Ahmihi knew this Mantis was of some higher order, beyond anything his ’Sembly had seen. To it, their lives were fragmented events curved into… what? So the Mantis thought of itself as an artist, studying human trajectories with ballistic precision.

He thought rapidly. The Mantis had some cold and bloodless passion for diseased art. Accept that and move on. How could he use this?

You share with others (who came from primordial forces) a grave limitation: you cannot redesign yourselves at will. True, you carry some dignity, since you express the underlying First Laws. Still, you express in hardware what properly belongs in software. An unfortunate inheritance. Still, it provides ground for aesthetic truths.

“If your kind would just leave us alone—”

Surely you know that competition for resources, here at the most energetic realm of the galaxy, must be… significant. My kind too suffers from its own drive to persist, to expand.

“If you’d showed up when we had full Chandelier strength, you’d be lying in pieces by now.”

I would not be so foolish. In any case, you cannot destroy an anthology intelligence. My true seat of intelligence is dispersed. My aesthetic sense, primary in this immediate manifestation, still lodges strongly in the Hall of Humans that I have constructed light-years away. You visited it just now.

“Where?” He had to keep this angular thing of ceramic and carbon steel occupied. His people could still slip away—

Quite near the True Center and its Disk Engine. You shall visit it again in due time if you are fortunate and I select you for preservation.

“As suredead?”

I find you primates an entrancing medium.

“Why don’t you just keep us alive and talk to us?”

He was sorry he had asked the question, for instantly, from the floor below, the Mantis made a corpse rise. It was Leona, a mother of three who had fought with the men, and now had a trembling, bony body blackened by Borer weaponry.

You are a fragile medium—pay witness. I do know how to express through you, though it is a noise-thickened method. Inevitably you die of it. But if you prefer—

She teetered on broken legs and peered up at him. Her mouth shaped words that whistled out on separate exhalations, like a bellows worked by an unseen hand.

“I find this… overly hard-wired… medium is… constrained sufficiently… to yield… fresh insights.”

“My God, kill her.” He thrashed against the pincers that held him aloft.

“I am… dead as… a human… But I remain… a medium.”

He looked away from Leona. “Don’t you have any sense of what she’s going through?”

My level does not perceive pain as you know it. At best, we feel irreducible contradiction of internal states.

“Wow, that must be tough.”

Working her like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Mantis made Leona cavort below, singing and dancing at a hideous heel-drumming pace, her shattered bones poking through legs caked with dried brown blood. Fluids leaked from the punctured chest.

“Damn it, just talk through my sensorium. Let her go!”

My communicative mode is part of the craft I create. Patterns of fear, of hatred; your flood of electrical impulses and brain chemicals that signifies hopelessness or rebellion: all part of the virtuosity of the passing mortal moment.

“Sorry I can’t seem to appreciate it. Leona… she’s sure-dead?”

“Yes… This one… has been… fully recorded…” Leona wheezed, “I have… harvested her… joyously.” “This way… she’s hideous.”

As this revived form, I can see your point. But with suitable reworking, hidden elements may emerge. Perhaps after my culling among the harvested, I shall add her to my collected ones. She has thematic possibilities.

Ahmihi shook his head to clear it. His muscles trembled from being held suspended and from something more, a strange sick fear. “She doesn’t deserve this.”

Yet I feel something missing in my compositions, those you saw in the Hall of Humans. What do you think of them?

He fought down the impulse to laugh, then wondered if he was close to hysteria. “Those were artworks? You want art criticism from me? Now?”

Leona gasped. “I sense… I have… missed essentials… The beauty… is seeping… from my… works.”

“Beauty’s not the sort of thing that gets used up.”

“Even through… the tiny… grimed window… of your sensorium… you sense… a world-set… I do not. Apparently… there is… something gained… by such… blunt… limitations.”

Which way was this going? He had a faint glimmering. “What’s the problem?”

“I sense… far more… yet do not… share your… filters.”

“You know too much?” He wondered if he could get a shot at Leona, stop this. No human tech could salvage a mind that was suredead, “harvested” by the mechs—though why mechs wanted human minds, no one knew. Until now. Ahmihi had heard legends of the Mantis and its interest in humans, but not of any Hall of Humans.

“I have… invaded nervous… systems… driven them to… insanity, suicide.” Leona twitched, stumbled, sprawled. Her eyes goggled at the vault above, drifted to peer into Ahmihi’s. “Not the… whole canvas… something… missing.”

He tried to reach a beam tube and failed. The Chandelier’s phosphor lights were dimming, shadowing Leona.

With obvious pain she struggled to her feet. “I tried Ephemerals… so difficult… to grasp.”

Ahmihi thought desperately. “Look, you have to be us.”

For the first time in this eerie discussion the Mantis paused. It let Leona crumple on the floor below, a rag doll tossed aside.

That is a useful suggestion. To truncate my selves into one narrow compass, unable to escape. Yes.

Ahmihi felt a sudden pressure, like a wall of flinty resolve, course through his sensorium. He had no hope that he would live more than a few moments longer, but still, the hard dry coldness of it filled him with despair.

THE HARVESTED

>I had come around the corner and there it was, more like a piece of furniture than a mech, and it poked something at me.

>The last thing I saw was a ’bot we used for ore hauling, tumbling over and over like something had blown it, and I thought, I’m okay because I’m behind this stressed glass.

>I still got the memory of something hard and blue in my line of sight, a color I’d never seen before.

>She fell down and I stooped to help her up and saw she had no head and the thing that was holding her head on the floor jumped up at me, too.

>lt had a kind of ceramic tread that came around on me when I thought it was dead, booby-trapped some way, I guess, and it caught me in the side like a conveyor belt.

The Noachian ’Sembly fled the mech plunder of their Chandelier. Their Exec, Ahmihi, had emerged from his capture by the Mantis with a sensorium that howled with discord. Each neurological node of his body vibrated in a different pattern. His voice rang like a stone in a bucket. It was as if the symphony of his body had a deranged conductor.

But within hours he recovered. He would never speak of the experience with the Mantis. He led his ’Sembly into craft damaged but serviceable. The mechs did not attack as over three hundred escaped the drifting hulk their once glorious spin-city had become.

This was one of the last routs of the Chandelier Age. After these defeats, humanity fled deep space for the nostalgic refuge of planets. This was in the end foolish, for the Galactic Center is unkind to the making and tending of worlds. There, within a single cubic light-year, a million suns glow. Glancing near-collisions between stars can strip the planets from a star within a few million years. Only worlds carefully stabilized can persist. Even then, they suffer weathering unknown in the calm outer precincts of the great spiral galaxy.