He met a Rattler while playing with some young men. They were chasing each other, carrying a ball, a game that called forth the hunting joys buried in the primordial past. So immersed they were that the Rattler got within a few hundred meters.
They were playing near the ruins of a huge Kubla left by the people who had claimed Isis millennia before, then left. Its pleasure dome still offered vibrant illusions if stimulated, and Paris thought the Rattler must be one of these when he first saw it—moving slinky-quick, armatures pivoting to focus upon the men.
The Rattler cut down six of them before Paris could reach his weapon, a long-bore kinetic rifle. It was hopelessly antique, but that was all they had to give the young men in training. He fired at the Rattler and even hit it but then a friend fell nearby and that distracted him. He had seen death, but not this way. He hesitated and by pure luck the Rattler did not kill him. A bolt from two others stilled the coiled thing. Paris knew he was of no use then and resolved to do better. The emotions that wrenched him as he helped carry the bodies away were like a fever, an illness that did not soon abate.
That was the beginning. You start out thinking that other people get killed, but not you, of course. The first time you are badly wounded the worst shock of it is not the physical one, but the sudden realization that death can come so easily, and to you.
It had taken a long time after that to know that nothing could happen to him that had not already happened to every generation before. They had done it and so could he. In a way, dying was the easiest of the hard things.
There was an inscription above the archway of a broad public plaza, one crowned with a transparent dome through which the whole mad swirl of the Galactic Center constantly churned, and he had written it down to keep it, for the strange joy it brought when he understood it:
By my troth, I care not: a man can die but once; we owe God a death… and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.
After a while he came to know that nothing happens until it actually comes to you, and you live your life up until then to get the most out of it. To live well, you had to live in each gliding moment. Cowardice—the real thing, not momentary panic—came from inability to stop the imagination from working on each approaching possibility. To halt your imagining and live in the very moving second, with no past and no future, was the vital secret. With it you could get through each second and on to the next without needless pain.
The Me learned this and the I accepted it.
THE HARVESTED
>They threw me in this pit of mech-waste, stuff like greasy packing fluff and I figured, sure as hell I can climb out of this.
>All around these mechs were gathered like it was a ritual and they hanged me upside down first, shooting me through the belly and watching the blood run out and down over my breasts and into my face so I could taste it, warm in the cold air.
>A whistling sharp by me and then a smack.
>Must of been some nanos in the bread I ate before this hot sour taste rose up in my throat and I started choking real bad.
>It stabbed me with an antenna, a big surprise because I thought it was one of those mechs that only used microwave pulsers.
>It was at the very end of the campaign and I was tired out and lay down to catch a few snores and this slow thing came by, I didn’t pay it any mind.
>We were going real fast to get away.
>She went first and made the jump clean as you like and I did too but my leggings busted out and I lost my Goddamn balance.
Riding in his upper spine he carried an advisor Aspect of great antiquity named Arthur.
By then Paris was listened to in ’Sembly gatherings, though he was still fairly young. Arthur always urged moderation in diplomacy with the mechs and gave examples from ancient human history. When Paris questioned the hardships Arthur related from the Olden Times when humans had first come to Galactic Center, Arthur huffily replied,
Let us say it was not precisely tea with the Queen.
Every now and then Arthur would use these archaic expressions from the Old Time and nobody knew what they meant, but Arthur never seemed to notice. He had others, such as
Warts and all—some big enough to hang a hat on.
When plasma discharges sent burnt-gold lattices across the entire sector of the night sky, Arthur observed
Any sufficiently advanced technology at the Center will appear to be a natural phenomenon.
He was right, of course. Mech constructions swam in gossamer profusion within a few light-years. No one knew what the mechs were doing at Galactic Center, beyond the obvious point that here the raw energies and particle fluxes favored their kind. Not only were they less vulnerable to the cutting climate, they seemed to have a larger purpose.
Arthur regaled Paris with tales of how grand the earlier human eras had been, one of his more irritating habits. Still, his Aspect-stilted advice was useful in dealing with the roving mechs who now pestered the ’Sembly’s days.
Mechs were moving in and they made arrogant displays of their contempt for mere mongrel humans. Dried-up carcasses of animals and humans alike—for to mechs they were alike—dangled on rubbery ties from some mechs’ legs, so that they bounced and swayed with walking or just in the wind. Some thought this was just another way to terrorize humans, but Paris sensed in it the mech sense of humor, or something like it, for none of it of course was funny to humans.
So the mechs came: Snouts, Lancers, Scrabblers, Stalkers, Rattlers, Baba Yagas, Zappers, Dusters, Luggos. Humanity had paid a high price for each name, each word calling up in a sensorium an instant, resonant, precise catalog of traits and vulnerabilities the mech had, facets won by many deaths.
Beneath a smoldering sky where there was never truly a night—for dozens of nearby stars brimmed with furious glows, giving a simmering, nebula-lit sense of spreading immensity—mech ships descended like locusts.
Paris fought in the sprawling, terrible, year-long battle that destroyed the principal mech units on Isis. In that year he wore a wolfish grin, all sharp edges and strung wire. He distinguished himself beneath the Walmsley statue, an ancient shaped mountain. There was a small village and some shacks built into the foot of the memorial monument; that’s how big it was. There Paris deduced the mech maneuverings before they could execute them, and so won the day.
Not that the men serving under him found him warm. By then his increasing distance had become legendary. “Tight bastard, couldn’t fart without a shoehorn,” he overheard, and took it as a term of respect.
By then he saw that a machine was a man turned inside out. It could describe all the details but in its flood of data it missed the sum of it all, the experience plucked from the endless stream. A vital secret of humans lay in their filters, what they chose to ignore.
He did not feel degrees Kelvin or liters per second or kilograms; he felt heat or cold, flows, heaviness. He knew love and hate, fear and hunger all beyond measure. Beyond the realm of digits.
Their defeat of the mechs on Isis was surely only temporary. Everyone knew it.
So the ’Sembly—grown to many millions now by immigration and fast-breeding—convened to celebrate the continuity they honored. It might be the last chance they had to do so.
In a communal linkage the entire ’Sembly resurrected the Ole Bros—Personae so complete that some interpreted their very twilight existence as evidence for an afterlife. The Ole Bros advised that the ’Sembly strike back at the mechs in deep space, where they dwelled. Only by taking the fight to them could humans hope to survive.
Paris believed this. Plan on being surprised, the Ole Bros said, and then unaccountably laughed. Paris took up their cause. He had many followers by this time, and women came to him easily, but he was not distracted. Something in the dire situation of his time called to him. He used the ’Sembly’s reverence for the Ole Bros to sway them, while not for a moment believing the theology surrounding the ’Sembly’s reverence for digital resurrections, for the implied afterlife in some remote analytical heaven.
This turned Paris to a question many had asked in adversity. Of what use to humanity was religion?
He knew this was not how the others of ’Sembly Noachian saw the world. But part of him insisted: Bare a benefit, explain the behavior. Why he thought automatically in terms of this rule he did not know, but he felt the shadow-self move in himself.
