Paris found his voice. “They want to go. Listen.”
From the long axis that tapered away to infinity there rose a muttered, moaning, corpuscular symphony of anguish and defeat that in its accents and slurred cadences called forth the long corridor of ruin and affliction that was the lot of humanity here at Galactic Center, down through millennia.
He stood listening. Parts of his mind rustled—moving uneasily, understanding.
The Mantis sculptures got the most important facets profoundly wrong. The Mantis had tried to slice human sliding moments from the robed minds of the suredead, but it could not surecopy them: their essence lay in what was discarded from the billion-bit/second stream. In the mere passing twist and twinge of a second, humans truncated their universe with electrochemical knives.
Hot-hearted, to humans death was the mother of beauty. Their gods were, in the end, refracted ways of bearing the precarious gait of the mortal.
To Paris as a boy the compact equation eπ+1=0 had comprised a glimpse of the eternal music of reason, linking the most important constants in the whole of mathematical analysis, 0, 1, e, π, and i. To Paris the simple line was beautiful.
To a digitally filtered intelligence the analog glide of this relation would be different, not a glimpse of a vast and various landscape. Not better or worse, but irreducibly different.
That he could never convey to the Mantis.
Nor could he express his blood-deep rage, how deeply he hated the shadow that had dogged his life.
But his fury was wise in a way that mere anger is not. He surprised himself: he breathed slowly, easily, feeling nothing but a granite resolve.
Paris began killing the sculptures systematically. The others stood numbly and watched him, but their silence did not matter to him. He moved quickly, executing them with bolts, the work fixing him totally in the moment of it.
He did not notice the sobbing.
After a time he could not measure he saw that the others were doing the same, without discussion. No one talked at all.
The wails of the sculptured people reverberated, moist glad cries as they saw what was coming.
It took a long time.
The Mantis was waiting outside the Hall of Humans, as Paris had felt it would be.
I was unable to predict what you and the others did.
“Good.” His pencil ship lifted away from the long gray cylinder, now a mausoleum to madness.
I allowed it because those are finished pieces. Whereas you are a work in progress, perhaps my best.
“I’ve always had a weakness for compliments.”
He could feel his very blood changing, modulating oxygen and glucose from his body to feed his changing brain. The accretion disk churned below, a great lurid pinwheel grinding to an audience of densely packed stars.
Humor is another facet I have mastered.
“There’s a surprise.” Vectoring down, the boost pressing him back. “Very human, too. Everybody thinks he’s got a good sense of humor.”
I expect to learn much from you.
“Now?”
You are ripe. Your fresh, thoroughly human reactions to my art will be invaluable.
“If you let me live, you’ll get one or two centuries more experience when I finally die.”
That is true, for yours has been an enticingly rich one, so far. There are reasons to envy the human limitations.
“And now that I’ve seen your art, my life will be changed.”
Truly? It is that affective with you, a member of its own medium? How?
He had to handle this just right. “Work of such impact, it will take time for me to digest it.”
You use a chemical-processing metaphor. Precisely a human touch, incorporating the most inefficient portions of your being. Nonetheless, you point to a possible major benefit for me if you are allowed to live.
“I need time to absorb all this.”
He could feel his body’s energy reserve sacrificing itself in preparation for the uploading process. He had come to understand himself for the first time as he killed the others. Some part of him, the Me, knew it all now. The I spoke haltingly. “I think you have truly failed to understand.”
I can remedy that now.
“No, that’s exactly what you won’t. You can’t know us this way.”
I had a similar conversation with your father. He suggested that I invest myself in you.
“But you won’t get it just by slicing and dicing us.”
There is ample reason to believe that digital intelligences can fathom analog ones to any desired degree of accuracy.
“The thing about aliens is, they’re alien.”
He felt intruding into him the sliding fingers of a vast, cool intellect, a dissolving sea. Soon he would be an empty shell. Paris would become part of the Mantis in the blending across representations, in their hologram logics. He could feel his neuronal wiring transfiguring itself. And accelerated.
Art is everywhere in the cosmos. I particularly liked your ice sculptures, melting in the heat while audiences applauded. Your tapestry of dim senses and sharp pains and incomprehensible, nagging, emotional tones—I wish to attain that. An emergent property, quite impossible to predict.
“Never happen. You could understand this if you would allow me to fill out my natural life span.”
That is a telling point. I shall take a moment to ponder it. Meanwhile, cease your descent toward the accretion disk.
Here was the chance. The Mantis would withdraw to consult all portions, as an anthology intelligence. That would give him seconds to act. He accelerated powerfully down. “Take your time.”
For long moments he was alone with the hum of his tormented ship and the unfolding geysers outside, each storm bigger than a world.
I have returned. I have decided, and shall harvest you now.
“Sorry to hear that,” he said cheerfully. Dead men could afford pleasantries.
I wish you could tell me why you desired to end all my works. But then, shortly, I shall know.
“I don’t think you’ll ever understand.”
Paris took his ship down toward the disk, through harrowing, hissing plumes of plasma.
His I sensed great movements deep within his Me and despite the climbing tones of alarms in his ship, he relaxed.
Pressed hard by his climbing acceleration, he remembered all that he had seen and been, and bade it farewell.
You err in your trajectory.
“Nope.”
You had to live in each gliding moment. This mantra had worked for him and he needed it more now. Cowardice—the real thing, not momentary panic—came from inability to stop the imagination from working on each approaching possibility. To halt your imagining and live in the very moving second, with no past and no future—with that he knew he could get through each second and on to the next without needless pain.
Correct course! Your craft does not have the ability to endure the curvatures required, flying so near the disk. Your present path will take you too close—“To the end, I know. Whatever that means.”
His Arthur Aspect was shouting. He poked it back into its niche, calmed it, cut off its sensor link. No need to be cruel. Then Arthur spoke with a thin cry, echoing something Paris had thought long ago. The Aspect’s last salute:
If Mind brought humans forth from Matter, enabling the universe to comprehend itself to do its own homework—
“Then maybe that’s why we’re here,” Paris whispered to himself.
The only way to deprive the Mantis of knowledge no human should ever give up, was to erase that interior self, keep it from the consuming digital.
He skimmed along the whipped skin of doomed incandescence. Ahead lay the one place from which even the Mantis could not retrieve him, the most awful of all abysses, a sullen dot beckoning from far across the spreading ex- panse of golden luminance. Not even the Mantis could extract him from there.