No. A long time has elapsed since elements of me saw such work from your kind, but it is not unknown to us. The first of your phylum who came to the Center were not so skilled when they arrived. (Unintelligible.) They quickly learned some of our arts, however. You yourself encountered one of their duplications of a great work from your own far past, I believe.

“Whatsay? I don’t—”

I was tracking you at the time. You had an unfortunate encounter with a Marauder, class 11. I had been unable to dissuade it from attacking you. (As I noted before, I must work within my society’s contexts.) You took refuge in an artifact which we had preserved from that longpast event, when several of your phylum re-created the thing they called Taj Mahal. It was marked with the emblem of the human who led that party, a group now gone elsewhere in the Center.

Killeen remembered staring long and hard at that monument so he could place it in permanent storage. He called that up now and studied the artful curves, the solemn white glow of the stonework. Then he saw the square marker set in black. NW. So that stood for some forefather who had shaped and built as mechs did. “They made the Argo?”

No. They came well before the Chandeliers and were the first humans here at the Center. Later came other humans. The Argo, as nearly as we can glean from these surrounds, was the product of the early Citadel makers. They foresaw a time when your phylum might need a means of escape. They had witnessed our works towering in other parts of the Center and knew that time would bring us to occupy and shape Snowglade (as you call it) to higher purposes.

Killeen snorted. “Killin’ Snowglade’s a higher purpose?”

You must understand that my interest in you does not mean I believe your destiny is somehow on the level of ours. This, too, will be apparent to you as you learn more.

Killeen smiled without humor and said nothing.

He was learning to sense something of the complex interweaving states the Mantis possessed. It was a mistake, he knew, to believe that behind the Mantis’s words lay anything like emotion. Thing about aliens is, they’re alien, his father had said, and he would not forget it. Still, any feeling for what state the Mantis was in could be useful.

The Mantis was a faint presence on the edge of his sensorium when Killeen entered the Argo for the first time. Cermo-the-Slow and a Rook had made the first entrance and found nothing they could understand. Now micromechs crept stealthily into the Argo, trying to understand the ship.

From the Mantis Killeen picked up a chromatic shifting that seemed to correspond to anticipation, excitement, interest. He and Shibo prowled oval corridors dimly lit by red running lights. The Mantis could identify some modular sections from old mech records. Pieces of the Argo came from mechtech sculpted to human needs. Others had been shaped from ancient human designs, perhaps reflecting the technology which humanity brought to the Galactic Center long ago.

Killeen felt spurts of recognition from some of his oldest Aspects as he inspected the Argo. Old human technology brought warm memories welling up. Man was tied to his artifacts.

The Mantis commented:

Precisely. Often your works long outlive you. We, who propagate forward forever, do not tie any of our deep concerns to artifacts. They are passing tools, soon to be rubbish. This is one of the many intriguing distinctions between you and us.

When the Mantis spoke through his Arthur Aspect, Killeen had to guard against replying with more than a distracted assent. The Mantis was a thin wedge driven into Arthur, and might pick up Killeen’s own protected thoughts. Deception was difficult.

He was aided, though, by his other Aspects. The Mantis had not co-opted them. Their pleased chatter as the Argo’s mysteries unfolded served to mask Killeen’s more canny, assessing thoughts.

The Aspects’ muted cries would once have plucked at his attention, diverting him. Now he found he could suppress them to mere shadowy flickers on the wall of his mind. He had learned that in the Aspect storm. To his surprise, he now suffered no stark dreams when he slept, or had to struggle to smother his Aspects and Faces when he awoke. They still rode far back in him, though, and came quickly when summoned. He had only occasional glimmerings of the way they had struck at him in the storm. The waves that had broken over him, a biting acrid fluid of squirming bugs and spiders—that image he could swiftly force down.

Yet it came back to him in an oddly different way as he moved through the murky passages of the Argo. Micromechs scrambled everywhere. Their insect energy inspected and checked and fixed the long-dormant mechanisms of the slumbering craft. They seemed like waves washing over the carcass of a deep-sea beast, now beached and forlorn.

Yet the Argo stirred. He could feel at the tapering fringes of his own sensorium a skittering, bright presence. The Argo’s inner networks were reviving.

Laboring mech squadrons flowed like dark streams around the pebble that was the small human camp. There were many varieties of mech which humans had never seen before. Tubular forms, blocky things, splotchy as semblages with razor-sharp tools. Somehow these methodical machines knew to avoid humans and gave their open fires and tents wide berth.

In all, slightly more than a hundred people had come on the long trip to the Argo site. Mostly Bishops and Rooks, they had been frightened by the Duster that had flown them and the commandeered Rattler that had brought them here from the landing field. The Mantis had been the first startling encounter for them, when it met them beyond the hills that ringed Metropolis. But perhaps because of the prior presence of the Mantis in their sensoria, they got used to its assemblage of pipes and nodules.

Still, the motley collection of humans needed constant reassurance. Killeen found this irksome. People continually peppered him with questions whenever he returned from the Argo site to their camp.

What was that gas that had enclosed the ship, the one that made you talk funny if you inhaled some of it? (Helium, Arthur informed him. An inert protection against rust.)

Why was the Mantis getting bigger? (It added components to direct the swelling mech crews.)

Why was it so cold here? (They were nearer the northern pole. But Metropolis would eventually feel such bite, as the mech changes progressed.)

Food was running short; couldn’t the mechs hurry? (Making a centuries-dead ship work again took time. And Killeen would ask the Mantis to have some mechmade food brought in. Not tasty, but filling.)

Why was the manmech coming with them? (Left behind, far from its work site, it would be run down by a Marauder. It carried some fragment of the old human ways. And it wanted to come.)

He was glad Fornax and Ledroff had declined to go. Having either along would make this impossible. Both men had listened to Killeen’s proposal and had promised to ponder it overnight. But in the morning retreat had lined their drawn faces. As the three of them had spoken, the two Cap’ns had eyed him with new recognition. Speaking softly, not rushing things, Killeen had bargained for the people who wanted to go and see what the Argo was.

So the time had come three days later when the long column wound out of Metropolis. They might all return, of course. There was no guarantee that the Argo even existed anymore or that it would work. They had only the map of the manmech to guide them. But a hundred-strong they gambled.

Ledroff had stayed with the remaining Bishops. Already he was more occupied with maneuvering against Fornax, to become Cap’n of the entire Metropolis. But neither Cap’n was strong enough yet to stop the party that wanted to go to the Argo and so they had stood and watched, blank-faced.