Gregory Benford - Deep Eyes

Cermo sighted the small shiny hexagon. “Mantis is failin’ apart,” he said, kicking at it.

She did.

Killeen’s weathered face tightened. “Why? What’s it doing?”

Toby asked, “What’s the sense in that?”

“To lighten up,” Cermo said.

Toby tossed it in his palm. “No mass to this thing.”

“Probably just junked a whole seg and this is a frag.” Cermo said. He had tracked mechs of all descriptions and held them in a lofty contempt despite the fact that mechs had brought down many of his friends.

“Good sign,” Killeen said flatly and they went on.

The ground began to move under them. The worst of it was in the gut-deep confusion, nausea, and sickening lurches. Toby’s eyes did not tell him true about what his feet and body felt. He remembered Quath saying once about the timestone, The defining feature is the lack of definition .—which he had thought to be a joke then.

Not now. Rock parted and pearly vapor churned from the vent. Sheets of esty purled off in gossamer sheets, dissolving as they rose. Spray rose, enclosing him in a halo of himself, somehow caught and momentarily reflected in the event-haze, as if he were both there and also flickering into the surroundings and joining them. The other self peeled away and circled to the tops of the cliffs and became a wreath in the shearing wind, soon frayed into refractive vapor.

“Gets hard here,” was all Killeen said. They went into broken country ahead.

Then he knew he should have stayed behind once he and Quath had sighted the Mantis. He was a Bishop full grown now but for this pursuit experience was crucial and he had little. The Mantis and Killeen had fought each other ever since he could remember. Toby wanted to be here but he knew he was a drag on the others, though of course they would not speak of it.

Cermo said it with his eyes, firm and black. There was nothing to be done, the pursuit was on. This terrain was too dangerous for Toby to backtrack by himself; the Mantis was not the only high level mech here. They had watched from a distance as navvys and grubbers mined and foraged for mech debris.

So he settled in. He went hard and long and said nothing. Around their passage seethed strange vegetations, curled rock and clotted air, the esty’s energy expressed in frothy plenty. To Toby it seemed some moronic God kept reshaping the land beyond any probable use. The green profusion here seemed demented, underserved. He realized only dimly that his irritation came out of his fatigue. For that there was nothing to be done and in his father’s face he saw that. He kept falling behind their long, loping stride and so was glad when they stopped suddenly. To stay on his feet as they studied something on the ground he leaned against a rock, out of fear that he was already stumble-around tired.

It was a spool of something translucent yet mica-bright. Quath said.

In a hollow were dusty locomotion parts, a whole tractor assembly, footpads—all junked. Toby looked them over and saw they were modular.

Quath rattled her flanks.

Cermo and Killeen inspected the ground. They had done that all along the trail, talking to each other about the tract. Toby looked at the round depressions and flattened angular prints and saw the broken twigs where the thing had passed. The twig stems were not dry yet and Cermo fingered them around there. Crushed wild grass lay squashed but not browned as it would be soon.

“It’s doin’ pretty well for broken country,” Cermo said.

Killeen frowned. “Going to be hard.”

Toby said, “If I could make it out, maybe its systems are so far down—”

“You said you didn’t see it,” Cermo said. “Just felt it.”

“Yeasay.”

Cermo shook his head slowly as he looked down at the matted grass. “If we run up on it, won’t be feelin’ our way.”

Of course he was right. The Mantis was invisible to human sensoria. It could deflect attention from itself, disperse telltales, turn a thousand tech-tricks. Toby scuffed at a stone and said nothing.

Quath said.

“Enough so it can’t ambush us?” Killeen eyed Quath’s shifting bulk skeptically.

“Or wants us to think so,” Killeen shot back. He smiled to take the sting out of it. Toby wondered if Quath would understand the quick flash of yellow teeth in the rugged, walnut face.

Toby got dazed as the pace quickened with each passing hour. His wandering, miasmic mind was his true enemy now. He kept loping, inevitably behind the others, trying to go through the fog that deadened him.

They tracked the Mantis by its footpad scrapes across rocky ground. Cermo and Killeen took turns sweeping to both sides in case it was backtracking or leaving a false trail. They kept looking back to be sure Toby was still in sight. The humiliation of it was that they had done that years ago when Toby had been a boy and now he was not.

Men and women kept growing throughout their lives, so adults could outpace their children until the fragilities of old age finally caught them. There had been a time, Toby knew, when a boy reached manhood and was as strong as anyone. The competition with the mechs, who could always augment themselves further, had ended that. Humans had changed their own biology and chemistry to compete and in that way had become strangers to even their own past.

The timestone ebbed. Gauzy glows seeped up through the rough landscape. Days and nights were not evenly spaced here because the illumination came from light trapped in the space-time curvature itself. Refraction and time lags gave the radiance a hollow quality as though it had been strained through some filter and leached of its sharpness. They stopped and made camp and Toby fell asleep leaning against a boulder. He discovered this when he hit the ground and the others laughed, though of course not Quath. He made himself lay out his pad and once on it fell asleep again, and only woke when his father pulled off his boots to check his feet for blisters.

“You’re doing yeasay,” Killeen said softly in the dim dark. Toby’s nose caught the heady scent of cold but cooked vegetables and he found a plate of them next to his head. He ate them without speaking and his father brought a spicy tea hot from the fire. It was not a flame of course but a carbo-burner, so no mech could track them from the smoke or light.

“You’re holding up. Feet fine.”

“Just need some sleep,” Toby said.

“You and Quath were up finding it while we were sleeping. No reason you shouldn’t be a little behind.”

“I’ll do the sweep searching tomorrow.”

“Don’t take on too much. Have some more of those beans.”

“Not all that hungry.”

He was asleep before his father had turned off the burner and he heard nothing as the darkness waxed on. He thought of the Mantis or maybe he just dreamed that he did.

The next day he remembered the sleeping fondly before many hours of loping were done. It was bad by then. He had started fresh but it faded and he sweated more than he ever had. Quath spoke to him with some concern but Toby talked little. He carried as big a pack as the others but they also had the burner and some extra food so he was behind in that as well.

Cermo did not smile or waste energy on talk, and Toby remembered again the intensity of the man on the plains of his boyhood. That had been when humanity began to take on the mechs here on even terms and the fighting had been bitter.