Killeen shot back, “Those games and such, they were named for us.”
Cermo said, “Damn rightside!”
“You ask me,” Toby said triumphantly, “those Yankees and all, they weren’t so much. Their word for war was ‘pitch.’ Some fighters they were!”
You are amusing in your finitudes. Do not mistake my indulgence of you for more than it is, however.
Killeen knew the stalling was over when the crisp outline of the Mantis solidified against the distant hills. It was large and kept changing so he could not get the shape of it. “Now just wait, I—”
Waiting is done. If you refuse to yield up the acoustic trigger, I must interrogate you separately and in detail. Your selves will not survive this. I shall harvest as I inspect.
The matter-of-fact way the Mantis said it made Killeen certain this was no bluff. He breathed shallowly and thought and his mind went nowhere. The Mantis had been promising that eventually it would suck them up into itself, as part of its “preserving mission,” and there was no way to stop it.
“I’ll go first,” Killeen said. “I’m Cap’n, stands to reason I know more than these.”
True. Perhaps it is buried lore and you do not know you carry it. The unkempt manner of your interior, with its subconscious and other swamps, would allow that. Very well, then. This will be easier if you will walk into a recess and position yourself for an erasing execution.
A pale rectangle of blue-green opened in the air a few steps away. Killeen saw that the Mantis was in fact very close, simulating the entire countryside with absolute fidelity. He had not even known it was so close and now the door into that reality hung like a painting against the twilight hills. But the hills were the illusion, the doorway real. And here at last was his end.
FIVE
An Abyss of Squashed Duration
Nigel Walmsley landed on his ass.
Quath had warned him that it was safer to go through separately but when he looked up Quath was standing erect as if nothing had happened and he was covered with dirt, aching in every joint, his clothes ripped.
“You said this—”
<Had to be accomplished quickly,> Quath said, and started moving fast downhill. <We have been lucky to arrive.>
“Quite so.” They had gotten scooped up, all right, but Nigel had never seen the bird. Instead, the hills seemed to roll up like a brown sheet and whirl them into a weightless limbo. Quath had been transmitting, talking to entities Nigel could not see. All very fast. Then he had thumped down here.
“Slow down!”
<Very well—> She plucked him up and surged on.
He dangled like a leftover idea on her right side. The hills around them wavered, as if in a heat wave. Or maybe he was getting tired. He blinked and the hills rippled again and suddenly he saw that they were not hills at all. It was something enormous and somber and he caught an old, familiar sensorium stink.
“The Mantis.”
<That is why I hurry.>
He saw some Bishops against the sensed scenery. Killeen, yes, Toby, and an officer. Quath sent glad salutes, in the age-old manner of the Myriapodia; Nigel tried to think.
The bird was still in the game, to be sure, else they wouldn’t have been so quickly slipped through the warpage of the esty to precisely this spot. It was bringing matters to a boil, but to what end? The Mantis could still slaughter them all in a microsecond. Their only defense lay in the hope that at the moment it didn’t seem to want to.
No one paid him much attention as he climbed down from Quath’s side shelf. He was to these giants a scrawny mass of wrinkles, scarcely the stuff of legends.
He finally worked out that they were babbling about an acoustic Trigger Code. The Mantis-mind skated across the conversation, sampling each human consciousness in turn. Like an aloof connoisseur at a wine tasting, Nigel thought, but beneath that slept a floating anxiety. The clock was running on the Mantis, too.
All this he got from his sensorium. It was rather more sensitive and tricky than the Bishops’, but a toy compared with that of the Mantis. He could feel the machine minds dipping into him, flitting back to the Bishops for species comparison, then back again to grill his cerebrum a bit more. He supposed he should get used to it, but he never did.
I will inspect you as well, Myriapodia. The acoustics could be carried in such an intelligence.
<I do not believe so,> Quath answered.
“I’m certain she does not, in fact,” Nigel said mildly.
Gratifyingly, they all turned to look at him. Except the Mantis, of course, which was still only a slight dissonance in the apparent world.
“Who’re you?” Killeen asked warily.
“Tell you later,” Toby whispered to his father.
“I believe Quath does contain the secret, however,” Nigel said.
<You speak literally. And true.>
Quath’s side belly opened then, a synthesis of mechanical sliding action and organic birth, membranes popping.
A large man staggered out. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, looked around. “Been asleep,” he said.
“Abraham!” Killeen cried.
The others followed suit. Nigel watched them but his senses riveted on the Mantis. It would treasure this spectacle, this reuniting, but it would calculate and judge faster than Walmsley could. Every move from here on could be fatal.
Toby and Killeen wrapped arms around Abraham, shouted their joy. Doing the human thing, Nigel thought abstractly. Despite himself, he finally got caught up in the moment himself. He clapped Abraham on the back and smiled and for a passing moment the tension in him eased. Then the Mantis sent,
