He stopped then and let her lose interest. She kept moving among the bodies and doing her work. As he waited he thought about what to do. She scouted out away from him and then drifted back to the left as she searched.
He kept his sensorium on the lowest setting to track her and not give himself away. She was busy and had seemed nervous. He stayed behind a big warped brown tree. When she came back into view she was checking the last of the bodies and in a hurry.
He knocked her down with a stunner. She was quick and rolled as soon as she hit. He got off another bolt on lowest power and missed.
The other side of the big tree burst into flame. He saw her get to her feet and fire again but the shot went high. Through the air wrinkling from heat refraction he fired again.
She sat down solidly and rocked backward and struggled to bring her arms up. Her left hand was a weapon of some kind and it winked once. He felt the bolt go by and it was no stunner. His sensorium turned purple-red in warning. It could not defend him against a clean hit.
Without thinking but keeping his pull smooth he shot her twice more. They were medium-level stuns and this time she flopped over and did not get up.
He approached on the balls of his feet. She was sprawled out glassy-eyed. Carefully he bent down and took the pouch. It was heavy.
Her eyeballs followed him as he checked over her gear. One eyebrow twitched angrily.
“Banshee, yeasay?”
Her indices said she was something called Bahai. He fished an Aspect chip out of the pouch and pressed it against his wrist reader. The tiny hexagonal crystal there was cracked from some old accident but the optical pipe into his bone still worked. It told him that the Aspect was damaged and had been a woman in the Buddha Gathering, which he supposed was some kind of Family.
“You’re a scalp hunter.”
Her eyeballs clicked back and forth furiously. He thought about stimming her up so he could hear some more of her lies but she looked pretty quick even like this. And her gear was good. He did not even know what some of it did. She could be dangerous with just a finger or two free.
“I’ll be taking these.” He hefted the pouch. “Figured to sell them, yeasay?”
Her mouth was coming back a little and her lips twisted. It was interesting to watch. Then he thought about what she had been doing and the fun went out of it.
“I’ll give them to the first Family Buddha I find.”
He walked away fast. It was better that way, before he gave way to the temptation to make her pay a little more.
FIVE
The Sea of Sand
A long dark time came and the temperature dropped steadily. He was out of food now and there was little to forage. He met few people. The land wrenched and rippled and he was often sick with the gravitational turbulence.
In a desert region he came upon a man and a little girl. In the cold somehow the girl had in a moment of play frozen her tongue and upper lip to a pipe that was part of a ruined building. They were camping there. The man did not want to rip the flesh away and yet the girl was getting frantic, shaking from the pain. She crouched next to the pipe and whimpered. Her big eyes looked up at Toby and he had an idea. There was no water nearby. No fire going for fear of mechs. He explained to the man, who was her father. In the end the only quick way to do it was for the father to urinate on the girl’s lip to free it. This worked. The daughter said she could not even taste the urine either but Toby thought she was just being polite.
He went on along a sandy slope and could see a thickly wooded region beyond. He loped that way just as his sensorium wrinkled with the characteristic long hollow sound and the gray Wedge. The Mantis.
On the bare slumbering timestone he was fully exposed but he went through the usual measures. With a descending whisper his sensorium collapsed. He sprinted and wished for food.
The timestone trickled into pebbles and then rubble and finally long slopes of sand. It sucked at his boots as he wallowed through deep drifts. He went over one dune that came to a tip like a huge breast and then swept down. The slope came at him faster than he had judged and he nearly fell. Then it bottomed out and he trotted forward on a flat spot. But again sooner than seemed right the slope steepened. He struggled up it and the sand pulled at his legs as though trying to draw him under. The crest rushed at him.
For a moment he stood at the peak. Other dunes lay in long ridgelines. The sand became glassy in the distance and shimmered with small tremblings, like images seen through a heat haze. But the air was cold and getting colder.
His graphite-lubricated servos complained with a thin whine as they worked against the chill. His sensorium gave him not even the muted call-back of its lowest ebb. He got only a hollow, droning grayness.
He called for his Aspects and Faces. None answered.
The dunes were moving, he saw. Their long ridges marched slowly in from a curved horizon. He labored down the approaching slope and into the trough and up the next. The wave velocity helped his speed and in another few moments he stood atop the next crest but could see no farther. No sky above now, just empty speckled dark. A seething world of sand rippled by deep waves.
Though the massive undulations pressed into him through his boots the sand did not slide or crumble as it purred past. Tiny grains flowed around his boots and on, following the instructions of something below that rolled on without eddying behind him or otherwise taking note of his presence. Why he did not sink in such sand he could not tell. At the wave’s peak some sand broke into a churning tan foam and then subsided. Land like liquid.
On the next wave coming toward him was a patch of white. Long strides took him down the near slope and into the trough. He started up toward the white patch, which looked larger than before—
And stopped. Turned and ran back toward the trough.
The white patch was a garden of bones.
Bleached fingers and feet at the edge. Snapped forearms farther up, leading to ranks of smashed pelvises. Thighs arranged in spreading fans around barrel rib cages. A short tower of arms and atop it a circle of bleached human skulls. Grins that would last forever. Staring eye sockets.
Over the crest of the wave came a moving network of spindly rods. They looked to Toby like carbosteel bones pivoting in chromed sockets. Cables thin to near invisibility moved it with jerky but quick agility.
It did not move like a creature so much as a framework for something unseen. He had the impression of a jutting, constantly busy maze. A mobile lattice, housing a being that did not need true physical presence.
Not that this place was real. He knew that now.
Somehow he had gone from the bare-baked dryness of timestone to this sand-sea. Without noticing. Which meant that the Mantis before him had arranged this elaborate snare and he had run full tilt into it.
His Isaac Aspect said brightly,
It is an anthology intelligence and can speak more directly through us.
“You’re workin’ for it?”
You speak as though there were choice involved. We are immersed in it, just as you.
