“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.