The higher phyla are noticing us.

“Coming damned fast, too.”

Plants harness only one percent of the energy falling upon them. Here photovoltaics capture ten percent, and evolution acting upon the mechs has improved even that. Admirable, in a way, I suppose—

“Give it to me compressed, not true-voice.” An Aspect always tried to expand his airing time.

Arthur sent a squirt of compacted ancient lore—Fusion fires, he said, inside the photovores digested the ruined carcasses of other machines. Exquisitely tuned, their innards yielded pure ingots of any alloy desired.

The ultimate resources here were mass and light. The photovores lived for light, and the sleek metallivore lived to eat them—or even better, the human ships, an exotic variant. It now gave gigahertz cries of joy as it plunged after them into the magnetic fields of the filament.

“These magnetic entities are intelligent?” he asked.

Yes, though not in the sense we short-term thinkers recognize. They are more like fitfully sleeping libraries. I have an idea. Their thinking processes are vulnerable.

“How?”

They trigger their thinking with electrodynamic potentials. We are irritating them, I am sure.

He saw the metallivore closing fast. Beyond it came the convoluted mech guardian ship, closing remorselessly.

The remaining human ships executed evasions—banks, swoops, all amid the pressing radiance from the disk-glare. Around them magnetic strands glowed like smoldering ivory.

The metal-seeker would ingest them with relish, but with its light-wings spread to bank it could not maneuver as swiftly as their sleek ships. Deftly they zoomed through magnetic entrails. The mech ship followed.

“How soon will these magnetic beings react?”

Soon, if experience is a guide. I advise that we clasp the metallivore now. Quickly!

“But don’t let him quite grab us?”

Arthur gave a staccato yes, its panic seeping into Paris’s mind. Accurate simulations had to fear for their lives.

The steel-gray metallivore skirted over them. Predators always had parasites, scavengers. Here and there on the metallivore’s polished skin were things like limpets and barnacles, lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow that fed on chance debris, purging the metallivore of unwanted elements—wreckage and dust which could jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.

It banked, trying to reach them along the magnetic strands, but the rubbery pressure of the field lines blunted its momentum.

He let it get closer, trying to judge the waltz of creatures in this bizarre ballroom of the sky: a dance to the pressure of photons. Light was the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supported the great spherical volume of hundreds of cubic light-years, a vast, vicious veldt.

He began receiving electrodynamic static. The buzzing washed out his comm with the other human ships, distant motes. The metallivore loomed. Pincers flexed forth from it.

The crackling jolt. Slow lightning arced along the magnetic filament, crisp lemony annihilation riding down.

“It’ll fry us!” Paris cried out. Arthur recovered some calm, saying,

We are minor players here. Larger conductors will draw this crackling fire.

Another jarring jolt. But then the metallivore arced and writhed and died in dancing, flaxen fire.

The magnetic filaments were slow to act, but muscular. Induction was sluggish but inescapable. Suddenly Paris saw Arthur’s idea.

As soon as the discharge had abated on the metallivore, the potentials sought another conducting surface, that with the greatest latent difference. The laws of electrodynamics applied to the bigger conductor, closing in—the guardian ship.

The guardian ship drew flashes of discharge, their jagged fingers dancing ruby-red and bile-green.

Calls of joy from the pencil-ships. The ornate shape coasted, dead. The larger surface areas of both metallivore and starship had intercepted the electrical circuitry of the filaments.

“I… you really did know what you were doing,” he said weakly.

Not actually. I was following my archived knowledge, but theory makes a dull blade. Though perhaps some scrap of my intuition does remain…

Paris could sense the Aspect’s wan pride. The human ships accelerated now, out of the gossamer filaments; there might be more bolts of high voltage.

Near the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the lashing weather there, whirled a curious blotchy gray cylinder.

There. Clearly a mech construct.

“The Hall of Humans,” he said, wondering how he knew.

THE COLLECTED

>I had this terrible dream and I woke up and it was real.

>Thousands of us there must be, all in this black flat place only it curves around above, I can see up there with my one eye, and the ceiling is filled with us, too, all planted in place.

>I’m all veins, big fat blue ones, no mouth but I want to eat all the time.

>My mother is here just a few meters away but I know her only by the sobbing, sounds just like her, and none of the rest of that thing is.

>I got my hand free and poked one of my eyes out so I didn’t have to look at it but they fixed the eyes, said it was part of the expressiveness of me, and now I have to look all the time, no eyelids and they never turn out the lights.

>It is not hot but it is Hell and we whisper to each other about that and about it being forever and ever, hallowed be thy Name, amen.

It was a place of chalk and blood, of diamond eyes and strident songs.

Paris and the eleven other survivors found the lock, broke in, and prowled the vast interior of the rotating cylinder. He passed by things he could not watch for long, searching for sense.

Plumes of scent, muddy voices, words like fevered birdcalls.

Some of them were no longer remotely human, but rather coiled tubes of waxy flesh. Others resembled moving lumps of buttery bile. A man stood on one hand, his belly an accordion-pleated bulge, and as he moved oval fissures opened all over him, wheezing forth a fine yellow mist, long words moaning out: “I… am… a holy… contri… vance…” and then a throttled gasp and “Help… me… be… what… I… am…”

A sewer smell came swarming up from nearby. A woman gazed directly back into his eyes. She said nothing but her skin ran with tinkling streams of urine. Nearby a little girl was a concert of ropy pink cords, red-rimmed where they all tried to speak.

The twelve spread out in a daze. Some recognized warped versions of people they had known. There were people here from far antiquity and places no one knew.

Paris found an entire aisle of shivering couples, entwined in sexual acts made possible by organs designed in ways nature never had allowed: sockets filled by slithering rods, beings which palped and stroked themselves to a hastening pace that rose to a jellied frenzy, shrieked from fresh mouths, and then abated, only to begin again with a building rhythm.

An Isis man was vomiting nearby. “We’ve got to save them,” he said when Paris went to help him.

“Yeasay,” a woman pilot agreed. The survivors were drifting back together, pressed by the enveloping horror.

A wretched nearby sculpture of guts that sprouted leaves managed to get out three words, “No… don’t… want…”

Paris felt the fear and excitement of the last few hours ebbing from him, replaced by a rising, firm feeling he could not force out through his throat. He shook his head. The woman started to argue, saying that they could take the cases that had been deformed the least, try to free them from the alterations.