“Kill it,” Killeen said.
Cermo blinked, dazed. His right arm half-lifted Toby’s sharp-darter. He seemed stunned by the sudden intensity of the voice.
I am more than the sum of all memories.
“Pretty soon, be less,” Killeen muttered.
I have a gift for you, Toby.
Toby froze. He panted, confused.
You will need it.
Cermo lifted the shape-darter and pointed the snubbed snout at the center of the still-seething layers. The mainmind was in there somewhere. He angled for a shot. The moment hung in the air.
I saved so many Bishops. I have the greatest collection of you. And you are the most splendid of all the lesser forms.
Cermo jerked into life and fired three times.
Even single-handed, at this range each shot found its way into a submind and sparked a hard yellow flare in the Mantis sensorium. Each time Cermo swore angrily and the Mantis rocked with the impact.
The third one made the parabolic antennas whirl around very fast and faster and then stop. Toby knew he would remember the silly look of that.
Every sliding rod and servo in the Mantis halted and the dignity went out of it in a way he could not voice. One moment it was huge and suffering and then it was just a big pile of shattered parts. No whole.
Cermo fell then. He came down completely slack, arms loose and knees buckling. Toby saw that the Mantis had done some last thing and the aura of that burst hit him too. It gave him a prickly jolt all over. His sensorium fused, tilted, flashed with working veins of amber. He staggered but the pulse did no damage.
By the time he reached Cermo the heavy-lidded eyes had closed.
“Damn!” Killeen said.
<He is suredead,> Quath said. <The Mantis stripped his self away in the last moments.>
“Why?” Killeen demanded. His voice was strained.
<I do not know.>
“Revenge,” Killeen said.
<It had finished with you.>
“With us? Other way round,” Killeen said bitterly.
<It played out its own end by allowing you to express one of your embedded patterns. One it had not experienced.>
Toby’s voice was a croak. “What . . . pattern?”
<Your species hunted long ago across far terrain. In groups you large mammals mastered language and the rituals of pursuit. It led to your intelligence—a particular kind of mind.>
“It wanted to see us do that?” Killeen was quiet now, kneeling with his hands uselessly rubbing Cermo’s shoulder.
<I suspect it wanted to be a part of it. The only part it could play.>
Toby thought about the stored memories it had shed into the air, its treasure evaporating. But memory was not yourself, he saw. It could not drive forward, act. Memories just sat and waited.
TEN
Paths of Glory
The timestone tossed and broke and they spent a long time then just clinging to whatever stable places they could find. They did what they could for Cermo but that wasn’t much.
Killeen opened Cermo’s spine and swore. “They’re burned.”
“How?” Toby asked.
“Mantis must’ve worked down through all his inboards.”
“I thought our chips were protected.”
“So did I. But our tech is old and mechs never stop learning.”
Killeen said this heavily and with the respect a combatant had for another. Cermo’s cylinder spinal chips had carried the older Aspects and Faces from Bishop history. A suredeath reduced the present, subtracting one life. Chip charring carried that loss far back into a dim past, plundering the origins of the Family itself.
It was hard finding enough real ground to bury Cermo. They stripped away his gear and divided the mass out for taking back. Most of it was useless but to leave it would draw mech scavengers.
Utter darkness came for a while and they slept. It did not do much good for Toby and when he woke a gang of scavenger navvys had found the Mantis. He heard them cutting and clattering around and went up the slope to where they worked in the sprawling shambles. He remembered how the parabolic antenna had spun around like an eye searching madly and how the majesty had gone then. The flanks of it were gone too now, dragged off by scavengers. The mechs had their own ecology of a sort, recycling machined parts and whole intact auxiliaries. There was no more Mantis, just intricate assemblies slewed out of their mounts, and gear he could not understand fried by vagrant pulses. The navvys picked over the carcass where crystalline lattices had carried the Mantis intelligence. There were navvys of all sizes, scooters and jakos mostly, and they worked remorselessly in teams. When they were done they would leave nothing.
He shot three and that scattered them for a while. The anger in him had boiled out and he felt stupid when Quath and Killeen came running, their sensoria projected out in a defensive screen. He just shrugged. His father nodded. Killeen looked at the Mantis for a while with nothing in his face and then pulled a few of the arc struts free.
