But there was something more, as well.

Something shadowy sat within him, a Me beyond sensing except as specter. It seemed to watch while eluding his inner gaze. Yet he could feel this brooding blankness informing his own sense of self.

This frightened him. He cast about for reassurance. There were sport and sex and spectacle, all unsatisfying. He probed deeper.

The ’Sembly’s religion—its teachings so varied as to be contradictory—somehow summoned forth that state of free going, while the conscious mind was deflected by prayers, liturgy, hymns, rituals, numbing repetition. One day in Chapel, bored to distraction, Paris tried engaging the skimpy bandwidth of language with a chant, cycling it endlessly in his mind. He found his Me set free; thus he invented meditation.

In adolescence he found a genuine talent for art. But his work was strange, transitory: ice carvings that melted, sand-sculptures held together by decaying electrostatic fields. He would write poetry with a stylus on pounded plant material, using vegetable pigments… and then rapturously watch them burn in a fire.

“Poignancy, immediacy,” he replied, when asked about his work. “That is the essence I seek.”

Few understood, but many flocked to see his strange works pass through the moments he allowed them to have.

Art seemed utterly natural to him. After all, he reasoned, far back in human history, on mythical Earth, there must have been some primate ancestor who saw in the stone’s flight a simple and graceful parabola, and so had a better chance of predicting where it would fall. That cousin would eat more often and presumably reproduce more as well. Neural wiring could reinforce this behavior by instilling a sense of genuine pleasure at the sight of an artful parabola.

He descended from that appreciative cousin. Though living 28,000 light-years from the dusty plains where art had emerged in genes, he was building on mental processing machinery finely tuned to that ancient place. While he shared a sense for the beauty of simplicity, though, something in him felt the poignancy of each passing moment. That was human, too, but something else in him felt this sense of the sliding moment as a contrast. He did not know why, but he did know that this set him apart.

This was his first fame, but not his last.

Quickly he saw that while the Me acted, society held the I accountable. The human social vow was I agree to take responsibility for my Me. On this he brooded.

He found love, as a young man, and felt it as an agreement: Lover, my Me accepts you. So as well did spirituality come from I know my Me, just as true courage came from I trust my Me.

Consciousness—bit-starved, ill-informed—was the brain’s model of itself, a simulation of a much more ornate under-Self.

To experience the world directly, with no editing—what a grail! He attained that state only now and then, and when in it, felt the shocking fullness of the true world. Language evaporated like a drop of water beneath the sun’s full glare. All he could do was point a finger and mutter, “That.”

Still riding behind his eyes was that phantom, the watcher who could not be watched. Yet it did not control. He felt it riding in him, and learned to ignore it.

Or rather, his I agreed abstractly to accept the watcher. His Me never did. But there was no way it could control a shadowy vacancy.

In dreams, his I could not control. In everyday life, he learned that his body could not lie; its bandwidth was too high, sending out data from his Me in an unconscious torrent. Conversely, with its small bit rate, the I could lie easily—in fact, could hardly avoid lying, at least by omission. But not his Me.

This made him into the leader he had no real desire to become. He was too busy learning more than anyone had ever known about what it meant to be human.

One evening, as he stood guard in a distant precinct at the outer edge of their holdings, he caught a mouse and tried to talk to it. Since they were both of flesh and had sprung from similar origins—this was an Earth rodent, imported by the original expeditions for reasons best known to themselves—he thought he should be able to commune with it. The mouse studied his face across an abyss of processing ability, and Paris could get nothing whatever from the creature on his sensorium.

Yet somehow he knew that within that tiny head lay deep similarities. Why could a communion not come from a mech? He wondered.

Amid such puzzles, life pressed upon him. The mechs had returned to Isis.

* * *

He met a Rattler while playing with some young men. They were chasing each other, carrying a ball, a game that called forth the hunting joys buried in the primordial past. So immersed they were that the Rattler got within a few hundred meters.

They were playing near the ruins of a huge Kubla left by the people who had claimed Isis millennia before, then left. Its pleasure dome still offered vibrant illusions if stimulated, and Paris thought the Rattler must be one of these when he first saw it—moving slinky-quick, armatures pivoting to focus upon the men.

The Rattler cut down six of them before Paris could reach his weapon, a long-bore kinetic rifle. It was hopelessly antique, but that was all they had to give the young men in training. He fired at the Rattler and even hit it but then a friend fell nearby and that distracted him. He had seen death, but not this way. He hesitated and by pure luck the Rattler did not kill him. A bolt from two others stilled the coiled thing. Paris knew he was of no use then and resolved to do better. The emotions that wrenched him as he helped carry the bodies away were like a fever, an illness that did not soon abate.

That was the beginning. You start out thinking that other people get killed, but not you, of course. The first time you are badly wounded the worst shock of it is not the physical one, but the sudden realization that death can come so easily, and to you.

It had taken a long time after that to know that nothing could happen to him that had not already happened to every generation before. They had done it and so could he. In a way, dying was the easiest of the hard things.

There was an inscription above the archway of a broad public plaza, one crowned with a transparent dome through which the whole mad swirl of the Galactic Center constantly churned, and he had written it down to keep it, for the strange joy it brought when he understood it:

By my troth, I care not: a man can die but once; we owe God a death… and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.

After a while he came to know that nothing happens until it actually comes to you, and you live your life up until then to get the most out of it. To live well, you had to live in each gliding moment. 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, was the vital secret. With it you could get through each second and on to the next without needless pain.

The Me learned this and the I accepted it.

THE HARVESTED

>They threw me in this pit of mech-waste, stuff like greasy packing fluff and I figured, sure as hell I can climb out of this.

>All around these mechs were gathered like it was a ritual and they hanged me upside down first, shooting me through the belly and watching the blood run out and down over my breasts and into my face so I could taste it, warm in the cold air.

>A whistling sharp by me and then a smack.