Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 129
to take stock of his body. Hitherto the body had been just a
vessel, rugged but ultimately disposable. Today as he walked
he had begun to come to grips with the idea that this was his
only body now--that his resources were finite and concentrated
in this ruined husk.
His wounds were healing. If he tried he could articulate
words with his split tongue, and his fingers could grip again.
The terrible wound in his chest had closed, and great sloughs of
skin had fallen away to reveal flesh new and pink. As he
walked he had stuffed leaves into his mouth to make up the
mass he'd lost, dimly aware as he did so that the human biology
of his body protested. He overrode it to command digestion
and assimilation. After all he was not human; he was Armiger,
agent of a god.
Or he had been. What he examined now in the failing
daylight was a badly wounded man, dehydrated and staggering
on blistered feet. In his experience in the field, he had seen
men like this weeping as they collapsed by the side of his
marching columns. They tended not to rise again.
When he closed his eyes and listened to this human body,
Armiger knew why. Yesterday as he walked he had wondered
how the small lives around him experienced existence,
unaware that he need only pay attention to his own body to
know.
As long as he thought of himself as Armiger the
demigod, this body's problems seemed trivial, as he had treated
those dying men's tears as trivial. After all, they were so
stupidly unaware of themselves as parts of the systems of
army, ecology and planetary action which Armiger felt in his
deepest being. What was a body, or even a mind? Get rid of it,
there were more, the important thing was the system. Armiger
had been the systems' awareness; they had been it also, but