Gregory Benford - Deep Eyes

Toby saw Quath on topo a fair distance off. She was blocking the Mantis’s retreat. “It’s close by. Smell that?”

Killeen said, “We got the bastard now.”

“It wasn’t trying to get me solid.

“Its body’s shot,” Killeen whispered.

It was. A heavy odor of something like suffering layered the air as they came into a stand of gnarled trees and thick undergrowth. They trotted as quietly as they could although speed mattered more now.

The Mantis was leaning against some trees. Branches stuck through its open spaces. Coming up on it slowly, Toby thought the thing looked as though the trees had grown in the Mantis body itself and it was now a work both organic and mech.

He could see the back of it, jet black and soft gray and huge, lattices united with complex angularities. He followed his father along flanks that sighed and settled as though something was going out of the Mantis. Something was—fleeting wisps of data hummed and buzzed in their passage.

It was as big as a house and Toby saw now the way energies had held it together and would no more. More slabs of data emitted from it like blood running out and Killeen raised his emag and fired. The Mantis had antennae and disks in their own enclosed bays and one of these focused on them. That was its only reaction. There was no need to do it mechanical damage, to use explosives or bolts. The intricate information web that made up the Mantis was frying into nothing. Programs from the Trigger Codes fed with a crackling intensity that Toby could hear eating like flames through the whole gray sensorium of the Mantis. Three parabolic antennae swiveled to look at them. His father fired again and the whole thing shook like a house about to come down.

Toby backed away. “Plenty done now,” he said.

“No.”

The Mantis fell. Parts popped free and rolled and the intricate crystalline layers smashed. Some beautiful arc struts popped from their collars and the complexities they had supported spilled. The ground rumbled but the two men did not back away from the unspooling masses.

“It’s done,” Toby said.

“No.”

Toby did not like it but his father was right. Quath came up behind them and said nothing. They all heard the thin cries of the subminds as pleasure-pains slipped into them. The Trigger Codes at work.

The Mantis had been trying to stop the spread of the disorders all this time, and its despair and agony came intensely to the men, released by constellations of subminds which had finally given up. The thing was letting itself go in a final burst of bliss. Patterns danced and flared in its sensorium, spilling out filigreed and rich and meaning nothing to humans.

Toby stepped back and his own aching pain made him suddenly weak. “It’ll be gone soon, Dad.”

“No. Prang it once yourself.”

“Let it go.”

Cermo limped up suddenly behind them, one ear tom loose and blood down his face. His left arm dangled uselessly and showed white bone but Cermo’s face was whiter. Toby remembered instantly when Killeen had lost arm function to a mech long ago, and the way Cermo had paid it no attention out of respect, except when Killeen truly needed help.

Cermo’s sensorium rang with medical alarms. Cermo paid them no attention and Cermo did not look at Toby or Killeen or Quath either. He hobbled up and took Toby’s weapon in a hand caked in brown blood. Cermo staggered with the weight of it and nobody said anything.

There was no sounds except the Mantis still stirring. From it whirred smears of information and into Toby came one clear voice.

Here is all I can give.

“Kill it,” Killeen said. Cermo blinked, dazed. His right arm halflifted Toby’s sharp-darter. He seemed stunned by the sudden intensity of the voice.

I am more than the sum of all memories.

Cermo lifted the sharp-darter and pointed the snubbed snout at the center of the still seething Layers. The mainmind was in there somewhere. He weaved, unsteady. The moment hung in the air.

I saved so many Bishops.

I have the greatest collection of you.

And you are the most splendid of all the lesser forms.

Cermo jerked into life. He fired three times. Even singlehanded, at this range each shot found its way into a submind and sparked a hard yellow flare in the Mantis sensorium. Each time Cermo swore angrily and the Mantis rocked with the impact.

The third one made the parabolic antennae whirl around very fast and faster and then stop. Toby knew he would remember the silly look of that.

Every sliding rod and servo in the Mantis halted and the dignity went out of it in a way he could not voice. One moment it was huge and suffering and then it was just a big pile of shattered parts. No whole.

Cermo fell then. He came down completely slack, arms loose and knees buckling. Toby saw that the Mantis had done some last thing and the aura of that burst hit him, too. It gave him a prickly jolt all over. His sensorium fused, tilted, flashed with working veins of amber. He staggered but the pulse did no damage.

By the time he reached Cermo the heavy-lidded eyes had closed.

“Damn!” Killeen said.

Quath said.

“Why?” Killeen demanded. His voice was strained.

“Revenge,” Killeen said.

“With us? Other way around,” Killeen said bitterly.

Toby’s voice was a croak. “What… pattern?”

“It wanted to see us do that?” Killeen was quiet now, kneeling with his hands uselessly rubbing Cermo’s shoulder.

Toby thought about the stored memories it had shed into the air, its treasure evaporating. But memory was not yourself, he saw. It could not drive forward, act. Memories just sat and waited.

The timestone tossed and broke and they spent a long time then just clinging to whatever stable places they could find. They did what they could for Cermo but that wasn’t much. Killeen opened Cermo’s spine and swore. “They’re burned.”

“How?” Toby asked.

“Mantis must’ve worked down through all his inboards.”

“I thought our chips were protected.”

“So did I. But our tech is old and mechs never stop learning.”

Killeen said this heavily and with the respect a combatant had for another. Cermo’s cylinder spinal chips had carried the older Aspects and Faces from Bishop history. A suredeath reduced the present, subtracting one life. Chip charring carried that loss far back into a dim past, plundering the origins of the Family itself.

It was hard finding enough real ground to bury Cermo. They stripped away his gear and divided the mass out for taking back. Most of it was useless but to leave it would draw mech scavengers.

Utter darkness came for a while and they slept. It did not do much good for Toby and when he woke a gang of scavenger navvys had found the Mantis. He heard them cutting and clattering around and went up the slope to where they worked in the sprawling shambles. He remembered how the parabolic antenna had spun around like an eye searching madly and how the majesty had gone then. The flanks of it were gone too now, carried off by the scavengers. The mechs had their own ecology of a sort, recycling machined parts and whole intact auxiliaries. There was no more Mantis, just intricate assemblies slewed out of their mounts, and gear he could not understand fried by vagrant pulses. The navvys picked over the carcass where crystalline lattices had carried the Mantis intelligence. There were navvys of all sizes, scooters and jakos mostly, and they worked remorselessly in teams. When they were done they would leave nothing.