Cermo shook his head vigorously. Killeen said, “Not so’s you’d notice.”
Quath had been nearly silent since the navvy attack and now she said, <They appear to have intricate relationships, but not genetically based.>
“If not family,” Killeen said, “what?”
<Links of their minds. Or shared models of the world.>
Killeen frowned. “Models?”
<Frames for comprehending experience.>
“Seems to me you either ken things or you don’t.” Killeen grinned at Cermo as if this were a private joke. Toby didn’t get it.
<They seem to order themselves in social strata, based on capabilities. Within those classes they form close working associations.>
“Not families, not at all,” Killeen said bitterly.
EIGHT
Phylum Myriapodia
Where’d you get Abraham?”
The bird had somehow manifested Quath here, in this place which now had no gritty feel left in it at all.
This was definitely Quath, done precisely down to scratches on leg sheaths and the curious jerky way her heads moved. How the bird could make Quath come here . . . ? But of course, Quath herself was an anthology intelligence, and so could exhibit facets of itself here, plucked up by the Highers. Or someone/something.
<The Myriapodia paid a terrible price for him.> The Quath manifestation torqued itself on the rocky ground, settling intricate sections on the warm stones.
“How?”
<The Tukar’ramin, the Illuminates . . . all perished.>
“That’s why you’ve been so quiet.”
<The only entrance to the Labyrinth was the Rent.>
“Rent? Ah—the seam the mechanicals tore open?”
<It voided into the inner edge of the ergosphere.>
“So your kind . . .”
<Flew at great cost in energy along that inner sheet. Poised. When the Rent opened, they entered.>
“I don’t see—”
<They knew that they must surprise the mechanicals. All this was necessary to quickly take the Abraham from them.>
Nigel turned to look at the muscled but weathered man who was munching some fruit nearby. “He looks fairly hearty.”
<He lived. The Myriapodia gave of themselves. That was the only way to unleash the Codes.>
Nigel said nothing. “Why?”
<That is not answerable.>
“Outside my conceptual space?”
<Yeasay.>
He would always wonder if, at this moment, the alien was deliberately using a human slang. Perhaps that was what, in its own coordinate system, invoked what he would, in his chimpanzee manner, call sadness. Or grief. Or, by the nature of the unknowable, a joke.
NINE
Stalking
Why doesn’t it fly?” Killeen asked in one of their short breaks.
Toby had been wondering, too. The Mantis could jet across Lanes. Men didn’t have flying gear. They couldn’t generate the thrust to deal with gravitational stresses, not and be able to walk, too. “Maybe it can’t anymore?”
Cermo swallowed some water and spat it out again, an old ritual to get the dust taste out of his mouth. Then he cocked an eye at the distant emerald roof, the folded terraces of land far overhead. “Could be it threw away its propulsions first thing. We just didn’t run across them.”
Quath murmured, <Perhaps it does not wish to fly. Being foot-bound and pursued is a different experience.>
The men looked at each other and shrugged. Toby wondered what Quath could mean but she ambled away then, combing the area. He did not get a chance to think further because Cermo was looking up at the foggy esty again and frowning and then pointing. “Matterfall,” he said quietly.
Masses of green and brown ripped away from the landscape above. Silently they shot up in a geyser. Lumps tumbled and smacked into each other.
