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.

“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—