Great Sky River (37 page)

“You mean like those legs and arms I saw back there? Growing ’em in farms?”

He edged closer to the Fanny-thing.

Those are useful in bioparts, yes. But the finest specimens of body parts are kept for artworks. Those you saw were being
grown for a drama the Mantis wishes to present. An entire staged reenactment of a human battle against early mechs, perhaps.

A humming. Killeen was distracted by it as he took another step. Then he saw it was coming from the gouged nostrils under
each breast of the thing. Slow, agonizing
mmmmmms
interspersed with
uhhh-hunmms.
It seemed to be trying to say something.

Another step.

The Aspect’s voice went on, coolly unconcerned:

The area which the Mantis wishes your help with falls precisely in the zone which the mechs have not been able to penetrate.
The most intense human interactions seem to lie beyond their reach. The Mantis attempted to correct this by preferentially
recording the oldest humans—

“That’s why it took Fanny?”

A halfstep slid his foot under a triangular rock as big as his hand.

The thing hummed louder, its rhythm laced with anxiety.

The eyes beseeched him.

Yes. This matter has been a vexing problem for it, ever since the inception of its career.

“What
…
?” Killeen had a sudden suspicion.

The Mantis began its artistic program with what the Families call the Calamity. Understand, the mech cities would eventually
have destroyed the Citadels in any case, as part of their pest-elimination procedures. The Mantis supervised operations so
that it could harvest a maximum number of humans, allowing few to die unrecorded. The Mantis preferentially harvested the
older, riper humans. Just as it did, you’ll remember, at the meeting of Rooks and -Bishops. But some elements do not accumulate
better in the old. Evidently, several categories of human life remain only as dim echoes in the memory. Thus the Mantis wishes
to—

He saw his chance and took it. With one motion he flipped the flat rock into the air and caught it with his right hand.

Two steps forward.

The eyes of the Fanny-thing widened but it stood its ground.

He brought the stone point down heavily. It split the skull with a loud crack.

Killeen backed away from the falling form. As it crashed to the sandy mat the Mantis clanked forward, far too late.

Then it stopped. Killeen looked up at the impassive lenses and antennae and thought carefully,
It wanted to die. It needed death.

The Mantis did not move.

Arthur said nothing.

Movement. Killeen turned.

Toby came running from behind the bristly bushes.

“Dad!”

“Run!” was all Killeen could think to say.

Toby reached out toward his father. His foot caught on a root.

He crashed facedown. A fine net of cracks spread across Toby’s back. Killeen heard tiny, brittle popping noises.

The cracks broadened to black lines, racing zigzag all over the boy.

Before Killeen could move, his son broke crackling into fragments, shattered like glass.

He blinked and was awake. His hands and feet were cold. Grimy polymer flooring pressed against his cheek.

Killeen rolled over, his mind a jumble of disconnected thoughts. He had been reaching for Toby—

Toby.

But he had been embedded in the sensorium of the Mantis, he reminded himself. The sensations had been absolutely real, gritty,
full-bodied. Far deeper than the dispassionate electrical imagery of the human sensorium.

Illusion. All illusion.

Now he was back in the world of stunted, normal human perceptions. Staring upward into harsh lamps that beamed streaming blue
light down from an impossibly high ceiling. Breathing not the moist clasp of the Mantis sensorium, but a dry air tainted by
acrid flavors.

He sat up. He was wearing his coveralls, just as he had been when the Mantis came upon them. He patted his pockets automatically.
Everything was there.

Around him Hatchet and Toby and the rest of the party were slowly reviving, shaking their heads, blinking, recovering.

Toby.
Killeen got to his feet and unsteadily walked to where his son sat. Toby, head hung between his knees, gasping for breath.

“You okay?”

“I… think so. That place…”

“The islands? That ocean, with—”

“Naysay. I was in some sorta cave. Things crawling the walls. Real spooky…” Toby’s head snapped up, alert. “Not that I was
scared.”

Killeen grinned. “Suresay, yeasay. Just a little show from the Mantis, it was.” He didn’t feel that way, his heart still raced,
but there was no point in letting it roust them.

“It asked me lotsa questions. I didn’t understand ’em.”

“Forget all that.”

Toby stood up. “Let’s get outta here.”

Hatchet came over, looking disoriented. “Whatever that was, I think we—”

The scissoring sound made them all stop and turn. The Mantis appeared from around a nearby corner. Killeen watched it now
without real fear. They were utterly in its control and he knew enough to simply bide his time.

The Mantis approached slowly, high and angular, tiptoeing through a series of sculptures. The nearest work was an immense
human hand, cupped upward to hold Shibo. She climbed out of it, holding on to a huge lacquered fingernail and swinging down.

1. Was easier with you all in my world.
   
2. But you truer to selves in real-form.
   

From the reactions of the others Killeen could see that they, too, heard this in their sensoria. The Mantis had now learned
how to penetrate the human net fully.

“Let’s go!” Cermo-the-Slow cried with bitter anguish.

Killeen wondered what Cermo had seen in his own private visit within the Mantis’s interior labyrinth. Each journey had been
shaped for the individual, he guessed. The Mantis had certainly known how to trigger Killeen’s deepest emotions. For what
dark purpose?

1. I have not finished.
   
2. Each must yield more.
   
3. I seek your inner senses.
   
4. Intensity is the prime element missing in my collection.
   

Around the humans dark sculptures began to stir with gravid life. Near Killeen a great eye opened, its lash like a huge fan.
Yellow veins traced intricate patterns in the bluewhite iris. Tear ducts exuded globes of shimmering gray fluid.

It was as though the complex of human organs, here rendered separately grotesque, was responding to some summons. The monstrous
eye batted its lash with a whispery whipping quickness. The pupil contracted and expanded like a pulsing, spherical heart.

The Mantis had atomized human experience and now wished to integrate it, through them.

And when it was done with them…

Killeen grabbed Toby’s arm. “Come on.”

They started away, threading among the huge working things. Killeen deliberately did not look at them. The high ceiling lamps
gave little illumination here. The slug
gishly moving parts were veiled in twilight, giving off rank odors that cut the air.

1. Questions remain.
   
2. I ask for help.
   
3. In return comes freedom.
   

“How can we believe that?” Killeen asked.

They did not slow. He glanced back and saw the others were stilled, heads turned as though listening. The arms of the Kingsman
that were paralyzed back on the Crafter had regained their function. He lifted them trembling to his face. For each in the
party there was some special, unguessable message.

1. The trust between intelligent beings.
   
2. This is all you have.
   
3. Or I.
   

Killeen shrugged this off and kept moving. Then, ahead, something stepped from the veiled shadow. It had been lurking there.

He had thought that the things he had seen on the glassy green sea were illusion. Now he wished they had been. The reality
was worse.

The Fanny-thing stretched, muscles stringy and trembling. Its eyes flashed, liquid-quick. Circles of flaking corruption rimmed
the stem where a mouth should be. Mucus clogged its sighing breath-hole beneath each shriveled breast.

“So you did make it,” Killeen said with quiet despair.

Actuality holds elements not found in any synthetic construct.

“This… No…”

Toby stepped backward, mouth an incredulous O.

Some categories of human experience are apparently not memory-stored in sufficient detail for myself to harvest. Thus I require
that you mate. Your close connection with this female human promises to bring a high response function.

Killeen froze. “You don’t—you can’t—”

Your reaction in the trial was most surprising. Gratifyingly so.

“Trial?” Then the entire illusion of ocean and islands and Fanny had been a preparation for… this.

Many aspects of human response remain to be analyzed and expressed artistically. However, it has been my impression that the
emotions of fear and lust parallel each other. Often fear induces lust shortly afterward. This can be understood as an evolutionary
trigger function. Fear reminds you of your mortality, so in answer, lust ensures some fragmentary sense of immortality—though
a pale shadow of the true lastingness to be found in our recording of your selves, of course. It is this dimension of fear/lust
that I wish to study now.

Killeen got a steely grip on himself. The Fanny-thing shambled forward in its agonized way.

He had killed a sensorium-construct of this thing. In some sort of reply the Mantis had shattered the sensoriumimage of Toby.
Was that a threat?

Killeen gritted his teeth. It was impossible to guess intentions. The Mantis had used the incident simply as information,
one more icily abstracted data point. That was what they were to it. Masses of numbers and geometries, curved by the fragmented
events that humans called lives, and that this Mantis viewed as mere interesting trajectories.

“You can’t understand how wrong you are,” Killeen said defiantly.

Toby’s voice came to him, a wavering note of disbelieving horror, “Dad… Dad… it’s not really … for… is it?”

“Not really.”

1. You refuse then?
   
2. I can make you.
   
3. I wish only data.
   

As the shambling thing came nearer in the quilted shadows Killeen saw that it was a decayed construct. Instead of Fanny’s
sun-browned and wind-roughed skin, it had a mottled, purplish hide. Scabrous fungus ran from the great yawning nostrils below
the breasts, a green scum that flowed down its left side to the heavy-socketed hip. The buds of each hand ended not in flesh
but in a running shiny brown pustulance.

“It’s sick.”

Now the Mantis spoke directly, using Arthur’s voice:

Constructing the entire organism from purely mental information is difficult. Combining it with other lifeforms is the very
height of the artistic frontier. Admittedly I may have made errors, unaccountable errors, in some details.

“Mighty big of you, admittin’ it.”

Some are stylistic choices, as well. But I believe you will find the production is quite fully human. I ask of you a mere
few moments of coupling, to see if the powerful emotions engendered—

“No!”

Toby pulled at Killeen, speechless and terrified. The two backed away as the Fanny-thing advanced.

The eyes of the thing seemed to plead, to beckon. Killeen felt an ache rise from his diaphragm into his clenched chest.

Then Hatchet said at his elbow, “Listen, man, you gotta!”

Killeen turned, confused. “What… you don’t…”

Hatchet had come out of the shadows as if called. He gestured at the approaching figure. “You don’t, we can’t cut any kind
deal.”

Hatchet’s voice was bland and factual. His eyes, though, burned with a fevered intensity.

“What did
you
do for it?” Toby demanded.

Hatchet curled his lip. “You never mind, boy. It asked me, I did. Took only a minute. Now I heard it ask you for a li’l somethin’,
and you sayin’ no. So I come over. Seems you’re havin’ trouble.”

Killeen saw suddenly that the man believed totally
what he was saying. Killeen would never know what had happened to Hatchet on his own time in the Mantis sensorium, what deep
demons had slipped their leash. But he could see the effects in Hatchet’s dancing eyes. The man’s entire face was open now,
all calculation gone. Hatchet could no longer conceal the manic expressions that raced across his face, twisting his red mouth,
making his chin into a tight ball of hard muscle.

“Get away, Hatchet,” Killeen said quietly.

“Listen, you gotta.” Hatchet put his hand on Killeen’s shoulder in a warm gesture, showing that he had completely misread
Killeen’s mood. A jagged smile lurched across his lips.

“That thing isn’t human, Hatchet.”

“Not all human, no,” the man said, his voice chillingly reasonable.

“You
can
’t.”

“Look, Crafter’s dead. Only way we can protect Metropolis is stay in good with this Mantis.”

“No”
Toby whispered.

The Fanny-thing stopped, its glittering eyes watching them in the quilted glow. The rose bloomed garishly from the furrowed
bones of its face. Its breasts were wrinkled and rosy-nippled. Beneath them a shallow breath whistled, giving a strange sour
scent.

“C’mon. Just slip the old rod to it.”

Killeen stepped back from Hatchet, his throat clenched tight, unable to speak.

“Dammit! Won’t take a minute. What is she, an old woman, right? Made up somehow.”

Killeen could tell that in Hatchet’s mind he was patiently explaining the simple facts of the matter, showing how this hideous
reeking thing was really only a mo
mentary obstruction on the way to ensuring that Hatchet’s lifework, his Metropolis, could carry on. Nothing else mattered
in Hatchet’s world and nothing ever would. Nothing personal or even human could stand against Hatchet’s plan and destiny.