He held steady so his periphs could come up. Searching, searching.
He went to fast-flick. Something swayed among sheets of wintry-gray light to the left. Something gangly and arabesqued with worms. Traceries danced in filmy air. The fleeting image merged with rock and was gone and then swam up out of the slate-black vegetation farther away. For shaved seconds he could see it and then not. The thing was responding to his systems with a false image it projected to match its background as it moved. Tubular legs and a long flat cowled head and prickly antennas swiveling.
“What do you see?” Andro asked.
Killeen opened his mouth to tell him to shut up.
Something poked a hole in his eye and dove through.
THREE
The Pleasure Plague
The Mantis was larger this time.
He had been here before. On the island of undulating sand that floated impossibly on a blue sea.
Killeen had never seen a body of water bigger than a smelly, dying pond. He knew the sea only from his immersion in the Mantis itself. The thing had caught him years before on Snowglade and tucked his mind into the larger canvas of its own, almost as an afterthought.
The boneyard of human skulls was there too and he walked over it this time. It crunched beneath his boots.
When he did that the ground buckled for just a flashing moment. Then it went solid again.
And Andro was suddenly there and somehow they were both walking across the unending sand island and trying to reach the sea. Yet Killeen felt himself still scrambling up the steep clay gully side and Andro panting behind him. His arms and legs did not stop their working. Part of him was still there in the gully and another was here with a sadness and a leaden certainty that this time he would die in the Mantis’s grip.
I hope my lesson was clear.
The Mantis’s dry rattle boomed, resounding in his mind as acoustics never could.
“We’re not quite as slow as you think, y’know.”
I have always savored your humor, holding forth in even the most difficult of circumstances.
He could not see it; humans seldom did. It could be within arm’s reach or dispersed in a planet-sized net. Or both.
It is a pleasure to once again be your archiving receptacle.
“What is this—” Andro began but Killeen waved him into silence.
They were still hanging by fingers and toeholds and inching their way up the hard clay. Somewhere.
“What do you want?”
I am sure you believe I am simply here to kill you.
“I don’t think you do anything simply.”
Once again I savor the delights of an ambiguous rhetoric. Yet I am simple.
“Not by me you aren’t.”
All my thoughts are known to myself. All of myself. What could be simpler?
“Leaving us alone would be. For a start.”
I cannot. You are my primary work materials, as an artist. Now, alas, rude survival intrudes even upon this sheltered venue. I come to you seeking aid.
Killeen laughed. And pulled himself up into a crevice where he could lean down and give Andro a hand.
You quite rightly use your immortality-
simulating rite.
Killeen laughed again. Anything to keep it amused.
It is a wonderful adaptation to your predicament. As its discoverer, I am most proud. My superiors commended me roundly.
“For ‘discovering’ that we laugh?”
No. For discovering what it means. For that brief stuttering vocal instant you live as we do. Outside the clench of time. Of mortality.
“What does it want?” The naked terror in Andro’s voice made Killeen look down as the man edged his way into a toehold. Andro was sweating and his eyes were rolled far up showing the whites. Somehow he could still climb. His muscles stood out, vibrating.
“It wants us. Some kind of slice, right? Or maybe this time the whole goddamn cake.”
I wish I could dally as an artist, I do. Unfortunately, you are correct. I am here to glean information from you and perhaps a last sample.
“I’m fresh out of information.”
