And below that tiny conscious stage worked sinewy chords. The true deep mind worked there. Creation, desire, the sense of the exalted—all wove and lurked and had no conscious voice. They broke onto the conscious stage only with force, sudden actors in a play that no one faction wrote.
That was the human lot, he saw.
He was looking at his own mind.
A human could not do that. Could not step outside and watch itself have an idea, trace the origins of desire, of dislike . . .
So . . . what did that make him, now?
Then the enormous voice was there again and he saw that he had been taken to another place, another small cage in a labyrinth mind.
To continue his little lesson. Of course.All life extracts energy, uses it, and discards the dregs, energy in a degraded form. The history of life is a long saga of unconscious ingenuity, finding new pathways in the fields of brimming energy. The universe is yet young, and squanders its energies in flowers of excess-bright stars, whirling singularities, gaudy finery. Life profits from this.Organisms—natural, mechanical/electronic, or magnetic- feed upon their ecosystems. These systems are in turn driven by simple energy sources from below. Mild sunlight and chemicals, for the Naturals. Mass and raw photons and electrical discharges, for others. But those organisms with minds themselves are the energy sources for higher orders: self-replicating patterns of information. These can thrive only in brains, or in the extensions of brains—books, computers, data banks. Mental musics, supported by brute matter.In organic cells, enzymes and raw materials form a soup for making DNA. Viruses hijack these to reproduce themselves. Minds, too, can bring into being parasites. On the stage of minds, dramas unfold. Ideas can hijack anxieties, unmet needs, even the diffuse mental hunger called curiosity.Minds are the substrate for memes.The simplest of these memes are like diseases. Some contagions are helpful, some destructive, some merely crippling—but all draw their sustenance from the organisms themselves. For they feed upon the thought processes of their hosts.Cultural evolution can be seen as the advancement of these patterns: memes are self-propagating cultures. In many life-forms, religious ideas were the earliest examples.Even simple mental systems can ask questions which they cannot answer—indeed, that have no answer.Planning for the future confers a powerful survival advantage; realizing that one should not venture back into a dangerous place means one may live to see tomorrow’s sunrise. Dependence on the seasons, especially in farming, sharpens this selection.But considering the future raises powerful questions. Unanswerable riddles: Where will I go after death? Where was I before birth?The mental tensions set up by such natural problems create a niche. Into this slot in the mental landscape, ideas can migrate. They arrive there by mutation from earlier, related ideas. Providing plausible answers to unanswerable questions, they occupy the niche. The host welcomes this aid, profits from it. Then they can spread. Those ideas which induce copies of themselves in other brains have greater chance of surviving. Religions are parasitic memes. Some lead to wholesale abandonment of the ordinary world, producing faiths susceptible to mass suicide, or celibacy, or irrational attempts to propagate the faith with violence. These can quickly kill the host, and so self-limit the meme growth. Successful parasitic memes evolve into mutual symbionts. Stable, long-lived religions are examples. Their adherents hand down doctrines and formalisms for millennia. They can even enclose and absorb other ideas, carrying them forward in time, protected by the bulk and momentum of belief.They can make the host resist other parasitic ideas. Every concept needs some protection.Logic is one of these. It tests memes for consistency. Such meta-memes check other, smaller ideas before allowing them into the mental theater. They function as do the simple alarm systems which tell a cell that a virus has invaded. The scientific method, which is essentially an orderly common sense, is a similar meme defense. It is more discriminating, more interactive with the invading meme itself, than the most primitive defense: to simply reject any new idea, uninspected.All memes can be seen as living, struggling entities which compete for space and energy. An idea can leap from mind to mind, encased in a single sentence. Intelligent beings convey far more information through memes than they do through genes.
Nigel awoke lying on a mud flat. Cold, wet, sticky.
He got up slowly. The voice had been soft and sensible and still had shaken him thoroughly.
It was not of course a voice but a . . . lesson. His body ached and he had trouble breathing. Interference with the lower levels of the brain?
He looked around but there was nothing but the mottled dark. He missed human contact, an ache he had learned long ago in places like this.
He started walking. It was slow, hard work; his knees trembled, but he kept going.
SEVEN
The Suredead
His gear used the mech positron traps that were new and light and carried a lot of energy in a small magnetic pocket. The clouds of positrons gyred in their magnetic pit and when his inboards or servos needed power positrons would snake out of their snare, find electrons, and die. Somehow that made potentials stream through him though Toby never thought of how it worked. The navvy’s mag traps they discharged into their own, harvesting most of the store. Energy stripped from mechs always had a special jolt to it.
Killeen clapped him on the back. “Just shows how desperate the Mantis is,” Killeen snorted with derision. “Threw that navvy together. Put no defense in the mag traps.”
Toby felt better until he woke up that night. The timestone was smoldering a dull ruby red half-light and they had all rolled their pads out to take advantage of the momentary night. Toby had been bone tired and grateful for it, a break not given as a favor by his father but simply by the weather.
But he woke up with an itchy nervousness and could not sleep, thinking it had something to do with the positron power. He got up to pee though it was not pressing and that was when he saw it.
The latticework did not move against the far ruddy hills, but it was not a building. It cast a shadow in his sensorium that was not a blankness now. He looked for the webs of loci and motivators and subminds. They were faintly luminous, tracing out the array of rods and struts. It moved then and he felt it as a positive thing finally. Not a vacancy but a presence.
He knew by legend the impossible way it moved. As he stood absolutely still and watched, the matrix shambled away from him. No hurrying, no sign it knew he was there. It was two klicks away, easy. In range, but he did not think of that. He followed to keep in view the shifting phosphorescent mainmind exposed in the tilting work of rods and the great disks swiveling.
It came at him then without a single flicker of sensorium warning. The burst was in him, before his inboards could counter. He staggered and fell. Hit hard, arms loose. The pulse skated through him and burned hot and was gone.
He lay without moving, Bishop tactics. Numbly through his sensorium he watched it go. Angular energies, vectoring into a dwindling shape. Then nothing.
He let his inboards run diagnostics and they came up with trivial overloads, easily corrected with a reset. He got up carefully. Creaky and legs shaking at the knees but all right.
He could not explain what had happened. He knew he had to think about it but not right now. There was too much in him. A pressure seethed in his systems. Fear and a hollow longing too. Some quality of it reminded him of the way women drew him out, but it was not that either. On the way back to his pad he decided not to wake the others.
Quath stirred electromagnetically as he passed. <?> she sent and he answered with —.^.—, which told her submind that it was just him. He envied the way she could delegate to her partial minds and fall instantly asleep if she wanted. It was a little surprising that such an intelligence needed the down time to process memories and arrange itself, which humans did by letting the subconscious levels work during sleep.
It was the dreams that told him. He saw the long procession of Bishops in their Citadel, then on the plains, in battle and at peace. Many of the momentary shimmers of saved experience were of their last moments. That must mean that these were salvaged slivers from the lives of doomed Bishops. Eyes wide with surprise, or slitted by pain. Mouths gasping or else hardened against what they saw coming. But there was more to it than such externals. He felt the moments, lived through them in a way impossible to get from a mere image.
These were the records of the suredead. Bishop minds, ransacked by mechs—by the Mantis—in age-old conflicts. Like volumes to be kept on a shelf and taken down and browsed. Or read intently if you cared.
The Mantis had sent these shards of the suredead into him. Discarding them? Radiating away data as it executed its own subminds?
He rolled sweaty in his sleep and woke sandy-eyed and ragged. At breakfast Killeen said, “I got some diagnostics on my morning screen. Said there was mech near us last night.”
“Me too,” Cermo said.
Toby said nothing and did not know why. The Mantis was dying anyway. The two men looked at him and still he said nothing.
“I can pick up right now some pretty weak echoes that way”—Cermo gave a thumb-jut uphill—“but not moving.”
Toby could see nothing in his sensorium. When they started off he took rear point. They lost the Mantis trail in a place where overlapping mech signatures reeked in Toby’s sensorium, coded as stinks. He caught rotting leaves, a sharp pungency, something damp and musty. “Smells funny,” was all Cermo said.
They followed the smells, all really just electronic prompts but no less exciting for the fact of their knowing it. They found the cause in a rugged narrow gulch.
The mechs had died in convulsions. Disease programs had gotten into them and they had ended in an agony of pleasure, capacitors flashing over, mag traps sparking and searing their gray matte finish. That was what made the Trigger Codes so good. They brought intense ecstasy and the desire to share that with others, and so the mechs sent it on electromagnetic wings to each other, all in a delighted delirium. Toby knew it was supposed to be a pleasant way to die but the convulsed limbs and ripped matte-carbon skins were ugly, terrible.
“Mantis was through here,” Cermo said.
“I pick it up,” Killeen said and then Toby did too, a faint tangy odor that wound between the mech bodies. These were far lower order mechs than the Mantis of course and they crammed the little gorge. The Mantis had passed by the fallen and gone on.
“Paying its respects, maybe,” Toby said. The men laughed although he had not meant it to be funny.
Toby touched one of the wrecked carcasses. “You suppose mechs have, well, families?”
