When Toby walked past the inner cells of the Mantis he saw a mag storage kernel hung partly disconnected from the frame. He took it. He told Quath he wanted the energy store but he carried it with him on the long march away from there without discharging it.
<You have something more than that,> Quath said as they headed downslope.
“The memories it sent?”
<I received none.>
“How’d you know I did?”
<By your actions. It chose you.>
For a searing moment he wished that he had never seen the Mantis. “I don’t want that.”
<They are in you now.>
He walked on in silence.
His father carried some of the beautiful arc struts strapped to his back despite the weight. Killeen was smiling and tired and said, “Plenty Bishops will want a piece. It killed a lot of us.”
“How many?”
“It’s cut through generations of us. Nobody can do the count. None of us has lived through the full time of it.”
“We were trying to kill it, too.”
“Yeasay. Had to.”
“Murder on both sides.”
“Now there is, yeasay.” His father squinted at him and looked away.
Toby kept pace with Killeen behind Quath. They loped across timestone that had settled down. A golden glow seeped up through it and cast shadows up his father’s face from the chin. The silence between them simmered until Killeen said, “It made artworks of us. Hunted us. Sucked us up as suredead.”
“Cermo made a mistake.”
“I suppose.”
“Coming on close to it at the end like that.”
“Have it as you like.”
They walked a while with the excitement going out of them and the only sound was their servos.
“It cared about Bishops, y’know.”
“Cared plenty. Cared enough to hound us.”
“Not what I meant.”
“I know, son.”
The Bishops had lost something too when the Mantis went out of their world but Toby could not say to his father what that was. He would be a full man before he came to understand it or to know that he had brought away from the Mantis not only the magnetic kernel—which he kept for years and never got around to discharging—but also a discord of loneliness that would go with him even when he was surrounded by Bishops.
After some hard marching they found a Bishop camp. The news spread quickly and more Bishops came hurrying across the stretches of timestone. They saw the curved Mantis struts that Killeen had carried out on his back and insisted on standing them up in an arch for display. Together like that they looked fine in the smoldering ruby glow of the timestone.
People crowded around the struts and touched them carefully. Killeen had a liquor toast from some of them and then another and talked freely. Toby stood back and watched as his father and himself and Quath were transformed into heroes by the excited chatter of the crowd who had not been there.
They had lifted a burden and legend from the Bishops and he knew with one part of himself how he would feel if someone else had done that. But it was different to have done it yourself and nothing in the talk could change that or even explain it. Especially not explain it.
Killeen said to him a little later, “Wish Cermo could be here.”
“He is,” Toby said and in that moment felt what the Mantis had sent into him in its last moments. Cermo. Truncated, flattened, seeping in spongy interstices of him, slivers and rivulets flowing in his sensorium and flavoring the liquid light, forever, Cermo.
He sent a whisper to Quath, —Why?—
<Not long ago, you would not have asked such a question. You would have called me Big Bug and made a joke.>
—Yeasay, and been plenty happier.—
<It is knowledge of things we cannot say that makes your kind and mine somewhat alike, tiny thinker.>
—Funny, how primates can get along with mechanical maggots.—
<We Myriapodia are selective in our diets. On the other hand—a primate expression, you’ll note—you are dietary opportunists, much like these maggots you compare me with.>
—Quick-witted bug you are, ol’ Brave Crawler with Dreams. You just look like a giant maggot, is all, only beefed-up with metal.—
<I delight in your primate syntax. Beefed with metal?>
