“How many of my people… are left?”
I count 453—no, 452; one died two xens ago.
“If you’ll let them go—”
That shall be your reward, should you comply with my desire for a conversation. You may even go with them.
He let a glimmer of hope kindle in him.
This final mech invasion of Chandelier Rook had plundered the remaining defenses. His Noachian Assembly had carried out the fighting retreat while other families fled. Mote disassemblers had breached the Chandelier’s kinetic-energy weapons, microtermites gnawing everywhere. Other ’Semblies had escaped while the Noachians hung on. Now the last act was playing out.
Rock was a plum for the mechs. It orbited near the accretion disk of the black hole, the Chandelier’s induction nets harvesting energy from infalling masses and stretched space-time.
In the long struggle between humans and mechs, pure physical resources became the pivot for many battles. It had been risky, even in the early, glory days after mankind reached the Galactic Center, to build a radiant, massive Chandelier so close to the virulent energies and sleeting particle hail near the black hole itself: mech territory. But mankind had swaggered then, ripe and unruly from the long voyage from Earth system.
Now, six millennia since those glory days, Ahmihi felt himself hoisted up before a bank of scanners. His sensorium told of probings in the microwave and infrared spectra. Cool, thin fingers slid into his own cerebral layers. He braced himself for death.
I wish you to view my work. Here:
Something seized Ahmihi’s sensorium like a man palming a mouse, squeezed—and he was elsewhere, a flat broad obsidian plain. Upon which stood… things.
They had all been human, once. Now the strange wrenched works were festooned with contorted limbs, plant growths, shafts of metal and living flesh. Some sang as winds rubbed them. A laughing mouth of green teeth cackled, a cube sprayed tart vapors, a bloodred liquid did a trembling dance.
At first he thought the woman was a statue. But then breath whistled from her wrenched mouth. Beneath her translucent white skin pulsed furious blue-black energies. He could see through her paper-thin skin, sensing the thick fibers that bound muscle and bone, gristle and yellow tendons, like thongs binding a jerky, angular being… which began to walk. Her head swiveled, ratcheting, her huge pink eyes finding him. The inky patch between her legs buzzed and stirred with a liquid life, a strong stench of her swarmed up into his nostrils, she smiled invitingly—
“No!” He jerked away and felt the entire place telescope away. He was suddenly back, dangling from the gun-leg. “What is this place?”
The Hall of Humans. An exhibition of art. Modesty compels me to add that these are early works, and I hope to achieve much more. You are a difficult medium.
“Using… us?”
For example, I attempted in this artwork to express a coupling I perceive in the human worldsum, a parallel: often fear induces lust shortly after, an obvious evolutionary trigger function. Fear summons up your mortality, so lust answers with its fleeting sense of durability, immortality.
Ahmihi knew this Mantis was of some higher order, beyond anything his ’Sembly had seen. To it, their lives were fragmented events curved into… what? So the Mantis thought of itself as an artist, studying human trajectories with ballistic precision.
He thought rapidly. The Mantis had some cold and bloodless passion for diseased art. Accept that and move on. How could he use this?
You share with others (who came from primordial forces) a grave limitation: you cannot redesign yourselves at will. True, you carry some dignity, since you express the underlying First Laws. Still, you express in hardware what properly belongs in software. An unfortunate inheritance. Still, it provides ground for aesthetic truths.
“If your kind would just leave us alone—”
Surely you know that competition for resources, here at the most energetic realm of the galaxy, must be… significant. My kind too suffers from its own drive to persist, to expand.
“If you’d showed up when we had full Chandelier strength, you’d be lying in pieces by now.”
I would not be so foolish. In any case, you cannot destroy an anthology intelligence. My true seat of intelligence is dispersed. My aesthetic sense, primary in this immediate manifestation, still lodges strongly in the Hall of Humans that I have constructed light-years away. You visited it just now.
“Where?” He had to keep this angular thing of ceramic and carbon steel occupied. His people could still slip away—
Quite near the True Center and its Disk Engine. You shall visit it again in due time if you are fortunate and I select you for preservation.
“As suredead?”
I find you primates an entrancing medium.
“Why don’t you just keep us alive and talk to us?”
He was sorry he had asked the question, for instantly, from the floor below, the Mantis made a corpse rise. It was Leona, a mother of three who had fought with the men, and now had a trembling, bony body blackened by Borer weaponry.
You are a fragile medium—pay witness. I do know how to express through you, though it is a noise-thickened method. Inevitably you die of it. But if you prefer—
She teetered on broken legs and peered up at him. Her mouth shaped words that whistled out on separate exhalations, like a bellows worked by an unseen hand.
“I find this… overly hard-wired… medium is… constrained sufficiently… to yield… fresh insights.”
“My God, kill her.” He thrashed against the pincers that held him aloft.
“I am… dead as… a human… But I remain… a medium.”
He looked away from Leona. “Don’t you have any sense of what she’s going through?”
My level does not perceive pain as you know it. At best, we feel irreducible contradiction of internal states.
“Wow, that must be tough.”
Working her like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Mantis made Leona cavort below, singing and dancing at a hideous heel-drumming pace, her shattered bones poking through legs caked with dried brown blood. Fluids leaked from the punctured chest.
“Damn it, just talk through my sensorium. Let her go!”
