Gregory Benford - Deep Eyes

The lattice work did not move against the far ruddy hills, but it was not a building. It cast a shadow somehow in his sensorium that was not a blankness now. He looked for the webs of loci and motivators and subminds. They were faintly luminous and traced out the array of rods and struts. It moved then and he felt it as a positive thing finally. Not a vacancy but a presence.

He knew by legend the impossible way it moved. As he stood absolutely still and watched, the matrix shambled away from him. No hurrying, no sign it knew he was there. It was two klicks away, easy. In range, but he did not think of that. He followed to keep in view the shifting phosphorescent mainmind exposed in the tilting work of rods and the great disks swiveling.

It came to him then without a single flicker of sensorium warning. The burst was in him, before his inboards could counter. He staggered and fell. Hit hard, arms loose. The pulse skated through him and burned hot and was gone.

He lay without moving, Bishop tactics. Numbly through his sensorium he watched it go. Angular energies, vectoring into a dwindling shape. Then nothing.

He let his inboards run diagnostics and they came up with trivial overloads, easily corrected with a reset. He got up carefully. Creaky and legs shaking at the knees, but all right.

He could not explain what had happened. He knew he had to think about it but not right now. There was too much in him. A pressure seethed in his systems. Fear and a hollow longing, too. Some quality of it reminded him of the way women drew him out, but it was not that either. On the way back to his pad he decided not to wake the others.

Quath stirred elecromagnetically as he passed. she sent and he answered with—.^.—which told her submind that it was just him. He envied the way she could delegate to her partial minds and fall instantly asleep if she wanted. It was a little surprising that such an intelligence needed the down time to process memories and arrange itself, which humans did by letting the subconscious levels work during sleep.

It was the dreams that told him. He saw the long procession of Bishops in their Citadel, then on the plains, in battle, and at peace. Many of the momentary shimmers of saved experience were of their last moments. That must mean that these were salvaged slivers from the lives of doomed Bishops. Eyes wide with surprise, or slitted by pain. Mouths gasping or else hardened against what they saw coming. But there was more to it than such externals. He felt the moments, lived through them in a way impossible to get from a mere image.

These were the records of the sure-dead. Bishop minds, ransacked by mechs—by the Mantis—in age-old conflicts. Like volumes to be kept on a shelf and taken down and browsed. Or read intently if you cared.

The Mantis had sent these shards of the suredead into him. Discarding them? Radiating away data as it executed its own subminds?

He rolled sweaty in his sleep and woke sandy-eyed and ragged. At breakfast Killeen said, “I got some diagnostics on my morning screen. Said there was mech near us last night.”

“Me too,” Cermo said.

Toby said nothing and did not know why. The Mantis was probably going to die anyway. The two men looked at him and still he said nothing.

“I can pick up right now some pretty weak echoes that way—” Cermo gave a thumb-jut uphill—“but not moving.”

Toby could see nothing in his sensorium. When they started off he took rear point. They lost the Mantis trail in a place where overlapping mech signatures reeked in Toby’s sensorium, coded as stinks. He caught rotting leaves, a sharp pungency, something damp and musty. “Smells funny,” was all Cermo said.

They followed the smells, all really just electronic prompts but no less exciting for the fact of their knowing it. They found the cause in a rugged narrow gulch.

The mechs had died in convulsions. Disease programs had gotten into them and they had ended in an agony of pleasure, capacitors flashing over, mag traps sparking and searing their gray mat finish. That was what made the Trigger Codes so good. They brought intense ecstasy and the desire to share that with others, and so the mechs sent it on electromagnetic wings to each other, all in a delighted delirium. Toby knew it was supposed to be a pleasant way to die but the convulsed limbs and ripped matte-carbon skins were ugly, terrible.

“Mantis was through here,” Cermo said.

“I pick it up,” Killeen said and then Toby did too, a faint tangy odor that wound between the mech bodies. These were far lower order mechs than the Mantis of course and they crammed the little gorge. The Mantis had passed by the fallen and gone on.

“Paying its respects, maybe,” Toby said. The men laughed although he had not meant it to be funny.

Toby touched one of the wrecked carcasses. “You suppose mechs have, well, families?”

Cermo shook his head vigorously. Killeen said. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

Quath had been nearly silent since the navvy attack and now she said,

“If not family,” Killeen said, “what?”

Killen frowned. “Models?”

“Seems to me you either ken things or you don’t.” Killeen grinned at Cermo as if this were a private joke. Toby didn’t get it.

“Not families, not at all,” Killeen said bitterly.

“Why doesn’t it fly?” Killeen asked during one of their short breaks.

Toby had been wondering, too. The Mantis could jet across lanes. Men didn’t have flying gear. They couldn’t generate the thrust to deal with gravitational stresses, not and be able to walk, too. “Maybe it can’t any more?”

Cermo swallowed some water and spat it out again, an old ritual to get the dust taste out of his mouth. Then he cocked an eye at the distant emerald roof, the folded terraces of land far overhead. “Could be it threw away its propulsions first thing. We just didn’t run across them.”

Quath murmured,

The men looked at each other and shrugged. Toby wondered what Quath could mean but she ambled away then, combing the area. He did not get a chance to think further because Cermo was looking up at the foggy Esty again and frowning and then pointing. “Matterfall,” he said quietly.

Masses of green and brown ripped away from the landscape above. Silently they shot up in a geyser. Lumps tumbled and smacked into each other. “Coming fast,” Killeen said nervously.

There was nothing to do. Sometimes the esty fissured. Along its surface gravity would abruptly vanish as stretched lines of space-time snapped back, like rubber bands releasing energy. Matter would find itself suddenly released, free.

“No pretty li’l arch this time,” Cermo said.

Sometimes the trajectory of a matterfall made an arc and the mass slammed back down nearby. Once the freed debris got high enough, though, it could just as soon spray all the way across the vast space between Lane walls. This time it had more than enough energy. It seemed to speed up and still there was no sound.

“Coming close.” Toby stood with legs tight and ready to run. But which way?

The clotted stream of mass shot toward them. It swelled and Toby saw trees and rocks clearly. The leading edge was a little to his left, he saw, and then very quickly the whole sheared mass came down toward them.

Close, but not right smack on. It slammed into the esty unslope. The shock wave bowled them over. Thunder followed it. They doubled up against a spattering rain of pebbles and silt. One hit Toby in the shoulder and hurt but broke nothing.