of mechanical sliding action and organic birth, membranes popping.
A large man staggered out. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, looked around. “Been asleep,” he said.
“Abraham!” Killeen cried.
The others followed suit. Nigel watched them but his senses riveted on the Mantis. It would treasure this spectacle, this reuniting, but it would calculate and judge faster than Walmsley could. Every move from here on could be fatal.
Toby and Killeen wrapped arms around Abraham, shouted their joy. Doing the human thing, Nigel thought abstractly. Despite himself, he finally got caught up in the moment himself. He clapped Abraham on the back and smiled and for a passing moment the tension in him eased. Then the Mantis sent,
* * *
You are the oldest and have the acoustic trigger.
* * *
Abraham looked like a wizened combination of Toby and Killeen, with the same guarded gleam in his eyes. “I do.”
* * *
Stand and deliver.
* * *
“Yeasay, Isay,” Killeen said. “Give it to them.”
Nigel was not sure whether Abraham knew what was going on. He said quickly to Killeen, “Do we want this?”
Killeen glared at Nigel. “Sure do.”
“They’re after the same thing in the long run, y’know,” Nigel said mildly. He tired to carry the sentence with confidence, though it was a bit difficult when he came scarcely to Killeen’s waist.
“What d’you mean?”
“They’re working on the grand problem. Preserving all life-forms, far up ahead in time.”
Killeen frowned in disbelief. “What?”
“By preserving themselves in electron-positron plasmas. A bit of an abstract apotheosis, I’ll admit—”
“They’ve murdered us!” Killeen exploded.
“More than you know,” Nigel said. “Question is, what’s right now. The past can’t be allowed to—”
“This thing—” Killeen jabbed a thumb at the Mantis-shimmer that had curled up from the hills, wrapping them all, “it hunted us, killed us, ripped babies to pieces for fun. I say—”
* * *
You must deliver up this acoustic code and cease this obvious theater. It is designed to dissuade me and those I represent—the Exalteds—
* * *
* * *
from our path. Do not imagine such a lowly deception will gain you delay. Your fate is sealed. It has but to be played out.
* * *
Killeen shouted, “You’ll get yours!”
Nigel took Abraham’s hand and looked into his deep eyes. This old man had been rescued from the fall of the Citadel, all at the hands—wrong metaphor, but the hell with it—of the bird. Some mechs had died then and some other things, beings Nigel himself could not name. All so that this wrinkled old man could come to this place and give his part to a puzzle that none of them understood except in fragments.
“Do you know what will happen, if . . . ?” Nigel’s voice trailed off into a whisper.
Cermo stepped forward suddenly and pushed Nigel away. “Leave him be.”
Nigel staggered. “I don’t think any of us understands—”
Nigel saw in the face of the old man a crafty nostalgia. Ah. He remembered something, had probably meant to pass on its subversive facet to Killeen. But the mech attack at the Citadel had cut him off from Family.
So the final key had been carried in the seemingly fragile cup of human culture. The designers long ago had written into the Bishops and countless other Families and Teams and Corps a variety of secret messages, all encased in culture. They knew that the central character of humanity was continuity—and without it, humans were lost.
People escaped their own mortality through laughter and connection, the two great consolations.
To unite the two was wise. So they had chosen something, he guessed, that carried joy and insured connection. Something
ancient and enduring that the mechs would think little about.
Nigel turned with new respect to the alien. “I still—”
“Do it, father,” Killeen said passionately. “What’s the code? Say it!”
The old man’s face crinkled with confusion. “Code?”
“Something to hand down.”
“Well, there is something . . . but . . . no damn code in it.”
“We’ll see.”
“I mean, it’s just a—”
* * *
You will deliver it up or else face infinite pains, infinitely prolonged.
Sailing Bright Eternity Page 32