“You figure the Mantis meant for that to happen?”

Quath settled down on her many legs. Their shared sensoria contracted further and her sensors, better than his, scanned the sky. <If so, to what end? With the Illuminates and Philosophs to guide, I helped you reach this eerie place.>

“So? Why’d any mech want us here?”

<You assume the mechanicals act with one vision, one cause.>

“I never saw them do any different.”

<For the lower mechanical orders, perhaps.>

“Lower?”

<The types you could kill.>

“We did all right. Stayed alive.”

<I suspect the higher ones would be impossible to kill.>

“Umm. Like the Mantis.” Shadowy shapes came nearer, slipping over hills like sheets of gliding oil.

<If we have come here as part of some larger aim—>

“Doesn’t make all the work and danger look so damn glorious, does it?”

<I suspect that is too narrow a view. Very primate.> Quath had an antiseptic tone, a polite disdain for such animal excesses.

“Look, what’s this Mantis after?”

<Certainly not merely to kill us.>

“Suredead us, then.”

<It probably could have done that before now.>

“Then what’s it want?”

<You, I suspect. All of you.>

Toby’s brow wrinkled. A shadow fell over the thick canopy. He squeezed down his sensorium. With acoustic suppressors even the wheeze of breathing could not leak out. He lay covered by the loops of spiral blue-green that had showered down. He raised his head slightly and was just in time to see a thin yellow spark come caroming among the trees. It struck some and bounced off, humming as if it were talking to itself. About the size of his head. The spark turned darker and orange-tinged with each collision. It came nearer—and moved faster than he could follow.

It hit Quath. Angry red embers shot over Quath’s carapace. One leaped off her and chewed at Toby’s left side. He rolled automatically, trying to get away from the pain. “Ah!” The embers fizzled away.

Toby lay absolutely still. Nothing changed. The shadow had passed on and with it the pale wedge in his sensorium. Aches hardened into swift, shooting pain in his arm. “Q . . . Quath?”

No signal. “Quath!”

<Quiet.>

They lay that way for a long time as winds whipped through the high spiral folds above. Toby probed at himself. He flinched when he moved his left arm a certain way and found out that the arm was broken. He blocked most of the nerves from there but could not get all of them. To stop all the hurt would have meant losing motor control of the arm.

Quath moved. Slow, tentative.

He had been thinking of himself and felt guilty when he saw how much damage she had taken. It was all on the far side of her. “Hurt bad?” The words sounded stupid. Three legs shattered. Spokes of white metal jutting through the carapace. Brown fluid everywhere.

<I have tapered down the pain centers.>

“Can you walk?”

<Marginally.>

“Can I help?”

<Yes. Leave.>

“Huh?” Toby stood, staggered, and picked up one of her splintered shanks. “No way!”

<I will only draw fire to us. You should leave. Escape this Lane. Your only protection is to immerse yourself among humans. The Mantis will have more difficulty finding you that way.>

Toby scowled. “What’s changed. Quath?”

<None of my feelings for you, be assured.>

“But, but what—” He stopped himself because he was afraid he was going to cry.

<I came with you because I suspected that your protection was of great importance. The Mantis confirms this.>

“Why am I such a big deal?”

<I suspect you are part of a larger pattern.>

“Damn it, that’s just a theory!”

<We must act with imperfect knowledge.>

“What sanctimonious, ridiculous—”

<Your anger is understandable. I understand what it masks. I love you, too.>

“What? I, I, uh . . .” He was stymied.

<Go. You must stay out of their grasp until we all know more.>

“But where’ll I meet you? This place, it’s so big, what’ll I do?”

<You must make your own way now. Go.>

“Damn it! I won’t.”

<You will.>

SIX

Mind Surgery

He holed up in a shaded hollow and the pain started in on him. It had spread into his ribs and he was not surprised to find that three of them were broken too. The electrical energy of the spark had dissipated into tiny shock waves that snapped bone and broke capillaries.

That’s what his diagnostics told him. The facts popped up in his left eye when he keyed in for them. Signifier icons showed bright and clear. Yellow fractures, scarlet blood patches in his arm, 3D blue spaghetti for pain networks.

Solutions popped up too. Making field repairs was not easy. He called up two seldom-used Faces who did the hard work at the back of his skull. They wormed down out of his cerebral cortex and into the basic, shadowy machinery. Most of the brain was circuitry for housekeeping operations. You couldn’t consciously intervene in how your food got digested or control your heartbeat. They ran just fine on their own. And it would be a bad idea to make intervention easy and risk screwing yourself up out of clumsiness. But repairing damage could be accelerated and this was a time when he needed that.

These Faces squirmed down into operating centers that fed stimuli and ferried nutrients. They took over. He knew they were working when his arm started to tingle. It was like being tickled deep inside only it didn’t make you laugh. So he cried for a while and felt better. He wriggled around and broke out in a clammy sweat all along his left side.

More explosions boomed down from the sky but he was a far way beyond that and didn’t care. His systems labored heavily. Bone repair was hard, he knew, and he tried to not let his conscious mind interfere.

But there were a lot of things to think through and he could not keep his mind on them for long. Spikes of pain broke through and startled him. Then his systems would catch the problem and he would be all right for a while. The sweats did not go away though.

The dreams started then.

Only they were not dreams because in between them he had his eyes open. They played on his retina and there was nothing he could do to stop them. He tried closing his eyes but they still ran.

He was riding in something that had wheels but seemed to fly. A woman had offered him a ride in it and somehow they had passed through dissolving air and furious, fast rock, and now were careening down (or maybe up) a steep flat lake. It was smooth and seemed horizontal, with his weight thrusting straight down along his spine. But it was also angled so that they accelerated across it. The jet-dark surface spewed and foamed and muttered to itself like a stormy liquid but the woman rapped it with a stick every few minutes, as if trying it for strength, and the stuff gave back a solid ringing smack, like steel ringing bong bong on granite.

Shibo grinned at him. Her bright sharp teeth laughed out words so mangled he could not catch them and there was no time to smooth them into meaning. They plunged forward.

It went on a long time. She had teeth missing, two ears on her left side and none on the right, and wore only a halter. This had seemed important when he first saw her but such facts were now dwarfed by the blistering wind that raked him, the jolting speed, the lurches of his already aggrieved stomach. “Long live all!” she shouted back to him and took a pull from a vaporizer.