“Mantis said needed Crafter harvested,” Shibo answered.

Killeen nodded. The Mantis had penetrated each human’s sensorium, deciphered ways of talking to each of them separately. This had dawned on him as he staggered away from where he had killed Hatchet and the Fanny-thing. Apparently each human had undergone some encounter with the Mantis. Each had been shocked into pensive silence.

They left the strange place of carved, laminated land and surged across a flat tan plain. Mechs buzzed and flew everywhere. Kileen felt himself getting edgy again, his eyes shifting at each passing mech, hands aching to reach for a weapon.

Arthur’s cool voice came laden with the brittleness it had when in the possession of the Mantis:

No need for alarm. I have cleared the way.

The tones were distant, scrupulous. Arthur was crammed into a small compartment by an intruding personality of far greater heft and power.

The Mantis had made no mention of the killing. It had brought the Crafter with it and directed the humans to board, like any ordinary mech quickly cleaning up debris after a job was done.

Now the Mantis escorted them back toward Metropo lis. Its presence was pervasive. Dry and distant, it answered questions and gave orders.

From what the Mantis had implied, Killeen now saw how deeply they had been drawn in. The Crafter had all along been operating, without knowing it, under a safe umbrella cast by the Mantis. That was why the Crafter had been able to lead Hatchet into so many mech factories without getting caught.

The mech civilization was complicated. Separate fiefdoms regulated defense of the factories, so the Mantis could not ensure complete safety. Two humans had been lost to a new type of guard, developed by the factories to defend against just such Renegades as the Crafter.

A similar, adapted mech had attacked the Bishops in the Trough that night after Fanny died. The Mantis could not completely control the Marauders, could not stop the hunting of humans. On occasion it had to surekill humans itself, or else arouse suspicion.

Still, it had managed to conceal the Metropolis; the Crafter had spoken true about that. But the Crafter had never known that itself was a tool of another presence.

Now that strange intelligence carried the human party back to their enclave, a scruffy village that dared to call itself Metropolis. And Killeen had a good idea of how the Mantis would treat them henceforth: as pets. Clients. Raw material for its art.

“We’re going back on that Duster?” Killeen asked. He addressed the Mantis directly. The reply came in Arthur’s voice, but the Aspect was only a narrow funnel through which a far greater bulk forced and compressed itself. Killeen could sense Arthur struggling to translate. Often Arthur would simply blurt Unintelligible and skip on to what he could render into human terms.

Yes. I can use the traitor Crafter to transport you, but it must return for demolishment soon. (Unintelligible.) I could not disguise its penetration of the biological warren. Thus it must be sacrificed, broken to its constituent parts.

“Gone tear it down?”

A traitor must be rendered to infinitesimal oblivion. There is always the possibility that it has in some limited fashion made of itself an anthology mind, like me. If so, all portions of it must be consumed and obliterated. The price for insurrection is true death.

“It worked with you. You can’t save it?” The answer came rimmed with iceblue calm:

It was a lesser mind.

“So’re we.”

Just so. Still, you do not betray your kind.

“Crafter was just stayin’ alive.”

It did so in a manner against our precepts. That is the crucial distinction. (Unintelligible.) I discovered the Crafter some time ago and did not report it because I knew I could use it for higher purposes. That is the only moral reason to suffer such an aberrant mind. It wished to retain all its memories, personality, everything. That is not possible when an individual mind is subsumed into the mechmind. (Unintelligible.) A portion of the individual experience propagates, yes. A sense of selfness, yes. But not the whole. That would require storage space and complication without end.

He closeupped the horizon and saw a fast transport platform. There rode the Mantis.

It had tracked them this way ever since leaving the biological factories, keeping within transmission sight but at a remove. Killeen had the uneasy suspicion that the Mantis was covering its ass in some way. If they were intercepted by some higher-order mechs, the Mantis could get away, pretend innocence.

Killeen felt himself relax, the tightness in his muscles draining. Something in him made him say with a jaunty lilt he did not feel, “No mech heaven, huh?”

You attempt to make trivial that which is exalted. To be recycled into the hosting mind, and then propagated outward again in a specific mind and place—that is the most any consciousness could hope for, surely.

“Is it all you want?” Shibo asked.

Killeen blinked; he had imagined his conversation was private. Slowly, without making any sign, the Mantis was invading and integrating the responses of the humans.

I am of a different order. An anthology intelligence cannot be fully killed, since it is arrayed over the entire surface of this world. (Unintelligible.) Even a maximal thermonuclear blast could end only my elements on the illuminated face. My sense of self is kept by the phase-locked coherence of each locale, much as a net of antennae spread over an area can see as though it were one eye of that size. Yet it is not an eye at all. In a similar way, I am not a mind but the mind.

Killeen grinned. “You didn’t look so hot when Shibo ’n’ me, we blew you all to shot an’ scatteration. ’Member? Back when the Rooks ’n’ Bishops met?”

He was reasonably sure the Mantis would not let any of them live long, but a manic urge in him made him poke at the distant mech with gleeful malice.

I was prepared for that. I had recorded many of you and needed time to sort, to digest. So I transported all self-sense out of those parts, to another locale. In your terminology, you destroyed hardware, not software.

“Slowed you some, dinnit?” Shibo asked. Her lean face split with a sardonic smile. She had caught Killeen’s mood. They were all released from a dark compression. No matter what their fate, they would not be daunted.

True. Anthology minds pay such a price. We are accustomed to being unlocalized, however. That was why I could not fathom, at first, your feelings about my sculptures. I—indeed, all mechs—am used to being broken into parts, repaired, and reassembled. That is the natural way. I did not understand that for you mortal, organic intelligences, the iconography of the human body, rendered into parts, would be repulsive.

“Those things we ran into?” Killeen remembered the disembodied legs and arms, the hideous sculpture of human genitalia remorselessly working—

Indeed. I see the distinction now, one of those points which seems obvious only in retrospect. The sole time you see the inner workings of each other is when one is ill, malfunctioning, and must be opened. Or, of course, during decay. In either case the subject person is in pain, unconscious, or dead. Such occasions cast into the human mind sets of associations freighted with strong emotions. Negative ones, purely. None of us has realized this before. It is a profound discovery. (Unintelligible.) This is one of those valuable aspects which art can capture, giving us an enduring picture of the organic world.

“Don’t count on it,” Shibo said dryly. Killeen grinned.

What do you mean? I cannot read your—

Killeen said, “Those ’sculptures’ of yours? That isn’t humanity. It’s a horror show. A bunch of freaks. You don’t know shit about humanity.”