>Thousands of us there must be, all in this black flat place only it curves around above, I can see up there with my one eye, and the ceiling is filled with us, too, all planted in place.
>I’m all veins, big fat blue ones, no mouth but I want to eat all the time.
>My mother is here just a few meters away but I know her only by the sobbing, sounds just like her, and none of the rest of that thing is.
>I got my hand free and poked one of my eyes out so I didn’t have to look at it but they fixed the eyes, said it was part of the expressiveness of me, and now I have to look all the time, no eyelids and they never turn out the lights.
>It is not hot but it is Hell and we whisper to each other about that and about it being forever and ever, hallowed be thy Name, amen.
It was a place of chalk and blood, of diamond eyes and strident songs.
Paris and the eleven other survivors found the lock, broke in, and prowled the vast interior of the rotating cylinder. He passed by things he could not watch for long, searching for sense.
Plumes of scent, muddy voices, words like fevered birdcalls.
Some of them were no longer remotely human, but rather coiled tubes of waxy flesh. Others resembled moving lumps of buttery bile. A man stood on one hand, his belly an accordion-pleated bulge, and as he moved oval fissures opened all over him, wheezing forth a fine yellow mist, long words moaning out: “I… am… a holy… contri… vance…” and then a throttled gasp and “Help… me… be… what… I… am…”
A sewer smell came swarming up from nearby. A woman gazed directly back into his eyes. She said nothing but her skin ran with tinkling streams of urine. Nearby a little girl was a concert of ropy pink cords, red-rimmed where they all tried to speak.
The twelve spread out in a daze. Some recognized warped versions of people they had known. There were people here from far antiquity and places no one knew.
Paris found an entire aisle of shivering couples, entwined in sexual acts made possible by organs designed in ways nature never had allowed: sockets filled by slithering rods, beings which palped and stroked themselves to a hastening pace that rose to a jellied frenzy, shrieked from fresh mouths, and then abated, only to begin again with a building rhythm.
An Isis man was vomiting nearby. “We’ve got to save them,” he said when Paris went to help him.
“Yeasay,” a woman pilot agreed. The survivors were drifting back together, pressed by the enveloping horror.
A wretched nearby sculpture of guts that sprouted leaves managed to get out three words, “No… don’t… want…”
Paris felt the fear and excitement of the last few hours ebbing from him, replaced by a rising, firm feeling he could not force out through his throat. He shook his head. The woman started to argue, saying that they could take the cases that had been deformed the least, try to free them from the alterations.
Paris found his voice. “They want to go. Listen.”
From the long axis that tapered away to infinity there rose a muttered, moaning, corpuscular symphony of anguish and defeat that in its accents and slurred cadences called forth the long corridor of ruin and affliction that was the lot of humanity here at Galactic Center, down through millennia.
He stood listening. Parts of his mind rustled—moving uneasily, understanding.
The Mantis sculptures got the most important facets profoundly wrong. The Mantis had tried to slice human sliding moments from the robed minds of the suredead, but it could not surecopy them: their essence lay in what was discarded from the billion-bit/second stream. In the mere passing twist and twinge of a second, humans truncated their universe with electrochemical knives.
Hot-hearted, to humans death was the mother of beauty. Their gods were, in the end, refracted ways of bearing the precarious gait of the mortal.
To Paris as a boy the compact equation eπ+1=0 had comprised a glimpse of the eternal music of reason, linking the most important constants in the whole of mathematical analysis, 0, 1, e, π, and i. To Paris the simple line was beautiful.
To a digitally filtered intelligence the analog glide of this relation would be different, not a glimpse of a vast and various landscape. Not better or worse, but irreducibly different.
That he could never convey to the Mantis.
Nor could he express his blood-deep rage, how deeply he hated the shadow that had dogged his life.
But his fury was wise in a way that mere anger is not. He surprised himself: he breathed slowly, easily, feeling nothing but a granite resolve.
Paris began killing the sculptures systematically. The others stood numbly and watched him, but their silence did not matter to him. He moved quickly, executing them with bolts, the work fixing him totally in the moment of it.
He did not notice the sobbing.
After a time he could not measure he saw that the others were doing the same, without discussion. No one talked at all.
The wails of the sculptured people reverberated, moist glad cries as they saw what was coming.
It took a long time.
The Mantis was waiting outside the Hall of Humans, as Paris had felt it would be.
I was unable to predict what you and the others did.
“Good.” His pencil ship lifted away from the long gray cylinder, now a mausoleum to madness.
I allowed it because those are finished pieces. Whereas you are a work in progress, perhaps my best.
“I’ve always had a weakness for compliments.”
He could feel his very blood changing, modulating oxygen and glucose from his body to feed his changing brain. The accretion disk churned below, a great lurid pinwheel grinding to an audience of densely packed stars.
Humor is another facet I have mastered.
“There’s a surprise.” Vectoring down, the boost pressing him back. “Very human, too. Everybody thinks he’s got a good sense of humor.”
I expect to learn much from you.
