>The suet wasn’t so bad but drowning in mucus was and when I coughed and it came out through my mouth tasting like something that rotted down there in me.
>After my skin blistered up black and brown and peeled back the chill set in on the skin below it and ran like scorching oil all over me.
>I screamed but this thing with lots of legs would not stop.
He met the Mantis while on patrol, alone.
It was a glimmering thing, a play upon the planes of rock against a distant hillside. To see it meant looking past the illusions it projected. He could taste and smell it better than see it. Since he was on a routine transport job, alone with some simple ’bots, he was not well armed.
Paris stood absolutely still and felt it glide closer. No point in running.
Clan legend told of such a seldom-seen mech class, striding down through a corridor of ruin, broken lives and widespread suredeath, with tales of phantoms glimpsed as many-legged silhouettes scrambling across shadowy horizons, a tradition bequeathed to all the human Families and ’Semblies of horror, ghostly and undeniable, millennia of desiccated Aspect memories and encounters which few survived.
I ask entrance. You echo of some essence I fathom from a far past. Do you recognize me?
“No.” Though something buzzed and stirred at the back of his mind, his fear froze it. Then his training asserted itself and he felt rising in his chest a cold anger. He estimated how easily he might damage this thing. It refracted his sensorium’s interrogations, sending back to him hard claps and images of refracted icy layers.
You have a quick and savory life, here in the wild. Your primate form is sculpted from a longer logic than I customarily encounter.
Paris caught a fragment of a many-legged image moving rapidly at the base of distant hills. Carefully he calibrated the distance.
Your phylum of laughing, dreaming vertebrates is capable of manifold surprises. You are an especially complex example of this; you have harvested many of these facets. I look forward to reaping and reviewing them.
“From me?”
Of course. You… do not know?
“Know what?” The Mantis had paused, which in an entity of such vast computing power implied much.
I see. We, who propagate forward forever, though in mixed forms, do not share your concern for artifacts. Though they seem permanent to you, I have already outlasted mountain ranges. Artifacts are passing tools, soon to be rubbish.
“Just like me?”
In your way, yes. So you do intuit…?
Paris felt in the Mantis’s slow question some hint, but abruptly a part of him swerved from that line of thought. No, he would not go that way.
Instead he locked his sole weapon on the last vector-signature of the Mantis and fired off a swift burst. The Mantis flickered and was gone.
We shall merge in time, vessel.
Seconds ticked by. Not a sign wrinkled his sensorium. No retaliation.
The rattle of the salvo had soaked through him, enormously gratifying. His heart pounded. Something in him loved the release of action, while another seethed with unease. He felt an exhilaration at having veered away from a confusion his Me did not wish to confront. And what had the Mantis meant by that last transmission?
He moved away quickly, fear and pride somehow eclipsing the moment, and he seldom thought of it ever again.
Other Families and ’Semblies had come to Isis, strengthening this planetary redoubt. But in the fast pace of events at Galactic Center, great changes came even over the comparativeiy tiny life span of three centuries enjoyed by humans. Mechs lasted millennia and planned accordingly. Nanomechs still harried the people of Isis. Their Citadels were hard-hammered by the drawing dry climate of prickly dust storms, laden with nanos borne on the restless winds.
Against the salting of the Isis atmosphere they mounted considerable space-based defenses. No mech could drop an asteroid on Isis, no ship could easily penetrate its magnetosphere. Paris volunteered for training in these military arts. He loved weightless glee, the play of hard dynamics, of Newtonian glides in a friction-free void.
Isis beckoned with its dry beauties. At the dawn line, arid valleys lay sunk in darkness while snowy mountains gleamed above, crowned by clouds that glowed red-orange like live coals. Mountaintops cleaved the sheets of clouds, leaving a wake like that of a ship. Brooding thunderheads, lit by lightning flashes, recalled the blooming buds of white roses.
The glories of humanity were just as striking. The shining constellations of Citadels at night lay enmeshed in a glittering web of highways. His heart filled with pride at human accomplishments—beaten down, perhaps, but still casting spacious designs upon whole planets. So much done, in the mere century of his life! He had helped shape artificial seas and elliptical water basins, great squared plains of cultivated fields, immaculate order hard-won from dry valleys.
By then he had found a wife who loved him despite his strangeness, his need for solitude and silence. He had children of his own, but they showed no interest in art. Their children had children, and Paris sensed their continuity with him. Yet something rode in him he could not name, for it seethed on the billion-bit flow beneath the well-lit theatre of his conscious mind.
He helped the burgeoning space fleet secure a wormhole for their sun-system. This one had been discovered in a murky molecular cloud that came coasting by the Isis star many centuries before. Hauling it closer consumed two decades of Paris’s life, but he gave them freely. A worm-hole mouth opened to humanity a fresh grasp. Until then, only mechs had employed them.
His labors were well timed.
After many decades of the full experience of the ’Sembly, after creating an amazing body of his strange short-lived artwork, the skies blazed once more with constructs the size of moons.
More vast mechs arrived, ready to break down all seven planets in this solar system, all for raw materials to aid their great Constructions. A faction urged diplomacy. Some other ’Sembly members struggled to complete a vessel to take them away, before the mechs got around to disassembling their planet out from under them.
Paris opposed this. Instead, he urged the ’Sembly to strike back. “Destroy something they value!” he shouted. “Only then will they respect us enough to listen.”
But even as he said it, he knew that something different brewed in him.
The shadowy presence that had sat beyond view of his inner self now moved with sluggish purpose. Into his mind flashed the coordinates and routes necessary to take a desperate band of pilots within reach of the great accretion disk at True Center. The data-flow was a torrent, thick and fast and coming from a source he could not clearly sense. Perhaps a deep-carried Aspect? But no, another portion of himself denied it. What, then?
He chuckled ruefully to release the tension such thoughts brought, and for a darting moment saw himself down a long telescoping tunnel of immense perspective, glimpsing himself as a member of a phylum—that of the laughing, dreaming vertebrates.
THE COLLECTED
>The thing with plenty legs, it said I was a monument to my kind.
>There was a team of five of the little ones and a big one with funny legs and they cut me up slowly to see.
>My mother was there with parts of animals growing out of her and when I tried to get to her they did that to me, too.
>I was kept in my fighting suit like being laid to rest only there were these maggots that kept bursting out from puckers in my skin and crawling all over me.