Of course he was right. The Mantis was invisible to human sensoria. It could deflect attention from itself, disperse telltales, turn a thousand techtricks. Toby scuffed at a stone and said nothing.
<I believe its abilities are diminishing,> Quath said.
“Enough so it can’t ambush us?” Killeen eyed Quath’s shifting bulk skeptically.
<Perhaps. Notice the locomos. It discards, trying to move quickly.>
“Or wants us to think so,” Killeen shot back. He smiled to take the sting out of it. Toby wondered if Quath would understand the quick flash of yellow teeth in the rugged, walnut face.
FOUR
Abraham
Nigel sat and listened. He ignored the gods who loomed like acoustic shadows all around him and Abraham. He concentrated very hard on hearing what one single human voice said and let that anchor him again in a place where he could keep his sanity. He had done this before, the memories were there, and knew that though this was a small, seemingly simple act, to fail to do so was to die. The hugeness around him, squatting in his mind like mammoths in the night, just beyond the faint human campfire, would crush him without even noticing the act.
Abraham did not talk much about what the Highers had done. They had showed him things, maybe to teach and maybe for some other reason that was never evident, and he could not describe those, either. Later, maybe. Not right away. Maybe never.
He had been held by them in a kind of mixed state. He could feel his body and the bare simple open spaces around him but that was all. He could walk or run but he never got anywhere. Dry and smooth, the plain never ended. He came to understand that it was closed but had no boundary, no wall. The plain somehow wrapped around on itself though he could feel no curvature. A pearly glow came up through the featureless plain and when that faded he slept, though of course nothing told him to.
Simple food appeared when he slept. He spent a lot of time exercising and there were always his captors to talk to just by speaking into the air. They were almost impossible to understand and he tired of their unintentional riddles. It had gone on a long time and he had adapted to it.
So he spent a lot of the time inside himself. It was surprising, he said, what you can remember when you have nothing to do but remember. He went on imaginary walks through the Citadel. He had seen it crashing down and smelled its scorched ramparts but in his mind he could saunter down the Aisle of Sighs and across the Oblong Square to the little place where crisp fried breads clouded the air with their fragrances. He could taste the snap of them and the cup of kaf he had with them. Then he would carefully walk down the Hypothetical, counting off the streets in order. When you were doing it by yourself rules were even more important. If he made a mistake he made himself go back to the beginning, silently sounding the names. Somebody would need to write a history of the Citadel someday and this was a way of keeping it through a time when Bishops did not write.
With luck, if he were ever to make it into Aspect, part of the Citadel’s chronicles would go with that shaved sliver of himself.
There were other people there, too, sometimes. He could not speak with most of them because the Hunker Down had bred new languages. Still they traded stories and in the intensity of it he came to care for Families with names like Steamer and United and Punjab, and for people he had never met made vividly real through the telling.
They made up jokes about talking to the Highers and how near unintelligible they were. For fun they made up a handy phrase book in Higher Jabber, with useful phrases like, “I am delighted to accept your kind invitation to be used and bored for your superior purposes,” and “It is exceptionally kind of you to allow me to travel in the asshole of your being.” At the time these had been hilarious.
The jokes would slide effortlessly into bitter disputes, too, over minute details. Only slowly did the humans, assembled in the misty, echoing spaces where the Highers left them, learn that low comedy and fierce arguments were crucial. Essential to the species. Without them you gave up. In the heightened reality of that place all things were disproportionate.
With talk alone, none of the elaborate pseudreal tech, they took each other on mental trips to their own Family, their native planet. They described imaginary meals, perils, vast and ornate histories. All those worlds had distant views of the Eater and all were doomed, of course. They all knew that and it gave events an extra edge.
Abraham said that his isolation from all he had known made life like a hall of mirrors. There was no hiding from himself or from the others or from the reflections they gave of himself.
There are always other dramas going on and some were of a scale that made coming back to the human perspective hard. Reality was the lenses you came with.
Abraham shrugged a lot now. He said that there was no point in trying to know it all. It was not yours anyway.
FIVE
Confusion Squall
Toby got dazed and distracted as they kept up the pace, which seemed faster with each passing hour. His wandering, miasmic mind was his true enemy now. He kept loping, inevitably behind the others, trying to go through the fog that deadened him.
They tracked the Mantis by its footpad scrapes across rocky ground. Cermo and Killeen took turns sweeping to both sides in case it was backtracking or leaving a false trail. They kept looking back to be sure Toby was still in sight. The humiliation of it was that they had done that years ago when Toby had been a boy and now he was not.
The timestone ebbed. A gauzy light seeped up through the rough landscape. There were not days and nights evenly spaced here because the illumination came from light trapped in the space-time curvature itself. Refraction and time lags gave the radiance a hollow quality as though it had been strained through some filter and leached of its sharpness. They stopped and made camp and Toby fell asleep leaning against a boulder. He discovered this when he hit the ground and the others laughed, though of course not Quath. He made himself lay out his pad and once on it fell asleep again and only woke when his father pulled off his boots to check his feet for blisters.
“You’re yeasay,” Killeen said softly in the dim dark. Toby’s nose caught the heady scent of cold but cooked vegetables and he found a plate of them next to his head. He ate them without speaking and his father brought a spicy tea hot from the fire. It was not a flame of course but a carbo-burner, so no mech could track them from the smoke or light.
“You’re holding up. Feet fine.”
“Just need some sleep,” Toby said.
“You and Quath were up finding it while we were sleeping. No reason you shouldn’t be a little behind.”
“I’ll do the sweep-searching tomorrow.”
“Don’t take on too much. Have some more of those beans.”
“Not all that hungry.”
He was asleep before his father had turned off the burner and he heard nothing as the darkness waxed on. He thought of the Mantis or maybe he just dreamed that he did.
The next day he remembered the sleeping fondly before many hours of loping were done. It was bad by then. He had started fresh but it faded and he sweated more than he ever had. Quath spoke to him with some concern but Toby talked little. He carried as big a pack as the others but they also had the burner and some extra food so he was behind in that as well.
Cermo did not smile or waste energy on talk and Toby remembered again the intensity of the man on the plains of his boyhood, on the baked beauty of Snowglade. Cermo pointed to each sign of the Mantis and interpreted it with assurance. Cermo was pointing to a fresh print when the confusion squall hit them.
Purple bees. It felt as if they were biting him as they swarmed inboard. Toby got down fast but the fan beam caught him and he could not see any more. He rolled downhill and fetched up against a rock. That jabbed him in the side and he rolled around it and further downhill. That was the surest way to get away from the swarm of emag turmoil. Above him hummed a tangle of magnetic fields and orange plasma discharges. Forking energies. His inboards covering up made sharp clangs in his sensorium.
He slammed into a gnarled tree and could then see again. He lay there looking up at the others. They shared the stupefaction.
Two heartbeats, three. The squall passed without any follow-on bolts.
The Mantis used these to soften targets. Not attacking made no sense. He walked back up the hill and Quath greeted him with, <It is leaving them as traps for us.>
“Good, ’cause otherwise we’d be dead.”
