by Gregory Benford
Quath said.
Each corkscrew was a scaled-down woodland. Their helical sheets were veined in green and orange, concealing pockets and crevices packed with creatures who clicked and chattered and whistled, calling from the coiling complexity of the parent tree. For fun he tried to catch a mouse with wings and ended up with a skinned elbow, from snatching futilely at nothing but air.
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, 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.
“Mechs. They’re high up.”
“Damn!”
“Double dog damn!”
“They must’ve broken in.”
“I remember some of these patterns and—” Something in his sensorium, coming fast.
“Quath . . . It’s the Mantis.”
A long silence. Striations moved at the edge of his sensorium.
“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.
Smaller forms flitted among puffball clouds. One skimmed whispering over the canopy, veered, was gone.
“We thought we killed the Mantis back on Snowglade.”
“We blew it to pieces with Argo’s exhaust!”
“Well, slicing them up seemed to work pretty well.”
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 . . .”
“My Family’s escape from Snowglade . . .”
“Maybe it was a setup?”
“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.
“So? Why’d any mech want us here?”
“I never saw them do any different.”
“Lower?”
“We did all right. Stayed alive.”
“Umm. Like the Mantis.” Shadowy shapes came nearer, slipping over hills like sheets of gliding oil.
“Doesn’t make all the work and danger look so damn glorious, does it?”
Quath had an antiseptic tone, a polite disdain for such animal excesses.
“Look, what’s this Mantis after?”
“Suredead us, then.”
“Then what’s it want?”
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!”
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.
“Can you walk?”
“Can I help?”
“Huh?” Toby stood, staggered, and picked up one of her splintered shanks. “No way!”
Toby scowled. “What’s changed. Quath?”
“But, but what—” He stopped himself because he was afraid he was going to cry.
“Why am I such a big deal?”
“Damn it, that’s just a theory!”
“What sanctimonious, ridiculous—”
“What? I, I, uh . . .” He was stymied.
“But where’ll I meet you? This place, it’s so big, what’ll I do?”
“Damn it! I won’t.”
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 in
to 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.
These Faces squirmed down into operating centers that fed stimuli and ferried nutrients. They took over. He knew they were working when his arm started to tingle. It was like being tickled deep inside only it didn’t make you laugh. So he cried for a while and felt better. He wriggled around and broke out in a clammy sweat all along his left side.
More explosions boomed down from the sky but he was a far way beyond that and didn’t care. His systems labored heavily. Bone repair was hard, he knew, and he tried to not let his conscious mind interfere.
But there were a lot of things to think through and he could not keep his mind on them for long. Spikes of pain broke through and startled him. Then his systems would catch the problem and he would be all right for a while. The sweats did not go away though.
The dreams started then.
Only they were not dreams because in between them he had his eyes open. They played on his retina and there was nothing he could do to stop them. He tried closing his eyes but they still ran.
He was riding in something that had wheels but seemed to fly. A woman had offered him a ride in it and somehow they had passed through dissolving air and furious, fast rock, and now were careening down (or maybe up) a steep flat lake. It was smooth and seemed horizontal, with his weight thrusting straight down along his spine. But it was also angled so that they accelerated across it. The jet-dark surface spewed and foamed and muttered to itself like a stormy liquid but the woman rapped it with a stick every few minutes, as if trying it for strength, and the stuff gave back a solid ringing smack, like steel ringing bong bong on granite.
Shibo grinned at him. Her bright sharp teeth laughed out words so mangled he could not catch them and there was no time to smooth them into meaning. They plunged forward.
It went on a long time. She had teeth missing, two ears on her left side and none on the right, and wore only a halter. This had seemed important when he first saw her but such facts were now dwarfed by the blistering wind that raked him, the jolting speed, the lurches of his already aggrieved stomach. “Long live all!” she shouted back to him and took a pull from a vaporizer.
“Long live me, anyway,” Toby answered. He had taken a few hits from the vaporizer and was feeling strange but still scared.
Something big hit the black lake and threw up a dark geyser in snarled fingers.
“We’ll make it!” Shibo shouted.
She had to because other people were trying to talk to him. Their voices came down from the sky, but by the time they reached him they were whispers.
Instead of breaking into droplets the black waters squared out into planes. “Let me do it,” Shibo called. She smashed the panes into showers of glinting mica shards. “See?”
—and he was in the open, rolling down a hill. He cracked his knee on a rock and inhaled dust. Choked. Gasped. This was real, no dream. He looked back up the slope and saw the tall grass mashed down where he had been lying in a bath of his own sweat. Something had made him get up and stumble and fall out here, exposed. He scrambled back up as fast as he could.
On the way up his knee hurt more than his arm or ribs. That was a good sign as long as the knee wasn’t damaged. He found the place where he had been lying. It was damp and smelled bad.
His knee was getting better, though. He walked a little unsteadily to a stream and cleaned himself off for the first time in—two? three?—days. Hard to tell. His inboard monitor told him, 2.46 days in all. Impossible to tell here with the light coming and going like fitful weather. He wondered how all the forest had adjusted to this erratic pace.
For a while he just lay beside the stream without any energy for more. A solid fact sat in front of him and would not let him rest. He knew what had to be done now and that Quath had been right. Shibo had kept him from seeing it. The way she had kept him from registering other things. Amusing him with interior spectacles that got more and more frantic.
The damage and repair had undermined some part of her somehow. At least for now. Which meant he had to do it now or later he would think of something else that needed doing or maybe get distracted by a gimpy joint or a funny itch and then he would never do it. Maybe not for the rest of his life.
He crawled back in a shaded hole and got out his field kit. The tools were not made for this job. They had socket and groove faces, tiny insert arms and variable-geometry drivers, but nothing specialized. And he had to work behind himself. Operating by feel, sitting up when he wanted to lie down.
You do not want to do this.
He did not answer her. The small adjustable tips were hard to get right. His fingers were blunt and clumsy. He dropped one tip and had to fish it out of the dirt and clean it off. No way to even keep all the instruments lined up properly.
I have done so much for you. You and I work together. Your female side integrates with mine.
The tip ends would not come right. He lined them up and inserted them into the butt of the axis tool. The fit was not perfect but it would do.
I have so much more to teach you. If you will only give me time. I can give excellent advice on how to deal with this place. You are alone. You need me.
Reaching behind his head was hard. He braced himself with his nearly useless left arm. The spreading ache in it told him that this was not a great idea. His Faces working the repairs sent little warning spikes up into his cerebral cortex. Lances of aggrieved pain/anger, like the emotions of insects. But there was nothing else to do.
We can have so much fun together! I’ve shown you my past. My whole world. Isn’t that enough?
“Don’t want your world.”
He gritted that out through clenched teeth. She was talking faster and faster as he got the sleeve fitted into his spinal slot. Images shot through him now. Ruins in purple shadows. Mech carcasses sprawling across a field on Snowglade. Tastes of spicy hot dishes, smells of fresh spring, laughter heard pealing down a stony hallway.
He cut the skin away from the slot to get more room. He had to operate by feel alone now. The pictures running in his eyes were clipped, speeded up, flickering with demented haste.
You are betraying your father. He put me here. It was to guide you. To help you! And you turn against me, throw me—
He popped the slot open. Poked into the micros. The racing images got ragged, spotty.
A Personality can’t live chip-encased for long. You know that. I will shrink. Parts of me will evaporate! I will shrink back down into an Aspect unless I am aired, used.
The tools were not right and he could not be sure he would not damage the chip. This slot had been double-decked to take a Personality. The readers were jammed to a one-molecule-thick layer around the chip. There was a way to take the readers out without stripping them but that was impossible without a lot more gear than he had, even if he could see what he was doing.
You can’t! I’ve done so much for you. The whole female side of your personality—I’ve brought it out. Made you much more mature.
“Yeasay. I’m so mature I’m stuck here alone and banged up and no Family to help me pry you out.”
I didn’t make you do all those things. You can’t escape the guilt of running away from your fathe
r. It wasn’t my doing!
He felt carefully. It seemed like he had got the tips in right but it was hard to tell. They had to fit just so in the crowded receivers at the socket rim.
Please! I won’t do any remembering or thinking without you approving it. I just, you don’t know what it’s like, I had to—
He tried one. Tugged gently on the end and the tip caught against the socket and held. He did not know what would happen if he got only part of the chip out. She was firm-integrated with him through the hard circuitry at the base of his skull. Could he get the chip free and not leave part of her with him? He did not know.
I’ll do anything you want!
No point in waiting. He took all the tips in a tight grip and breathed deeply.
Wait! Please!
For a long, hard moment he could not move. She had his muscles locked and he felt her sleeting anger slam into him full force.
She had been a wonderful woman once and living on like this had made her into something else. Carrying a Personality was far harder than an Aspect, but something else had happened between them. Something about her and him, the imponderable mix of people. Not the fault of either, maybe, just a fact.
He did not know if the true Shibo could ever come back again in a Personality but that was not the point now, and in a flash of close contact between them he told her that, not in words but in pangs of sharp remorse.
Two heartbeats. Then her reply.
Her fury battered against him. His right hand shook. Fingers went numb. Hard to hold the tips in them. His breath caught.
She moved fast, trying everything. His sphincter clenched, balls ached. Jumpy nervous energy wormed across his skin. His chest froze up. Hand jangling, thumb askew, muscles rock-hard.
He made himself relax his right hand and let the wrist go free. In the backlash of the muscles he reversed the tension against her and moved.
He jerked the tools out at all four quadrants. They came free.
No you can’t I love you love Killeen love all of you don’t make me stop please please I can’t can’t can’t can’t can’t can’t
His hand brought the tips around all bright-bloody and with skin caught in them. Like a single muscle his body shivered. A violent jerking, throwing off a sheen of droplets. Lungs heaved as if he had been under water a long time.