Around him Hatchet and Toby and the rest of the party were slowly reviving, shaking their heads, blinking, recovering.

Toby. Killeen got to his feet and unsteadily walked to where his son sat. Toby, head hung between his knees, gasping for breath.

“You okay?”

“I… think so. That place…”

“The islands? That ocean, with—”

“Naysay. I was in some sorta cave. Things crawling the walls. Real spooky…” Toby’s head snapped up, alert. “Not that I was scared.”

Killeen grinned. “Suresay, yeasay. Just a little show from the Mantis, it was.” He didn’t feel that way, his heart still raced, but there was no point in letting it roust them.

“It asked me lotsa questions. I didn’t understand ’em.”

“Forget all that.”

Toby stood up. “Let’s get outta here.”

Hatchet came over, looking disoriented. “Whatever that was, I think we—”

The scissoring sound made them all stop and turn. The Mantis appeared from around a nearby corner. Killeen watched it now without real fear. They were utterly in its control and he knew enough to simply bide his time.

The Mantis approached slowly, high and angular, tiptoeing through a series of sculptures. The nearest work was an immense human hand, cupped upward to hold Shibo. She climbed out of it, holding on to a huge lacquered fingernail and swinging down.

Was easier with you all in my world.

But you truer to selves in real-form.

From the reactions of the others Killeen could see that they, too, heard this in their sensoria. The Mantis had now learned how to penetrate the human net fully.

“Let’s go!” Cermo-the-Slow cried with bitter anguish.

Killeen wondered what Cermo had seen in his own private visit within the Mantis’s interior labyrinth. Each journey had been shaped for the individual, he guessed. The Mantis had certainly known how to trigger Killeen’s deepest emotions. For what dark purpose?

I have not finished.

Each must yield more.

I seek your inner senses.

Intensity is the prime element missing in my collection.

Around the humans dark sculptures began to stir with gravid life. Near Killeen a great eye opened, its lash like a huge fan. Yellow veins traced intricate patterns in the bluewhite iris. Tear ducts exuded globes of shimmering gray fluid.

It was as though the complex of human organs, here rendered separately grotesque, was responding to some summons. The monstrous eye batted its lash with a whispery whipping quickness. The pupil contracted and expanded like a pulsing, spherical heart.

The Mantis had atomized human experience and now wished to integrate it, through them.

And when it was done with them…

Killeen grabbed Toby’s arm. “Come on.”

They started away, threading among the huge working things. Killeen deliberately did not look at them. The high ceiling lamps gave little illumination here. The slug gishly moving parts were veiled in twilight, giving off rank odors that cut the air.

Questions remain.

I ask for help.

In return comes freedom.

“How can we believe that?” Killeen asked.

They did not slow. He glanced back and saw the others were stilled, heads turned as though listening. The arms of the Kingsman that were paralyzed back on the Crafter had regained their function. He lifted them trembling to his face. For each in the party there was some special, unguessable message.

The trust between intelligent beings.

This is all you have.

Or I.

Killeen shrugged this off and kept moving. Then, ahead, something stepped from the veiled shadow. It had been lurking there.

He had thought that the things he had seen on the glassy green sea were illusion. Now he wished they had been. The reality was worse.

The Fanny-thing stretched, muscles stringy and trembling. Its eyes flashed, liquid-quick. Circles of flaking corruption rimmed the stem where a mouth should be. Mucus clogged its sighing breath-hole beneath each shriveled breast.

“So you did make it,” Killeen said with quiet despair.

Actuality holds elements not found in any synthetic construct.

“This… No…”

Toby stepped backward, mouth an incredulous O.

Some categories of human experience are apparently not memory-stored in sufficient detail for myself to harvest. Thus I require that you mate. Your close connection with this female human promises to bring a high response function.

Killeen froze. “You don’t—you can’t—”

Your reaction in the trial was most surprising. Gratifyingly so.

“Trial?” Then the entire illusion of ocean and islands and Fanny had been a preparation for… this.

Many aspects of human response remain to be analyzed and expressed artistically. However, it has been my impression that the emotions of fear and lust parallel each other. Often fear induces lust shortly afterward. This can be understood as an evolutionary trigger function. Fear reminds you of your mortality, so in answer, lust ensures some fragmentary sense of immortality—though a pale shadow of the true lastingness to be found in our recording of your selves, of course. It is this dimension of fear/lust that I wish to study now.

Killeen got a steely grip on himself. The Fanny-thing shambled forward in its agonized way.

He had killed a sensorium-construct of this thing. In some sort of reply the Mantis had shattered the sensoriumimage of Toby. Was that a threat?

Killeen gritted his teeth. It was impossible to guess intentions. The Mantis had used the incident simply as information, one more icily abstracted data point. That was what they were to it. Masses of numbers and geometries, curved by the fragmented events that humans called lives, and that this Mantis viewed as mere interesting trajectories.

“You can’t understand how wrong you are,” Killeen said defiantly.

Toby’s voice came to him, a wavering note of disbelieving horror, “Dad… Dad… it’s not really … for… is it?”

“Not really.”

You refuse then?

I can make you.

I wish only data.

As the shambling thing came nearer in the quilted shadows Killeen saw that it was a decayed construct. Instead of Fanny’s sun-browned and wind-roughed skin, it had a mottled, purplish hide. Scabrous fungus ran from the great yawning nostrils below the breasts, a green scum that flowed down its left side to the heavy-socketed hip. The buds of each hand ended not in flesh but in a running shiny brown pustulance.

“It’s sick.”

Now the Mantis spoke directly, using Arthur’s voice:

Constructing the entire organism from purely mental information is difficult. Combining it with other lifeforms is the very height of the artistic frontier. Admittedly I may have made errors, unaccountable errors, in some details.

“Mighty big of you, admittin’ it.”

Some are stylistic choices, as well. But I believe you will find the production is quite fully human. I ask of you a mere few moments of coupling, to see if the powerful emotions engendered—

“No!”

Toby pulled at Killeen, speechless and terrified. The two backed away as the Fanny-thing advanced.

The eyes of the thing seemed to plead, to beckon. Killeen felt an ache rise from his diaphragm into his clenched chest.

Then Hatchet said at his elbow, “Listen, man, you gotta!”

Killeen turned, confused. “What… you don’t…”

Hatchet had come out of the shadows as if called. He gestured at the approaching figure. “You don’t, we can’t cut any kind deal.”

Hatchet’s voice was bland and factual. His eyes, though, burned with a fevered intensity.

“What did you do for it?” Toby demanded.

Hatchet curled his lip. “You never mind, boy. It asked me, I did. Took only a minute. Now I heard it ask you for a li’l somethin’, and you sayin’ no. So I come over. Seems you’re havin’ trouble.”