Across the Sea of Suns

One

Downward, into an ocean of night. The submersible was a bright, gaudy Christmas ball with spangles of running lights. It cast a wan glow on the massive shelves of carbon dioxide ice that walled the vent. Motors whirred. In the tight cabin the air chilled and pressure climbed.

Lancer’s recon analysis had located dozens of warm spots on the surface. They were cracks in the ice layers, where warming currents below had worked their way up the fracture faults of the ice continents. The mountain ranges of ice and rock moved and shifted in gravid tectonics, breaking and folding and splintering.

This moon was bigger than Ganymede. Below its icy skin, a huge volume of slush and liquid circulated. At the center, a core of rock and metal became hotter as the radioactive elements decayed. Earth itself gained most of its internal heart from decay of radium and uranium. Here the heat from below sought an exit, working at the thin spherical cap of ice, seeping upward, finding an opening here, a weakness there, and at last breaking onto the surface in short-lived victory.

When the flow came strongly, escaping liquids built volcanoes. From their crown and flanks steam rose incessantly. They created lake-speckled plains when the currents ebbed. The ground crews had chosen a quiet upwelling, so they did not have to fight strong turbulence when the submersible descended, searching.

The vent widened as they plunged. Chunks of ice drifted by in the amber spotlights. They dropped several kilometers through solutions of ammonia, carbon dioxide slush, methane crystals, and twinkling specks of debris. The moon’s spin stirred the grains of rock, keeping a fine suspension hanging like a shimmering curtain before the working lights.

They reached a zone of reasonably pure water. Carlos deployed a huge sac and ran nose into the current. It billowed and filled—strong, though only one molecule thick. Carlos showed Nikka how to attach floaters to the tail of the sac while he ran the board. He found a strong updraft. When he called out, she released the floaters and the sac self-sealed. Guided by the floaters, it rose up the vent. It would bob to the surface of the lake, be snagged ashore, and a mass spectrometer would separate out the rare deuterium. Lancer’s fusion motors could burn the deuterium, as backup to the reactions that ran in the ramscoop drive.

“Rather a lot registering on the impurity detectors,” Nigel observed.

“Whole zoo of stuff out there,” Carlos muttered. He had been quiet since their descent. His face knotted with conflicting thoughts and he kept his attention fixed on the complex half-moon control pit.

“What’s it look like?” Nikka had come forward after freeing the floaters manually.

“Chicken soup, actually. Or the Ross 128 equivalent,” Nigel said from the wall bunk where he lay.

Carlos said, “Science Section’s coming down in a few days, take deep samples.”

“Interesting. Heavy molecular stuff. Free radicals, too.”

“This water’s too cold to make free radicals spontaneously,” Nikka remarked. “No energy source.”

“Indeed.” Nigel frowned. “You’d imagine—”

Carlos. Want to talk to those passengers of yours.

“That’s the fifth time he’s called,” Carlos said.

Nigel yawned. “Poor fellow. Ask if there’s news.”

“Ted, this situation is really out of hand and I just want to do what’s—”

I know that. Hitting you all of a sudden like that, really mixing up your loyalties—I know, Carlos.

Nigel whispered, “Sounds quite judicious and forgiving. Man for all ages, is Ted.”

Nikka smiled and shushed him.

“Marvelous actor. I never appreciated that till now.”

Carlos had said little the last hour. The release of talking to a third party opened him up. He could not hide his own confusion and uncertainty, but this came through as reluctance to own up to his actions; or so Landon would interpret, Nigel guessed. Landon listened and conferred with the director of Pocks Operations. The surface crews were angry at the violation of regs and the possible danger—principally to the equipment; it was good to remember what was replaceable—in case Carlos got into a jam. But if he stayed away from the vent walls it made sense to let him go ahead, locating streams of pure water and filling the teardrop sacs. Landon conferred some more and then provisionally approved Carlos staying down. If anything changed, or Nigel’s condition deteriorated, however—

“I’ve got a filter with me,” Nigel put in.

Was wondering when I’d hear from the kingpin. I must say this is right in line with your whole career. Under pressure you crack.

There was a gentlemanly iciness in Landon’s voice. They were, of course, both speaking for the recorded benefit of any future review board.

“Undergo a phase transition, is more the way I’d put it. Or tempering. Marvelous process, that. Lessens brittleness. Reduces internal stresses.”

Well, we’ll wait out the time for your mandatory vote. Don’t think the consensus isn’t going to factor in this escapade.

“I came with him, Ted,” Nikka said. “Do you want to shut me up, too?”

“Don’t commit yourself,” Carlos broke in. “Ted, I hope you can see that she’s in a very excited state and not really—”

I follow. Well, I could have done without this slice of shit you put on my plate, Nigel. Things are jittery back here as it is, with the Earthside news. We’re waiting for an update now and I may have to replan everything if—

“What’s the news?” Nikka asked.

Getting a spotty carrier wave. More thermonuclear strikes, looks like. Satellite warfare seems to have gone just the way everyone predicted—complete cancellation. Reports of alien craft in orbit, too. Some are landing in the oceans.

“My God,” Nikka said softly.

Yeah. And Nigel picks this moment to pull one of his—

“Bit cavalier about causality, aren’t you?” Nigel said sharply. “You already had warning signals about the Earthside situation—it’s been brewing for a week. So you thought you’d slot me away while everyone’s distracted. No accident it’s all happening at once. Only it’s not going as you’d planned, is it?”

Paranoid, Nigel, real paranoid.

“We’ll see. If I’ve any friends up there who’ll vote for me—”

After this? Don’t bet on it.

Nigel grimaced in irritation. “No point in this talk. Carlos, what’s that on the sonar? Big structure in the left quadrant.”

“Signing off,” Carlos barked. The job took precedence over all else. He banked to port in a downstream.

“That was to get him off the air,” Nigel said gently. “Needn’t shy away from everything.”

“If we hit one a those bergs—”

“Doesn’t mean we must stand off by kilometers. Might as well get in a bit of exploring while we’re waiting for the hangman.”

“Nikka, want to deploy a bag? Getting good percentages here.”

She moved back to the manuals. The floater frames and sacs were neatly arranged in the big bay that comprised most of the ship’s volume. She worked the big controls at the mouth of the bay. “Free!” An answering thump and whoosh.

Carlos nodded. Nigel moved forward to the copilot’s couch and lay in it, studying the board. A prickly sensation running through him. Carlos bent over the crescent array of controls, involved. The man had shown typical male responses during the talk with Landon. It was often that way when the conversation involved mostly men; each was bursting with something to say, waiting for the other to finish, for his own precious chance to impose his own pattern. Nigel had done that often enough to recognize the mode. But what was new to him was in fact that recognition. He had spent his life pressing forward, maneuvering the talk the way he wanted it to go. Focusing, always focusing. There were other ways to work, less wearing paths. He had learned those slowly, gradually. The fact that Carlos was showing recognizable signs meant that the man was working out for himself some sense of identity. Good. But it promised problems in the hours to come.

“Ready to tie it off?” Carlos called.

“Sealant deployed. One, two, mark.” Nikka came forward, brushing her hands on her crimson jumper.

“Mind dropping a bit to the northwest?” Nigel said mildly.

“What for? Current’s vectoring to the high quadrant.”

“Some optical spectrum from over there.”

“Huh. Okay.”

Into the murk. They fell in blackness, the obliging whine of the motors making a high keening background wail they scarcely noticed. The dark clasped them and removed all sense of direction save the press of Pocks’s muted gravity. They sought a glimmer, but in the shifting currents the craft could not hold to the course.

It was one of the fine ironies of history, Nigel thought, that this craft was in the end the result of classic, constricted warfare. Submarines had become the carriers of thermonuclear death nearly a century before. The major powers built involuted vessels which could withstand vast pressures, seek any enemy, survive, and track in utter blackness. When the Jovian moons were explored, it was natural to use such technology to penetrate the ice crust, sniff the seas below. The marriage of war and science continued, despite occasional domestic spats. So Lancer had carried a team of submersibles, in case open oceans were rare on planets, and they had to penetrate a moon.

He squinted at the blank blackness before them. He knew with a dead finality that this was as far as he was going to get. He had stalled for time but now he was tiring. A few hours, a meaningless gesture of defiance—and then a sad, sour return.

Sod that, he thought suddenly. I’m not going.

There were some things a man wouldn’t do.

Two

They searched for hours. They ate, argued, took samples, deployed sacs, and sent them rising to the vent, tugged by racks of floaters.

They spoke fitfully, without making any clear progress. Nigel had been in a deeply conflicted three-way before, and recognized some old patterns. It occurred to him that he sought these complex emotional geometries because they removed some of the pressure of demand from him, allowed him to dream and laze about, focused on his own inner states. Not a wholly welcome revelation. But coming at the tether of a life, it at least implied that he could accept this truth, too, for it was clearly too late now. Then he laughed at himself—provoking a quizzical glance from Nikka, who probably suspected why—for this also was a conveniently intellectual way of escaping the pressure of change. Self-knowledge that arrives too late loses its momentum. He laughed again.

“I’m getting a lot more of that molecular stuff,” Carlos said gruffly.

“Deeper, then,” Nigel said. “Sniff it out.”

“Dammit, I don’t take orders!”

“I was suggesting—”

“You’re always just ‘suggesting’ and ‘advising,’ aren’t you?”

“You’re quite right. I’ll say nothing.”

Carlos hesitated, still fuming. With Nigel having given way so easily, he was left with nothing more to say. He busied himself with the control board and after a while began following the direction indicated by the chem sensors. It was, after all, the obvious thing to do.

Slowly, so that at first they were unsure whether they saw it or imagined it, a faint blur of green formed in the dark. The instruments had picked it up, but only the eye gave form and substance to the mottled glow.

Abruptly, green shifted to burnt orange. Something came at them out of the blankness. It was long and spindly. Disjointed parts flexed and turned as it swept silently by. Trailing strands wove in the turbulent passing. Then it was gone.

“What the—”

“Exactly the question.”

Nikka said softly, “Self-luminous.”

“Yes. Feeding off the free radicals, I’ll wager.”

“No eyes.”

“No reason to evolve them here.”

“What do you figure—”

“Over that way.”

A dim glow. The craft gave off a high-pitched ping and crack as they descended.

“What’s that?”

“Can’t make it out.”

“Must be far away. No resolution.”

“If it’s that bright—”

“Right. Bloody luminous.”

“Not one of the things we just saw.”

“No. Bigger. A lot bigger.”

It grew. Yellow bars of light moved in the suspended wash of particles. The craft bucked and turned against sudden currents.

“It’s moving.”

“A pattern. Look, see, it repeats.”

“Revolving.”

“Yeah. Spins around in ’bout two minutes.”

The thing swelled. It was huge and pitted with fire. Brownish gold and orange swept across its face. From each bright flare point burst a cascade of bubbles, each working with its own inner fire.

“Damn thing’s more’n a click across.”

“Yes. See those big bags attached?”

“Balloons.”

“To keep it afloat?”

“Must. Spectrometer says that’s rock there. Hot.”

“The free radicals.”

“Dead right.”

“They come from that?”

“Big fat energy source.”

“Samplers out?”

“Yeah, got it. Lots of energetic molecular stuff.”

“Food.”

“For …”

The three humans shifted uneasily in their couches. Their spotlights ebbed away in the silted darkness. They watched the thing that spun slowly in the black and pulsed irregularly, throwing out gouts of orange and burnished green and gold and red, showers of hot bubbles. They strained forward, trying to see farther.

“Lot of radioactivity.”

“Figures.”

“I’m … getting kind of nervous.”

“Yeah. You feel it, Nigel?”

“What?”

“Like … something’s out there.”

“Moving.”

“Beyond our lights? … Yes.”

“We’re in the updraft from it now. Getting a lot more Geiger.”

“Dangerous?”

“No. The gammas can’t get through our skin.”

“Blowoff from that thing.”

“Suppose so. That big rock …”

“Right. A crude nuclear reactor.”

“Duct chemicals through it, they get bombarded—”

“—you get excited molecular forms.”

“What’s the source of organic molecules?”

“Below here? Something’s got to supply them.”

“Right. Tending the fire.”

“Why put it near a vent?”

“Why move to Florida? Warmer.”

“No, wait, that’s the wrong way round. The vent, the vent is here—”

“Because of this.”

“The whole thing’s artificial.”

“The volcanoes, the lakes, they’re made by things like this?”

“Walmsley’s Rule.”

“In spades. Warm currents, food—”

“And an opening to the surface.”

Carlos said, “To do what? I mean …”

“I don’t know,” Nigel said.

“Why are we whispering?” Nikka asked.

Nigel shouted, “Maybe they can hear!”

“Jesus!” Carlos said.

“Then again, maybe not.” Nigel settled back in his couch. “They’ve overheard our motors long before this, if they do. And they must, come to think of it. Acoustics are the fish’s eye.”

Nikka said, “That thing that went by us was luminous.”

“So?” Carlos said.

“There must be a reason for that. To find prey.”

Nigel murmured, “Or lure it.”

Carlos said, “I wonder if I should douse our running lights.”

“It might well be a good idea,” Nikka said.

He snapped off several switches. The control crescent cast angular shadows in the cabin.

Nigel said softly, “Should call Lancer, let them know.”

Carlos did. Before he could explain, Ted Landon came on the line. “We’ve got a solid majority vote on your petition, Nigel. Sorry ’bout that.”

Nigel shook himself from his dreamy state. “What … oh, yes. So?”

“You’ve lost. C’mon out.”

Nigel sighed. Ted was in quite a jovial mood. “Tell him, Carlos.”

Talk continued, but he knew what would come next. He felt a fatigue seeping into him but with it came an old certainty. Ted was a stickler for the rules, especially those rubber-stamped by the consensus mandate of the beloved bloody people.

Carlos spoke with assurance, putting down the facts in steady fashion, orderly and authoritative. He would be more difficult to deal with, the more he clarified his own idea of himself.

Nigel got up and moved casually to the rear of the ship.

“Nature calls,” he said to Nikka. He could not risk a parting wink.

Three

Their suits were racked in smooth-swiveling braces. He swung one out in an arc until it clipped onto the self suiting platform. He backed into its enfolding grip. He jackknifed forward to get his arms into the sleeves and then worked his head through the neck ring. It enveloped him, an action that to Nigel always carried the quality of shaking hands with a corpse. He straightened and the rack zipped him up the chest. Helmet locks snapped and clicked home. The suit had full thermal insulation and heavy heaters, weighing on him like a blanket.

He shambled into the equipment bay, an ankle protesting the added bulk. A hexagonal frame was resting in the launch pod. It held the six floaters for the next sac. Nigel detached the leaders to the sac so that the frame stood alone. He took the two central floaters out and climbed into the vacant space.

The balance would be wrong. He looked around for something massive. His eye stopped on the medfilter, set down and forgotten hours ago.

Why not? Infernal thing, reminder of countless hours spent in its clutches. This was the last act, but still the thing could perhaps keep him alert, fight off the nausea if it returned. And he needed ballast. He fetched it and clamped it to the midsection of the frame, moving as quickly as he could.

Very well. Time to go.

He turned the manual controls and leaned back. A conveyor carried the frame into the lock. He found a way to clip his suit belt to the frame. Nigel punched in instructions for his suit as the lock sealed behind him. Air fled, pressure dropped, he braced himself—

The outer lock irised open. Whoomp. The frame shot off the platform. Air broke into a gush of bubbles and the roar carried him out, tumbling. The floaters popped free and began to swell. He spun, weightless, the fulcrum of vectoring forces as his suit creaked and his ears popped and a shower of bubbles rose around him like a flock of bright birds. Then the dark descended.

He came upright and saw the ship below, glistening. The floaters bobbed and sucked him upward. He had not thought through the balance of buoyancy and now saw he was too light.

What the—Must be a misfire Nikka go back there check the

He was rushing away from the glimmering ball of light. Farther below the smoldering fires of the stony reactor reddened the water. From this perspective they were remarkably similar pieces of technology.

Bags are free? How’d that happen must’ve been

Nikka answered, No I think wait

Ted says we should back away from this don’t worry about the equipment might be a pressure malf anyway we should get clear fast let ExoBio get in on this

He was rising too quickly. The frame would scoot all the way to the ice skin with so little weight to drag. Nigel suddenly realized that his suit could take extreme pressures, but could not adjust quickly to rapid changes in depth. If he kept rising—

Carlos where is he I can’t

Nigel’s ears popped. He stared upward at the floaters, swelling as they rose. Darkness cloaked him now as the ship fell away below. He did not dare show a light this close but he would need it to free one of the floaters. Now he could scarcely make out the bulk of them.

You mean you think he

The suit was bulky and awkward in the water and he had to search for the tabs on his left arm. He uncapped the spike and raised the arm. The third button should be—

A bright blue line sliced the water. He fanned it, leaving behind curling wisps of steam. The laser cutter boiled away a thin column and found a floater. The bag crinkled, turned brown—

Broke. Air gushed out. Nigel fired again, at the opposite floater. The beam churned the water soundlessly. It ate a thin, straight path, ghostly blue, haloed by steam. If the power ran out before—

That’s crazy! Mierda seca, the old bastard’ll That suit can take it but listen to me damn it turn on the spots we can trace him

The second floater burst. The beam leaped across the inside of it and punched a hole through the top. Nigel felt himself falling and then the frame slowed, still dropping. Equilibrium.

I’ll call Ted he’ll.

Later. See anything? There might be a suit light. Try the tracer.

Something wrong no pickup I can see

He can’t be beyond range this soon

Look for yourself his code shows nonoperational. He doctored it before he left must be

Floating, in an absence of space and light and weight. It was like the time on the slab, disconnected from the wearing of the world. Being in the high dark emptiness of space was much like the blank absorbing blackness here. His movements were sluggish, blunted by the unseen waters. No sound. When his boots struck the piping there came not a ringing but a muffled thud. He hung loosely to the frame and waited for something to come.

Look Ted’s on the line says he’s too busy to worry about this old fart there’s news from Earth-side looks bad new assembly starting in a few minutes

They can’t leave him out there call the teams on the surface get some more subs down here and

Nikka, this is Ted. Admittedly Nigel was right about one thing looks like—I mean his Walmsley’s Rule and all that. That must be a Watcher and Operations tells me it’s showing signs of life now, probably in response to our ground teams so

Then send down some submersibles damn it

Look there’s too many things happening at once Nikka I don’t have time to hunt for that bastard right now let him stew

He did it to stall for time don’t you see that

Stupid move just makes us more pissed up here

Ted I appeal to

He’s acting like a horse’s ass over nothing. I’m through with all this shit of his! Maybe he thought he’d get some sympathy support this way but it won’t cut up here, I can tell you that in spades

He sensed the running current taking him farther away from them. This was the farthest he had ever been, the natural tether. It was better to do it this way, in pursuit.

I’m pulling you people out soon as I can and if he’s gone he’s just gone that’s it

It will take hours

Okay you can search for a while the assembly starts in ten minutes anyway but I warn you—look, if he’s patched in still he can hear this. Nigel, this is it man, the last

He ignored the barking voice. Something more immediate disturbed him.

Rippling currents. He ignited a small helmet phosphor. The bars of the frame leaped into being around him, yellow and stark.

Nothing nearby. A tug, a fresh direction—

Something glimmered. It grew. A ball of ruddy clouds. Swelling toward him, coming fast—

Things moved inside. Specks in the clouds. Drifting dots. He tried to judge size but without perspective—

The color. A smoldering red, dying embers—

He held onto the pipes of the frame as the cage jiggled and surged sideways. Where had he seen—?

The specks did not drift aimlessly. The clouds were in fact hillsides and the dots walked on them, slowly, amid swirls of dust. They were large, stately, with four smoothly articulating legs—

EMs.

But not the huge-headed beasts he knew. These were slim, tall, graceful in their grave pacing.

Not EMs, not without the radio-dish heads and the awkward carapace that housed the reworked guts.

These were what the EMs had been before.

Before the asteroid rain crushed their biosphere. Before they had to remake themselves into something the Watchers would pass as perhaps machinelike.

They were inside a vast ball, fully five kilometers across. Inside were hills, streams, dusty clouds, high forests of blue and brown. It reminded him of those childhood toys which, shaken, show a winter scene with descending snow. Only here the liquid was outside, and within moved a trapped world of air and growth. The sphere’s shell glowed, casting ruddy light inward. Above it, dark masses. Ballast? Stabilizers?

It began to dwindle, The currents were sweeping him past, taking him away. He fired his laser beam over his head, making a blue arc. One of the tall moving figures seemed to pause, to look outward.

Had they seen him? Did they know what had happened to their race back on the home world? Deformed, beaten down but still going on—

Of course they knew something. They must be the remnants of an earlier age, a time when their world sent out ships and explored the nearby stars. They had taken shelter inside this moon.

So close! He knew their descendants, could tell them that the home world hung on still. If he could make a sign, some gesture across the abyss—

The red world shrank rapidly. He waved once, forlornly, and rested heavily against the medfilter. The chance had slipped by him.

He closed his eyes and let time pass. The image of the tall, grave creatures faded slowly.

Four

Something moved.

He jerked awake. Nigel shook himself and wondered how long he had been asleep. The suit warmed him, made him comfortable even in this cold murk. He had been trying to fit the pieces together …

See anything of him?

No. Damn all, how could he get so far so fast?

He wondered why they could not pick him up on long-range sonar. Surely he could not have drifted that far away, not with them following the same currents he did.

Look at this video image from Earthside. One of those things in orbit, looks hell of a lot like a Watcher.

If he was close enough to pick up their general craft transmissions, they had to see him. Unless something was behind him, so they couldn’t pick up his image against it.

Movement again.

He clicked on a helmet phosphor. The sharp outline and colors of the floater frame leaped out at him. The medfilter, shiny aluminum pipes, floaters billowing above him …

Something beyond. Something in the shadows.

A huge wall coming at him out of the blackness.

Gray pores. Speckled bands of red and purple.

A vast oval opening in the wall of flesh, rimmed with ridges of cartilage.

It brushed against the frame. Suckers in its side clasped the support rods. Slick brown tendrils curled about the metal.

Tasting? Whatever, the motion stopped. Nigel waited. He shook the frame. The grip tightened.

It didn’t seem to want to eat him. Was it studying him somehow? Best to wait and see.

He heard nothing from Carlos and Nikka. The bulk of this thing must be blocking them.

Time ticked by. He felt the old weakness slide into him, the sign of his body going awry again. Sudden activity, without rest, had thrown his chemistry out of balance. He surveyed the huge creature that gripped the frame, and wondered if it knew he was here. Or what kind of thing he might be.

Weakly:

How we going to find him in this?

Lot of floating junk. Follow the currents, keep away from that big stuff.

He had known they had to be out here, hanging away from the strange intruding craft that spewed fumes and whined and bucked against the currents instead of following them.

The gamble was that they would not have a history of intrusions like that, that the Watcher had not sent down craft that cracked the ice and searched out life wherever it could be found, that the Watcher would wait in its rigid orbit and peer downward and know that as long as life kept inside its shell of ice it was harmless. The Watchers were patient and abiding and knew more of life than men, knew that it could arise wherever energy passed through a chemical environment and drove the processes that made a mockery of entropy, building up order.

This was the secret that Pocks had to teach: that at a moon’s core, nuclear isotopes collected and sputtered and delivered up their warmth to an ocean of elemental matter, and that was enough.

Eventually molecules would snag other links and make a crude copy, driven in this inward ocean to grow, clustered around the mock sun at the core of the world, amid crushing pressures and stinging dark, without lightning to hasten the brew or streaming baths of light from the sky, but merely and simply from the silent churn of nuclear decay, the way life springs from a heap of moist humus in a forgotten back corner, making use of energy from below in an ocean capped by ice, thermal cells mixing the chemicals which sought each other in their passion—at first plants innocent of photosynthesis, and then predators and prey who basked in the rich streams of life that were born amid the continual upwelling of free radicals. Sulfur compounds, like those bubbling from the volcanic vents in Earth’s oceans, could metabolize this brawling jungle with restless energy.

The nature of life here was to be always rejected, forced up by the thermals, into the upper blackness, pushed away from the molecular fire, a biosphere doomed to seek the searing dark. When the core ebbed, the long radioactive half-lives done, there came cutting competition, a narrowing event like the ancient drought in Africa that had sharpened the wits of primates. As the crimson corefires damped, at first life must have merely fought for places near the bubbling fires, but in time some being saw that the heat could be clasped, moved, used to push—upward through the weightless rigid black, against the ice, and into it, and then beyond—scavenging the crusty rocks that held radioactives, seeking in the hostile vacuum and searing cold.

There must have been a time when they struggled to understand their ice surface, perhaps managed to discover electricity and begin to tinker with radio, a time when the pre-EMs came, when the races met. A first, tenuous contact. But those first sputters announced their presence in a swelling bubble moving at light speed.

So there appeared above in the brilliant night a gray thing ancient and knowing, which hurled down rock and pitted the icelands and drove the creatures back, forced them retreating through the vent into the inward sea, where now with crude tools they kept watch, their brute sciences used to cup some rock from the core and buoy it, to make the upwellings and warm spots in the crust that would keep the vents wide, allow a shred of possibility that these huge things needed and would not let slip from them.

So the impasse came, with the slow tick of time running against these blind things, against the pre-EMs who had fled downward with them. For a while they would be safe from the passive Watcher. Ten kilometers of ice could stop any thermonuclear blast, absorb the slamming punch of an asteroid, withstand the furious bursting of its sun going nova—which the machine civilizations had used before in Aquila; Nigel knew that from the Marginis records, though the conventional astronomers had another explanation—and so the Watcher waited.

Impasse. They remained, enduring and yet trapped, sealed into their bleak sea with the certainty that the stone above would win in the end. Without the freedom to crawl out, to learn the Newtonian web of laws that governed life in freedom from water but enslaved to gravity, they could not hope to match and destroy the Watcher.

So in their songs there had to be tales of a brave and foolish time when gallant ones had sought the vacuum, been pounded and destroyed, and so dragged back down to make their tales and rage against the thing that waited at the top of the long vents. Yet the fact that they kept the vents open, tending them like fires that must never go out, meant that the tales still lived and the harsh judgment of history had not bowed them down, not driven them finally back to the core, where they would cluster about the embers and die.

Okay keep looking but I tell you he’s gone.

Stay at this depth, Carlos, I’m not leaving—

Okay okay, but I want to hear the report.

Shut up—hey—no light in the cabin!—I can’t see with—

I just want to—

Shut up

He felt a slackness in his legs. Every movement took enormous energy. He reached over, got a grip on the medfilter. It looked okay. The plug-ins—

He swore. The canister of interfaces was gone. The hoses where it clamped to the side were open, bare. Hitting this creature had ripped it away.

So he was finished. Within an hour the buildup of residue in his blood would lead from nausea to spasms and then into a merciful coma. Without a receiving system, some fine-webbed fiber to accept the sludge that the medfilter leached from him, the device would not work.

Nigel sighed. Betrayed in the end by a malf. No philosophical lesson here, unless it was the eternal one: We die from entropy.

He peered down. No sign of the ship. He would call them now. If they could find him in time, all well and good. It had been a temporary gesture, irrational at best, an attempt, he now saw, to make some fleeting contact with the life he knew must lurk in the shadows beyond the lights. He smiled at his own folly. So—

Something made him turn to the mottled, pitted hide beside him. It stretched away, filling half of space, mute as stone waiting for the chisel. He frowned.

Jesus you hear that Madre Dios a war

If there was the right kind of fiber under the skin …

Ninety percent destruction a full nuclear exchange all four major powers Jesus

Where’s the message from then

Orbital stations they’re still alive but they say there’s no way they can continue transmission for long the power requirements are too much now but Jesus

Nigel hung, letting the news wash over him, and for a long time could not think. Humanity driven to its knees. And by its own hand.

Talk flooded through him, from the submersible and then a full comm from the Lancer meeting. He listened and yet the weight of it could not fully come to bear. His instinctive defenses blunted the news, the details, the train of numbers and blasted cities and death counts, of nations erased and lands turned to cinder.

Slowly he began to move again. He blocked the stream of talk. He drew back into himself and made his hands do what he knew they had to do, despite the chaos of emotions that ran through him.

Unclamp the medfilter. Cut some piping from the frame sharpen the pipe to a point, using the laser cutter.

Attach the tubing. Issue start-up commands.

Even at these pressures and in this chill, the system came up to full mode. He hooked it into the med inputs in his suit. A simple vein tap was enough for now.

The wall of flesh glistened beneath his working phosphors. It writhed with soft hands of pale crimson and purple. Intricate patterns, arabesques of line and big, mottled patches. So he had been wrong: In this ocean that was a world lived something that could see such patterns, or else they would not have evolved. Perhaps the swift self-luminous thing they saw earlier? There had to be a vast, complex ecology here, schools of fish-like things to feed on, a pyramid of life. The submersible had probably frightened them away.

He realized he was theorizing, delaying. The knowing of it released him from the storm of emotion he was repressing and he gave himself over to it.

He drove the point of the pipe full into the mass of flesh. The movement cast a shadow, lunging and enormous across the plain.

It went halfway. Nigel pushed hard and buried it farther. He felt no response, no tremor, no sign of pain. Moving sluggishly, he completed the hookup. Turned on the pumps. Relaxed into a dazed and empty state, a strange pulse flowing in him.

Five

Inert. Drifting. Disconnected from glands and the singing of blood. Awake but not fully aware.

This was how it might be for the Watchers, and the machine labyrinths that had made them. Patient and calculating, in principle like life in their analytic function and in the laws of evolution that acted equally on silicon-germanium as it did on DNA, yet they were not fully in the world as life was, they had not risen from the crusted bonds of molecular law, did not thrive in the universe of essences—as the Snark had put it, groping for a human term to tell what it felt lay forever beyond its cybernetic grasp—and thus feared and hated the organic things that had given birth to them and died in turn.

Or perhaps the words hate and fear could not penetrate the cool world where thought did not stir hormones to love or flee or fight, where analysis reigned and built with bricks of syllogism a world that knew the hard hand of competition but not the organic wholeness that came out of an enduring mortality.

Yet the Watchers had things in common with organic life. A loyalty to their kind.

They had destroyed utterly the world around Wolf 359, and patrolled it still. But they did not oversee the dutiful robots who chipped bergs from the outer ice moons and sent them spiraling in, to crash on what was once their home world. A Watcher circled that world, to guard against any organic form that might arise when the vapor and liquid brought sunward finally collected into ponds and seas.

It would have been simpler to destroy those robots too, leaving all barren and without hope. The Watcher allowed those simple servants to continue, knowing they would someday err in their self-replication as they repaired themselves, and in that moment begin machine evolution anew.

So the machines wanted their own diversity to spill over and bring fresh forms to the galaxy—all the while guarding against a new biosphere, which the patient, loyal robots labored to make—so that machine societies would not be static and thus in the end vulnerable no matter how strong now.

They needed the many functions, echoing life—the oil carriers who voyaged to some distant metropolis, the Snarks to explore and report and dream in their long exile, the Watchers who hammered worlds again and again with asteroids.

Yet they must know of the chemical feast within the giant molecular clouds that Lancer had brushed by. Know that every world would be seeded perpetually by the swelling massive clouds. Know, then, that the conflict would go on for eternity; there was no victory but only bitter war.

If the machines crushed life where they could, why had humanity arisen at all? Something must have guarded them.

The Watchers kept sentinel for signs of spacegoing life, signaling to each other as the one at Isis had sent a microwave burst past Lancer, to Ross 128. The Marginis wreck was evidence that Earth’s Watcher had been destroyed by someone, a race now gone a million years.

The pre-EMs? The race that remade itself at Isis?

The thought came suddenly. Perhaps. So much was lost in time …

Whoever had come to that ancient earth had left fluxlife, a sure sign that the Marginis wreck carried organic beings, for only they would use a thing that reproduced itself with a molecular genetic code. And fluxlife was the sign and the gift: an opening to the stars.

The pulsing in him was becoming a song and the harmonics of it called up the long weary wail of the EMs, in a timeless weave that blended this huge blind creature into the same slow, ponderous hymn of life in the galaxy, weighed and hammered down yet still with an abiding hope, a need, a calling.

He felt his mind clearing.

He checked his medcomp. It was good, no trace of the runaway reactions. He gingerly detached from the silent solid mass. Pulled out the sharpened pipe.

The tendrils holding the frame jerked away in a spasm of rejection. The frame shuddered and came free.

The medmon tumbled out of the pipe brace. Nigel twisted around and snatched, gasping. Caught it.

He grabbed for the frame, too, and pain shot through his arm. He held.

Stretched between two charging horses, he thought wildly. The frame wrenched sideways. His joints popped. Can’t take much of this. By the dim suit lamp he saw the slowly turning struts. Limp bags trailed it. Most of the floaters were crushed.

Falling. Above, the vast bulk faded in the dimming amber light and yet it was so large that it did not seem to grow smaller as the distance increased. He could not see the sides of it.

Nigel fought for a hold with his boots. The frame tumbled. Currents plucked at him, trying to snatch away the medfilter, to loosen his hand on the pipe.

He fought—and then realized he did not need the frame any longer. It was falling too, floaters useless. He simply let go. Darkness swallowed the skeletal shape.

His final security was gone. He was falling in absolute hard black, clutching his faintly ludicrous filter, invisible currents swirling and gurgling.

He came back from the blurred pain in his arms, to hear the ragged lines of argument from Lancer’s consensus meeting.

Swarmers had something to do with it everything to do with it of course don’t be a fool

But there’s no evidence not clear evidence anyway

Plain as the nose on your face they were the advance party

Yeah these ships in orbit now they look like the ones the Swarmers came in just look at the

All mixed in together

Nikka’s voice broke in, Nigel! Nigel! Time is “Yes, I hear.”

You had your reasons I’m sure but too much is happening, I’m frightened, I don’t want you out there when—

“Of course. I … I’m sorry. I was shagged out, dead bushed, and this seemed the only way to finally … I haven’t been on a planetary surface, I’ve had no chance to ever really, to … I …” His voice trailed away as he felt the old block, the inability to communicate deep recesses that lay beyond language.

Turn on your tracer. It works, doesn’t it?

“Done, I’m falling,” he added mildly.

How did—

“A boring long tale.”

We’re coming. You’re picking up the Lancer comm? I piped it through on open circuit.

“Yes. Dead awful.” He could think of nothing more to say. The full weight of it would come on him later, he knew. The mind did what it must to survive.

I’ve got you fixed a few klicks away but you’re moving fast nothing nearby

Jesus we’ll have to catch him how can we

Nigel relaxed, spread-eagling himself to offer the most flow resistance. His ears popped. Suit adjustment.

It’s impossible, we don’t have that kind of maneuvering ability

Shut up, he’ll hear you, Carlos

But it—look, we can get there but Madre Dios it’ll take ten minutes minimum and we’ll be moving too fast.

Knobbed joints grumbling with pain, muscles whining, heart thumping dumbly in the converging dark.

“Get—get under me. Then … deploy … a sac.”

Gliding in the soft night. Coasting. What was coming depended on relaxation, reaching out with the senses. He could not tighten up or the frail ol’ muscles would tire before they were needed. He had to let go.

Six

Decades ago, after Alexandria’s death, Mr. Ichino had said to him, I wish you the strength to let go.

He needed that now. Until he saw the submersible and knew which direction to bank toward, there was nothing productive he could do. Either they would snag him in time, or else he would fall farther in this cold murk, into higher pressures, and his suit would fail. He would squash like a grape.

From the Lancer meeting came

Obviously those goddamn Swarmers started it Yeah the Trojan horse

Dunno how the nukes got going but when those Swarmers started coming ashore what was China supposed to do. Matter of survival if what they say about the Americans is true

Was true you mean—North America’s gone, incinerated

Those high-burst bombs, just one’ll ignite a continent

Asian mainland took less nukes looks like Swarmers are getting pasted good there thank God

Merde je ne

Those flying things—ugly, you see’em, horrible—an’ that on-site report says the Swarmers don’ reproduce usin’ the flyin’ thing at all they’re some kind of add-on

Damn Swarmers musta planned it from ’way back an’ bioengineered themselves

Point is it’s all linked—the Watchers an’ those gray ships an’ the Swarmers—all in it together

He felt the waters rushing by, gurgling and whispering to him. He was without weight and form and felt himself spreading ever wider, as if his legs and arms were detached, a flag filling. Words and sentences and garbled bits came from Lancer and the submersible, but they seemed hollow and distant and finally irrelevant.

He wondered if the huge creatures perceived him, a falling mote, and puzzled over the brilliant bubble that swam to meet him.

Damfino how it all works but it’s plain as the nose on your face

Goddamn Ted we got to do somethin’

Latest says the deepspace net is sending in fragmentation loads, blow them up ten thousand klicks out and try to knock out some of their ships in orbit

Might get some of the small stuff but those big ones

He saw a faint luminous thread of orange to the left, turning and twisting and darting away, and felt at the same moment a long booming note that tolled through the water like a distant bell. It reminded him of the EMs and their song, and as he lazily plunged toward the heart of this ocean world he saw suddenly how this tied together with the Swarmers, all forms of life victimized and beaten down because in the end the machines could not stop life, could not smother it, could not eliminate forever the endlessly burgeoning forms which competed with the machines for resources and space, and so in the end they enlisted some forms of life to stop their worst competitors, the budding technologies.

The machines had known of Earth for a long time, they had fought some titanic battle there millions of years ago and lost—the Marginis wreck was the only mute remaining testament of that—and in the losing had become fearful of simply blasting it with asteroids or doing anything else which could perhaps be blocked by the Marginis wreck or by humans themselves. If they tried bombardment, as they did with Isis, and the humans captured some of their vessels, deciphered where their centers of power were, then the same crushing warfare might reach across the stars and find them in their lairs, unleash the terrible marriage of mind and instinct—which the machines did not have—and destroy all that the patient and implacable cybernetic beings had built up.

No, it was much easier to use organic forms against each other, to divert their attention, to strike at the weak spot all beings who grew out of chemistry had and which was both biological and social in form, and went by many names: cancer, overreactive immune systems, inappropriate response.

There was the key. Far easier to make humans destroy themselves and Swarmers as well. Far easier to feed on the deep and primordial antagonisms all organic forms felt for the outsider, the intruder, the alien.

Goddamnit I say we got to learn something about these things not just shy away from them

What we learn will help Earthside they’ve got the same kind over ’em right now.

Years ago yeah remember the light travel time we’re talking about a crisis that happened nine years back

Doesn’t change the fact that we’re the only ones know much about these things an’ here right here we have a chance to see what it can take

Light. A faint smudge of phosphors. Growing.

Nigel we’ve got the sac deployed below and with the mouth open

He banked left, sensing the currents, hearing a faint strum like a song of deep bass. His ears popped again. Suit pressure too high, overloaded. Pocks had light gravity, so pressure built only a tenth as fast as on Earth, but now he felt his suit creak. Monitor bulbs below his chin flashed angry red.

He’s dropping too fast, we’re too far away Cut the speed damn it he needs a stationary No got to get closer

“Hold your course!”

A ball of yellow and blue and amber. He thought of himself as a wing, turning and riding in the streams. He tried to catch the turn at the right moment, altering his vector to bring himself down at a steeper angle, then using the medfilter pack to cant himself to the right again—now down, now to the side, the bright ball growing and the big floodlights poking fingers through the silted murk. He grunted with the strain of keeping himself rigid, a hydrofoil. His pulse quickened. He was coming in at a good angle now and ahead he saw the filmy wisp of the sac, its mouth yawning, unexploded floaters weighing down its tail.

I’ve got you on the optical ’scope. How are you doing?

“Rilly trif.”

Drop the pack Nigel you’ll have a better chance of making it without that thing

“I think … I’ll need it …” he panted.

Swooping. Flying. A grain in the deep clotted darkness, insect flying into the harsh glare of the bulb.

The mouth swallowed him.

Seven

Nigel woke as they docked.

Sleep had helped. His vision was nearly right now; quick turns of his head brought only momentary confusion.

Nikka had gotten him to a bunk and he had waved aside all talk. There was more to come, he could sense that in the scattershot babble over the comm lines. So in the long journey floating up through the vent, he had slept. Now he lay resting and listened to the Lancer line.

Goddammit we’ve got to move

Yeah no telling what that thing will do to us if we try to leave after this

Hell yes that Watcher’s got word from Earth sure as we have

Look at it, things moving on its surface again

Just lights looks like to me

Bob you want to send some servo’d squad down there have a look

Naw can’t you get it straight this is no time for half measures

Ted! I say we shouldn’t try anything so dangerous, I mean the Watcher around Isis let us go

Lissen to him crawlin’ on his belly about how the damn thing might let us go if we’re good boys don’t make trouble Jesus

There was no point in trying to intervene in the hubbub aboard Lancer. His stock was at an all-time low, even though Walmsley’s Rule had turned out true.

They left the submersible and crossed the bleak purple ice. Carlos rattled on about the Lancer concensus, the rage, the horror, but the words went by Nigel without stirring him.

He leaned on Nikka for support as they shuffled away from the lake, boots crunching on ice. A finegrained fatigue laced through him, bringing a giddy clarity.

His suit had burnished marks where the big creature had apparently tried to hold onto him. He had never noticed.

Near the fissures something a curious pale gray covered the ice. It stretched across the plain in long fingers. In places it seemed to seek the full sunlight glare from Ross.

“What’s that?” Nigel gestured.

“Some kind of plant that can grow in vacuum, I’d guess,” Nikka said.

Nigel paused to look at the stuff. It was crusty on top. He thumped it with a fist. It clenched. “Grips the ice, looks like,” he said. “Marvelous.”

This thin remnant cheered him. Life had crawled out onto even this blasted, hostile place. Life simply kept on. Blindly, yes, but undefeated.

“Looks a bit like algae,” he said, squatting. “See how it holds onto the ice?” He tried to pry up the edge. With considerable effort he managed to lift an inch-thick slab the size of his fist. The ice under it was pitted. It oozed a filmy liquid. When he let go the pancakelike algae flopped back down onto the ice.

“Come on,” Nikka said, ever the efficient, careful worker. “Let’s get to shelter.”

“Comin’, luv,” Nigel said in a parody of a British accent.

He felt oddly elated. Emotional currents moved in him.

He watched the crews laboring on the plain, beneath a black sky. For an instant he tried to see them as the Watcher would: Bags of ropy guts, skin shiny with grease, food stuck between their teeth, scaly with constantly decaying cells that fell from them as they walked, moving garbage, yellow fat caught between brittle white bones, stringy muscles clenching and stretching to move a cage of calcium rods around, oozing and stinking and—

He shook himself. The machine cultures had been in the galaxy a long time, since the first inhabited world committed nuclear suicide. They were an accidental fact of the universe, arising from the inappropriate response of the organic beings. But that did not mean they would reign supreme, that their vision was any more true than his own oblique perspective.

Earth needs all the information it can get

With nine years’ time delay?

You heard that message they picked up from the Pacific. People out there afloat, workin’ with the Skimmers, talkin’ to ’em, waitin’ for those gray amphibious things to come up to the surface after they landed—

He’s right, we got-to get information, figure out what’s goin’ on, how these Watchers work, send it Earthside to help them

Damn right Ted we got to

Now listen, I’m as brassed off as any of you at all this delay but believe me I want us to have a full consensus here

What the hell you saying?

You don’t act, Ted, we can replace you last, real fast—

Plenty of people can step right in, take over

Sure, listen, it could be that Watcher hasn’t gotten the whole story from Earthside yet, from those gray ships, they must be pretty damn busy

That Watcher’s old, slow

We hit it now maybe take it by surprise—

Enough of your waffling Ted

Yeah you got the sense of the meeting

You do something and fast or we vote you out, Ted

Simple as that

I understand your concern and if you’ll merely let me think

I’m calling the question Mr. Chairman

No wait let me ask—Bob?

Uh, yes, Ted?

Are we cleared?

All revved

All right then I’m ordering Propulsion to bring the ramscoop up to ignition

That’s great!

I take it I have the approval of you all? And does anybody have anything further to add?

All primed Ted

Team here is ready

Nigel shook himself. Ted has used the consensus for so long, and now it was using him.

“Don’t you think we should get inside?” Nikka asked.

“That air bubble won’t be any protection. Quite the reverse, if you shed your helmet.”

Carlos called, “Look! They’re turning Lancer.” Then plaintively, “They’re not going to evacuate first.”

“The Watcher is active. It might skrag our shuttle,” Nigel said, looking at Carlos.

The man was making an effort to be more authoritative now, speaking more deeply and using more abrupt phrases. Still, it was unconvincing. Inappropriate response. Yes, that was the nub of it, the wrong answer to one of the inherent troubles of organic life. The machines had no need of sex; they could reproduce through a template. And they could alter themselves at will, a form of voluntary evolution.

Organic beings were forever split into the efficient yet isolating bonds of two sexes, two views of the world, two dynamics that only partially overlapped, two beings who desired the other but could never wholly be the other, no matter how surgery or simulations promised a fleeting false liberation from the problem of forever being who you truly were, separate and unlike and yearning in the darkness you made for yourself.

Overhead in the hard night, Lancer moved.

It turned on its axis and brought the exhaust of the ramscoop to bear on the Watcher. Men and women stood on the barren plain and watched the silvery dot that was their home. Lancer pulsed with fresh energy. The magnetic fields gathered, driven by the awakened fluxlife.

“Hope they burn the damn thing to a cinder,” Carlos said fiercely.

“Nigel, I don’t like this,” Nikka whispered.

Nigel said laconically, “Listen. They’re calling it an ‘exploratory attack.’”

“It’s revenge,” Nikka said.

“Don’t be such a coward,” Carlos said roughly. “It’s about time somebody did something.”

Nigel’s eyebrows arched like iron-gray caterpillars. “Indeed. But not this.”

Crusted orange lights moved on the Watcher. Blue bands crisscrossed it. A halo of darting burnt-yellow specks appeared around Lancer as the drive engaged. The ramscoop required a mix of deuterium and other isotopes to begin the fire.

Carlos began, “I bet it’s never seen a fusion drive before, or it’d be more—” and the sky exploded.

A gout of flame curled out of Lancer’s exhaust. The fusion start-up belched ionized plasma in a roaring streak that slammed into the Watcher.

“Jesus!” Carlos cried. “That’ll fry it for sure.”

Soundless, the stream poured forth, spattering streamers of blue and gold and crimson on the Watcher’s gray stone and tarnished metal.

“This is mere show,” Nigel said. Arcing plasma lit the plain around them, throwing grotesque shadows. “The high-energy gamma rays are doing the real damage.”

“How long can it …?” Nikka said.

“Lancer can keep this up for hours, but—ah, see, it’s altering orbit from the reaction already.”

“Damn thing’ll be fried good by—”

Movement from the Watcher.

A thin spout of crisp orange flame shot forward, spanning the distance to Lancer so quickly it appeared instantly as a bar of light between the two. It wrapped around the flux lines of the magnetic throat and exhaust, licking and eating at the ship, curling down the long magnetic tunnels, spewing into the drive tubes, burning everywhere, gnawing at the delicate electronics and fluxlife and humans inside.

Lancer’s drive sputtered. Died. The Watcher’s orange flame went on and on in a deepening, deadening silence, cutting and searing and boiling.

A low moan came over the group comm line. Nigel stood rigid, his chest locked, seeking a purchase on this.

We should have called it Pox, he thought. He looked around at the blind craters: blinkless sockets.

Above, a spot on the Watcher exploded in a shower of crimson and violet. Silent smoke and debris spread a gray fog. “Something in the gamma-ray beam touched off a delayed reaction,” Nigel murmured.

—and he felt himself again, after so many years, living in a place absolutely blank and waiting for each moment to write upon it, time like water pouring through, the quality that the Marginis aliens had tried to bring to humans and that Nigel had gotten a fragment of—they had come bearing enlightenment, the one wedding to the world that the machines lacked, sought, and knew only as a sucking vacancy.

Nigel saw in an instant, as the flame from the Watcher cooled, that he had lost it years ago—become tied to events by ropes of care which sank him, tugging him below the waves—and now had found it again, falling down there in that great perpetual night beneath his feet, found it by finally letting go. He stood empty now, his past pilfered from him, free of the baggage of age and death and having to be Walmsley’s Fool, free again to measure each moment by what it was, let’s all slide out of here one of these nights

Casualties! God so many of them look at those indicators

What happened what went wrong

endless clashing cross talk, human or Skimmer or EM, all welling up from the depths, the rattling chatter of minds forever cut off from integrating with each other but seeking, talking, yammering hammering on

Total electrical failure onboard looks like

Where’re the Life Support Indices I get damn little

He sucked in a gulp of air, and realized he had been holding his breath.

He thought of the beasts below. There was a natural alliance possible, they knew the piercing of mortality, felt the immemorial sweep carrying forward and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns.

amid the rush and ruination

over in the territory but they were all out in the territory now, the country of the strange—but linked to Earth and Skimmer and the mute, huge, blood-rich things below by cycles of talk and sign and inevitable death

Watcher’s damaged sir but still active I’m getting counts from it

damn we didn’t get it

Weak signal from Lancer, nothing on shipcomm at all

Lots of casualties, it got most of ’em in the hall

Ted? What about Ted

Nothing

Ted had never been a captain and had never had a ship.

The drive’s out! Blew it out! We got no way home—

The voices rang on, thin with panic.

He had been here before, in the land of the seemingly defeated. But they had not.

He remembered the radio clamor that carried the EMs through their blasted red world; remembered the booming songs he had heard in the ocean below his feet; remembered the cramped message received from Earth only hours ago about one man, Warren, and his scribbled words from the Skimmers; remembered how humanity seemed to him one unending sea of talk—unthinking, automatic, like breathing.

All the myriad voices, and I says all right, that suits me. He could hear them all—EM, Skimmer, human—from Pocks, no need to voyage back to Earth, and the incessant mad organic talk would go on.

Nikka whispered, “So many … gone …”

“Yes.”

“Now we’re … we’re like the Skimmers. Far from home and no way back.”

Carlos began to sob. He collapsed onto the gritty purple ice. He pounded at it with a fist. “We’re alone!” he cried out. “We’ll die here.”

There was a long silence on the stark bare plain. Then:

“Probably,” Nigel said. And for some reason, he smiled.

Eight

He waited for the Watcher to emerge.

Nigel’s heart still tripped with skittering excitement. Something in him recalled days long ago, when he had boosted up above Earth’s filmy air in transatmospheric craft. There had been the same steady tug of acceleration as the sluggish plane skated up into the thin reaches of atmosphere. Then the rocket part of the hybrid would thunder into life, ramming him at the hard blue-black sky. He had gone up that way on his first deep space mission, to the gas-cloaked asteroid Icarus. But that small world had turned out to be a ruined spaceship, and so had launched him on a long career of flinty risk, of unastronautlike disobedience.

Now his heart recalled those days. It thumped agreeable, happy to be riding a torch up into weightlessness. He felt the pressure of acceleration dwindle. He floated with the sudden buoyancy that for an aging man spelled returning youth. His idiot heart wanted conflict, exploration, zest, the fierce emptiness and the black velocities.

He glided above Pocks, bound with parabolic grace toward the Watcher.

You all right? Nikka called on comm. He turned and waved at her. They rode on makeshift braces, twelve people crammed into the shuttle space meant for five. Carlos was wedged into a cranny halfway between them, his eyes studying the viewscreen anxiously.

Now was the moment. They had boosted off from Pocks and now would come within view of the Watcher within seconds. If it saw them, they were dead.

Nigel peered ahead. Using override command, he called for a closeup of the Watcher as soon as its outline nudged above the tightly curved horizon of Pocks. Then he searched for the missile they had launched against the Watcher. It was their only hope.

There. A dim blob of gray hung against the unyielding black of space.

If they had sent anything metallic against the Watcher it would have quickly sensed it. Metals were the language and substrate of machines. Their textures and electromagnetic glints were as natural to the Watcher as skin and smell were to humans.

And there lay a vulnerability. Or so Nigel guessed. And bet his life upon.

They had spent days gathering the odd, pale gray algae that lived in utter vacuum. Evolution’s persistence had somehow forced waterborne life up, out of the fissures in the ice. There it had adapted to a cold, airless world. It had learned to suck sustenance from ice. The top surface of the lichen was a hard, silicon-rich armor against the piercing ultraviolet of Pocks’s star, Ross. Its underside transferred Ross’s heat, minutely melting the ice and brewing a slow-kindled photosynthesis. The slimy stuff took a tenacious grip on whatever it found.

It could survive for a while in vacuum without clinging to ice. It could withstand the boost into orbit.

Better, it had no metal innards, was transparent to radar.

So the small band of isolated humans had cobbled together some thrusters and made a kind of balloon filled with algae. They had to do this while the Watcher was on the other side of Pocks, so that their activity did not catch the Watcher’s interest.

Nigel had spent long hours scooping up the muck. It clung to its forlorn ice and rock. He had grunted with effort, yanking it free. And been reminded of gardening in far off Pasadena, of the whole warm brush of life that perfumed Earth’s air. The work had put him right again. His limp went away. His pulse steadied. He felt ten years younger—no, twenty.

Then they launched.

Slimeball’s coming up on the Watcher, someone sent.

Nigel braced himself, then relaxed and felt foolish.

On the screen the gray dab coasted toward the curved horizon, a few minutes ahead of them in orbit. And in a moment, as if in answer to the life-filled balloon, the silhouette of the Watcher would poke above the smooth roundness of Pocks.

Seconds were crucial. The Watcher would see them soon. They were defenseless against it. But first …

Tock. Their charge detonated on the leading edge of the balloon. The sound of the balloon splitting came to Nigel over the comm. A faint, still sound.

Go, slimeball!

Ahead of them the gray mass spread outward. An organic shotgun blast into—

The roughened hull of the Watcher loomed above Pocks. Gray groping fingers reached out toward it … touched … and swarmed over the leading surface, smothering the Watcher in a sucking, hungry tide.

Made it!

Dead on!

Eat it, slimeball!

Nigel smiled. He felt strength flooding into him from some buried resource.

It is pleasant enough to be abstractly right. He had had quite enough of that during the years on Lancer, thank you. It was far finer to act and win. He had advanced the algae idea to the others, half expecting them to shrug it off. He was sure that despite all, they would still rather have had Ted leading them. Good old savvy Ted. But they were desperate. The notion had stuck.

Just as the algae itself now stuck and crawled and slithered over the eyes and ears of the Watcher. Eating at the delicate sensors. Blinding them.

So that as the humans in their frail craft glided close, no bolt answered them.

Nikka sent, I’d hate to have some of that ice-eating fuzz on me.

“All life’s an ally,” Nigel murmured. Not all life’s responses were inappropriate.

He was already readying himself for the battle.

The Watcher was a labyrinth. It wasn’t easy to get in, even with the external sensors covered by the thirsty algae. They had to burn it away from the hull to find a way in.

After they had forced an entrance at a bulky lock, the party of twelve found themselves floating through winding spaghetti corridors. Some necked down to scarcely a hand’s width. Others swelled until an elephant could have wallowed through.

A strange humming fled through the lacquered walls Skittering tones shot through the electromagnetic spectrum. Nigel followed Carlos down a tube that seemed to drop away into infinity. Red panels spattered random glows on bulk-heads and complex equipment. Nigel tried to see a pattern to the illumination, but most of it seemed to be wasted on bare, plain metal and stone.

The Watcher was half an asteroid, just as the ancient Icarus craft had been. Into the carbon and raw metal of a minor planet something had fitted elaborate technology. And whatever ran the Watcher lurked somewhere here. Nigel drew Nikka close and followed Carlos. The silence of the place hung like a warning.

They did not have to wait long.

Things long and snakelike scuttled from holes. Bigger machines, tubular and awkward, jetted down side corridors.

There were impossibly many of them. The humans fired at the approaching machines with a grim desperation. Laser bolts and e-beam cutters lanced forth.

They were almost surprised to see their shots fall sure and hard on the machines. Parts blew away. Electrical arcs flared blue-white, then died. The machines tumbled forward, out of control, and smashed into walls.

There are so many! Carlos called. He had a laser projector in each hand and two power packs strapped to him.

Turn sideways, so you’ll be a smaller target, Nikka answered.

Down this way, Nigel called.

They fled the hordes. Nigel rebounded from three walls in quick succession and darted down a narrow tube. Weightlessness gave him back the deft reflexes he had too long missed. As soon as Carlos and Nikka had caught up to him he turned down a side passage. Two slender machines, glossy with glazed ceramic, came at him. He punctured each with a bolt of tightly bound electrons.

Carlos began, What are—

Nigel sent a signal back into the passage they had left. Crimson light burst upon them. A crackling of electromagnetic death ricocheted through their comm lines.

“Implosion devices I cooked up,” Nigel said. “Spits out electromagnetic noise. I’ve been dropping them every hundred meters.”

Nikka said, I see. It will burn out these creatures?

“Hope so.”

It did. The swarms who staffed the Watcher had once been made to defend it against intrusion. But time works its way even with stolid machines. Those which wore out were replaced, but each time the basic instructions were engraved into fresh silicon or ferrite memory, a small probability existed of a mistake. The weight of these errors accumulated, like autumn leaves blown into a chance pocket of a backyard, making improbably dense piles.

So the minions of the Watcher had devolved. They were slow, sluggish, and dumb in just the deadly crafts of battle that life could never afford to neglect. Humanity’s penchant for warfare now paid off.

It took hours to work their way through the Watcher. Small machines launched themselves at any moving figure. Some exploded suicidally. Others jumped from ambush. Mines detonated, ripping at legs and lungs.

Nigel played cat and mouse down the dark corridors. He used stealth and tricks and, to his own vast surprise, stayed alive.

More men and women launched from the base on Pocks. They slipped aboard like pirates and joined battle.

In the end the machines retreated. Running, they were even less able. They were blown apart or fried with microwave bursts. Every machine fought to the very end. It was obvious that whatever had designed the Watcher had not thought deeply about the chance that it would be boarded. After all, the vast ship was intended to bombard planets, perhaps even kindle suns to a quickening fire. Hand-to-hand fighting was not its style.

Still, over half of the humanity that entered the Watcher left as corpses. Many more groaned and sweated with deep wounds. Others bit their lips at the pain and swore with ragged, angry pride. The last machines they found, cowering now in dim hiding holes, they smashed with great relish into small, twisted fragments.

Much of the Watcher labyrinth they would never understand. It was a forest of glazed surfaces, nested cables, inexplicable tangles of technology alien to all humanity’s avenues of thought.

But they did understand the small ship they found.

It was buried near the center of the vast complex. It had a curious blue-white sheen, as if the metal were fired in some unimaginably hot furnace. Yet it opened easily at a touch of a control panel.

Carlos said, “It’s not the same design as the rest of this Watcher. Looks finer, I’d say. The Watcher is solid but crude. This thing …”

Nigel nodded, The craft was a hundred meters long, but still seemed tiny and precious compared with the monstrous Watcher. And its arabesqued surfaces, its feeling of lightness and swift grace, conveyed its function.

“It’s a fast ship,” Nikka observed, passing a hand over circuits that leapt into amber life.

“I agree,” Nigel said. “The Watcher’s a blunderbuss. This is a stiletto. Or maybe an arrow.”

Carlos touched the hard, dimly alabaster-lit surfaces of it. They stood in what had to be a control room. Screens blossomed into unintelligible displays when they approached. “Robots flew it, I guess,” Carlos said. “Must’ve built the Watcher around this.”

“Perhaps.” Nigel calculated. They had already found evidence that the Watcher was very old, perhaps as much as a billion years. Radioactive isotope dating techniques were fairly accurate, even for such long durations. If this ship was older, it implied a machine civilization of vast age.

“I wonder if we could use it? Figure out the controls?” Nigel wondered.

Carlos brightened. “Sail it to Earth? My God! Yes!”

“Earth?” Nigel hadn’t thought of that.

They were all intensely aware that they were like fishermen swallowed by a whale.

Somewhere in the huge Watcher was the guiding intelligence. Its minions destroyed, it had withdrawn. But it would not give up.

Eventually it would find a way to strike back at the vermin which had invaded it. The Watcher had time. It could move subtly, deliberately.

The corridors took on a brooding, watchful cast.

No one went anywhere alone.

It took three days to find the core.

A crewman led Nigel to the small, compact room near the geometric center of the Watcher’s huge mass.

“Looks like an art gallery, I’d wager,” Nigel said after a long moment of surveying the curved walls.

It was a wilderness of tangled curves. Nothing sat flush with the walls. Small, ornate surfaces butted against each other, each rippling with embedded detail. Patterns swam, merged, oozed. A giddy sense of flight swept over Nigel as he watched the endless slide of structure move through the room.

“This is where it thinks?” he asked.

A crewman said at his elbow. “Maybe. Functions seem to lead into here.”

“What’s that?” A hole gaped, showing raw splintered struts.

“Defense mechanism. Killed Roselyn when she came in. I got it with a scrambler.”

Nigel noticed that some of the panels were spattered with drying brown flecks. The Watcher was exacting a price for each of its secrets.

He sighed and pointed. “And that?”

The crewman shrugged.

A pattern came and went, as though it was a huge ocean wreck seen deep beneath the shifting waves.

It was first a line, then an ellipse, and now a circle. Its surface piped and worked with tenuous detail. Somehow the walls seemed to contain it as an embedded image, persistent against the passing shower of lesser facts. Nigel frowned. An unsettling, alien way to display information. If that’s what it was.

Again came the sequence. Line, oval, circle, oval, line. Then it struck him. “It’s the galaxy.”

“What?” Nikka had just arrived. “What is all this?”

“Watch.” He pointed. “See the broad line of tiny lights? That’s the galaxy as it looks from the side. That’s the way we see it from Earth, a plane seen edge-on. Now watch.” His lined hands carved the air.

The line thickened, winking with a cascade of lights. It swelled into an oval as other data sped across the image, like clouds rushing over the face of a slumbering continent. Fires lit in the oval. Traceries shot through it. It grew into a circle. Strands within it flexed and spilled with light.

Nigel said, “Catch the spiral arms? There. Faint out-lines against those bright points.”

“Well …” she looked doubtful. “Maybe.”

“See those blue points?” Dabs of blue light stood out against the other tiny glows. Evidently they were all stars. But … “I wonder what those stand for?”

“Other Watchers?” Nikka asked.

“Could be. But think. This is a map of the whole damn galaxy.” He said it quietly but it had an effect on the others now crowding into the cramped room. “Seen from every angle. Which means somebody—some-thing—has done that. Sailed far up above the whole disk and looked down on it. Charted the inlets of gas and dust and old dead suns. Seen it all.”

In the silence of the strange room they watched the galaxy spin. It moved with stately slowness. Grave and ghostly movements changed it. Sparks came and vanished. Dim gray presences passed across its face. Lingered. Were gone.

Then a specialist Nigel knew slightly, a wiry astronomer, said, “I think I recognize some of the pattern.”

“Where?” Nigel asked.

“See that quadrant? I think it’s ours.”

A segment of the galaxy did seem to Nigel, now that the astronomer pointed it out, slightly more crowded and luminous that the rest. He frowned as thin mists seemed to spill liquidly through the pie-slice segment. “You recognize stars?”

“In a way,” the astronomer said with a certain prim precision. “Not optical stars, no. Pulsars.”

“Where?”

“See the deep blue ones?”

“Yes, I was wondering—”

“They’re where pulsars should be.”

Nigel remembered vaguely that rapidly spinning neutron stars accounted for the pulsar phenomenon. As the compacted cores of these dense stars spun, they released streams of plasma. These luminous swarms flapped like flags as they left the star. They emitted gouts of radio noise. As a star spun, it directed these beams of radio emission outward, like a lighthouse sweeping its lamp across a distant ship. When the beam chanced to intersect the Earth, astronomers saw it, measured its frequency of sweep.

The astronomer went on, “They’re so prominent in this map. Far more luminous than they are in reality.”

“Perhaps they are important?” Nikka asked.

“Umm.” The astronomer frowned. His face was lined with fatigue but the fascination of this place washed away the past. Even amid tragedy, curiosity was an itch that needed scratching. “Could be. As navigation beacons, maybe?”

Nigel thought of his lighthouse analogy. Beeping signals across the blind abyss?

But there were easier ways to find your way among the stars. He pointed again. “Why is there that big blue patch at the center, then?”

The astronomer looked more puzzled. “There aren’t any pulsars at the galactic center.”

Nikka asked, “What is there? Just stars?”

“Well, it’s got a lot of gas, turbulent motions, maybe a black hole. It’s the most active region of the whole galaxy, sure, but …”

Nikka asked, “Could it be that the galactic center and pulsars have something in common?”

The astronomer pursed his lips, as if he disliked making such leaps. “Well … there’s a lot of plasma.”

Nigel asked slowly, “What kind?”

“All kinds,” the astronomer said with a touch of condescension. “Hot gas made still hotter. Until the electrons separate from the ions and the whole system becomes electrically active.”

Nigel shook his head, not knowing himself where he was headed. You just skated, and went where the ice took you. “Not around pulsars. I remember that much.”

The astronomer blinked. In his concentration the weight of the last few days slipped from him and his face smoothed. “Oh. Oh, you’re right. Pulsars put out really relativistic plasma. The stuff comes whipping off the neutron star surface close to the speed of light.”

Nigel wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. Still, something tugged at him. “What kind of plasma?”

“There aren’t any heavy ions, no protons to speak of. It’s all electrons and their antiparticles.”

“Positrons,” Nigel said.

“Right, positrons. The electrons interact with the positrons in some fashion and make the radio emission. We—”

“And at galactic center?” Nigel persisted.

The astronomer blinked. “Well, yeah … There was report a while back. … A detection of positrons at the galactic center.” His voice caught and then a wondering enthusiasm crept into it. Nigel watched the man’s face fill with a wan yet growing delight. “Positrons. If they slow down, meet electrons, the two annihilate. Give off gamma rays. A gamma-ray telescope Earthside, Jacobson’s group I think it was, saw the annihilation line.”

Nigel felt a slow, gathering certainty. “Those blue dots …”

Nikka said softly, “The Watcher keeps track of where positrons appeared naturally in the galaxy.”

The fact sank into them. The Watcher’s main job was to stamp out organic life, that was clear. But something had told the ancient craft to notice pulsars and the positron plasmas they spewed out into the galaxy. A phenomenon that occurred also at galactic center—but on a hugely larger scale, apparently, judging by the large blue zone at the very hub of the rotating swirl.

The astronomer said, puzzled, “But there can’t be so many pulsars at the center of the galaxy …”

“Still, there is that blue globe,” Nigel said.

Something was happening at galactic center. Something important.

And the machine civilization thought it was vital, perhaps as important as the obliteration of the organic yeast they so hated.

Nigel said softly, with a gathering certainty, “If we are ever to deal with these things, with their Watchers and Snarks and the whole damn mechanical zoo of them … we’ve got to confront them.”

Nikka saw what he meant. “But—Earth! We can return now. There is so much to be done.”

He shook his head. Looking around the room, with its myriad sliding sheets of alien thought and strange design, he watched the luminescence play upon the haggard faces.

Faces pursued by a voracious and unyielding intelligence. Faces lined and worn by the silent anxiety they all felt, just being here.

The Watcher would give them no rest. They had to get out. Move on.

But not simply run back home. Earth was no haven. There was no blithe sanctuary now. Not anywhere in the whole swarming galaxy.

“No. We’ve got the means. That little ship we found. It must be a fast craft. I’ll bet it came here and supervised the building of this Watcher.”

“Nigel …” Nikka began a protest, then stopped.

“That ship still works. It could go back. Back where it came from. Where we must go.”

They began to murmur and protest.

A small band of humans, their incessant crosstalk rebounding from the alien surfaces. Nigel smiled.

Their dreams lay Earthward. They would have to be convinced.

le’s all slide out of here one of these nights

But he knew he could convince them. The rest of humanity was reeling under war and a vast, brute yoke. If this small knot did not seize this opportunity, humanity would dwell forever in the dimness of ignorance. Victims. Prey.

and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns

There was no turning back now. Maybe there never had been any possibility of turning away from what lay out here. He had felt it for a long time, since the first vague pricklings of understanding at the sunny, long lost Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Odd, he felt almost nostalgic for the place now.

Now that he knew he would certainly never see it again.

For there was always the opening-out, and it would always win.

over in the territory

He pointed at the somber, revolving disk of countless fevered stars. Unfathomable messages glided across quilted surfaces.

and I says all right, that suits me

“Let’s go,” he said, and pointed at the galactic center.