<No. We engaged with a higher form, I am sure.>
“Oh yeasay? How high?”
<Our records are vague. But the connection took us to a higher plane of contemplation. More advanced than single-minded forms.>
Toby wasn’t sure what “advanced” might mean, and was not much impressed if it meant you were huge and had to clank around in a hard carapace and knock over things without noticing.
He had tried to shave in the mornings here but the water and soap had the fluid sucked out of them by the air before he was half through. Aridity squared, air like a sponge.
Breezes of thwarted gravity led them into a territory of demented vegetation. Corkscrew ferns twisted in tight loops all around them. Giant fronds feathered to catch the sporadic light of the distant esty walls.
<They respond to the esty weather,> Quath said. <A helix can better resist the shears and warps of changing gravity.>
Each corkscrew was a scaled-down woodland. Their helical sheets were veined in green and orange, concealing pockets and crevices packed with creatures who clicked and chattered and whistled, calling from the coiling complexity of the parent tree. For fun he tried to catch a mouse with wings and ended up with a skinned elbow, from snatching futilely at nothing but air.
He was eating some delicious purple fruit when he felt a twinge in his sensorium. Not much, just a wrinkle. Then a pale ghostly wedge shot through his senses. Blunt inspection. Not the earlier subtle sense of eyes just beyond view.
He looked up. Something long and tapered came gliding high up in the brassy sky.
He had felt such cool, remorseless force before.
Quath called, <Quick!> and was off, moving fast.
Toby followed. To watch Quath go up a slope was to see the job reduced to its essentials. They got under some dense trees. He was running and trying to identify the skittering sensorium traces when a massive boom hammered down through the forest.
It flattened them both. His sensorium rang. Limbs crashed nearby. Helical fronds rained down.
<Keep low. I shall spread a deceptive screen.>
“Mechs. They’re high up.”
<Some small figures. One large.>
“Damn!”
<Not mere reconnaissance, as with the bird.>
“Double dog damn!”
<It is ominous that the mechanicals have invaded the Lanes.>
“They must’ve broken in.”
<Yes, but why now? Observe their patterns. Clearly they are searching.>
“I remember some of these patterns and—” Something in his sensorium, coming fast.
<I am a disadvantage to you now. I am far easier to find.>
“Quath . . . It’s the Mantis.”
A long silence. Striations moved at the edge of his sensorium.
<I heard of this form from Killeen. A higher order of mech.>
“Dangerous as hell, too.”
The Mantis shape moved in a strange zigzag way. One moment it was shrinking, seeming to go further down the Lane—and next he caught its movement along a ridgeline nearby, half hidden by the glowing rock.
<Others.>
Smaller forms flitted among puffball clouds. One skimmed whispering over the canopy, veered, was gone.
“We thought we killed the Mantis back on Snowglade.”
<I wonder if the higher orders of mechs die at all.>
“We blew it to pieces with Argo’s exhaust!”
<We think of selves bound up in bodies. The mechs may not.>
“Well, slicing them up seemed to work pretty well.”
<Think of this manifestation, if you must, as a kind of cousin to the Mantis you knew.>
Toby laughed. “Mechs with relatives?” Family was so human; mechs had no need of the concept. “So you figure it’s coming here, snooping around . . .”
<I agree. This implies an unsettling revision of our ideas.>
