The three humans stared at one another, startled.

The manmech spun again, rattling and churning. “Ruff! I stand ready! Ruff. Message ends! Ruff!”

He had no warning. The attack came as he walked back into Metropolis with Shibo and Toby. They were talking to the manmech, which ground along on noisy, grating treads.

Toby chattered at his side, eyes alive with bright visions.

In a distracted moment, Killeen’s own Aspects struck at him.

He wavered, stumbled, and fell in what felt to him to be a pinwheel dive forward into a thin patch of aromatic grass.

A tide rushed in him. All his Aspects and Faces yammered at once. Quick hot spikes of protest shot up from an undercurrent of low moaning fear.

It was a chorus that swelled into a lifting, surging wave. Each voice lapped over others. They invaded his arms, legs, and chest with icy rivulets. His muscles jerked. The hammering shouts coursed through his veins and struck coldly into his tightening gut. He opened his mouth to cry out and they jammed that, too, lockjawing his aching hinge joints.

They had seen what he was thinking.

Aspects and Faces were old, conservative, wedded to Snowglade.

A wave of shrill fear broke through him. His heels drummed against the grass. Milky white flooded his eyes, blotting out Toby and Shibo, who were reaching for him, their mouths moving soundlessly like fish behind glass. Killeen fought against the swelling ancestral yammering.

He tried to slip away from them, escape down into his sensorium. They followed everywhere, striking chilly spikes into the crevices where he fled.

Don’t risk us! a dozen voices cried. Never leave the homeworld!

He writhed. He felt his body only distantly, through a narrow gray tunnel. His feet and hands scrabbled at the soil. These came as slow percussions, as though he was numbed by creeping cold.

And still the high-pitched babble washed through him. Burnt-yellow anxiety spurted, yowling. Below it groaned a mad bass undercurrent of foreboding.

Coward! Do not flee!

The shouts came to him through watery light.

Rebuild the sacred Citadels. The Holy Clauses demand it!

Killeen struggled against a downsucking wave of anger. He was drowning in a sea of insects.

They splashed against him and crawled into his nostrils. Tiny shouts plucked at his skin. Pincers stung his flesh. He tried to breathe and inhaled a tickling, tinkling chorus.

Fool! Ingrate!

Traitor you are!

Centuries labored we here. Dare flee it now? Think not of us?

We belong here. Snowglade is humanity’s true home.

Run now you would with tail between legs? Coward!

He felt himself weakening.

Tiny feelers plunged through his sinuses. Antennae choked him.

His lungs filled with a black army.

Then his furiously kicking heels nicked something solid.

The waters were a living mass of tiny scrabbling legs.

He rolled in a crashing insect wave. He struggled for air and his legs sought the firm rock beneath.

Caught it again.

Pushed down. Stood.

Wriggling masses lapped at him.

Plucked at his skin.

Swarmed and cried and splashed.

He was standing in the wash of a pounding storm that blew in from far offshore. The waves of tiny voracious minds came steadily, shouting at him, licking mouths in every droplet. Moist tongues lashed at him. But he dug in his heels and the next wave did not overpower him. He fought against the swirling currents. Then the riptide tried to draw him away, tugging at his feet.

If he had been standing on sand, the rushing insect waters could have undermined him, cut away his footing.

But it was rock. Hard and solemn stone.

And it carried the stiff, brittle feel of the Mantis.

He backed toward the shore, always keeping his eye on the incoming toppling combers of mad mouths. They sucked at him with bloody lips. He stepped carefully, always gripping the rock with his toes, feeling his way, the stone his true anchor.

The currents lashed and fought and then finally ebbed. He struggled ashore against a strong tide. Then he puffed and coughed, spitting out the motes, blowing his nose clear of sticky mucus. As the slimy stuff struck the rocks it cried out sharply in vain tenor despair.

Cool droplets of tiny biting pincers oozed down his legs and puddled on the crisp warm sand. He shook the screaming insect minds from his hair, cricked them forth from the corners of his eyes. Their wails dwindled.

He looked at a yellow glow high up the sky. It dried him.

Then he was staring faceup into slanting blades of pale pure Denixlight.

Shibo said, “He’s blinking. Are you… ?”

“Yeasay. I’m here.”

“Aspect storm?”

“Yeasay. I… something…”

He felt the solid stone still pressing against his heels. He glanced at the circle of anxious faces peering down at him.

“It was… the Mantis,” discovering this and saying it in the same instant. “It came, gave me a standing place. Leverage. So I could fight them down.”

“Mantis?” Shibo asked wonderingly.

He was still panting and the air cut clear into his lungs. Memories of the horde seeped away. “It… knows about… what it calls ’sentient information.’ Can keep subsystems… Aspects… in line.”

“You can stand?”

“It did somethin’ more, too. When the Aspects opened up, the Mantis could reach them. And farther in, too. Undid some stuff I got in there. I can feel it… different.”

“You need rest.” Shibo wiped his brow with a cloth and he was surprised to see it come away sopping wet.

“The Aspects, they… saw what I was thinking.”

Shibo frowned. “Did Mantis?”

“Don’t think it had time.”

“You think there’s… hope?”

“Yeasay.”

Shibo’s face of planes and angles showed relief and lingering puzzlement.

I can solve that puzzle, he thought. The abrupt idea seemed both odd and yet certainly right, obvious.

Then Toby was hugging him and sobbing with long-stored tears that seemed to patter down on Killeen from the limitless sky. Arms wrapped around him. Hands helped him up. The manmech barked. They crowded around, talking and patting and asking.

TWELVE

There was not much time to rest before the Witnessing. Killeen lay for a while thinking and then people came knocking tentatively at the door of his hut.

They were Bishops. Killeen talked to them in turn, not being too specific but telling them the outlines of what he had learned. He spoke calmly and with assurance, feeling a certainty he never had before.

But not true assurance, he reminded himself. When he momentarily wondered what to say, he would ask himself what Fanny would have done. Often he was not sure but he got through the difficult points somehow.

He could see in the faces of the other Bishops a surprise that evolved into interest and then agreement. A grudging agreement for some of them, but he sensed that it would stick. As word had spread about the Mantis, about Hatchet and what the man had been doing, everyone in the Families was sobered. Some Rooks came by, too.

After they had eaten some baked sharproot, Shibo and Toby and Killeen went for another walk around Metropolis, just exercising the boy’s legs. They left the manmech sitting inert, its solar panels repowering. Killeen was afraid the Mantis could interrogate it from a distance if it was running normally. The information about the Argo was best kept secret for a while longer.