“Thank God I can’t say that for me.”
We . . . you/I . . . once spoke together.
“Back when I’d just arrived here.” Nigel surprised himself with his sudden anger. “You killed my friend, Carlos.”
Harvested him.
“We Naturals have a bit of a different opinion about that. We know that a copy of us still isn’t us.”
When I was mechanical, I knew the opposite. We had not evolved the selfness as a reflex, for it did not affect our survival. For you Naturals, saving the self was essential. For mechanicals, replicating our self achieved evolutionary success. I see now—immersed in a larger compass—that both are . . . partial visions.
“Part and parcel of a higher Phylum, eh? You’re still just bloody murderers to me.”
A partial vision again.
“I suppose I’ll just stay anchored right here, in my primate point of view. You Highers nearly exterminated us. Then you beset us in our Chandeliers and then the Citadels. All the time occasionally sidling up to us and trying to talk.”
The careful application of terror is also a form of communication.
Even in his anger, Nigel laughed. “Unintentional jokes are the best.”
TWO
Besen
I have another of your kind. She can show you something of the mechanical world.
“Another partial vision?” Nigel sardonically studied the wavering Mantis image.
A great virtue of our mechanical, digital form was the ability to completely receive another’s experience.
“Ummm. Sometimes I think I’ve seen too much already. Go ahead.”
The compressed wall of perception came out of nowhere. He had time to recall that it was remarkably like the impact that had transformed him long ago, back in an alien wreck on Earth’s moon, a jarring shift blindsiding him—
The strange thing was how silent the mechs were through most of it. Immersed in the dirty Natural joys, she guessed. So awash in it they could not feel the mouths eating them.
For some reason they jammed into some Lanes. Of course they had swarmed everywhere before that and killed a lot of Naturals. Everything they could find, in fact. Then when the Proselyte Pleasures—that was the term she heard applied to it—blew through them, they reacted very strangely.
Some mechs tore themselves apart in a frenzy. The debris was loathsome and the others ate it. There were plenty of pieces floating through the Lanes by then. She supposed that the higher orders could defend themselves longer, but that brought on something like a fever. She knew this analogy was false because mechs weren’t biological, but that was the only way she could make sense of it.
The fever made them eat the others. Maybe it was to get more energy or fresh computing space or something that humans could not understand. Anyway, they ran out of dead members of the lower orders, navvys and rimouts and that sort.
So they started eating mechs that were still alive. The higher ones would break the locomos to keep them still and then stab into their quarry and take something out of them. Eating was the best word for it because she knew no other.
Not all of them. In one Lane larger mech forms had smaller mechs with them. They carried the small ones for a long time. She studied them carefully but they did not seem to be searching. They weren’t doing much more than moving, moving. The smaller ones had lesser defenses and after a while were plainly gone, dead, ruined. The big mechs still carried them. It was eerily like mothers carrying dead babies.
Besen watched it all from hiding and with her sensorium off. She was hungry but to move meant death here. There had been plenty of examples of that.
All those mechs. Screaming now in sharp frequencies. Broken and used and not being gathered into the higher orders at all. Not what they had been promised. The whole point of being a mech, it seemed to her, was that at least you got picked up at the end somehow. Added into some other and maybe higher mind.
It was obviously like a religion for them but it had worked. They knew it as a hard, technical fact. Now it did not happen. No point in being lifted into something that was dying, too.
The screams nearly drove her mad. She could not blank it out because that would mean turning on her sensorium to mute the staccato agonies and they would find her. It was all quite a business and it went on forever. Forever, yes, pain eternal rather than life everlasting, the mad business all around her.
—Nigel jerked back, chest heaving.
He could see her now, approaching the nearby Bishops. She gave him only a passing glance. The young woman was clear of eye and smooth of skin but carried in her sensorium a weight of lived anguish that he did not want to share.
It would take time, perhaps a lifetime, to deplete the stores of that shared grief.
Yet a moment after she appeared, she was laughing with joy at the sight of other Bishops. Nigel eyed them in their merriment, not innocent but oddly touching, and quite suddenly felt a sharp pang of envy.
THREE
A Long Way Ago
Drawing together all Bishops, from sundry Lanes, went far quicker than Toby had thought possible. The Highers did not announce themselves or even communicate; they just did.
The wooded landscape around the small Bishop band seemed to ooze people. Toby and Killeen had been deposited into a Lane with mild climate and agreeable, even edible plants. There was food for the getting and some Bishops—who had been unceremoniously yanked away by the Highers—brought supplies as well. Before long it was a celebration.
One Bishop had been taken for medical care and when she was shucked out of her suit people found that they couldn’t get her underwear off. It had been on so long her hair had grown through it. Toby could see curls sprouting out of the gray hide so that at first glance he mistook the underwear for skin. They finally had to pluck her, the brown matter underwear coming off like peeling a grape. Patches of skin came with it.
Toby saw Quath in the distance, and closeupped the man she was talking to: the Walmsley one. Then Besen came striding out of the trees. She looked bigger and her face was stronger. There was an air of certainty about her he liked and she kissed him without saying a word. He could say nothing.
“Damn but it’s been a long time,” she said.
“A long way ago,” Toby answered.
