This new Lane was pleasant and he sensed no mechs. He had gotten used to the mild, diffuse light that oozed from juts and plains alike, sometimes casting upward shadows. The stone sent ribbons of light projecting up through the root systems of trees. He could see them like buried blood vessels in the fleshy soil. He loped steadily and came down into the valley. Yellow knots of timefog clung to the peaks on both sides.
Nothing in the sky to alert him. Still, the mechs could come on you faster than his rickety sensorium could register. So he kept to the shadows when he could.
He had once spent a day staying barely ahead of some mech sniffer, a silver-gray flyer that skated just over the trees and shot at him three times. He had eluded it by jumping into a river and swimming until his reserve air played out. Mechs didn’t seem to understand water very well. Or at least couldn’t see through it. He had stayed under until a waning came, and crawled out gasping into total blackness.
Besen. Killeen. Ol’ Cermo-the-Slow. So long ago.
A burnt scent and beneath it something sickly sweet. Down the whole valley grew dense fields of maize. He had not seen any since a boy, and then only a scraggly lot at the edge of the Citadel when he was barely big enough to walk. He walked along a rutted harvesting trail and smelled the soft, milky air.
Maize. He remembered there had been maize planted in the mud of spring; dug into the earth on a plowed hillside, with narrow-eyed women keeping seed-eating birds just out of gunning range; fine stands of young maize sending a keen aroma into the rainy day; the work of chopping weeds from the base of the stalks, the shiny-bladed hoe churning up fine dry dust; cutting and shocking maize with a thick long knife; the bluegreen ears that could turn to follow the sun through the day; ripe ears thrown into a wheelbarrow; tiny insects tech’d up to defend the sweet maize against pests, each loyal to the death to its particular plant; bare stalks in a quiet snowfall; a sister who lost her finger in a shucker, quick as a wink; rattling kernels spewing from a hand-cranked, steel-toothed feeder, the bare cobs shooting out the top and tumbling onto a pyramid pile; a silo crammed with drying husks; whiskey sloshing in a wooden keg, the charcoal staining the spout where it had been strained out; sharp sweet smell of a pat of butter sliding down an ear, skating on its own melt—
—and Toby staggered, knowing that these memories were not his. But they felt absolutely real, especially the pungent fragrances.
I worked in the fields a lot when I was a girl.
Shibo’s voice seemed to come down from the yellow sky. Toby gulped, eyes watering. He walked on and let the dry scent of the fields calm him.
So he had not got all of her out. And now there was nothing to do. Not even a knife blade could help him now.
The burnt stench was stronger and he looked warily into the fields as he passed. The standing grain was at its peak, aching to be harvested. He shucked a few ears and ate them as he went on, the kernels popping full and sugary in his mouth. Some of the maize had started to shell out of the heads, overripe.
The few trees were splintered and singed as if something inside them had wrecked them trying to get out. There were a few bare spots in the closely planted fields, exactly circular. The maize was pressed flat.
He walked on and something stung his nose. He remembered the time he had sat sick in an outhouse at the Citadel, smelling it and afraid to leave even to get a breath of clean air, because of his diarrhea, which gave no warning. The whole Family had gotten sick with it and a while later he had helped his father push the little house over on its side and fill in the hole with the dirt from the next pit. Then a team of men and women had dragged it over and set it up in fresh splendor.
He came to the first bodies then. Brambles divided the long fields and irrigation channels. Chunky parts were hung up in the branches. Bodies had exploded and the pieces were split along no anatomical lines Toby knew of. It could not have been very long since it happened because they had not begun to rot, though the blood had long caked into a brown crust on them.
His Isaac Aspect fidgeted at not having been allowed out for a while.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as the ancient saying put it.
Toby knew that bodies did just the opposite. They decayed into wet slop, highly attractive to carrion beetles and clouds of flies. How could the ancients get so simple a thing wrong?
He touched a few bodies gingerly. Mechs had been known to booby-trap bodies back on Snowglade, but apparently they had not taken such trouble here.
It seemed wrong to leave the ripped sinews and muscle and bones snagged in brush but he turned away from the sight and moved on. The outhouse smell came from the simple fact that their bowels were spread over the fields, too, wider than the spray of heavier parts.
Further on whole bodies dotted the fields. They lay in small clearings where he guessed they had tried to fight something above. They were intact and their skins were smooth and glassy. He knew the way bodies changed with time. The skin quickly took on a lemon tinge which deepened into yellow-green. If left out for days the flesh went brown, a deeper brown than Cermo’s beautiful smooth color.
—and left long enough, he suddenly recalled, the flesh thickened to be like coal tar, crusting hard where ripped or torn, and the bodies swelled, too, getting too big for their clothes and bursting out at the cuffs and popping zippers open, people becoming balloons, and the smell of them in the dry heat of midday, a heavy thing that lodged in your throat—
He caught himself. Those were not his memories.
I saw much when my Family died that it would be better if you did not know.
“Then don’t let it out!” He probed for Shibo but she was elusive, darting away.
I cannot stop. Your memories intersect me and there I am.
“I don’t need it.”
I am who I am. Or was.
He walked on, keeping his eyes away from the bodies as much as he could. There were only one or two in each field.
The bodies showing no damage had probably died from loss of Self. They were suredead. Without the Self the brain went on running the simple routines that inflated lungs and pumped blood and digested food but very soon something went out of the whole thing. Then the body stopped.
Nobody had ever studied much why this was. There seemed no point in it. The person was gone in the most profound way possible. An old ship like Argo had techtricks to keep the body alive or at least frozen for future use, but there would be no point with the suredead.
He could see scuffed-up dirt and crushed yellowing maize where some of them in their last moments had pounded their boots against the ground, feet drumming and arms flailing though they were already down. As control slipped from them their bodies had fought in the only way they knew. Their fists were still clenched and their wrists were blue-black. Some had torn away their clothes in a mad frenzy to shuck off the thing that was inside them and eating where hands could not reach.
Toby thought about burying them but there were many and the stench was worsening beneath the yellow sky. He caught motion to his left and circled around a thick field of maize just going ripe. The movement registered as human in his sensorium. It would be smart to just keep going away from this place but he felt some need to see a living person so he angled back toward the spot.
One person. A lean woman kneeling beside a man’s face-down body.
For a moment Toby thought she was praying and he turned to leave. She held her hand up to the light then. Her little finger reshaped itself into a snub-nosed tool and she jabbed it into the body’s lower neck. The skin there was red and puckered up. She twisted her hand this way and that and pulled something from the spine. He recognized a slate-gray Aspect disk. The woman took no notice of Toby though he must have popped up on her sensorium at this range. She slipped the disk into a pouch.
Another body lay only a few steps away. She made two of her fingers into probing and unlocking tools and slipped them expertly into the spinal ports of the body. This time she got two disks and a squa
re cartridge which Toby recalled could carry three Faces in Family Bishop. When the woman had them in her pouch, she stood up and looked directly at Toby.
“You got rights here?”
He stepped from behind the rustling maize. “No. You?”
“Sure. Salvage rights.”
“They your Family?”
“Who’s asking?”
“I’m Bishop.”
“I’m Banshee.”
Toby eyed her. “I never heard of any Banshees.”
“I never heard of Bishops. It’s a big esty.”
“Any use taking those Aspects?”
“Might be.”
“Suredead usually have Aspects sucked out of them.”
“Depends on how fast it was done.”
“Even if some’re left, won’t they be crazy?”
“Got to take that chance.”
“I heard they get all fried out some way.”
“They’re still worth something.”
“What you mean?” Toby edged a little to his right.
“Trim an Aspect down to a Face maybe.”
“Might be better to let them go.”
“That’s Banshee business.”
“How I know these are Banshee people?”
She looked at him square and hard. “You mind your own business.”
He stepped back. “Yeasay.”
“Yee-sah? Whuzzat?”
“Means I agree.”
Her lips turned up in a faint derisive smirk. “Your ‘yea’ rhymes with ‘see’ and your ‘say’ is like ‘ha’? Funny way to talk.”
“Yeasay, ma’m.”
He gave a half-salute and turned and walked away. Her sensorium played at his back and set off his micros all the way across the field and down into the stand of trees beyond.
He stopped then and let her lose interest. She kept moving among the bodies and doing her work. As he waited he thought about what to do. She scouted out away from him and then drifted back to the left as she searched.
He kept his sensorium on the lowest setting to track her and not give himself away. She was busy and had seemed nervous. He stayed behind a big warped brown tree. When she came back into view she was checking the last of the bodies and in a hurry.
He knocked her down with a stunner. She was quick and rolled as soon as she hit. He got off another bolt on lowest power and missed.
The other side of the big tree burst into flame. He saw her get to her feet and fire again but the shot went high. Through the air wrinkling from heat refraction he fired again.
She sat down solidly and rocked backward and struggled to bring her arms up. Her left hand was a weapon of some kind and it winked once. He felt the bolt go by and it was no stunner. His sensorium turned purple-red in warning. It could not defend him against a clean hit.
Without thinking but keeping his pull smooth he shot her twice more. They were medium-level stuns and this time she flopped over and did not get up.
He approached on the balls of his feet. She was sprawled out glassy-eyed. Carefully he bent down and took the pouch. It was heavy.
Her eyeballs followed him as he checked over her gear. One eyebrow twitched angrily.
“Banshee, yeasay?”
Her indices said she was something called Bahai. He fished an Aspect chip out of the pouch and pressed it against his wrist reader. The tiny hexagonal crystal there was cracked from some old accident but the optical pipe into his bone still worked. It told him that the Aspect was damaged and had been a woman in the Buddha Gathering, which he supposed was some kind of Family.
“You’re a scalp hunter.”
Her eyeballs clicked back and forth furiously. He thought about stimming her up so he could hear some more of her lies but she looked pretty quick even like this. And her gear was good. He did not even know what some of it did. She could be dangerous with just a finger or two free.
“I’ll be taking these.” He hefted the pouch. “Figured to sell them, yeasay?”
Her mouth was coming back a little and her lips twisted. It was interesting to watch. Then he thought about what she had been doing and the fun went out of it.
“I’ll give them to the first Family Buddha I find.”
He walked away fast. It was better that way, before he gave way to the temptation to make her pay a little more.
FIVE
The Sea of Sand
A long dark time came and the temperature dropped steadily. He was out of food now and there was little to forage. He met few people. The land wrenched and rippled and he was often sick with the gravitational turbulence.
In a desert region he came upon a man and a little girl. In the cold somehow the girl had in a moment of play frozen her tongue and upper lip to a pipe that was part of a ruined building. They were camping there. The man did not want to rip the flesh away and yet the girl was getting frantic, shaking from the pain. She crouched next to the pipe and whimpered. Her big eyes looked up at Toby and he had an idea. There was no water nearby. No fire going for fear of mechs. He explained to the man, who was her father. In the end the only quick way to do it was for the father to urinate on the girl’s lip to free it. This worked. The daughter said she could not even taste the urine either but Toby thought she was just being polite.
He went on along a sandy slope and could see a thickly wooded region beyond. He loped that way just as his sensorium wrinkled with the characteristic long hollow sound and the gray Wedge. The Mantis.
On the bare slumbering timestone he was fully exposed but he went through the usual measures. With a descending whisper his sensorium collapsed. He sprinted and wished for food.
The timestone trickled into pebbles and then rubble and finally long slopes of sand. It sucked at his boots as he wallowed through deep drifts. He went over one dune that came to a tip like a huge breast and then swept down. The slope came at him faster than he had judged and he nearly fell. Then it bottomed out and he trotted forward on a flat spot. But again sooner than seemed right the slope steepened. He struggled up it and the sand pulled at his legs as though trying to draw him under. The crest rushed at him.
For a moment he stood at the peak. Other dunes lay in long ridgelines. The sand became glassy in the distance and shimmered with small tremblings, like images seen through a heat haze. But the air was cold and getting colder.
His graphite-lubricated servos complained with a thin whine as they worked against the chill. His sensorium gave him not even the muted call-back of its lowest ebb. He got only a hollow, droning grayness.
He called for his Aspects and Faces. None answered.
The dunes were moving, he saw. Their long ridges marched slowly in from a curved horizon. He labored down the approaching slope and into the trough and up the next. The wave velocity helped his speed and in another few moments he stood atop the next crest but could see no farther. No sky above now, just empty speckled dark. A seething world of sand rippled by deep waves.
Though the massive undulations pressed into him through his boots the sand did not slide or crumble as it purred past. Tiny grains flowed around his boots and on, following the instructions of something below that rolled on without eddying behind him or otherwise taking note of his presence. Why he did not sink in such sand he could not tell. At the wave’s peak some sand broke into a churning tan foam and then subsided. Land like liquid.
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.
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