My communicative mode is part of the craft I create. Patterns of fear, of hatred; your flood of electrical impulses and brain chemicals that signifies hopelessness or rebellion: all part of the virtuosity of the passing mortal moment.
“Sorry I can’t seem to appreciate it. Leona… she’s sure-dead?”
“Yes… This one… has been… fully recorded…” Leona wheezed, “I have… harvested her… joyously.” “This way… she’s hideous.”
As this revived form, I can see your point. But with suitable reworking, hidden elements may emerge. Perhaps after my culling among the harvested, I shall add her to my collected ones. She has thematic possibilities.
Ahmihi shook his head to clear it. His muscles trembled from being held suspended and from something more, a strange sick fear. “She doesn’t deserve this.”
Yet I feel something missing in my compositions, those you saw in the Hall of Humans. What do you think of them?
He fought down the impulse to laugh, then wondered if he was close to hysteria. “Those were artworks? You want art criticism from me? Now?”
Leona gasped. “I sense… I have… missed essentials… The beauty… is seeping… from my… works.”
“Beauty’s not the sort of thing that gets used up.”
“Even through… the tiny… grimed window… of your sensorium… you sense… a world-set… I do not. Apparently… there is… something gained… by such… blunt… limitations.”
Which way was this going? He had a faint glimmering. “What’s the problem?”
“I sense… far more… yet do not… share your… filters.”
“You know too much?” He wondered if he could get a shot at Leona, stop this. No human tech could salvage a mind that was suredead, “harvested” by the mechs—though why mechs wanted human minds, no one knew. Until now. Ahmihi had heard legends of the Mantis and its interest in humans, but not of any Hall of Humans.
“I have… invaded nervous… systems… driven them to… insanity, suicide.” Leona twitched, stumbled, sprawled. Her eyes goggled at the vault above, drifted to peer into Ahmihi’s. “Not the… whole canvas… something… missing.”
He tried to reach a beam tube and failed. The Chandelier’s phosphor lights were dimming, shadowing Leona.
With obvious pain she struggled to her feet. “I tried Ephemerals… so difficult… to grasp.”
Ahmihi thought desperately. “Look, you have to be us.”
For the first time in this eerie discussion the Mantis paused. It let Leona crumple on the floor below, a rag doll tossed aside.
That is a useful suggestion. To truncate my selves into one narrow compass, unable to escape. Yes.
Ahmihi felt a sudden pressure, like a wall of flinty resolve, course through his sensorium. He had no hope that he would live
more than a few moments longer, but still, the hard dry coldness of it filled him with despair.
THE HARVESTED
>I had come around the corner and there it was, more like a piece of furniture than a mech, and it poked something at me.
>The last thing I saw was a ’bot we used for ore hauling, tumbling over and over like something had blown it, and I thought, I’m okay because I’m behind this stressed glass.
>I still got the memory of something hard and blue in my line of sight, a color I’d never seen before.
>She fell down and I stooped to help her up and saw she had no head and the thing that was holding her head on the floor jumped up at me, too.
>lt had a kind of ceramic tread that came around on me when I thought it was dead, booby-trapped some way, I guess, and it caught me in the side like a conveyor belt.
The Noachian ’Sembly fled the mech plunder of their Chandelier. Their Exec, Ahmihi, had emerged from his capture by the Mantis with a sensorium that howled with discord. Each neurological node of his body vibrated in a different pattern. His voice rang like a stone in a bucket. It was as if the symphony of his body had a deranged conductor.
But within hours he recovered. He would never speak of the experience with the Mantis. He led his ’Sembly into craft damaged but serviceable. The mechs did not attack as over three hundred escaped the drifting hulk their once glorious spin-city had become.
This was one of the last routs of the Chandelier Age. After these defeats, humanity fled deep space for the nostalgic refuge of planets. This was in the end foolish, for the Galactic Center is unkind to the making and tending of worlds. There, within a single cubic light-year, a million suns glow. Glancing near-collisions between stars can strip the planets from a star within a few million years. Only worlds carefully stabilized can persist. Even then, they suffer weathering unknown in the calm outer precincts of the great spiral galaxy.
The Noachian ’Sembly used a gravitational whip around the black hole to escape pursuit. This cost lives and baked their ships until they could barely limp on to a marginally habitable world, named Isis by some other ’Sembly, which a millennium before had departed for greener planets, farther out from True Center. Isis was dry and windswept, but apparently of little interest to mechs. This was enough; the Noachians spiraled in and began to live again. But much had happened on the way.
Mech weaponry can be insidious, particularly their biological tricks. A ’Sembly platitude was all too true. You may get better after getting hit, but you do not get well.
A year into their voyage, Ahmihi lay dying. As he gasped hideously, lungs slowly eaten by the nano-seekers the mechs had carried, his wife came near to say goodbye. The ’Sembly folk were afraid to record Ahmihi’s personality into an Aspect, since he was plainly mech-damaged, perhaps mentally. In his fever he spoke of some bargain he had struck with the near-mythical Mantis, and no one could fathom the terms. He had been tampered with in some profound way, perhaps so that the story he told could give away nothing vital.
But they did have his archived recording from the year before; not everything would be lost. In a desperate era, skills and knowledge had to be preserved into the chips which rode at the nape of the neck of each ’Sembly member. These carried the legacy of many ancient personalities, rendered into Aspects or the lesser Faces or Profiles. Ahmihi would survive in fractional form, his expertise available to his descendants.
No one noticed when a small insectlike entity crawled from the dying Ahmihi’s mouth. It whirred softly toward his wife, Jalia, and stung her. She slapped it away, thinking it no different from the other vermin released from the hydro sections.
The flier implanted in Jalia a packet of nanodevices that quickly recoded one of her ova. Then it dissolved to avoid detection. The Noachian ’Sembly burned Ahmihi’s body to prevent any possible desecration by mechs, especially if nanos were alive in the ship.
Their prayers were answered; apparently the small band of fleeing humans were not worth mech time or effort to pursue.
Jalia gave birth to a son, a treasure in an era when human numbers were falling. Gene scanners found nothing out of the ordinary. She called the boy Paris, in the tradition of the Noachian ’Sembly, to use city names from Earth—Akron, Kiev, Fairhope—though Earth itself was now a mere legend, doubted by many.
When he was five his intensive education began. He had been an ordinary boy until then, playing happily in the dry fields from which skimpy crops came. He was wiry, athletic, and seldom spoke.
When Paris began learning, he made a discovery. Others did not sense the world as he did.
Every second, many millions of bits of information flooded through his senses. But he could consciously discern only about forty bits per second of this cataract. He could read documents faster than he could write, or than people could speak, but the stream was still torpid.
