An odd concept, “nobility,” for an Analyst.
Tell me more about these humans.
More knowledge awaits more inquiry.
Then be swift.
PART THREE
Categories Beyond Knowing
ONE
Prisoners of Immensity
Toby Bishop and Nigel Walmsley walked bent slightly forward. They struggled into the brisk breezes that swept up from the plain. Harrowing winds had scoured the ramps and walkways along the pyramid face. Around the sharp peak churned a howling vacancy.
Walmsley’s eyes narrowed as he studied the clean cut of the far horizons. Some disturbance had drawn him out here, a quick dart of a message Toby had felt as an electromagnetic flicker, no more.
It was good to be outside after Walmsley’s story. There had been a claustrophobic feel to the way the old man told it. Listening, Toby had an uneasy sensation of the wormhole constricting, forcing humans along a loop, trapped in events they could not change, prisoners of immensities they could barely glimpse.
Chill winds blew their hair, whipping like smoke, neither noticing.
Below them lay the ramps and terraces of a huge, geometrically exact pyramid, spreading down in great spare expanses, the flanks of the largest mountain Toby had ever seen. He had thought it was a natural upjut when he first journeyed toward it. The walk had taken him two sleeping periods—there were no days here—and only when he had reached the base did he realize that the entire mass was one artifact.
Toby shuffled uncomfortably. “Strange story,” he said inadequately.
“I haven’t told it, not that way anyway, to anyone.”
“Your children—?”
“They’re off in the Lanes. Family of wanderers, I guess.”
“So all this with the mechs . . .”
“Is part of a pattern. A history, I suppose, if one could look back from the other end of the wormline we followed. The far future.”
“There’s something they want from us?”
“Seems so. I picked up terms once, when Earthers were chatting up some Old Ones. ‘Trigger Codes’ and ‘First Command’—jargon, without the slightest explanation. When I ask Earthers, they pretend to know nothing.”
“Maybe they don’t know.”
“They know more than they’re telling. All this ties in with the Galactic Library somehow, too.”
“Library?”
Citadel Bishop had housed a library. One superior to that of any other Citadel, Family lore had it. He remembered from childhood the racks and racks of cubes, glinting russet and gold from thousands of tiny facets deep inside. His grandfather had told him once that each point stood for a whole roomful of the old-timey books, the ones with wood pages all clamped together at one end. He had seen a picture of one of those. “Our human library?”
“From all the organic races that came before mechs. Before us, for that matter, but including Earth as well.”
“The mechs want it?”
“To complete some pattern they desire. One of them said that to me once.”
“A pattern?” Something chimed in memory. His Isaac Aspect spoke rapidly in the whispery voice that came through his acoustic nerve complex.
The Mantis spoke of artfully complete patterns. It meant aesthetic motifs perhaps, but from what we have discovered, a more ominous meaning may be germane here. A plan of events, a . . . conspiracy. I would remind you that the Mantis enabled Bishops to find the buried Argo.
Toby said to Isaac, “The Mantis said it was after us because it wanted to make artworks.”
He had seen those, grotesque mergings of human body parts with mechs. Worse than anything he had ever imagined. Even talking about it in subvocal made his throat clench.
It said it was an artist. Surely that was not its only function.
Walmsley could not make out Toby’s private Aspect conversations, or so he thought, since no Bishop had the tech to do so. Toby was still ruminating on Isaac’s points when he caught up to Walmsley’s question: “—could they want what all organic races have?”
“Uh, how d’you mean that?”
“All signs point to one motivation. The mechs want everything they can get out of the Library. Not some specific thing. They want to read it all.”
Toby laughed dryly. “More like, they want to destroy it all.”
Walmsley pursed his lips, as if trying to recall something a long way back. “What fragments they have gotten, before we secured a place for the Library, they actually read. They didn’t simply smash the data cusps.”
