Excretion, we know. Ingestion, we know. And all that lies between.

Killeen was startled when everyone in the party laughed, the sound rolling off the steely carapace of the lumbering Crafter. He was further delighted when the Mantis sent clipped, interrogating signals shooting like crimson streamers through their sensoria.

I see. You make those sounds. This appears to be a characteristic feature of your entire phylum.

Toby asked, “Fie what? That some name you got for us?”

You are the dreaming vertebrates. A curious subphylum, to be precise. And of course now quite rare. Some of my portions, which are themselves old almost beyond measure, can remember when there were many such as you.

Killeen glanced at Shibo.

You characteristically make this convulsive sound. Your programming manifests itself in this odd way.

“That’s laughing,” Shibo said.

A kind of… spice?

Killeen chuckled. He knew immediately that the Mantis could not extract what it meant to laugh at the world. “Well, maybe.”

Shibo asked, “Is your palate so flat?”

I see that it might be. Each of you makes the sound differently, in ways not fully explained by the differences in genetic construction of throats and acoustic strings. I cannot predict or even easily recognize the pattern. Perhaps this is significant

Shibo said, “You’re not getting it.”

Getting what?

“Whole point You laugh, you’re… you’re…” She stopped, stumped.

When you make that curious sound, a brief illumination shoots through you. It is a sensation I recognize, at least in part. Something beyond the press of time. It is as though you lived as we do, for that quick stuttering verbal exclamation, that flash. For that space you are immortal.

Killeen laughed.

TEN

They worked their way down through rutted valleys swarming with machines. The Mantis conducted them through a dense mechplex without seeming effort. It had the power to redirect the rushing traffic, deflecting inquiries.

Then they broke into open country. It was barren, as the mechs liked it. Everywhere Killeen saw signs of the eroding biosphere. Gray weeds clung to mottled hills. Once he sighted a mountainside being gnawed away by a horde of the midget mechs who had dropped on them from a Duster, long ago.

Killeen felt at peace with himself. No regrets about the killing of Hatchet plagued him and he did not wonder at that fact. It had been natural, a final drawing of the line between what was human and what was not. If the Mantis later killed him for it, there was little Killeen could do to alter that outcome. Even this prospect did not trouble him. He talked to the others, letting in the soft balm of human voices.

He began to recognize terrain. The landing field for the Duster was beyond the next ridgeline.

Denix was setting at their backs. The Eater furled its own radiance beyond the rolling hills. Wavering in the high air ahead were fibers of orange luminescence. Directly before them fresh traceries frenzied the air. Killeen puzzled, and then remembered.

“Look!” he called to Toby and Shibo.

The Mantis, riding its crescent-shaped platform on a nearby hill, had seen the disturbance, too. Killeen could feel its pale swift intricacy in his sensorium, focusing forward, eyeing the descending lights.

He made his voice blend both acoustics and electrotalk. Transduced by buried chips, his words sprang forth as croaked stabs at the air. “You! The one from the Eater!”

The air wrinkled. Clouds made spindly, spinning feelers.

Wind-whisperings nearly covered the faint sound when it came.

Summer lashings veil me. I can barely hear your effusions. Speak louder!

“How’s this?” Killeen gave all his voice to it, sending each word forth as a coarse, clipped wedge of electrosound.

Better. That is Killeen, no? I have sought you.

The Mantis said:

What manner of—ah!

Killeen was startled by the Mantis’s abrupt shutdown of transmission. It had fled.

“Sought me for what?”

The Crafter itself stopped, its engines spun down to silence. The humans still clung to it, watching the sky develop a web of shooting colors. Faint whistlings shot downward. Sparks marked the magnetic field lines. The threads twisted and focused, bending down through the deepening cobalt vault of sky.

Killeen could see the entire geomagnetic bubble that shrouded Snowglade. It hung like a jeweled spiderweb and the stars seemed motes trapped in it. Then it began to deform. Speckled strands crunched together, as though a giant hand were wadding pliant paper. Where the fields necked together, sapphire-smooth glories flickered.

Columns of dim radiance blew in from the depths of the gathering night sky. They forced the field lines closer still, making a magnetic bottleneck. There, the rolling, deep voice became stronger. It was as though the words came to him as spoken straight out of a spot among the stars.

I have searched long and wary for you.

Killeen shouted, his throat already getting hoarse, “Why?”

You truly are the locus termed Killeen? I must be sure.

“Read me,” he said. Killeen was curious if it could detect the lingering sour flavor of the Mantis in Killeen’s sensorium.

Ah—it is you. But something is changed.

“Yeasay, there’s—”

Humble greetings to the minister of magnitudes!

The jittery salute came so quickly Killeen could scarcely read it. The Mantis’s tone was different from anything he had ever heard.

I sense a machine mode?

Yes, and amply honored to receive you. I hope this does not bode for an early intersection of our world with the massless ones? That would, of course, be a summation and an honor as well. (Unintelligible.) With great respect, I believe we in the machine mode are not prepared for such an august presence to—

No no, nothing like that. When the time tor intersection and ascension comes, you shall be well advised. These matters are dealt with at higher levels, I presume you know?

Yes, of course! I did not venture to intrude upon the progressions and convergences of—

Then please us with your absence.

Oh! Yes!

Killeen felt the Mantis shrink into a fat knot of black confusion. It withdrew, cowed.

The amber-fluted voice rang down powerfully from a shadowed sky:

The motive entity which bade me deliver the earlier message—that inductance again wishes to speak to you.

Killeen blinked. “What…”

It cannot speak directly, but must drive its meaning through electroflux and arching currents. It lives far further into the Eater than do L.

“Where? Who?” How could anyone know him!

It dwells inside the time-confused sphere of the Eater itself. It has plunged beyond the accretion disk, lower still than where my own feet are anchored by thick traps of raging plasma. This entity has dark realm a message. And it compels ne to bring it forth to you, along the stretched and rubbery magnetic ropes which are my body and soul.

The humans around him all stared upward, mouths gaping. Killeen had lost his awe and was now frightened. If the energies which could crush the geomagnetic fields so casually should err, and sputter downward into lightning, they all would flare and crisp in an instant. And that was not unreasonable, since the being above was so clearly mad….