Tides of Light (52 page)

Death came in
on sixteen legs.

If it is possible to look composed while something angular and ominous is hauling you up out of your hiding place, a thing
barbed and hard and with a gun-leg jammed snug against your throat—then Ahmihi was composed.

He had been the Exec of the Noachin ’Sembly for decades and knew this corner of Chandelier Rock the way his tongue knew his
mouth. Or more aptly, for the Chandelier was great and vast, the way winds know a world. But he did not know this thing of
sleek, somber metal that towered over him.

He felt himself lifted, wrenched. A burnt-yellow pain burst in his sensorium, the merged body/electronic feeling-sphere that
enveloped him. Behind this colored agony came a ringing message, not spoken so much as implanted into his floating sense of
the world around him:

I wish to “talk”—to convey linear meaning
.

“Yeasay, and you be—?” He tried to make it nonchalant and failed, voice guttering out in a dry gasp.

I am an anthology intelligence. I collapse my holographic speech to your serial inputs
.

“Damn nice of you.”

The gun-leg spun him around lazily like a dangling ornament, and he saw three of his people lying dead on the decking below.
He had to look away from them, to once-glorious beauties that were now a battered panorama. This section of the Citadel favored
turrets, galleries, gilded columns, iron wrought into lattices of byzantine stillness. It was over a millennium old, grown
by biotech foundries, unplanned beauty by mistake. The battle—now quite over, he saw—had not been kind. Elliptical scabs of
orange rust told of his people, fried into sheets and splashed over walls. White waste of disemboweled bodies clogged corners
like false snow. An image-amp wall played endlessly, trying to entertain the dead. Rough-welded steel showed ancient repairs
beneath the fresh scars of bolt weaponry that had sliced men and women into bloody chunks.

I broke off this attack and intervened to spare you
.

“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!”

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.

>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
.