Gregory Benford: Deep Eyes

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

He and Quath found the alien machine in the yawning darkness. Quath sent an emag warning, a crisp orange pinprick popping through Toby’s sen-sorium—then silence.

Toby waited. Quath moved silently to his right, enclosed in a sullen black so deep he could not see his hand without using his sensorium. The Mantis was up ahead somewhere. Senses he could not even name told him that other creatures moved here, too. They had little or no emag but they were tracking, following chemical trails left by others—scents seeping from deep glands, puffs of clinging odor released by accident or design. Everything here had mastered these chemical channels.

Toby’s natural senses were deaf to them. Humans drank in sounds and sights, the primate strong suits. Here the small noises of burrowing and scampering told him that there were other theaters, other plays in progress, and he would never be in the private audience. Yet he and even Quath had been of that theater, graduated from it perhaps to this curious shadow world of electromagnetic scents and jolting voltage deaths.

A trickle of inquiry eased into his sensorium. There: Quath. Together they moved up through snatchy brush. They took the time to slip by the snags. Even a small tear could alert the Mantis and there might be a trap, too.

Quath shivered with anticipation. Rivulets of silvery magnetic excitements came to Toby, scattershot and short-range, involuntary effusions.

The mutter of chemical life stopped. Silence. Toby could see nothing, through eye or sensorium inboards. Quath came closer, a presence he felt by a wedge of blocked air, to his left now. Then he caught it. The Mantis was a slab of nothing to the right. He could not have felt it unless he was standing absolutely still and ready.

His sense of it did not come from rich spatterings of his detection gear, sprinkled down through his nerves and bones. Those were silent. The Mantis was still well enough to make itself a blankness, an absence.

It moved by them at indeterminate range but Toby could somehow smell it. The old senses brought a stink, sour with a cool rot. He did not dare to move but the smell floating on a slight chill wind told him enough. The Mantis was moving fast and the empty patch shrank. Grey rimmed the spot now. It looked ordinary but he knew it was a Mantis blankness. Out of it could come in any split instant a forking spike. Death or injury, on emag wings.

Then it was just a point. Still moving. Toby whispered on short-range comm to Quath,—Got its signatures?—

—How bad?—

—Think it can shed them?—

—Then we’ve got to get it.—

They retreated then. Carefully, at first, they went back through the still total blackness and creatures stirred in their path. The Mantis was not even a dot now and Toby let himself go, not minding the rips as they got through a wall of thorny brush. His suit would self-heal in a while but the time lost now could not be made up except by head slogging. He and Quath had tracked and searched for a long time now, and beneath the buzz of energy in his legs he felt the seep of weariness.

The wind was picking up as the ground also moved under them. Here the esty shifted and deployed with a sullen energy and they had to be careful of their footing. The terrain itself was of alien making, a labyrinth made of space-time by forces ancient and unknown, and the Mantis seemed to know it better than humans did.

They picked up the supplies they had dropped earlier. Toby had shed his weapon, a sharp-darter long and elegant with power simmering in the butt.

Quath said,

—You’re sure?—

—We know a few, too.—

—You’re half mech yourself, fella.—

—Seems to me that just makes it a patch job—

—Ha! Insecurity? When the Mantis and its kind have killed so many of us?—

—Family Bishop’s lost over half its members to that Mantis.—

—Huh?—

Toby had only a vague idea what Quath meant, but that was not unusual. She was a blend of an insectlike organic race—her “substrate,” as she put it—and machine additions. In her bulk she carried the computing capacity to communicate with humans. The reverse path, people speaking to the Myriapodia in their digital staccato, had been a failure. Humans did not have the capacities or capacitances.

—We’re known for being hard to kill, mostly—

—A Bishop sights the Mantis, we go after it. Is that “grudge bearing”?—

—Uh, guess so. Right now this flesh needs some rest.—

“You sure it didn’t pick you up?” his father asked.

“Yeasay.”

“Quath?” Killeen’s eyes swiveled to study the huge head of the many-legger. Toby never knew why he bothered to do that. Habit, maybe. The alien’s face was an array of sensors and Toby had never been able to read any expression there.

“Damn all,” Killeen said, “I didn’t ask for a lecture.”

<1 estimate that it did not know we were there.>

“Confidence level?”

< Approximately seventy.>

Killeen nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s go.”

“Now?” Toby had wanted to ease back a bit.

“No point in waiting.”

Cermo muscled his way up the slope, puffing to the ledge they were all sitting on. “I get nothing from outlyin’ pickups.”

His broad face furrowed with concern but he said no more. The big man settled onto the ledge and looked out. Pale gray light seeped into distant timestone peaks. It was like a smothered dawn on a world that had curled up onto itself. Above them hung a distant landscape of tawny desert. Dried out riverbeds cut that land, several hundred klicks away but still visible through a cottony haze. Those river valleys looked ancient and Toby knew they could reach them with maybe a week of hard running, through esty slips and wrack-ranges. Maybe the Mantis would lead them that way. This lane was twisted and tortured, space-time turning upon itself in knots unimaginable until experienced.

“Let’s vector for it, then,” Killeen said and stood up.

Toby felt a surge of zest as they started out and it lasted until they picked up the Mantis trail. As first he thought he was stronger than Killeen and Cermo and even got impatient with their slow tracking, sweeping the area for signifiers. Killeen halted for a rest every hour, old Bishop Family discipline, but at the very start of a pursuit it irked Toby.

—I could damn sure get ahead faster than this—he sent to Quath on private comm.

Quath ran on internals of huge energy. She could outpace them all.—Maybe you should go on ahead—

—What are they?—Toby was genuinely interested. Myriapodia abilities dwarfed anything human.

—Um. That all?—

Beyond that Quath would say no more. Toby puzzled on it for a while but by then he started to tire and Killeen and Cermo were still moving at their same steady pace. They took the same short rests exactly every hour and picked up and went on. Quath herself was upping the pace too. Or so it seemed, though through his sweat-stung eyes the land was opening faster now to Toby and he plunged into it with a fresh energy bom of the fatigue itself.

They came upon the first of the Mantis loci in a slope of shimmering timestone.