Across the Sea of Suns

One

Nigel watched Nikka carefully arrange her kimono. It was brocaded in brown and blue and, as tradition dictated, was extravagant by more than ten centimeters. Nikka drew it up until the hem was just level with her heels, once, twice—at the fifth try he stopped counting and fondly watched her turn this way and that before the polished-steel mirror. She arranged a red silk cord at her waist and smoothed down the slack of the kimono. Then came the obi: a broad, stiff sash, fully five meters long. She wrapped it around herself at breast level, frowned, wrapped it again. Each time he watched this ceremony it seemed more subtle, revealed more of her shifting mind. He murmured a detailed compliment and a knot of indecision in her dissolved; she firmly fastened the two small cords that secured the obi. This layering and sure smoothing done, she tried a brass front buckle. Pursed her lips. Changed it to an onyx clasp. Turned, studied the effect. Plunged an ivory comb into her butterfly chocho mage crown of hair. Then a pale, waxy comb. Next, a brilliant yellow one. Then back to the ivory. He loved these pensive, hovering moments when she revealed the light and childlike core of herself. Lancer tended to iron out the graceful, momentary interludes, he thought, and replace them with clear, sharp decisive certainties.

“You must have the largest wardrobe on board.”

“Some things are worth the trouble,” she said, fitting on zori of worn, woven stalks. And smiled, knowing he too sensed how important such age-honored moments were to her.

A knock at the door. He went for it, knowing that Bob Millard and Carlotta Nava would be there, coming a bit early. The shipscene multifass began in ten minutes: time-bracketed communality.

Lancer was organized in the now-accepted mode. Whenever possible, decisions about work were made at the lowest level, involving the most workers possible. The intricately structured weave of social and political forces was a sophisticated descendant of an old cry—ownership of the means of production by the workers!—without the authoritarian knee jerks Marx left in the original model. It was flexible; it allowed Nigel to work on whatever odd bit of astronomical data caught his eye, as long as he also pitched into overall drudge jobs as they came up. The details were worked out by small labor cells.

To break down the ever-forming rigidities of hierarchy, the Shipwide Multifaceted Social Exchange blended all workers together; Mixmastering them into a classless puree. There were a minimum of classlike distinctions. Ship command officers ate the same boring commissary food and griped about it in the same sour, hopeless way. They wore the same blue jump suits and had no privileges. Nigel had some perks because of his age, not his rank; within the limits of efficiency, there were no ranks. Ted Landon headed the shipwide assembly, but his vote weighed the same as an obscure techtype’s.

Nigel liked it: smorgasbord socialism, without a true profit motive, since Lancer had only to return to Earth to be a success. This simplified the sociometric analysis; consensus communities, as the jargon had it, were notably stable. Nigel ignored most of the earnest entreaties that he participate more. He liked the community well enough, while distrusting its bland surface, its solicitous sensitivity. But the swelling exuberance of the multifass could sweep him along, drown his reserve. Bright, young people had an undeniable momentum.

“Hi.”

Carlotta kissed him. “Had another face smoothing, I see.”

“No, I decided to skip that and go straight to embalming. How’s it look?”

“It’s you, dahling. Are those laugh lines or an irrigation project?”

Bob shook hands in his good-ole-boy persona. “You figure there’s much on fer tonight?”

Nigel fetched drinks. “The free-form sex is down the hall, second left.”

“Don’t look for him there,” Carlotta said. “Nigel gets all tired out just struggling with temptation.”

Nigel handed her a drink. “Hot-blooded kid. I suppose you’ll be playing hopscotch tonight with real Scotch?”

“Si. You’re so much wittier after I’ve had a few drinks.”

“You two!” Nikka shook her head. “One could never guess you had spent the night together.”

“Mating rituals of the higher primates,” Carlotta said, taking a long pull. She stroked Nikka’s kimono. “Madre! It’s so attractive on you.”

Nigel wondered why women spoke that way when presumably it was men who were best qualified to judge attraction, yet men seldom used the term. Curious. Though of course in this case his generalization fell on its face. In their first hand touch they reestablished a lazy, familiar sensuality.

He watched Carlotta approach Nikka, speaking rapidly and approvingly, and then move away, and then return, an unconscious push-pull to draw Nikka out. Carlotta’s heavy, springy hair flowed with these movements. In marked contrast, her large brown eyes did not share this social gavotte. He liked the rigor of those eyes and the unashamed way they locked on whatever interested her, holding it for rapt attention.

Her intensity was too much for Nikka’s mood, so soon after the reflective dressing in the kimono. Nikka escaped into the kitchen for hors d’oeuvres. Carlotta reached out a hand as if to delay her and then drew back, seeing that she had stirred up some unintended current. She turned, her long scarlet skirt flowing, and studied a sunsomi triptich nearby. Nigel watched her eyes narrow from some inner effort. There was some reservoir of emotion she was tapping that eluded him. Something deep, another fulcrum for her personality. Which proved that merely sleeping with a woman did not open her to you fully, no matter how you might try.

Bob started in about shipboard work policy and Nigel joined in, glad of the diversion. A musical theme chimed: multifass.

“Ummm,” Carlotta murmured and turned to Nikka to try again. “What are you doing under the new job rotation?” A relatively neutral subject.

“Odd jobs here and there.” Nikka retreated behind a blank mildness. He recognized this as an old habit, common to Japanese, though Nikka had returned to it only in the last few years, as a day-to-day shield aboard Lancer. In this case, she was uncomfortable because a small deception was involved. He and Nikka had agreed to collaborate, without appearing to do so, filling in each other’s weak areas. That would help keep their labor ratings above minimum. It seemed a prudent tactic for the oldest members of the crew. “And you?”

“Well, systems analysis of the microbio inventory, of course, from the first flyback probe.”

Nigel said, “Until you’re finished, we don’t go down?”

Carlotta laughed, her eyes now moving with liquid ease. “Bob has been after us for a week, panting for the green light. We’ve got lots of results—”

“More’n plenty,” Bob grunted.

Carlotta frowned. Friction between departments about setting a date for touchdown? “Anyway, we’ve got so much biochem to interrelate, I don’t see how we can understand it all in terms of relationships to Earth-side processes, when we’ve had only a few weeks to—”

Another knock. Nigel went to answer. Yes, he should now leave the door dilated. It still struck him as odd, but precisely such policy decisions as the touchdown date could be dealt with and a consensus reached, in the middle of a multifass. And all with a disarming casualness. The analysts had discovered that most matters were in fact settled this way. The formal apparatus only confirmed what was already worked out. Electronic democracy with your shirt unbuttoned. A disarming notion, for those reared in the days of management pyramids.

Here at the door were three people he scarcely knew, bubbling with good spirits and ready to add to the steadily rising murmur that he could hear welling up in the corridor, more coming, the eternal primate chatter and bark, the voices of the ship—

Toke on this, Nebraska Red, high, angular momentum stuff—

Those microbes, never seen anythin’ like ’em. Dust huggers. Little fellas, no bigger’n paramecia.

He said if she didn’t like it what the hell she could change her whole jawline, he didn’t care. She lost it when that lug bolt fractured, you remember that godawful malf down C Bay, killed Jake Sutherland and her, it clean blew away her bone right up to the eye, they got the frags out of the cornea—

—they’re the same chem patterns repeated thousands of times over in the Isis biosphere, just like our left- and right-handedness in the sugars and long chains, y’know. I mean, you’ve got only so many atoms to work with in the whole universe anyway, right? So shouldn’t be a big surprise that the basic Isis chem combos—a five-carbon sugar, with one more phosphate in the carrier, whereas we get by with only three in ATP—are similar, I mean, no big shock there. Got a base tacked on, too. Obvious, simple alteration from our scheme, damn near Earthlike but you can spot the differences.

Christ I thought she’d wet herself when the A4 rating didn’t come through from the cell, she screamed bloody murder at the next confab but shit we weren’t havin’ any you can’t put one past us so she’s back on the auto-lathes. Hates it. Ruby’s got the A4 and good says I ’cause that bitch was—

—that stuff clutches onto the dust in the air like it was free lunch. Dust eaters. Backbone of the ecology. The flagella dig in and zip they take the sulfates straight out of the mineral state. No fluid solution needed!

So much for that life-needs-water crap.

Yeah, why should it when a martini doesn’t?

So these fellas, they go their whole lives without a drink. There’s water, sure, but not near the Eye. So the biosphere’s tapped this way to get energy out of the sulfates, poor bastards, livin’ on dust—

Li’l suckers got to hump like bejeezus to make an erg.

—in the wash of technical talk he steps back and studies Carlotta, sees pinched lines at her eyes and wishes he could unblock it. Easier, much easier, if the three of them could collapse into a comfortable, old-shoe life, each satisfied by a dimming echo of the initial passion they all had felt. She turns, visibly collecting words for a burst of talk—eyebrows knit, mouth purses, blunt tip of her nose dips a millimeter—and Nikka approaches, quicksilver changes ripple across Carlotta’s face, they touch casually, and Nigel remembers how they had been instinctively close from the beginning, sharing jobs, living together while Nigel was in the Sleepslots. They exchange a word, Carlotta glances at him, she makes the familiar stretching motion, the one she taught him to ease knotted muscles, and Nigel feels in her liquid grace why he has through the years narrowed his ability to see into others. It is simply too hard now, too involving. For Nikka and Carlotta, yes, but the thought of reaching this way into Ted or Alex or others—it is too dense and wearying. He had gotten it from the Marginis wreck and used it to get through the ISA Byzantium: chatting up power brokers, sensing what Lancer engineers meant as opposed to what they said, giving them the appearance of seasoned astronaut that they wanted. And he had liked it, been good at it. For years afterward he had remembered each welding inspector’s beaming mug. But now—He feels the reserves ebbing for this; he cannot muster it for a multifass or even a seminar. Insight comes only in flashes now anyway, and the sensitivity hurts when he rubs against the abrasive mysteries people carry inside. Carlotta pats Nikka on the arm absentmindedly, her attention caught again by a passing spate of jargon, and Nikka comes toward him—

Carlotta was awfully tart when she arrived.

Miffed at something perhaps.

There’s nothing developing between her and Bob if that’s what you’re thinking.

I’m not thinking at all actually.

I don’t think she knows herself what’s bothering her; she can’t talk about it, but look at that forced way she’s laughing over there and how she keeps glancing over at us.

Well look at it her way, we two’ve been together since the Pleistocene and she’s always going to be the last in, the odd number

Funny, it’s easier to talk about her here than when we’re alone

Ye olde multifass, everything comes out here—

And you always mixing around, it looks like aimless walking—

Walking yes, aimless no

Eavesdropping?

I, I like the mix—

Thing is, they’re going such a long way around in biochem terms, using what they can get after the sunlight scatters around in all that dust. No UV gets through down at the surface to speak of. That poor li’l biosphere, they stack photons on top of each other somehow to get enough energy, then grab onto water near the ocean, split off the oxy, God what a lotta work

Petrowski calcs that the biosphere’s older than our solar system, really old, been perkin’ along over five billion years, think ’bout that, figured it from the heavy element abundance—

—dust transfers the energy to the bigger life-forms, uses mostly sulfide electron donors, quite a trick when you consider—

—riding those winds, eating the goddamn dust, little bitsy microbes on their way from the Eye to the sea—

—still think you’ve got the most beautiful ass honey of any guy who wears those maintenance overalls—

Seems to me you people got a purty good handle on the biosphere, can’t see why you don’t pass on the touchdown option an’ let us get on with it.

Bob it’s not that simple

Lissen we let the specialists chip away at the thing ferever we’re gonna turn gray up here ’fore we ever get down and movin’

Squeeze it a li’l an’ see what you get

Tough ecology, man, I mean tough. This place’d be dead as Mars with just a little less sunlight and atmosphere. Bio’s creamin’ their jeans to see what else’s under that dust

Too early to tell; we can’t see well enough to estimate the extent of the life pyramid

Shit this all there is to drink gotta be sumpin’ better down at Nguyen’s

Look at him makes you wonder how a muitifass can work with people getting carried away, drink and even drugs on a ship no less

Him? They’re self-canceling, doncha see? Keeps things loose but when votin’ time rolls around they’re too fuzzed to care—

You look at paramecia or your own sperm cells even they have this little whip,

No thanks not my kind of thing

flagella down there is your justly famous balls, my good man

wigglin’ upstream like salmon. Story of my life

and if this grack will let me finish, there are nine fibers on the outside of that whip to every one fiber on the inside

she’s fine y’know wonderful but also great at takin’ the ol’ romance out of it

and that ratio, that nine to one, is the same in thousands of organisms all over Earth and nobody has the slightest idea

unoriginal God is the best explanation. He just got tired

couldn’t you mumble a little softer I can still hear what you’re saying

okay okay so tell us nine. to one

we can’t see any obvious selective survival advantage for the nine-to-one ratio but who knows, still the easiest out is that ’way back at the beginning when sex started the nine to ones were just lucky is all and that ratio got locked in early

kiss me quick I’m nine to one

had too much sniffo already eh?

love me love my ratio

well you just keep on holding up that bulkhead it looks like hard work white the adults talk

hark the queen speaketh

so first thing I look for in the dust crawlies from Isis is the flagella, and sure enough—oh thanks, I’m having that rum stuff—sure enough I squint into the electron mike and there are the little whips going like mad, only when I splice some down it’s a seven to one, not our nine to one. So question is, what’s magic about odd ratios?

only two cases hell honey not statistically meaningful

still sounds suspicious to me

could be that an odd ratio gives ’em edges to hold onto?

so what’s the comparative advantage?

more leverage with an odd ratio? maybe that way it’s easier to make your point even if the lady’s not interested

talk about anthropocentric

must be they need a good grip right Nigel?

I never speculate on extraterrestrial pornography

Well they use something to hold onto those dust motes while they’re riding the winds out from the Eye, up those mountains and down to the sea, chomping away on those sulfide electron donors

then when the Eye winds turn near the seas the big cyclone pattern that’s when the dust falls

Remarkable how fast his head clears I could almost follow that

But do we need to decide basic mechanisms like that before a manned landing?

There’s lots of biochem to study we can spend a year easy

Not me Come now we’ve been in orbit for months already bloody long enough

Much as we all love good, old Bob-boy I’d rather rely on Nigel’s judgment

Thanks but isn’t that what this muitifass is about?

Goddamn dust if we could only see more. That third flyback probe, it found lots of dust eaters dropping off near the seas but you know I keep thinking

Yeah, seems like those li’l buggers are a planet-wide feeding system for the bigger life-forms, so we ought to look at who benefits

Their function is carrying chemical energy you mean, that’s all?

Sure, they’ve sopped up photons at the Eye and made the right carbo-oxy compounds

—which get dumped into the mountain valleys where those EMs are—

right

Strange kind of energy vector, moving biochem energy out from the Eye. Hard to see how a whole biosphere like that could evolve

This isn’t New jersey m’ love

I’ve noticed.

Damnably low-grade process though, with that skimpy energy budget the deck’s stacked against the whole biosphere

God’s ingenious

Well he had longer to work on this one.

Five-billion-year-old biosphere makes you wonder what could happen

You two might talk to Bob over there about the exploration if you’ve the time—

Sure come on soul mate

Damn that sniffo’s some stuff isn’t it? Whattad I say?

Just let me do the talking

Nigel, Nigel, lemme tell you, I figure you can do somethin’, man I was so

mad

I felt like runnin’ over a toad with a power mower—

Ted’s more the man to complain to, precious little I can do

Sure but the right word in, y’know

Can’t promise anything but if it’s a friendly ear you’re after

C’mon you could have his job anytime we’d all vote for you.

Nonsense, step over this way the noise is dreadful now what was the—

He values the cascade of impressions more than anything. He drifts down carved rock corridors, in and out of rooms, never lingering long—

—yes, I know him, he’s from GHQ, works with Ted, kind of nice but homely as hell—

—uh-huh, ugliness like that is nature’s contraceptive, I figure. Forget it. You got anybody else in mind, though, the night is young even if I’m not—

—She came over to me and positively whispered all of it to me in one gush which was a kind of tribute when you think about it, coming from a woman who obviously hasn’t found much in the world it was necessary to whisper about—

—Evolution goes all sorts of ways, that’s why I don’t think we’ll puzzle out the radio sources just by peeking at the basic biochem, not when we got such lousy resolution through all that damned dust. I mean, all kinds of things are selected for, right? You and me are myopic because the nearsighted males couldn’t hunt so good, so they stayed home while the bruisers went out running down meat. Just hanging around the caves and painting the walls and gettin’ a little on the side in the heat of the day. Never mind all that strong pair-bonding stuff they always tell you; fact is, you never know who the father is and that’s why a male strategy of spreading it around as much as you can pays off. So it gets selected for. Hell, it feels good—that’s the sure sign; evolution doesn’t read our rule books, she’s got her own—

—think you’ve had enough? That rum isn’t rum, it’s spidmeer and you’re starting to look like a lobster—

—we need more recon down there skip this biochem piffle—

—yeah, right, way I see it is, we got a surplus a genius an a shortage of guts aroun’ ’ere—

—an oxidation-reduction cycle,’s what it is, down there in that dust they’re playin’ the same ol’ game we are, only not so profitable. Higher up the chain from those dust eaters there’s gotta be starch production using that crummy low-cal sunlight. Leaves oxy as leftovers, an’ that’s what the EMs gotta breathe, but damned if I know how anything could live off that—

—I don’t see why she has to bite my head off just over a spilled

sample

container—

—You get us contaminated with those Isis spores I’ll vac you so fast—

—well I

didn’t

why should I look I don’t. think you can say that just like

that

—

—Could be wrong but

some

body left off the seals.

—then don’t look at me when you—

—call this a multifass well, this may shape you up for a vote but nobody’s talking about what I want

—part of it’s to find out what the goddamn issue is if you’d just listen fer once—

—I was saying, when the smaller animals breathe they have this little sac, kind of an air trap, and it filters the dust out of the air before they hit the inward stroke to suck in a lungful—

—Real slow, about two breaths a minute, I’ve seen it

—No bigger’n your finger, intricate li’l things, damn fine design for eatin’ up those dust-huggin’ fellas. Then the ones fat as your hand, they’re lunchin’ off the finger-sized guys

—Him? Just a passing thing, yer ol’ hump ‘n’ hustle is all—

—Come on Elinor no civilized woman ever regrets a pleasure and this is going to be—

—so while you guys are grandstanding it with the survey, somebody’s taking out the garbage, getting meals, agronomists and skiffers, all scutwork, so at least we’d like to be in on what’s comin’ out instead of flashin’ on it in the weeklies you squirt Earthside—

—I still say you stack up your shipcred, you can get your tail upholstered the way he did, just give the usual squeeze to Dexter in medmon, they’ll slip you in, won’t be more than a hairline scar nobody’ll notice in the dark

He eased over into the group around Ted Landon and waited until a break came. It still all came through to him as overlapping voices, so even his own sounded involuntary, part of a stream.

—Ted, we’ve got to go down there and have a look.

—Hold your horses, gosh, this isn’t the best place to go over the technical details, Nigel; if you came to the briefings you’d be more up to speed—

—They take too long, never understood why you call them briefings, but I do run through the tapes.

—Glad to hear that, and of course we are doing a study of all the ramifications, looking for a safe way to do it.

—Seems a trifle obvious, actually.

—Well, some are advocating an active recon mode— you know, where we use remote radar sensing to interrogate the internal biochem of the EMs for—

—Sounds bloody awful.

—Ah, there’s the alternative, a passive mode which I incidentally favor, which is to station servo’d eyes in well-sheltered spots, and watch the EMs if they pass nearby. We’ve had good staff review of that proposal.

—Mere eyes? Use walkers. We’ll need mobility.

—In the long run, sure. We’ve got walkers in the ready equipment. Lord, were prepared for anything Earthside could anticipate. There’re even submersibles in storage, in case Isis was an all-ocean planet.

Bob appeared at Ted’s elbow and nodded vigorously.

—Walkers? Ah like that bettern sittin’ still.

—Ted, I should think it’s technically feasible to make a radio-reflecting blanket. One we could throw over a standard walker.

—What about it, Bob?

—Sure. You thinkin’ to calibrate them till they reflect the EMs’s own signals back?

—Dead on. But scatter their pulses to the side, the same way ordinary rocks do.

—Bettuh than hunckerin’ down, waitin’ for EMs to come strollin’ by.

—Perhaps program the blanket in some way, make its reflectivity change with time? That way the EMs won’t register a same-shaped object following them about.

—Mebbe possible. Have to look at the specs.

—Grand. I’ll pitch in whatever talents I have.

—Whoa there, Nigel. That’s Bob’s section. I can’t—

—Fine then. Bob, I’m on for the first go.

—Jess a minit now—

—My idea, lads. I should get some fraction of the action, as the slang puts it.

—I dunno about ground team. I mean, assumin’ the approach works. Dunno if you’re up to physical specs, Nigel.

—Undoubtedly. But most of those walkers are servo’d, true?

—Sure. Havta be. Can’t afford to put a big team on the ground. Ted’s Operations study showed—

—That’s okay, Bob, don’t need to bother Nigel about details.

—Must keep surveillance maximized, Ted. Your own study showed that.

—How’d you get to read that part? It isn’t due for release until—

—Mere rumor, I assure you.

—Huh. Sounds like we got a big leak somewhere, Bob. Okay, since you got the dope anyway—We’ll land enough guys to service the equipment, then have teams From here servo’d to the hardware. Saves logistical problems. Five-hour shifts.

—Good. But there’s bound to be dead time there. No one can take a lot of being tied into machines, not on that long a circuit, ship-to-surface. So peg up a short shift, occasional sods like me. We can stand watch, keep an eye for anything odd. Patrol duty.

—Well, I don’t know as I like—

—He’s got a point, Ted. Long’s he’s just standin’ watch, nothin’ special—

—Thanks very much, Bob, I do appreciate it.

—Hey, now, I didn’t say definite you could.

—Awfully good of you.

—Nigel, we’re out of the rum already and—

—It’s not rum, luv, it’s spidmeer.

—Hey, now—

—Well, anyway we’re out and if you could—

—Certainly. Brilliant interruption. You look as if you’re deplorably empty there, Bob, I’ll just nip in and get you—

—But hey

—No trouble really, Ted you ought to come have some of the—

—Hey—

Two

Nigel stirs restlessly, itchy from the encasing probes and pickups attached to him. He is moored to this electroneural net and feels the cramped capsule only dimly.

He waits for Isis to unfurl into him. There— it begins. Throughout, he will be trapped in a suffocating machine’s clasp, but he is willing to set aside the unpleasant overtones of this in return for the experience it opens to him.

There—

He shuffles out of the storage and maintenance shed, his suit clanking. Hydraulics wheeze and he steps onto the crusted face of Isis.

It is blurred browns and pinks, the dust whipping by with a lingering gusty ferocity as it slowly ebbs, the cyclone whirl from the Eye losing its force after these three days of lashing storm. Everywhere, a pink cloak. He can see perhaps ten meters in the optical, thirty in IR, in the UV nothing farther than his gloves.

Where are the EMs? Off that way, his pulsing faceplate display says. Beyond the beeping reference tabs the earlier teams have left, lighthouses in the murk. He revectors. The suit swerves with the usual oversteer, huge paws biting into the caked silicates, the sliding ceramic plates at arms and legs rasping in the pressing silence.

Nigel receives split signals from his two worlds. Encased in the hushed module aboard Lancer, he feels the subtle clutching flex of servos responding to him, amplifying each movement. Simultaneously, across kiloklicks of space, the feedback exosenses and senceivers give him the rub and clank of the hydrasteel robot, striding over hummocks and stones, two locomotors thrusting forward as two stabilizers seize the crumbly turf. All this spills into the run-on tapes as he gathers data and checks for landmarks—spots now familiar to Command but coming fresh and crisp to him, his first time on this storm-worn place.

Rustworld. Grains of iron blow by, licking at his lenses, and sulfur dioxides make white tracers in the ruddy sleet, so much oxygen locked up forever in the land, stirred by the winds. A sudden burst of IR flickers over the ridgeline he is mounting and Nigel thumbs for amplification, the lightpipes gathering in photons and processing them, filtering turbulence in the air and the surges of dust, narrowing the reception cone and the scale, for he knows this opening in the clouds will pass, so he has only moments to grid an overview; he sees the valley he has memorized, checks it against the overlay that flashes on his faceplate and shifts to follow his head turning, the distant scarp looming like a rough-edged knife, the black basalt flow fanning out beneath him, scraggly bushes dotting the gullies where the brown, matlike grass clusters, clinging to heavy topsoil that the winds cannot snatch away. He angles downslope, boots clank clank on metal-rich stones, Ra’s steady glow making the sky momentarily brim in echo to the strawberry tinge of the soil. The curling smoke to leftward rises from the shank of the mountain. He sees the slumbering heat in the massive shoulder of rock to the east, the oven which can rumble forth with fitful streams of lava and boiling ammonia, steam rising from the caldera, new moisture free at last to wet the winds and stem the tide of dust from the Eye. He crunches forward and suddenly there comes a shift in the insistent singsong that he half listens to, the radio stutter altering. It is a chromatic weave, that much they have learned, not the diatonic tones of Western music, so Nigel cannot seem to feel the scattershot clicks and shifts as music at all, even if he could assemble it in his mind after eliminating the long pauses between each quick darting blip, and yet now something changing in it draws his attention. The buzzing in the radio spectrum—he flashes a time-summed display, watches it evolve—is quickening, new amplitude-modulated pulses adding to the steady pattern.

Where are they? Regional sensos, buried in crevices to elude the EMs’s notice, report to him in a flurry of data points. There: a few EMs are active, beaming their labored signal skyward, toward the distant, invisible Earth, which for a few hours now peers around Ra. But most are dormant, their tracers static, though a few show sluggish movement on the 3-D-projected map. Nigel thumbs a flash-forward of his recon path, sees that he will not reach the vicinity of the EM creatures for some hours, and without hesitation stamps down, the suit reinforcing the motion, sending him arcing over a gray boulder and down the opposite face of the blunted ridgeline, gyros keeping him from tumbling at this new surge, and he lands crump and is off again, keeping the leaps low to avoid attracting Command’s attention, but moving fast, attention riveted to the murk ahead as the dust closes in again, the stubby wire-trees scooting by below. His acoustics pick up the persistent immemorial breath of the Eye winds and higher, a chippering, a rustic of frantic scurryings as small things scatter before him. They run only a few meters and then stop, exhausted and listening, conserving their muscles’ reserves as they scavenge the dust-laden air for oxygen. This new sulfur-swollen storm from the Eve has robbed the air of more oxygen than usual and beneath the gale, life becomes torpid, sluggish. Skimming, he runs. Below passes one of the curious cairns, its stones sliced with hacksaw lines, not a representation of anything men can make out, but made by the EMs, they are sure of that. Several of the creatures have lingered near the cairns, rearranging the stones, murmuring in the microwave.

He surges among the rumpled hills, expending power reserves without care, running, rasping, clanking, probing the ruddy murk ahead. The spatterings of radio singsong shift and click. Above, a bright lance of yellow breaks out on the scarp: lava. Its fuming brilliance cuts through a shroud of dust, and Nigel puffs, the exertion building in him now a thin sludge of fatigue, as he trots down a long gully and onto the floor of the ravaged sulfurous valley. A shadow melts and then reforms and Nigel stops dead still, half-hidden by a shank of rock. A strange prickly sensation seeps into him as he watches the shadow behind a veil of dust, a shadow of pale blue that works forward, four legs, yes, the quadrupedal imperative, one of the biomechs aboard had said, and the alien looms, suddenly near, as a gust clears the air. Huge. Silent. Still. Yet a crisp microwave pulse bursts from it as the long rectangular head turns, jerking like a wheel on ratchets, away from Nigel and toward the base of the scarp. Its skin is waxy and rough, cloaking an apparatus of bones so obvious that to Nigel it seems he looks deeply into the radio being, sees the lattice-work, the boxy ribs, the brittle cage of sticks that encases the abdomen, the stiff long legs that jerk as the thing picks its way among the heat-shattered rocks, stepping tentatively, walking by touch. Nigel lets it recede until it is a mere slight darkening in the rosy haze, and then follows. Above, yellow fingers lace the rock face. His acoustics pick up the frothing bubble of the volcano, a sluggish torrent of lava splashing down a few hundred meters away. Exosense registers rising heat. He follows the EM creature. To Nigel’s left a splotch grows suddenly, becomes definite, huge, towers over him in the shifting russet streaming. He squats, shuts down his mechanical murmur, holds his breath—

Nigel, what’s the idea bein’ off recon path? I jess come on an’ run a check on all stations. Ramakristen says everybody’s on hold till ’is storm’s over, an’ I check you—

“Quiet, Bob, I’ll rep you later.”

What you mean, later? Man, you’re three sigmas out from your point.

“In contact mode, Bob. Flag my output for T’ang.”

He steps quickly back in the swirling dust haze and the two shadows move off together, stick legs jerking, faster than he has ever seen them on 3-D. The rectangular heads turn and he hears a stuttering, a broadband splash of microwave beats and harmonics.

Christ, you got EMs all round you, Nigel, how’d you get in there and for goddamn sure why?

Nigel calls up the color-coded overview and sees the blips converging, integrated vectors all pointing toward him now—no, no, near him, east a few hundred meters. “Something’s happening.”

That’s jess what’s supposed to not; you’re there to hold the position, not make—

“What’s the radio map say?” Nigel murmurs to deflect the man, and moves cautiously behind the swaying shadows that lumber away, melting in the flowing, clotted air.

I’m gettin’ it, Alex is on line, but I got to beep Ted on this Nigel, you’ve blown the tactical guidelines all to hell.

Nigel stays silent, listening to the howling hollow winds as they sweep over the upthrust crags of split boulders, listening on acoustic channels for anything from the EMs. Nothing comes, and nothing ever has. They appeared to be nonvocal. Yet they are blind as well, and sense each other only with the massive boxy radio emitters in their heads. Their song now lifts, scatters along a diatonic scale. He edges closer. These are among the biggest, over four meters high, and they lurch as they grope for purchase on the rugged gray rocks.

A booming crash rolls through the fine, dust-shrouded eternal days.

Hey get away from there, I jess picked up—

“It’s the volcano, that’s all.”

But you’re smack on top a—

“I can run faster than a lava flow.”

What if there’s a slide? They’re happenin’ all time there—

“Quiet.”

Fuck, Nigel you’re—

“What’s Alex say?” Ahead, more shapes.

Oh, the EMs are all shut down. Went out ’bout a minute ago, all of a—

“Quiet.”

The hissing heat of the lava flow is farther away; he picks it up clearly on acoustics. Ahead, the shadows tilt and settle. Seeking heat? It would be useful; they have a low metabolic rate and, while they are not reptiles, they could save valuable reserves by warming up at a convenient though dangerous source. He shrinks back into a cleft of rock. Six of them converge on a rough outcropping, where blue-green mottling dots the broken rock. They move awkwardly, shifting and canting their hulking bodies, and slowly they settle downward, the knobby black protrusions that frame their abdomens thrust forward—a sexual image flits through Nigel’s mind—and down upon the bare rock. He comes closer. No radio crackle. They might as well be asleep. In the wan rosy light they could see him if they had eyes, but they do not stir. Nigel waits. No motion. Then, slowly, their skins begin to swirl, the pale blue blushing and rippling, quick rainbows of color washing over them. They are inert, but their shiny, waxen flesh dances with a gaudy chromatic flourish. The distant volcano rumbles, flashing yellow. Something is happening, something quiet and important, and if he can catch the weave of it—

Nigel, this is Ted. You’re ordered back, right now I don’t want you—

“Certainly.”

In Ted’s precise voice there is an edge of anger. Nigel sees he has pushed the limits of his watch assignment as far as they will go for this time. Best to retreat. And he is tired, too, more than he expected to be. There is something intense here that has drained him in the effort of sense it.

“Falling back, Ted.”

He edges away. In his servo’d harness he is sweating and he hopes the tap-ins will not reveal how tired he is. He will take it slowly on the long walk back. The mere act of shambling back to the suit storage and maintenance module will itself be a crisp pleasure. He has learned to savor such immersion. He scuffs lemony sand and treads backward, watching the EMs fade from view, and turns into the rushing howl of wind and the endless streaming of the ancient, transfixed rustworld.

Three

Ted stuck his head out of his office doorway as Nigel went by. “Hey, got a sec?”

“Of course.” He paused at the open doorway which faced the crescent pit of Command. Consoles and running displays dotted the yawning floor, and tiers of separate subsections rose up from the plain like large trees. People moved everywhere, yet there was only a mild hum of unassignable noise, a blending of typeout machines, human voices, and a steady tremor that seemed everywhere and nowhere, that came from the rock itself. Nigel leaned against the doorframe, a bit tired. Here the slashed rock of Lancer was given a cosmetic plastsheen.

“C’mon in.”

Ted’s office was lined with pseudwood, deep walnut. Nigel wondered once again why the man hadn’t simply gotten the real thing; it massed only fractionally more.

“I see you out there in the pit a lot,” Ted said conversationally.

Nigel smiled. The preliminary ritual: a touch of how’s- the-weather, and then to business. “I like to get round every day. Sometimes takes them awhile to log in new data.”

Sage nod. “Yeah. They got this habit of refining the radio maps till they’re like Picassos, when all the time guys like you are panting for the raw goods. Difference in styles, I guess.”

Nigel nodded. He had long since accepted the mismatch of interests. “You had something new …?” he prompted.

“Give a look.” Ted flipped on a meter-sized wall screen, tapped in a command. Isis swam into being. The image swelled, shifted to a narrower focus, and centered on a tiny glint of light. Numbers clicked by in a blur at the lower left hand. The glint moved across the pink face of the Isis highlands.

“A satellite.”

“Yeah. In a polar orbit, crossing a little to the east of the Eye’s center. Here’s a closeup.”

An irregular rock, pale gray, with a grid of black clots scattered across the face. “Curious,” Nigel said. “Those spots, they’re not an artifact of the opticals?”

“No, that’s what everybody thought at first—some bug in the program. But they’re there, all right.”

“Artificial.”

“Yeah. A converted asteroid, I guess. And there’s another one.”

“Oh?” The images shifted again. A second dot traced out an equatorial orbit as the screen time-stepped. Close-up: Another chunky gray rock, gridded. “Um. In sum, they can survey every square centimeter of Isis. The minimum needed to give full coverage.”

“Right. We’ve run those orbits backward for nearly a million years. They’ve been stable that long, but if they were put up before that, they’ve had to make course corrections to stay in place.” Ted leaned forward over his desk, fingers laced together. “Got any comments?”

“How is it this wasn’t in the dailies?”

“Look, the techs work faster without the whole crew looking over their shoulder.”

“Um.” Nigel stared at the rough surface of the thing. “Some signs of old cratering, very nearly worn away. Are those scratches there? Perhaps some shock fracturing from old impacts. But the black dots were clearly put in long after that. What’s the mag on those?”

“Here.” The screen filled with black and then backed off to show some surrounding bright, scuffed rock. “Can’t resolve anything. Maybe they’re holes.”

“Tried active probing?”

“No, not yet, but Alex—”

“Don’t.”

“Huh? Why not? Alex says he can probably get a good look-see by tonight. His interferometry can give us twenty, maybe thirty pixels in that patch. Then—”

“You’re daft to tap on someone’s door without knowing who’s inside.”

“Inside? Good grief, Nigel—”

“I urge caution. This is the first piece of technology we’ve seen in Isis space.”

“Sure, but—”

“Let’s study the surface first.”

“Dammit, there’s nothing left down there. The erosion’s so fast. And the crater-count expert, Fraser, says there was an era of heavy meteorite bombardment roughly a million years ago, too. That’s wiped the slate clean of anything that could’ve put up those satellites.”

“No signs of cities?”

“Not yet. There’s damn-all down there, far as the IR and deepscan people can see. That’s why seems to me we should look at what’s been left in orbit. These two satellites are probably the only old stuff around Then, when we understand that, maybe those EM creatures will make more sense, and we can start—”

Nigel looked intently at Ted. “The cratering data, I haven’t looked at that yet. What’s the whole history?”

Ted waved a hand, his mind on something else. “Fraser’s still doping out the crater size versus frequency curves. He has to recalc for the fast erosion, and allow for different epochs.”

“How many epochs of crater making were there?”

“Oh, Fraser says there was the initial period, just like our solar system, but that was ’way back. He’s got that probe data from the moons around the gas giant, and that gives over five billion years ago, when the initial cratering stopped. But then there was this recent epoch, you can see it in the highland terrain on Isis. A lot of junk falling, all over.”

“About a million years ago?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Seems damned strange. After the planets swept their orbits clean of debris, vacuuming up the initial junk from the formation of the whole Ra solar system, there should have been an end to cratering.”

“Well, look, Nigel …” Ted leaned back in his net chair and began toying idly with a pen. “Isis has been moving outward from Ra, forced out by tidal forces, so who knows how that’s going to change bombardment? I mean, this is a whole new ball game here and the old rules of thumb don’t apply.”

“Precisely,” Nigel said in a clipped, introspective way.

“Meaning what?”

“Why assume the satellites are the last bit of whatever civilization the EMs had? Their orbital age is about the same as the last cratering epoch—but coincidence doesn’t mean causality.”

“Look, we’ll know more when we find some cities.”

“One supposes.” Nigel shrugged, and got up to leave. “Maybe the EMs never had any.”

But there were cities.

Or at least, buildings. Site Team #6 found the circular motif, using IR studies of a particular highland plateau. There was evidence of earlier ages with heavy dust dunes, but now a shift in the Eye winds had uncovered a plain that was, from radioisotope dating, 893,000 years old. Gently curving depressions ringed a central high spot, an ancient weathered hill. Lanes radiated from this point, spokes in a wheel. Excavation found buildings a mere fifteen meters below the dry, wind-scraped terrain. The ancient stones were rectangular and carried faint markings. The anthropologists on Lancer deduced little from these scratchings. They could trace the general outline of streets, an irrigation system, and a river valley ecology. There was no trace of fabricated or smelted metals, but then no one had expected any. What the rust did not claim, the winds rubbed away.

Four

Nigel watched the blood streaming out of him and yawned. Somehow it always made him sleepy. The first few dozen times it had made him pass out.

“Hey, I didn’t ask you wanted ta lay down. Wanna?”

“I’m inclined to it, yes,” Nigel said, but the medico didn’t smile. She simply lowered his operating chair with a quick, carelessly efficient wrist motion. Nigel watched the tubing carry away pink strands of his plasma into the medmon.

The hulking machine clicked as it moved on to another sampling diagnostic.

“Some skilled job,” the medico muttered. Nigel would have nodded sympathetically, except his upper arms, chest and neck were turned off. The medmon had to keep cardiovascular rhythm going despite the drop in pressure, and it was easier if the patient didn’t interfere. He could operate his mouth, though. “Let something go wrong and you’d be needed, you know that. Same as a pilot—”

“I only trained for this so, y’know, I could make crew. I was an engineer, best there was, but not the right category for shipwork. Only I noticed this jobclass and I figured it was nothing I couldn’t stack in on.”

Nigel contorted his lips in a way he hoped conveyed agreement. He peered at the medico’s thin, bored face and tried to read the woman’s mood accurately. If nothing else, this exercise took his mind off the unpleasant ringing in his ears which always came as the medmon began sucking harder, filtering the plasma out and keeping his red blood cells. The blocky machine mixed in artificial plasma at the same time, but still the ringing came. With the plasma presumably went the damaged blood cells, while new stuff flooded in. Antioxidants to wipe out free radicals. Microenzymes to unlink confused old DNA strands that had gotten tangled. Immunological boosters. Leaching agents to destroy aging cells which had lost the ability to reproduce themselves correctly. The antisenescent cocktail.

“Does seem rather a bore,” Nigel said carefully.

“Damn right,” she said, surly. “You know, hard to believe, but once doctors used to do this. It was a big deal.”

“Really?” Nigel tried to keep some interest in his voice, despite the fact that he could remember when doctors injected one with needles and thought eating meat was bad for you.

“Now a flush job’s just, uh …”

“Maintenance?”

“Yeah, right. I mean, I like to work with my hands, real on-line stuff, but this jacko—no offense, y’know, I mean I ken you need it, but it’s like being a hairdresser or somethin’.”

“You were an engineer.”

“Fact. Now they got me tracing plasmapheresis and slappin’ fixes on hormones and—”

“How’d you like a spate in the drive tubes?”

She came out of her fixed anthology of gripes and looked at him. Until now he had been another anonymous customer, another plug-in for the medmon. “Well, shit, sure I’d tumble to that, only—”

“I believe I might be able to get you on the crew.”

“Who says?”

“I do; I’ll take it up with Ted Landon.”

“You could do that? I mean, it’s tough to get—”

“Of course. I can see this is bloody tedious. Must be dreadful, particularly for folk like me, who’re just the same old thing, piping it through the medmon.”

“You know it.” She brightened and her thin face filled with interest. “You could maybe get me workin’ with that team? I mean, just cleanin’ the tubes would be, you know, interface solid state, lots of fieldwork and some lab stuff, too, I’d—”

“Fine. You seem the sort who should be set free of this.” He would have waved an arm in mute demonstration, but he made the attempt and found motor control gone. “Feel like a zombie.”

“Here, we’re nearly through.” She flipped a switch and he could move his right arm.

“Seems a pity I have to use up someone’s time to do this—the monitoring, the patching, so on.”

“Yeah. You should be able to handle it yourself. How come you’re not on self-serve medmon?”

“Ted’s being careful. Wants to monitor all the old scruffs like me.”

“Jeez. Just makes more work.”

“Precisely.”

“Frap, if you could get me into engine work—”

“Think you could put me over onto self-serve? I mean, it’s a dreadful waste.”

“I guess so.”

“Good. I’m not going to make a mistake where my own health is concerned, after all.”

She looked at him. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Thanks, very.”

He relaxed. Relays thumped and sensation returned to his chest and arms. He hated dealing with people the way he had just done, but at times there seemed no way out.

Nigel was in a good mood. He and Carlotta and Nikka had spent the evening playing sambau on a traditional board. He had lost heavily, giving up a month’s worth of household chore time to Nikka and some ship credit to Carlotta. Unfazed, he kept up a stream of bad puns and unlikely stories.

“What’s got into you?” Carlotta asked. “Been skoffing those disallowed drugs again?”

“Nothing so mundane.” He winked and thumped his chest “You see here a revitalized son of Britain.” He paused, weighing whether to go on. Then: “I got on self-serve.”

“Oh, good,” Nikka said mildly.

Carlotta said, “Translation: now nobody’ll know how fast he’s falling apart.”

“Correct! A man’s enzymes are not suitable points for snooping by program directors and similar riffraff.”

Carlotta asked, “How’d you do it?”

“Moment of opportunity. Talked the medmon attendant into it.”

“Um. The attendant’s got the right—decentralized authority and all …” Carlotta said, frowning. “But a simple systems review will catch it.”

“That’s where you come in.” Nigel watched her expectantly as she arched an eyebrow. “You’ve got plenty of comm-systems lackeys. Surely you can exempt me from their small-minded scrutiny.”

The two women glanced at each other and laughed. “So that’s—”

“The old razzmatazz,” he said lightly.

“Nigel, you want me to put information into the system that’s not true.”

“Truth is merely an opinion that has survived.”

“You mean faking data.”

“Right, sacred holy data.”

“You’re presuming on our, our—”

“Oh, come on. We’re not English schoolchildren, sitting about eating crumpets and reading When the Otters Came to Tea. This is for keeps.”

Nikka said softly, “You’re asking a lot, Nigel.”

“Love survives forever and all that, but vanity is less rugged. I can’t sit in this apartment scanning reports and doing nothing.” .

“If you’re not physically capable—”

“Don’t you see, that’s merely a hand stick to beat me with. Ted—”

“I can’t do something dishonest!” Carlotta cried.

“Dishonest? Seems to me its in what the Americans delightfully call a gray area.”

Nikka said slowly to Carlotta, “It would mean a lot to him. Otherwise he’ll lose his job.”

“Which means what?” she replied. “No more servo work on the surface.”

Nikka leaned forward earnestly. “That’s very important to him.”

“Him! Always him!”

“We have to support each other,” Nikka said stiffly.

“Mierda seca.”

“I believe that means—”

“What I mean is, we’re both revolving around him. Don’t you see that?”

Nikka blinked, her face immobile. “There is inevitably some inequality …”

“Sí, nobody can balance it all perfecto—but we’re, we’re competing for Nigel, and that’s wrong.”

“Yes,” Nigel said, “it is. I don’t see this as part of a contest, though. You—”

“I see it that way,” Carlotta said.

“And I don’t,” Nikka responded. “I’m simply saying that Nigel needs help.”

He said mildly, “I’d like to go down there in person. No chance they’ll allow that. So servo’d is the only way I’ll see anything of Isis.”

Carlotta looked at Nikka and doubt crowded into her face. Nigel watched. It was best to keep well out of things now.

Carlotta had come out of the sun-streaked decaying barrios of Los Angeles, carapaced in executive competence. She skated with womanly grace over the myriad details of a systems-analyst universe.

Her career had involved collisions with managers and bosses, job switches and long hours. The natural drift in a technical career was to loft into contract manager, then program director, then division head, buoyant in the modern managerial morass. She resisted. She wanted to keep close to the work.

In time she got a reputation as a terrific trou bleshooter who suffered fools not at all, particularly if they were bosses. She had her own standards and they had made her unapproachable. Until Lancer departed Earth orbit and started trials, she had been bottled up inside herself. Nikka had liked her from the start, though, and along with Nigel had slowly developed connections, getting the three of them through the early, uneasy years, and onto a plateau of comfortable intimacy.

But any three-way dynamic was stressed, inevitably, if only by constant comparison with the conventional two-person model, which looked so bloody easy. How much loyalty did their snug harbor command? Nigel wondered as he watched Carlotta.

“I … I suppose I might … for a while. Only while we’re in Isis space, though.”

“Great! Knew you’d see the advantage of an old sod not having to explain every gimpy leg.”

He was being falsely jovial, and they all knew it, but it gave the women a chance to sit back and listen to him as he rattled on about the surface work. Nigel studied Carlotta’s pensive eyes as he talked. She smiled reflexively at his jokes, but she glanced at Nikka now and then tentatively, as if seeking approval. He saw that she had made this compromise more for Nikka than for him. Very well. He had gone begging and had gotten what he asked. Best not to fret over the reasons.

—we’re competing for him, she had said. Perhaps so. He had to admit that he rather enjoyed that, had always been open to this sort of arrangement, as far back as California, with Shirley and Alexandria—

He abruptly jerked his head, stopping the thought. The women flicked puzzled looks at him. He made his face become casual, distant.

He didn’t like to think of his previous three-way tie, and how it had ended. Letting the past filter into the present that way was a bad idea. He had to try to see Nikka and Carlotta as they were, above a calculus dictated by experience.

Still, he could not ignore the other side of the equation. In counterpoint to competing for him, they in the bargain competed with him … for each other.

It worked. He kept his own medical records and was able to disguise temporary injuries or stillness. That kept him on the roster but didn’t help him get jobs he wanted. It was weeks before a good servod surface mission came along, and Nigel didn’t make the squad.

The team went after an EM creature, intact. Alex had tracked thousands of them with the big radio antenna. In a valley system near the Eye, the EM signals had begun to ebb away. Then one winked out.

“Dead?” Nigel asked him.

“Prob’ly. Didn’t move for ten days. Then we lost its signal. Weak, for sure.”

“Does its body heat show up in the infrared?”

“Did. Doesn’t now.”

Five

It took a week to reach a shipwide consensus, then another to plan the raid. The all-volunteer party dropped down, grabbed the alien, and boosted up—all in less than two hours.

They brought the big polyflex sack into the sterilized bay. The EM creature lay in it like a Tinkertoy monster that had fallen on its side, legs at impossible angles. In the blazing uniform bay light the thing had no shadow. It did not move. The team of sixteen wheeled the specially made cart slowly, carefully, into position among the crowded banks of sensors and diagnostics and gleaming racks of surgical instruments.

Nigel watched intently through the big viewport. He could make out Nikka in a stark white sealsuit. She pulled at the roller platform on the cart and the thing inside slumped into a better position. They were all drilled and sure. They moved quickly to position the instruments around the EM creature. Then they sliced the bag.

As the scalpel went in, the sack exhaled a thin mist. The team drew back for an instant and then, sheepish, watched the dust settle to the deck. The bay air was Isis normal, but without the fine sulfur-rich haze. Nikka sawed away part of the sack and stepped back, handing the polyflex to an assistant behind her. I hope it doesn’t need that wind and dust to live, she said over General Comm.

This thing’s dead already, came from elsewhere in the bay. And the assembled specialists began. For years they had waited to see something like this, and now the waxy skin of the EM lay glistening under the piercing lights. A murmur came from them.

Nigel breathed deeply, not noticing the crowd around him. The air in this corridor was as flat and pure and dead as it was in the bay, BioSci had ordered a clean, positive-pressure balance all around the bay, just in case. He reached up and flicked the comm monitor perched on his ears, and tuned for all channels coming from the work zone.

Careful, careful there, Andreov, peel that back as though it were your daughter’s hymen.

thick-skinned isn’t the word look at that like shoe leather

X rays look good. Complicated bone structure I’d say.

Some kind of tripod spine running down into the underbelly see but what’s that big long thing up there, must be in the head

yeah that’s parabolic, Jeffreys said that on the boost-up, a longitudinal parabolic antenna fitted into the rectangular frame in the head, so it can pick up microwaves all along the long axis

must be what ’at bone’s for, housin’ the nerve endings for its radio sight, picks it all up an’ ’er’s a processor some’ere in ’ere to shape up the input for ’at funny-shaped brain

okay the spectral stuff is coming in on these tissues; nothing big so far pretty stringy stuff really

chem says the flash on that first sample is just plain ole oxy-binding iron hemoglobin wrapped up in a corpuscle blanket, same biochem patent the vertebrate line holds on Earth

this stuff’s chromatophores just like I said and McWilliams said was bullshit, remember but lookit it respond see

man look it jumps up like that from smooth to prickly must be papillae in the skin

maybe helps flick off the dust

it’s a reflex probably not conscious, just like shivering is for us

you keep ridin’ my ass ’bout that I’ll oh you think so huh look at that sked we don’t get to those incisions for half hour at least, so you can wait for your microspecs until Kovaldy makes his cut

I know we got to move fast can’t tell if this thing is clinically dead after all what’s it mean we’ve been through all that before only now looking at the goddamn thing jeezus it’s impressive so big the 3D doesn’t really make you feel it but still I think we ought to hold back until the superficial team is through we don’t know what sort of neural patterns we’re going to hit

hey that’s some kinda sac you’ve

sir there’s fluid over there on team A’s incision lots of it they say

caught it fine only can’t figure what

look at that pH

like nothing I ever saw it’s a metallic salt a whole big bag of it carried up under that

watchat

got the needle okay

standard tissues here high water-storage ability just as we expected

no, nobody touches the head or anything spinal yet didn’t you agree on that when we laid out the

hand me the other one I can’t cut see this stuffs like leather

flaps are all over the slit there, you can see on the low-E X ray, see sir I think that’s a mouth only the flaps are down over it, there are teeth back in there

awful damn sharp but what’s it eat

Avery, get those legs braced better no we don’t go in yet I don’t want it to move is all, tell Kajima we’re ’bout ready

clean at up ’fore you

get your lens on this I’m making a cut like so up and across

hold the bowl just in case

Nikka you got a hand I

something tough here I think I

Hey

Jesus

’at’s not living tissue at all Sam

little threads of it I thought we’d hit some nerves by this time but this stuff jeez get chemsamp over here

tough innit

grab that

you know what this is it’s silicon, right, strings of silicon with boron in it of all things

I don’t get it there are look it’s all laced through this living tissue here maybe some intrusion

like cancer maybe?

hey Singh we’re getting some weak electroneural noise from the head I think we oughta step down till we

it’s gangliated, that silicon, part of the bones maybe?

somethin’ like a belly here, let me see that scope shot yeah it’s empty see, just maintaining pressure and notice how it’s linked to that tangle of stuff, for sure that’s an intestine, all stacked funny how regular they are innit perfect design for getting max digestive surface for the space you want, concentric

yeah, spherical shells instead of the swarm of ropes we’ve got in our gut

a lot better engineering you ask me

no we must have separate samples of each, I know they’re coming fast now freeze-dry or vac-dry them every other one of them if you have to but don’t fall behind I told Ladunda we should have had more backup on that but would he of course not well do what you

low metabolic rate they got though listen with that low a blood O₂ you’d be a corpse

this one is already

well sure but not because of that there must’ve been something else

it stopped moving jess like the rest in the valley

shit now look just four centimeters away from that boron-silicon string there’s that look at the lines that’s phosphorus for sure, lots of it, all mixed in with the silicon

I think we oughtta stop right here until we get this straightened out

it must be rotting now already, you want to crack your suit and give it a whiff just go right ahead

come on

we’ll have to vac you afterward of course but for science y’know you should be proud

stop gawking Kafafahin and fix that

put a potential drop across it you get funny characteristics see

what are you doing, Jeffreys?

the electrical characteristics of these silicon threads they’re damn funny in fact you asked me I’d say it’s a transistor, a lot of ’em

yeah that’s what makes the thread flexible, see it’s made up of little platelets all strung together, just a couple millimeters long max and they have some give in ’em

don’t get it

it’s a transistorized neural net, that’s why you can’t find any nerves in those tissues, that’s not bone or anything it’s a bunch of goddamn chips carrying info back an’ forth

the blood vessels are so small they sure don’t get much oxy to the tissues this way

we’re only a few centimeters in don’t jump to

platelets I mean platelets of silicon migod ’at’s crazy how you going to lay down silicon in a body when

down in the DNA, isn’t that obvious there are lots of ways to transfer nucleic acid information into protein structure and build up inorganic structures in parallel if the code is there

sections of each I’ve got to have sections on each slice get Hendricks he can help, with all this pushing and shoving how’m I supposed to what’s that babble over there anyway we’re supposed to work not talk when

the opportunity I mean

these are electroplaques for sure, boron for p-type transistors, phosphorus for n-type, stimulated by the adjustments in potential in the tissues themselves, same as our nerves only with more control I’d say, like the difference between a semiconductor transistor and a plain wire, you can do a lot more that way than you can with simple nerves like ours, same as difference between those old vacuum tubes and a microchip at least

hold that steady

shit I’d swear that arm moved

they’re pokin’ into it, I don’t wonder

so it’s got both p-type and n-type transistors for different

don’t you think we oughta back offa this till we understan’ whatinhell is

Hendricks give me that bi-clamp I think there’s something else, looks like

here, I’ll help you get it

a myelin sheath sort of but thicker, got silicon plating it too here wait hold it there watch your

yeah okay tissues awful dry here

got to cut through hand me that

okay wonder what

something hard here som—

The fierce, dry snap of it jerked heads up all around the huge carcass, as the man shuddered and shook violently, the voltage shooting through him and wrenching open his mouth, a rattle of breath escaping, and his assistant also shared the current for a moment as it surged, rooting him to the floor, and then the assistant’s hand, arm went into a spasm and slipped from the clamp he held so the current passed from him and he collapsed to the deck, unnoticed, for the first man now jerked and shook so violently everyone watched, frozen, and inside him the central pumping chambers of the heart, which had been starting to relax in their cycle, went into ventricular fibrillation, shaking and banging together and stopping the flow of blood, the man’s eyes rolling up, the current shooting through his arm to his feet and into the mass of the ship, the crowd around him still unmoving, staring, until at last a woman seized a plastform instrument and hit him, hard, freeing the hand, and the man fell loose upon the deck. Nikka dropped the instrument and knelt beside him. The room burst into babble.

He sees there is nothing he can do of course yes as the man falls, puppet with cut strings, eyes rolled back, Nikka following through with the blow, always stroke through the ball his father had said, and Nigel sees what will happen next, the gasps and quaking thin astonishment around the huge body, the sudden clump of humans forming to get the man out and into a vacced-down and retrosterilized environment, so they can split the skinsuits and treat the charred flesh, probably saving the one man yes but not the other, it will take too long and it must have been high current, the most dangerous kind of discharge, it would have been easier if there had been only high voltage, but no that is—

he blinks, sensing his own slow respiration and the rank scent of the shuffling, muttering, frightened people around him, their sudden bitter sweat fouling the air before they sense it themselves

—that is unlikely, it had to be an electrical discharge appropriate to a biological system, low voltage, high current, stored somewhere perhaps in the electrochemical batteries they carried, the metallic salt fluids in insulated sacs, a very compact way to store energy on an oxy-poor, grim, red dust-smothered world, so the thing on the carry cart—

Nigel steps back, letting the others crowd by him to see the similar milling and pointless released tension dissolve into busy action beyond the viewport, feeling in this nostril-flaring surge the human animal as a tribe—the thing is alive, alive but muted, it still must feel the prick of the outside but through a foggy blur of hibernation, a wise, aeon-old tactic, to let the internal furnace ebb, avoid the mammal’s peaks and excesses of hunger-driven desperation, to wait out the world, to subside into long watchful inactivity, that is what cool calculation would teach, not to he of the warm kind like us, not to be a slave to steady metabolism, not when the grinding of history is so slow, so fine

—the crowd now surges back from the port without thinking, round Os of mouths, rasping gasps, a quick heat in the brittle air as Nigel turns, guessing and sees the humans scattering away from the carry cart, Nikka well ahead, helping carry the injured men, glancing back now, eyes big through the helmet bubble, as the EM creature fills the comm lines with a buzzing rattle, a sighing chirrup, and with aching slowness lifts a leg, struggles, finds a purchase, turns the great rectangular head—ah yes, the longest axis can resolve all wavelengths shorter than its length, so to get the best vision, to sharpen the image, you rotate the head until the long edge is aligned with the direction you wish to sense, and by instinct the brain stores the image, clears away the fog of imprecision, and the head—wobbly, weak, roused only by a mortal threat, burning now its anaerobic reserves for a final battle—rotates again, the webbed and waxy skin catching the light, arms flailing for a grip, legs kicking for a fulcrum to tilt itself erect, another angry burst of radio noise through the comm lines

—but this signal must be only for definition, perception, to see, Nigel reminds himself—

it catches the cart’s edge, wrenches itself sideways, arms thrusting, head now tucked down, legs descending to the deck, heavy, soundless but for the hornet hum in the comm lines, and surges swiftly erect, towers in the bay

—Nigel senses what it is like, the metal surfaces everywhere reflecting its pulses back, blinding it with scattered self as the thing sent out radar pulses to sense its world and at the same time named itself, the pulse was its signature, so now the universe so firm underfoot chanted and chattered the name back to him, the name shattered and unfeeling, not the way its fellows would return the song, no, but in the clanging, hard-edged manner of metal flinging the name back in rebuke and indifferent rejection, no sheltering sky silence overhead but instead a screaming piling on of echoes, voices and voices all chattering stuttering mindless chaos, hard and hostile, a shouting blankness

It staggered. Eighteen minutes now, and it was still on its feet. The sticklike legs shook. It took a hesitant step, feeling the smooth stone deck for purchase. Slow, achingly slow. The head turned with the soft jerks, tilting this way and that. It was trying to sharpen its definition of this metal-lined world.

“Look at ’ose knees tremble,” a man said nearby. Nigel eyed the man and his companions. They wore slick suits and carried heavy packs of equipment.

“It’s running out of energy,” Nigel said to Ted, who was standing nearby, listening intently to his earplug comm.

Ted nodded once, twice, and clicked off the comm. “That’s what we believe,” he said.

“It was in some kind of dormant phase,” Nigel said. “It had emergency reserves, though, that’s obvious. Something—”

“We’ll figure it out when we take it apart,” Ted said.

“Take it …?”

“Hendricks and Kafafahin are dead. Electrocuted.”

“Um.”

“Time to stop foolin’ aroun’,” said the red-haired man.

“I say, you can let the thing run down and simply be more careful next time. There’s no reason—”

Ted turned abruptly toward Nigel. “You look yourself. Two men dead, I don’t take any more chances. Guidelines are, we fulfill the conventions on alien life-forms—big ones, anyway—unless human life is threatened.”

“True enough. But—”

“No buts, Nigel. Fritz”—Ted gestured to the red-haired man—”when it falls, give it five minutes before you go in. Then follow that prelim biopsy routine—the one they had as a fallback.”

“There’s no need to kill it,” Nigel said evenly. “I think we can understand what caused that—”

“I’m not risking it,” Ted said flatly. One side of his mouth twisted up in a humorless grin. “Keep back from it when you go in,” he called to the nearby squad. “No contact.”

Nigel stepped between Ted and other men. If he could simply deflect the man’s attention from the preparations, slip some thought in on top of the adrenaline—“I believe if you’ll allow me to go in, I can sort out what’s happened. The thing must have storage points, internal capacitors. From the X rays we can locate them. Then I can short out the remaining—”

“I’m not risking anybody for that thing. Particularly not you, Nigel.” A brittle smile.

“If you’ll belay that order for a simple blasted ten minutes.”

“No. Now pipe down and let me think.” Ted clenched his jaw and tightened his mouth, touching his teeth together. He rubbed them carefully back and forth, jaw muscles rippling.

Abrupt movement through the port. Nigel watched the EM creature stagger, head wobbling. It kicked over an array of electronics. The arms waved uselessly, clutching at phantom reflected images from the walls, unable to find the key which could unlock this scrambled world.

It fell.

Equipment scattered in all direction. The tall figure toppled slowly, trying to catch itself, hold itself aloft. It could not find the balance. Its hands convulsed and the sharp nails at the end of the six tapered, knobby fingers struck sparks from the stone. Soundless. It kicked once, twice, shattering a biostorage unit.

“Get ready,” Ted said, his voice thin and reedy.

Nigel looked at the men and their tight, concentrated faces. He turned and walked away, tired and disgusted.

Nigel thumbed the focus of the phase-contrast microscope. The bio folk had been over the tissue slices a thousand times and he had read their prelim report, but he wanted to see it for himself.

The creature had many organ systems in common with earthly species. A liver, with double-membrane cells, ribosome-studded and intricate. A wrinkled gray brain. And the chunky body used the same economical cradling, bundles of tubes and support rods and swiveled sockets, now fanning out, now joining up.

But evolution’s firm hand had brushed aside the inefficient chemical kindling that ran Earthside animals. The EMs stored electrical energy in big cylindrical capacitors and discharged it in bursts when needed. The capacitors were sheets of membrance with fine accordion pleats, all wrapped in a Turkish-towel texture, a pictorial tale of an epic struggle for surface. Each capacitor was a forest of smaller capacitors, all insulated and buffered so that a chance twist of the body could not discharge the precious hoard.

Nigel clicked off the miscroscope. Once you had a glimmer of the idea, it seemed natural. Oxygen was in short supply down on Isis, with all the sulfur belching out to scavenge the air. So nature had used an entirely nonchemical method of making a big, energy-squandering animal. Don’t lock up energy in chemical bonds and carry the mass around with the body. Instead, eat whatever food you can find, and then process the chemicals, keeping the energy in separated positive and negative charges. The silicon-platelet “nerves” did some of that, and the odd-looking stomach carried the rest of the job.

No one Earthside had ever anticipated an electrodynamic digestive cycle. Yet once you saw the logic …

Nigel scratched his nose, bemused. It was all well and good to know the innards, but how did the EMs actually live? How had they got this way? The only clues would lie down there, in the raw, dim landscape.

Bob Millard had set out new exploration-team schedules, in light of the discoveries from the EM death. Nigel had a secondary job in the exploration, teamed with a chap named Daffler. He scratched his nose again. Perhaps an opportunity would arise, he would glimpse some clue. Perhaps.

Six

Rasping, clanking, clicking, Nigel picks up speed. Behind him Daffler is having trouble getting his left loco-motor to rev up. If he can get a lead on the man maybe Daffler will never catch up and Nigel can operate with some freedom, follow his nose—

Hey wait up I said.

“There’s something over this way—”

I said wait up and I mean wait up. Look, Nigel, Millard made it pretty plain. You follow my on-site orders or else I shut you down.

Nigel slows. He knew it wouldn’t work, but something in him made the attempt worthwhile, something lofting and playful that erupted when he again felt his stabilizers and locomotors bite into the crust of Isis. He senses that this will be his best chance, perhaps his only chance, to see the EMs as they are, not through 3-D or in dry reports, all of which distance him from the real experience and by selecting spectrum, data, site, slivers of information must always skew the flat facts of perception, and rob him.

I’ve got this lateral housing secured now. Be with you.

Nigel grins lightly, thinking of the cool stone interior of an English cathedral, the services he had dutifully endured there so long ago, a small boy still awed by rising columns of granite and the heavy solemn weight of the service itself, and the Lord be with you, Amen, and with thy spirit, the wafer burning his tongue with its bland consuming bond, promising that in the end he would rise up, a blood knot brimming from an eroded body, ready to take in the night, take, eat, this is my body and blood, eat everything, swallow a universe of dark that seeps in under doors into the warm orange of the family living room, his father sitting in that bobbing rocker, chewing his lip as he listened, rocking, rocking, stern, his son talking, tones deliberately muted lie the long flat notes coming from the organ as they take up the collection, coins ringing in the plates, granite smooth cool climbing up the air, rocker he says will go into rocket, only a t for an r, Father, Father who art in heaven, Father art in heaven now—

Looks like they’re vectoring north again

rouses Nigel and he calls up his faceplate web. Red dots. Time sweep shows them drifting up the valley, away from the gusty Eye winds. They are moving quickly. Faster, Alex says, than he has ever seen the EMs travel anywhere, at rates demanding more energy than the low-oxy environment would allow. Alex noticed the activity in this valley over a week ago. But other surface spots had priority, and by the time the big dish had focused on the region a new storm had moved in from the Eye. The valley was pocked with streaming volcanic vents. The dust swirled into the rising columns of heat, into air rich in water and ammonia and carbon dioxide.

Nigel turns his opticals downward, to see his own hydrasteel carapace, where spatterings of brown mar the robot’s serial numbers, dribbling off in streaks toward the ground. It is raining mud. The sulfurous dust falls as it strikes the volcanic air. It seems odd that the EMs would prefer this slippery, rumbling valley of murk to the downslope valleys beyond where the water runs clear and the air carries only the fine mist of Eyedust that survives the moist volcanoes.

Scoot down to the east, Nigel, I pick up some spiky microwave from there.

He clatters over wet rocks and picks his way down a hillside. The illusion is getting better as the feedback loops lace him into the machine dynamicals better and better, the deft sure movement of the servos coming through to him as the broad feet smack down clump, clack, feeling to Nigel like striding over rough terrain in training boots, and even the stabilizers, whose ground grip translates into surges of calf muscles, thighs clenching and relaxing, spine riding on its disks, arms swinging to keep the pace steady, steady, as the hydrasteel clanks through a blurred world, peering at shifting sheets of life-flecked dust, the thick air here a chemical factory driven in the end by the tidal forces that rip the land, thrusting up the Eye mountains, sawing through the caked layers of rock, poking vents into the high mountain valleys, everywhere flinging wet and grime skyward, cloaking the sky forever so the EMs have never known the stars, except perhaps for one night in a thousand years, when the dusts would fall and the silvery points would glimmer in the vastness, but the EMs had no eyes to see.

Are you picking this up, Nigel? Some sputtering on two hundred megahertz.

“Right, a trifle below sixteen degrees bearing from here.”

I make it seventeen point two. Close.

“Lets home on it.”

He stamps down. The servos transpond the movement into a leap that takes him/it over a canyon of brown vegetation, bringing him down crump on a shoulder of burnished basalt. The feet skid but the robot rights itself in time. Five meters visibility in the optical. Rain fogs his lenses. He leaps again, getting a boost as the back hydraulics come in with a whoosh, and he skims over twisted blue-green stumps of plants—slimy, sagging under boughs thick with mud. The radio overlay sputters, orange-tinted vectors pointing dead ahead—not one source, he can see that now, but scattered blotches and patches of radio noise, emitting around two hundred megahertz but not frequency-fixed, some giving off prickly hisses, others booming out long patterns that Nigel’s step-down electronics shape into acoustic rattles, the whole bunch sounding like a crowd tromping on broken glass.

Just checked with Alex. There are no EMs within a klick. This must be some other life-form.

“Weak signal. That might explain why Alex can’t pick it up. But still …”

Through the dusky swirl a rocky ledge appears. Nigel angles to the left, thumbing to IR. Visibility improves. He can see down a long canyon, dim in the bloodred wash of Ra light. “Rocks here look as though they’ve been worked.” He steps forward gingerly. No life-forms visible. The canyon walls are streaked and carved, long gouges weaving together. He switches back to two hundred megahertz and the snaps and pops leap out at him, coming from the cuts in the rock. “Looks like art, maybe.” The seams are lined with odd silvery stuff. Nigel reaches out a maniple, scratches it.

“This stuff is a conductor, an antenna.” He turns. He is in a large fenced-in area, like a corral. Through the gloom he sees caves dug back into the rock, caves with oval openings, other blocky and square, some triangular. “It’s a village.” The popping, chiming radio pulses come from marks near the doorways, wook wook for the ovals, skaah skaah from the rectangular. Other marks bark and mutter from the bare rock. Street signs? Nigel thinks, almost tripping over indentations in the muddy ground, curved patterns that seem to make no sense. He clumps down the canyon, knowing the runon tapes will capture it all and a dozen specialists will have a dozen ideas about it by the time he is out of the servo’d pod.

I’ve found another one, a very similar canyon. I estimate I’m about five hundred meters east. If you—

“Wait.”

Ahead hang woven strands, secured to the canyon walls and stretching across it about six meters above the ground. From the strands hang sheets of the silvery stuff, some of them giving off a chorus of radio sputter, others silent. Nigel approaches. “There something—” and Ther ing meth rees eesom thingther comes at him from the sheets, bouncing around the canyon, scrambling. “I think the”—inkth ti ti thi I kthelith—“super-conduc”—supduc con sup ducerco—“superconducting sheets—”

He turns, flees, unwilling to give up his radio spectrum but confused by the mocking wall of echoes. A hundred meters away he stops, sheltered by a jut of stone, and says, “They’ve got some elaborate, well, rooms, I suppose. A way to get some privacy, I guess—No, that doesn’t make sense. Why make them reflecting? No, it must be some kind of amplifier, a way to, well, a public-address system? I don’t …”

Nigel, you’re confused. Don’t you think you should—

“Bugger that. Look, get a team down here to go over this, this village.”

Sure, we will, just don’t get so—

“It hasn’t bothered you yet, Herb?”

Huh? What hasn’t—

“Superconductors. How do EMs with no technology left, no cities left standing, make superconductors?”

Oh. Well, there are those satellites. Maybe—

“I got a good look at the sheets. They’re tarnished. They have cracks in them. They look as though they’ve been folded and refolded many, many times. They’re old, my good fellow. Old.”

The next team is on in, let’s see, six running hours. I’ll ask for a biodate. But hang on, I want a look at your village, too. I’ll be there in—

“Hold. Stay where you are. Or perhaps better, back away.”

Why? It’s just a—

“The EMs are out milling around, Alex says. We’ve just stumbled on something that resembles a village, correct? And odds on, the reason we haven’t seen one before is that they were always occupied. We didn’t want direct contact, so we missed the villages.”

Sounds plausible. However, we can’t—

“But no one really deserts a village. You leave behind—”

Through the swirling gusts of russet mist a dark shape lurches. Nigel ducks behind a boulder, grimacing, and kills his radio transmissions. You leave behind the weak, the old, perhaps the children—but you don’t leave them unprotected.

Nigel tucks his head down, knowing this movement has no analog for the craft he is driving, but does it anyway, aware that to distance himself from the machine in any way now will lessen his effectiveness. To hide, crouch down, avoid the licking radar of the approaching creature, hope the suit reflects like an uninteresting gray stone—

A webbed foot comes down on his foredeck. The EM creature surges up, clumbering over the rocks, head swiveling and tracking, its foot pressing down. Plates buckle on the ribbed foredeck. A motor whines in protest and abruptly goes silent. Circuits buzz, warning. Nigel feels the blunt pressure turn to a cutting, jarring pain. He fights against his impulse to back away, to scramble out from under.

I’ve switched to K-band, Nigel, hope you’re getting this. Your Mayday beeper just cut in. Should I head into that canyon?

Nigel decides to risk a transmission. If Daffler comes into view, moving, the EM creature will surely catch on, will know there are odd moving rocks in the village. He clicks to K-band and sends “Stop!”

A frozen moment. The EM halts, teetering, two feet on Nigel’s groaning deck. Some side band of the K-band wave must have gotten through to it, although the EMs seem to broadcast and receive on a much longer wavelength.

The EM tilts forward hesitantly, feeling its way. A foot lifts. Then the other. It moves off, farther up the canyon. Nigel picks up warbling radio bursts as it echolocates itself, endlessly sending its “name” and receiving back the reflected and scrambled world-picture painted by the same “name”—the canyon, the metallic scratchings, the superconductor sheets, the sky above which is a blank except for a low mutter from Ra. Nigel wonders, watching its aching slow progress, what effect this way of seeing must have on how the EM thinks— if “think” was the right word at all. To it the world responded eternally with fragments of its own name, like a constant reassuring chorus which both tells the EM what it needs to know and reassures it of its own individuality, its importance in the very act of defining the world. If the EM did not call out its name, the world was a cipher, a silence. Yet if it spoke, the universe itself leapt into being. Only fellow EMs were emitters. Each sends on a slightly different wavelength, so the babble of the community does not blind all. Nigel wonders how a solitary EM had discovered Earth’s faint whisper, a voice which appears periodically as a weak dot in the sky not far from Ra’s deadening murmur. Perhaps an EM alone, meditating, had seen it, probed it, guessed the existence of other intelligences in the yawning vacancy.

Nigel, Bob wants me to move in on you. I’m coming up the canyon, bearing north at thirty-eight. Your subsystems signal damage in—

“Quiet!”

Look, the EM is moving off and Bob’s got an idea that I can check your systems out before we try to move you or—

“Come on if you bloody well must, but keep quiet.”

The EM is gone, swallowed in the sullen red gloom. Nigel peers about him and sees more of the ruts cut into rock, lets his eyes be led by the sloping lines down the canyon. From this angle the design is at once apparent. Troughs intersect in a downward-tending web, emptying here and there into small holes near the canyon walls: cisterns. Farther on, a gust clears the air for a moment and Nigel sees a spillway, the brown rock that forms it worn and eroded but still functional, and beyond, a crude catch basin. So the EMs gathered water here, stored it. But there is no agriculture.

I’ve got you in the IR, Nigel. Just hold still, don’t try to move.

“I told you, mind the transmissions.”

No trouble, I’m sure that—

It comes at them with amazing speed, knees jerking high. It scrambles over boulders. Daffler emerges from the veils of dust and does not see the EM bearing in from the east. Daffler is a hydrasteel walker, like Nigel, and he looks forward through forward-focused, mag-adjusted opticals so he is blind to the east unless he turns his sensor head; but as he lumbers forward, now only meters away from Nigel, the dust falling thick and white-streaked again, the EM lunges and strikes Daffler from behind. “Roll!” Nigel calls, the word leaping out of him in his amazement, but Daffler cannot draw his forward legs up in time and the walker pitches over, scraping on the rocks, orange sparks scratching the air, and the EM steps over the tumbling robot that now seems so weak. Nigel backs away from the towering dark figure, watches its head dip and turn away from Daffler and toward Nigel, the thing is sure of where he is, must have gotten a fix on him earlier and not given any sign, simply waited them out, Daffler shouting now got to ’bort out, something hit me as the huge head sways, Nigel feels Daffler tumble against him, jarring, legs a tangle, and senses a sudden spattering of radio pulses, a highly structured wave form, and then a loud crisp sound like fat frying as the EM lifts Daffler and brings him down on Nigel’s deck, crunching, a lancing pain, bright burst of green—

The medmon moved with rectangular urgency; sniffing at him, humming to itself. Nigel lay passively, wanting this to be over. He eyed the ceiling.

“That thing for sure took you and Daffler to the cleaners,” Bob Millard said casually.

“It came at us like a bat out of hell. Otherwise, I’m sure—”

“We’re sure of nothin’, Nigel.”

“Well, I am sure I don’t need this thing”—he thumped the medmon appendage—“nosing about me. Christ, Bob, I was tucked away in the servo capsule, not down on Isis. I can’t possibly be hurt.”

Bob shrugged. “This is SOP, according to Medical. Any big accident, we put you through.”

“Then why isn’t Daffler here?”

“His unit wasn’t creamed, ’at’s why. We’re still getting a carrier and inboard diagnostics from his walker. Yours—zip.”

“The EM must’ve smashed into my outer circuitry. That could precipitate a shutdown in the whole—”

“Could be. Thing is, we can’t go back and see right away. Have to wait.”

“Why?”

“A whole flock of EMs have moved into that ‘village’ of yours. Ted ’n’ I feel we shouldn’t risk further contact with ’em right now. They’ll be waitin’.”

“I want to look at those superconductors.”

“So does half the crew.”

“Then perhaps—”

“No go, Nigel.” Bob smiled lazily. “The EMs’ll defend that town or whatever it is. Y’know, in all this, you kinda forgot what I sent you down there for.”

Nigel saw he was going to have to go through this mild byplay to find out what the tac-strat people thought was the next smart move. “What was?”

“Figure out what’s makin’ ’em so jumpy.”

Seven

The spot on Isis lying directly under Ra’s glow is bleak and fevered, its dull heat a remorseless engine.

Air drives out of the Eye, cloaking the land with dust, and shadows blur the forms moving on the slopes of the hills. The mountains above mutter like an old man swearing in his sleep.

A shock wave ripples through the carapace of the robot, another shifting of the earth as the churn of the planet cycles and recycles the crust endlessly, quakes and slides and upwellings bringing fresh iron forth to lick the winds and bind up the oxygen. And volcanoes belch forth more water, which in turn is split by random energetic photons into hydrogen and oxygen, elements feeding the ecology that clings to the planetary crust, frail life, suffering the jolts and the million minor deaths and the dry bareness. Gales pour over the mountains with their dust, carrying a howl that never ends in these narrow valleys, hollow and vacant and without hope of change, reedy and distant, as though the air itself is worn out.

He moves on, clump, crump, leaden steps carrying him across the silted valley floor toward the hills, ceramic sheaths of his hydraulic rasping, a bitter taste of a stim tab is his mouth. Onward.

Daffler is in the lead and a woman, Biggs, is approaching the clustered EMs from the other flank of the volcano. Orange flash: the mountain mumbles, and the land is for a moment awash in fresh light. The dust thins as the moist volcano breath washes away the sulfur oxide blur from the Eye. Alex has never seen a group of EMs bunched together like this on the radio maps. Something brings them here, away from the “village,” so a team now approaches the EMs while a larger team invades the “village” again, to take a look at a superconductor sheet, crawl into the caves, learn what they can. Daffler and Nigel and Biggs are a diversion, an afterthought really, to watch the EMs but do nothing else. If contact is to be made it must come from the specialists, the encoders and analysts who have sat silent and waited, stern and close-lipped, for more input. The biomeds have trapped a myriad of small animals by now, picked them apart, and found nothing that echoes the semiconductor nerves and brain of the EMs. The animal kingdom of Isis is slow, ordinary, run by the grinding inefficient chemical processes of oxidation in an atmosphere where iron and sulfur steal the oxygen at every turn, leaving life to snatch what it can before the oxygen-rich volcanic air is locked up again, for a billion years, in the hungry rocks. Yet it is not oxygen the EMs seek near this volcano; Nigel sees this, watching their shifting specks on his overlay. They do not congregate where the drizzle descends, bringing oxygen.

Sighted one to the south. Headed toward me. I’m not moving.

“Right.” Daffler sounds tight, cautious. As he bloody well might be.

Suggest you bear on it, following an axis through me. That way it’ll see no lateral motion.

“Right”

Nigel plunges on, legs working. Something skitters by him. A small rodentlike thing, running as fast as it can. The animals here have anaerobic reserves, just as Earth-side animals, but they are weak and last only a few minutes. After that, they must slow to the rate dictated by the oxygen supply. Nigel peers ahead. Clouds are sweeping in, drawn by the convection call near the volcano, and the ruddy cranberry glow soaking down reminds Nigel of the aura over a distant burning city, the way cities had been devoured since ancient Egypt, the libraries in flames, Alexandria—

It’s passed me.

Another small creature, running to the left.

Bob’s voice came through clearly:

Guess you oughta hunker down, Nigel. Don’ want a repeat a last time.

Nigel obligingly stops all servos, settles to the ground, tapers off his carrier waves in X- and K- and R-band. A howling of wind. An orange flash from the crater high above. Something moving: dog-sized, four legs, matted brown coat, tongue lolling. Behind it, seventy meters away and closing: an EM, striding smoothly on the baked sands, negotiating a narrow wash, coming on as stolidly as a train. But the EM is tired, too, Nigel sees. The legs waver and the arms are slumped at its sides. This is a pursuit, and a long one, and in the space of time the EM takes to make one stride Nigel pieces together this latest fact, and all the other data on EMs, and sees that of course they are following a carnivore pattern, moving steadily over the land but keeping separated so that each EM has an area to hunt, and between the passing of each EM there is time for the prey to forget, to grow careless. No other creature on Isis has the semiconductor wiring because they have been hunted down, just as man has no similar land competitor because in the far past he eliminated them. The EM slows now, head lifted, peering to the north where the doglike thing vanished, and suddenly it stands erect, stopping, head high and turning east, it seems to gather itself, and Nigel hears again the fast pop-ping sound, crisp, bacon frying, louder, louder, louder, until his receiver circuits overload, and silence washes in.

Nigel! Goddamn, this animal comes running by me, not fifty meters away and then it just falls over. What’s—

Nigel studies the EM. It sags to the side, catches itself. Finally it begins to walk, legs heavy and ponderous. “It’s moving toward you.”

Damn. Wish I could—

“Have a go at that animal. Get a quick look, up close.”

Okay.

Pause. Sheets of dust drift in a breeze. The EM fades from sight, moving with thick-jointed weariness.

Well I—this is—

“What?”

It’s all black and, and it’s, it looks … burned.

For a moment Nigel doesn’t breathe. Then he nods. “Right. Get straight away from there. The EM hasn’t got much energy left, I expect, but there might be enough.”

Enough to what?

“Not trample you. Not this time, no. It could fry you, though, friend Daffler. With well-focused radio waves.”

Though he cannot see through the rolling mist of fine dust now moving up valley, Nigel watches the EM move on his overlay, and he smiles, thinking of the vast slow creature, exhausted, its capacitors drained and running now an anaerobic stored energy, as it lumbers forward to claim its rightful prey.

Nigel crouches in the shifting murk, watching the finger of orange work its way down the mountain. More lava. The land shrugs and murmurs. He waits.

The EMs are clustered half a klick away and Bob will not allow any closer contact until a larger team comes on duty. There are many other interesting sites scattered around Isis and teams are working them all: digging in the worn old cities; classifying flora and fauna in the downslope passes; dipping into the rust-rich wealth of life beneath the seas; tramping through the arid twilight lands near the terminator.

The entire expedition has now taken on the wide, scattered tone of the fragmented specialties themselves. A busy buzzwork. First they will collect the data, and then they will think. But they do not see that what the data say depends in the end on how you think, and Nigel feels again the strange impatient lust that drives him forward, that always has, that goes through and finally, becomes part of the serenity that sits behind his mental darts and dashes, so that he cannot simply gather facts like wheat, he has to inhale this place and see it whole, become the five blind men and the astrophysical elephant, let the greased pig of this world slip through his arms and yet leave behind on each pass a skimmed lesson, so that by accretion he builds it up, hears the EMs that lie beyond the remorseless hark of the data, the clatter of facts.

Hey they’re moving, comes from Daffler.

“Righto,” Nigel sends merrily in X-band.

Bob says he’s putting afresh team on in an hour. Sylvano and his guys.

“Hell, Sylvano’s a biomech man.”

There will be a communications specialist in the team, don’t worry about that, Daffler says blandly.

Nigel shrugs, realizing that of course Daffler is the communications man for this miniteam, and thus thinks that’s the most important role. The comm people have been riding high lately, sure that understanding EMs rests on knowing how they evolved to see and speak in the radio. Yet they hadn’t a clue about the hunting, and the discovery only two hours ago of the EM ability to burn down prey at hundred-meter range has obviously shaken Daffler and Bob and everyone.

So much for the predictive power of science. Yet they should have guessed something of the sort, Nigel muses.

With Ra fixed in the sky, all regions of the planet would have a steady level of illumination. Only the eccentricity of the Isis orbit would make Ra sway slightly through the year, a mild wobble. In the constant pattern of shadow and light, or amid the dust storms and fine mist, the ability to probe, radarlike, would be valuable to a predator. Ordinary eyes—passive, easily blinded by the dust—would be less useful. And in the wan light of the terminator zone, prey with optically sensitive eyes would be nearly blind, even more vulnerable.

But the crucial ability was, as always, killing. So the logic of evolution has pressed the radio eye into service. With oxygen at a premium, chasing down prey could easily exhaust an EM’s energy reserves, making it vulnerable. Far better to fry a target and approach it cautiously. The radio eye could probe, identify, and kill—and then probe again, listening for telltale signs that the targets nervous system had gone out of business. All this, without coming close enough to risk the prey’s claws or horns or hooves. So with evolution’s marvelous economy, the eye did everything; seeing, talking, killing, even cooking. And the mind behind the eye struggled to improve perception, resolution, accuracy. The eye and the mind must have evolved together, perhaps in a bootstrapping loop like the hand/mind link in man.

Nigel, they’re drifting your way.

“As I expected,” he mutters to himself.

What? What’s that? Look, if you have something in mind, Nigel, I would just as soon not have Bob jumping down our throats about—

“Quite. Worry not, friend Daffler. I’m simply here to see what I can see.”

There will be plenty of guys down here in an hour. You tell them what to look for and—

“I’m not quite sure myself.”

Pebbles rattle against his plates and the land heaves beneath him, an orange flare burst through the shrouding dust, and Nigel sees the descending streams of orange again, bigger now, spilling down the burnished rock faces hundreds of meters above.

Jeez, it’s picking up again. That western face might slip down any moment, I’d say.

“Geology’s not your department, Daffler. You’re the comm man. I’m the jack-of-all-trades.”

Well, yes, but simple—

“Nothing down here is simple. Mind the EMs, eh? They’re having a go.”

What? Oh, I see. They’re heading toward you. Straight for that flank of the ridge.

“Right. You can scarcely ask me to maneuver around them, not since Bob’s warned us off close contact until the big team arrives.”

Uh, yes. But—

“Closing down now, if you don’t mind. I want to be sure I’m not seen.”

Uh-huh, Daffler grunts suspiciously, but his carrier falls silent.

Nigel is alone in the sleeting amber light as the low murmur of the mountain comes to him through his treads and he listens intently to the muted sputters and chiming beeps that make up the EM conversations and songs and continual probings, the microwave scattering through the canyons and washes of this bleak land. He thumbs on the radio map sent down from Lancer and studies the gathering dots that shamble toward him.

A small animal scurries by, frightened, and Nigel marvels that the little thing—eyeless, pea-brained—can sniff the EMs at this range, and know enough to flee.

The EM body itself may serve as a big antenna, the bones acting as low-conductivity pickups, so that to the EM there is a vague sense of smaller beings approaching. Otherwise they would be vulnerable to parasites and ingenious throat-slitters, who could mount them and be invisible. But somehow the whole-body antenna must “see” small predators so the EMs can fry them, step on them, pluck them off. Perhaps under selection pressure the brain had developed some aperture synthesis technique, like the widely separated radio antennas on Earth that have an “eye” the effective size of their separation. And did their spines serve as tuning coils?

Nigel clanks into a narrow gully as the EM specks approach. He wants his performance to be beyond criticism by Bob and the rest, to seem a perfectly responsible pattern in view of the EM movements, and so he draws back into the gully, toward an outcropping of blue-green rock.

A burst of orange throws shadows before him. He pauses at the mottled blue-green place, puzzled, remembering, but the second flash blinds him and then comes a crashing, stones shower him, a rough roar makes him peer upward where the mountain belches clouds and flames, long streams of lava now pouring from the sagging mouth of the fresh crater, huge jets of steam gushing forth into the banks of dust, the moisture clearing the air before it, the sulfur oxides now falling into the valley beyond, where they will feed the scrub plants and weak little animals, the bottom of the food chain which the EMs tap, and have been tapping for a vast long time now, though how long the geologists cannot say, with the crust of Isis always churning and destroying all evidence of the past.

Nigel turns back to the mottling, curious, reaches down—and suddenly sees the EM, sluggish but steady, legs jerking, coming dead toward him. The big head is fixed directly at him and Nigel hopes his radio blanket looks to the EM like a boring, typical rock. He inches backward, shuts down all carrier waves, braces—

But the EM halts, ignoring Nigel, head swiveling, and cants itself, settling downward, thrusting the lumpy black knobs in its abdomen, lowering itself until they make contact with the blue-green veins in the rock.

Its waxy skin ripples, it settles farther, the glazed blue of its skin begins to pulse with other colors, as soft purples seep from the abdomen, and Nigel reminds himself that in the Ra light this purple is in a fact a green, a biochem flag of a porphyrin derivative, but the colors wash away the thought as magentas and hard yellows and sprays of red curl across the body of the EM, flowing as boom the volcano above rips light through the hovering sheets of fine dust, a stream of lava splits the rock face fifty meters away with a sudden lance of orange, and the EM trembles, trembles, tilts lower, seems to shake with a kind of lust and hunger, not noticing the second and then a third large shape that emerge from the slow, spattering rain that now begins to fall, fat dollops of moist sulfur oxides, drops that streak the approaching, lurching shapes as they lower themselves in turn to the outcropping, ponderous, their mircrowaves filling and merging with a new and stronger weave, the scattershot clicks and barks of radio-shifting as the ground surges and a crashing explosion high up the mountain pours light into the gully, the EMs signal now, flowing into song, their boxlike heads tilting, scanning, a steady note emerging now as Nigel recognizes the long, low tone that is from the old Earth-side radio show.

They are joining together to point at the sky and send the slow mournful impulse that will wed with the other millions of EMs and stretch across the light-years toward the Earth, a mere dot in the sky that so long ago seemed to speak to these time-weary creatures.

A shower of bright orange blossoms at the abdomen of each EM. Sparks cut the air. Nigel backs away.

A crackling fills his pickups and the EM fugue grows, the huge bodies rocking slightly as the air cracks and snaps with energy, dancing singing joy forever, brimming, flying, the lava crashing over the ridge, prickly heat pours from it, and Nigel sees suddenly how the EMs live for this moment, the single time when they have enough swelling, filling life to burst forth and claw up at the sky that holds a speck of hope and promise, some possibility beyond the smothering sameness of their twilight rusting world.

They seek the volcanoes for food, not for warmth. The lava flows down thousands of meters of mountainside, a hot metallic conductor falling in the strong magnetic field of Isis, cutting the magnetic field lines and generating currents, electric fields, a vast circuit that cannot close easily because the rock around the lava is inert, a poor conductor, and so the electrical current builds as the lava flows, cutting across more field lines, gathering energy until it strikes a seam of metal-rich ore and suddenly the circuit can close, it is shorted, the vast currents run through the blue-green rock layers, seeking a return channel to the top of the mountain, to complete the loop, blind current following Faraday’s remorseless law.

As the currents find their way through metallic corridors, wandering, the EMs tap into an outcropping of the seam and drink of the rushing river of electrons, sucking in to charge their capacitor banks, feasting, spilling it into radio waves as they celebrate this renewal of themselves. They soak from the land itself the high-quality energy, without having to undergo the slow and painstaking process of finding chemical foods, digesting them, transferring molecular binding energy into stored electrical potentials.

A joyful strumming life swells and pours into the EMs. Nigel sees in the jagged leaping orange sparks the last link, sees how Isis swings around Ra, the long ellipse taking it now closer, now farther from its star, so that the tidal force first stretches and then compresses Isis, kneading and heating the planetary core like a thick pastry. The energy coming from the orbital angular momentum of the Isis-Ra system, an eternal energy source, endlessly churning the crust of Isis, subducting metals in the soil and then in turn thrusting them, molten, from the mouths of the mountains, the iron-rich rivers snaking and seeking the center of the planet again, driving currents, stripping electrons from the iron, a vast and perpetual generator changing gravitational energy to useful electrical forms, an energy which no other creature than the EMs can tap, giving them the edge they need on this sluggish rust-world, making possible their radio eye and with it a steady survey of the sky, searching for an answering strum of electromagnetic song, a vigil that had gone on now for aeons without machines or computers or the army of mindless servants men have made to help them. Here these creatures had harnessed the grinding workings of the planets themselves, all to survive, all to call a plaintive note into a still and silent sky.

Nigel moves softly away from them, lingering to see the solemn chorusing shapes, singing, bathed in bright sparking bonfires of electrowealth burning through the dusty murk, like rockets straining to lift off, where forever three or more shall gather together a syllable will be cast out into the night, and smiling, Nigel knows that the time has finally come to answer.

Eight

Ted Landon was pulling the meeting toward a reluctant conclusion. Nigel watched him, reflecting. Ted called up reports from the exploration teams, from planetary survey, from the subsection on Ra, from inboard systems. A flat wallscreen displayed alternatives; Ted went through the suggested missions, assigning weighted returns-versus-risks factors. Each time a section leader digressed into detail, or shifted the topic, Ted brought him back into line. The staccato cadences by which he disciplined came from his nervous system, immutable.

“Well, the big sweep we tried two days back—following on the Walmsley-Daffler discoveries—doesn’t seem to have paid off. Am I right?” Raised eyebrows, inquiring looks around the table. Nods. Nigel nodded, too, for indeed the men and women who swarmed over that volcanic zone had not learned anything more of importance. The EM “villages” were simple shelters and little more. Some of the caves held piles of artfully worked rock; others were bare, with only alcoves clogged with EM droppings to mark their use. In a few, elaborate designs were scratched into the walls and filled with scraps of superconducting stuff. To the EMs these might be art; just as easily, the complex spirals and jagged lines might be history, literature, or graffiti.

Ted segued smoothly into a summary of other missions on Isis surface. They were tracing the outline of a complex ecology, but there were still large holes to fill in. What happened to the ancient EM cities? Why were there no other semiconductor-type nervous systems in the Isis ecology?

“All very interesting,” Ted said mildly. “But to many of us”—his eyes swept the length of the table—“the standout puzzle is the two satellites. How did they get there? Are they all that is left of the EM technology? Why—”

“Look,” Nigel interrupted, “it’s clear where you’re headed. You want to pay a visit.”

“Well, you’re jumping the gun again, Nigel, but yes. We do.”

“That’s too flaming dangerous.”

“They’re ancient, Nigel. Spectrophotometry shows the artificial component of those satellites—the metals, any-way—were smelted and formed well over a million years ago.”

“Old doesn’t mean dead.”

“Nigel, I know what you’re angling for.” Ted smiled sympathetically, his manner becoming milder. Nigel wondered how much of it was a controlled response. “You want first contact. The EMs still don’t know we’re here, if our tricks have functioned adequately—I’m pretty sure your radio blanket notion has worked out, Bob—and I want to keep it that way. Our directives, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone here, are to stay invisible until we fully understand the situation.”

“Pretty clear,” Bob said laconically.

“Until you inquire into the definition of ‘fully understand,’ perhaps so,” Nigel retorted. “But we’ve seen the EMs. They’ve tried to catch our attention already. And we don’t know bugger all about the satellites.”

Ted laced his fingers and turned his palms up, a diffuse gesture Nigel recognized as meaning What are you trying to say? with a hint of irritation, a sign all at the table would get, while simultaneously Ted said calmly, completely without any irked tone in his voice, “Surely a well-preserved artifact will tell us more about the high period of this civilization—”

“If it’s from here, yes.”

Ted’s eyes widened theatrically. “You think the Snark came from here? Or the Marginis wreck?”

“Of course not. However, in the absence of knowledge—”

“That absence is precisely why I feel—as does the majority of this panel, I take it—that we should keep our distance from the EMs for a while.” The section leaders around the table agreed with silent nods.

“They aren’t nearly as potentially dangerous to this mission,” Nigel said. “And they’re native life-forms. We have things in common, we must. Any opportunity for our kind of life to communicate—”

“Our kind?”

“The machine civilizations are out here somewhere, too.”

“Ummm.” Ted made a show of considering the point. “How prevalent do you think life is, Nigel?”

A sticky point. Isis was the sole source of artificial transmissions that astronomers had found in over half a century of cupping an ear to every conceivable part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Nigel paused a moment and then said, “Reasonably.”

“Oh? Why the radio silence, then? Except for Isis?”

“Ever been to a cocktail party where the person who’s unsure of himself babbles away? And everyone else keeps quiet?”

Ted smiled. “Lord protect me from analogies. The galaxy isn’t a cocktail party.”

Nigel smiled, too. He had no way of reversing the decision here, but he could show the flag. “Probably. But I think it’s not an open house, either.”

“Well, let’s knock on a door and see,” Ted replied.

Nigel found Nikka and Carlotta cooking an elaborate concoction at the apartment. They were peppering slivers of white meat and rolling them in scented oils. There were savories to fold in and each woman worked solemnly, deftly, the myriad small decisions provoking a phrase here, an extended deliberation there, all weaving a bond he knew well. Not the right moment to break in.

He volunteered to chop vegetables. He took out his intensity on onions and carrots and broccoli and had a cup of coffee. The first fruit of the “season” was in so he made a salad, following Carlotta’s directions, composing a light, spicy sesame oil for it. The first citrus had come ripe the day before, greeted by a little ritual. Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges had rolled over the witnessing crowd, echoing in the cavern. Someone had salted the clouds that formed on the axis, so that crimson and jade streamers coasted in ghostly straight lines overhead, up the spine of the ship.

Finally, at a lull he said, “I just heard the news.”

“Oh,” Nikka said, understanding.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d volunteered for the satellite mission?”

“Volunteer? I didn’t. I’m on the list for rotating assignments.”

“They thought it was better for morale,” Carlotta put in, “if we just let the personnel optimization program pick the mission crew. Fairer, too.”

“Oh, yes, we must be fair, mustn’t we? A fabulously stupid idea,” he said.

“Everybody’s dying to get out of the ship,” Carlotta said.

“It might well turn out precisely that way,” he said sourly.

Nikka said, “I thought it was better if I simply let the news come up as usual. I nearly told you before—”

“Well, then, nearly thank you.”

“It’s my chance to do something!”

“I don’t want you risking it.”

Nikka said defiantly, “I take my chances, just as you do.”

“You’ll be on the servo’d equipment, the manifest says.”

“Yes. Operating the mobile detectors.”

“How close to the satellite?”

“A few kilometers.”

“I don’t like it. Ted’s going ahead with this without thinking it through.”

Carlotta put down a whisk beater and said, “You can’t run Nikka’s life.”

He looked steadily at her. “And you cannot expect me not to care.”

“Madre! You really want to fight over this?” Carlotta asked.

“Diplomacy seems to have broken down.”

Nikka said mildly, “This mission is planned, there are backups, every contingency—”

“We’re blasted ignorant. Too ignorant.”

“The satellite rock looks to be about the same age as the last major craters on Isis, correct?” Nikka asked lightly, to soften matters.

“So?”

“It stands to reason they represent the last artifacts of EM technology. The two satellites, the superconductors in the village—that is all that remains.”

“Possible,” Nigel muttered. “Possible. But to understand Isis we’ve got to go carefully, start from scratch—”

“We’re scratching, that’s for sure,” Carlotta said.

“I do not want you to risk your life on an assumption.”

Carlotta’s face darkened. “God, you push things damned far. Are you really going to keep Nikka from doing the job she was born to do?”

Nigel opened his mouth to say, Look, this is a private thing between the two of us—and saw where that would lead.

“You may be a goddamn living monument,” Carlotta said, “but you can’t rule by authority. Not with us.”

Nigel blinked, thinking, She’s right. So easy to fall into that trap and

—suddenly saw how it was for Nikka, her mind shifting, restless, clotted with memories, reaching out toward him now with hands still moist from the cooking, the determined cast to the face, the firm lift in the stomach, a tight pull won from endless hours of exercise, keeping the machine ready so that she could still go out, the outstretched hands slick and webbed by age and brown liver spots, narrowing the space between them—

“You cannot fix me in amber,” she said.

“Or any of us, damn it,” Carlotta added.

To him Nikka’s face glowed with associated memories, shone in the spare kitchen with a receptive willingness.

“I … suppose you’re right.”

—It was 2034 again and he comes home in the warm Pasadena evening, putt-putting on a scooter. He clicks the lock open and slams the big oak door to announce himself, bounding up the staircase. In the white living room he calls out to her. Something chimes faintly in his ears. His steps ring on the brown Mexican tiles as he walks into the arched intersection of kitchen and dining nook. A woman’s spiked shoe lies on the tile. One shoe. Directly underneath the bedroom arch. He steps forward and the ringing in his ear grows. Into the bedroom. Look to the left. Alexandria lies still, facedown. Hands reaching out, clenched. Arms an ugly swollen red, where the disease was eating at her, would never stop eating—

He knew it then, saw her falling away into nothingness. The ambulance that shrieked through night mists, the antiseptic hospital, the terrible things done to her after—all that was coda to the symphonic life the two of them had shared, had tried to have with Shirley as well, yet the three-body problem had forever remained unsolved—

He saw abruptly that the fear of losing Alexandria had become part of him now. He had never recovered. With age, the fear of change seeped into him and blended with the losing of her. Nikka had now been with him longer than Alexandria had, and a mere hint of danger to her—

Nigel shook his head, letting the old, still-sharp images fade.

“Back with us?” Carlotta asked.

“I expect so,” he said unevenly.

Nikka studied him, understanding slowly coming into her face.

He said, “These things take a bit of time.”

Carlotta said, “I just won’t let you push her around.” She put her arms protectively around Nikka.

“Why does this conversation keep reminding me of the United Nations?”

“Well, it’s true.”

Nikka said to Carlotta, “Still, we each have some power over the other.”

“Not that kind.”

“All kinds,” Nigel said. “Thighs part before me like the Red Sea. Point is, what are the limits?”

“If I don’t stand up to you, you’ll just run right over her,” Carlotta said.

Nikka said mildly, “That depends on the circumstances.”

Nigel smiled. “I’m not the ambivalent type. ‘Do you always try to look on both sides of an issue, Mr. Walmsley?’ ‘Well, yes and no.’ Not my kind of thing.”

“Well, you’d better make it—”

“Oh, come on, you two. The crisis is past,” Nikka said.

“Indeed. Let’s eat. Get back to basics.”

Nikka said, “Some Red Sea later?”

“We’ll negotiate over dessert.”

Nine

The mission team deployed carefully around Satellite A. One-third stayed forty klicks away, with the heavy gear and comm packs. A third scouted the surface. They found nothing special, verified Fraser’s dating and cratering count, and reconned the entrance holes. The last third set up the recon machines, tested the dark openings for sensors and trip lines, and finally decided all was well. No murmur of electromagnetic life came from the holes; nothing responded to their elementary probings.

The machines went in, tentatively and quietly. They were blocked by a sealed passageway thirty-three meters inside the rocky crust. The robots were cramped in the passage as it narrowed down and could not find anything to free the seal. Two women went in to eyeball the situation. They attached monitors to the black ceramic seal and listened for acoustic signatures which might reveal a lock.

The crew standing near the edge of the entrance hole was listening to the two women discuss matters. They felt a slight percussion. At the same instant the two women stopped speaking, forever. Something blue and ice-white came out of the dark hole. A millisecond-stepped scan of the video readback showed only this blue-white fog, and then—next frame—the beginnings of an orange explosion among the three human figures standing nearest the hole. In two more frames the boiling orange had reached the video lens itself and transmission stopped.

The orange moved like a liquid, licking the surface of the satellite clean in seven milliseconds. A tongue of it leaped off the surface, at the point closest to the orbiting mission team. It projected eighteen klicks toward them and then lapped, straining in long fibers, for twenty-two milliseconds. The mission crew had by this time registered only a blur of motion on their monitors. Two-thirds of the crew—all that were on the satellite—were dead.

The orange fibers twisted, coiled, and all but one retracted, fading. One grew, stretched, and struck the mission craft a weakened blow. High-temperature plasma blinded sensors and pitted steel skins. A gigawatt of snapping, snarling death burst over the spider-limbed ships. More died.

The orange thing withdrew, withering and darkening and collapsing down in forty-two milliseconds to a guttering white glow at the entrance hole. The rock of the satellite was now a burnished brown. Within a further fraction of a second, all electromagnetic activity from the satellite ceased. There was no residual radioactivity. The twelve remaining crew members had not yet had time to turn their heads, to see the thing that had come and gone.

Jesus Christ did you

is overloaded I can’t see anything but ejecta

they’re just gone I said no sign anywhere

no there’s that debris, I’m picking it up now in IR but

god-awful, they’re all smashed up, all the modules in orbit, like squashed peas

the camp’s smeared all over the surface like something crushed it dammit launch the two now we’ll get a booster on and follow

the people in orbit, I can’t see much but ferget the others, only survivors are gonna be in the modules an’ not too blessed many a ’em either I’ll bet

Sylvano, I’m getting nothing on insuit for A14 to A36 inclusive, you overlay on that?

are we safe? safe? damn I dunno we’re two hunnert thousan’ klicks out maybe that’s enough distance but what else has that satellite got, answer me that an’ I’ll say

I never guaranteed pressure seals against whatever that orange was hell Stein measured a three kilo Torr jump in a couple millisec on an interior bulkhead, then all the instrumentation crapped out probably crushed ’em I’m sending the curves over now what you make of that

no, all their antennas are stripped, I can see that much, that’s why we can’t get

A14, A36 please respond

shit can’t pick up anything this range no dish

they’re tumbling anyway can’t aim the inboard rifle antenna at us even if look Nigel I tell you there’s no way I can find that out so get off my band and let me

lookit at here in the IR the whole side of module A burned away looks like see right there as it comes aroun’ into the light kind of brown and

Alex here, look I checked those insuit wavelengths and yeah I can tune the big dish for that we’re operational in that band if we pull in the lobes a little but you sure the ordinary link is out I mean you know I’m standing by on emergency so

of course it’s out cretin their antennas are gone if there’s any electronics active in their suits they’ll be broadcasting a Mayday with just sodding suit wiring and the only way to pick it up Alex at this range is through you

yeah Reynolds is moving as fast as he can I’d say ETA is four hours plus easy so

yes I well look I know and well fuck off Ted I bloody

look I got hey hold off a minute Nigel one minute I got from Nichols the suit ID and I’m online, reading now you can knock it off look there’s we’re getting it 2.16 gigahertz right, yeah, hope this right yeah there’s lines here, three, four, I count eight, sharpening them a little now, I can read off the IDs maybe straight from the scope face here just a sec

Nikka’s A27, Alex, that’s 2.39 gigahertz

you say 2.39 yeah Nigel got that one and 2.41

next to it they’re straight Maydays only 2.43 is out

and 2.45 too

how long do you think

Ted we’re under boost awready an’ ’at was damn fine for the conditions seems to me considerin’

I want to be sure you don’t walk into whatever happened to them, so you’ll have to take a slow approach, nothing too

okay putting us there in 2.68 hours, I make it a trajectory with Ra at our backs that’ll maybe be some help

reduce our visibility but we’ll have to maneuver y’know to reach all that debris it’s spreading out fast

Alex says that’s not necessary anymore. There are six no eight suits responding to our relayed medical interrogation and they’re in two capsules

Jesus eight out of how many was it thirty-six?

Yes, that’s why I want extreme caution, though God knows with that response time the crews couldn’t have done anything even if they had been armed, with no warning they

Nigel oh Zak look can you find Nigel for me, sounds like, I said, this is Alex, sounds like a madhouse in Central can you

hold it, oh, okay here

send Reynolds those coordinates pronto I want

Nigel, glad I found you look I’ve been monitoring all the insuit Maydays and several of them are going spotty on me it’s not a relay problem I’m sure of that or pretty sure anyway and

nope there’s nothing from the satellite, no interference so that can’t be causing it

Alex Alex this is Nigel here I’ve cross-checked and there’s no other explanation how long until the rescue team

hour twenty-seven minutes more Central says

hell can’t they

I’m sorry, I, look we just lost one of the insuits, I thought you’d, I called cause it’s the 2.39 gigahertz one Nigel, it’s just clean gone.

The white caked skin was dead and dry, leached of color. Nigel reached out and rubbed it tentatively. He felt lightheaded and vague, the residue of many hours. Her right eyelid was closed. Her left had been burned away. The left side of her face was waxy and hardening. In the enameled impersonal phosphor light he traced a trembling finger across the familiar lines, the weathered fretworks and canyons, and marveled that the wrinkles flowed smoothly into the firming new flesh without a sign of the transition.

“They’ll have the … eyelid … back on in an hour … they said,” Nikka mumbled. The shiny skin was still tight and her lips were swollen, purple. She had trouble with pronunciation.

“Quiet.”

“I’m still not … taking orders … Nigel.”

He stared at her, unable to think of anything to say.

“You … were right.”

“No, I was simply cautious.”

The bright yellow medmon continued to nuzzle her left side, pausing to manufacture more skin and then nuzzling again, patient and doglike.

“When my suit intervened and … shut down circulation … on my left arm I thought …”

“I know.”

“I still don’t see … how …”

“It chilled you down by venting gases at the right ports. Tricky. That was the only way out.”

“I … didn’t think suits could …”

“They can’t, not without a processor linking into a good metabolic control program. When your suit stopped broadcasting, we calculated it was probably trying to conserve its power, use its reserves on insuit medical. So Alex focused the big dish for transmission, and I called up the needed programs. Alex stepped up his power level and managed to overrule your suit. He interrogated it, got it to relinquish control and patch through to us. The shipboard programs told your confused little suit-mind how to shut you down, put you on the back burner.”

“You make it sound … very … lighthearted.”

His patient-visiting facade vanished instantly.

“You always were a … terrible actor.”

“Yes, dreadful.” He should have known he could not keep the strain and fatigue out of his face.

“I was sure I was dying out there, Nigel.”

“So was I.”

“I wanted to call out to you …”

“I know.” There wasn’t anything to say, so he held her right hand. It had a soft and worn and kneaded texture. He watched her face as passing storms of emotion swept across it silently, revealed in slight shiftings of expression in the swollen, discolored, patchy flesh.

Through a small window nearby he could see the other survivors lying on white slabs, being operated on by teams of smocked figures. Three were being readied for Sleepslots; their damage was too extensive and deep for Lancer’s capability. They would he stored in a silent, dreamy nothingness until the return to Earth.

“Has … has anything more come out of that …”

“No. It looks dead as ever. The other satellite shows no signs of activity, either. Mysterious.”

She studied him. “Unconvincing.”

“Ummmm?”

“You’re piecing this together … aren’t you?”

“Having a go, yes.”

“You don’t think the EMs … put up those … things …”

“No. But I have only intuitions. I should never have let bloody cretinous Carlotta—”

“I … know.” She squeezed his hand and attempted a smile. “We both … Carlotta and I … reacted … to something … I don’t know, your way of putting it … so …”

“Undiplomatic.”

“Direct, at least.” Her dark eyes focused on the glowing ceiling. The medmon altered pitch in its constant labor and she moved uncomfortably. “You … you aren’t the same now. Nigel. Your … I always sensed an equilibrium … in you. Now …”

“Yes.” He looked at her and remembered the long nights together, when they had first met, lying in a cramped bunk buried beneath the Moon, Nikka patient and analytical, while he carried on, ragged and rusty-eyed, pressing against what appeared to be the problem and failing to see into it for what it was, to clutch it to him. The forward tilt in his life sent him down strange routes, kept shaping and reshaping him. In those distant days there had been no equilibrium, not even the dynamic equilibrium like walking, which was a process of falling forward and catching yourself just in time. Not even that was possible when the world showed itself as a riddle and twisted away, manifesting its greased-pig persona which was only another face, but one which had to be answered, that kneaded and molded him as part of the riddle itself, pressing—

“You’re going out again … aren’t you?”

So she sensed it. “Not to the satellites, no.”

“The surface.” She scowled. The pasty stuff they had used to secure her hair transplant crinkled and a small bubble popped in its surface, leaving a yawning gray crater that quicky filled in. “In person? Or in servo?”

“Servo for me, more’s the pity. I’m too much of a tedious tottering wreck to allow on the surface. I’m to be a flunky, really. Daffler gets to make the overtures—he’s a comm type. Cool-headed, as well.”

“At least they should … let you set foot …”

“Impossible, I’m afraid. But Ted is finally consenting to a direct contact, so we’ve won that. It’s the only good thing to come out of this satellite farce.” Nigel’s eyes danced with anticipation. “Plus, I’ve gotten consent for Daffler to do the overtures in person. Minimum suit.”

“Why?”

“So the EMs can see he’s a living creature. Not another damned machine.”

“I don’t understand. Why not send a carefully coded signal down to them?”

“That might be a bit of a dicey proposition, really. Ted and some of his theoreticians brought up an interesting argument against it. The surface team on Satellite A found a web of radiosensitive, metallic stuff all over the rock, woven into it in some fashion. The thing seems extraordinarily sensitive. It can quite easily resolve and monitor the EM transmissions.”

“And ours.”

“Quite. But it hasn’t bothered us, not until we did something out of the ordinary. Apparently our signals, coming from orbit farther out, don’t bother the thing. It’s—”

“A watcher. Transmissions of that slow chant from the EMs … they’re okay. So are ours, since they’re coming from far away?” She frowned.

“Yes, Watcher—not a bad name. Point is, what happens if we start returning the EM’s hailing signal—that old radio show? How will the Watchers react?”

“So Ted’s strategy group thinks … we should hail the EMs from the surface. Where it won’t look … unusual.”

“That’s the theory.”

“What do you think?”

Nigel shrugged “Those things are bloody dangerous. Best to be careful.”

“If we only … knew more about them …”

“Ah, but we do. A bit, anyway. The surface team transmitted a spectral analysis of the rock. It was fused in some high-temperature process, about 1.17 million years ago.”

“Ummm. Fits with the estimate of the lifetime of their orbits.”

“Yes. But about two hundred thousand years older than the maximum limit on their orbit lifetime.”

Her eyelids flickered; she was becoming drowsy, the knottings of strain in her face relaxing. Nigel felt a surge of elation himself, a conviction that the crisis was past for her. “I … see. Interesting … but …”

“Exactly. Where were the Watchers for those extra two hundred thousand years?”

Nigel was helping cool down a greenhouse compartment when Carlotta found him. He watched the winter landscape form as the cool air forced a rapid cycle. The condensation of mere moisture, he reflected, was an infinite source of beauty. First frost made her sketches on the panes of the observing station. Curled leaves applauded the winter wind. Fall came, setting forth ice like the best bone china.

“I dropped the ball,” Carlotta said. He glanced up at her and she shrugged. “Your self-serve is revoked. I thought I had all the admin programs blocked, but—”

“Ah, well. Cheeky of me, anyway, wanting to slip out from under the microscope.”

She put her arm around him. “Think they’ll pull you out of servo work?”

“Depends on my next physical.” He rubbed his hands together, studying the knuckles. “The joints have been protesting lately.”

“Naw, they’ll keep on the Grand Old Man.”

“Grand Old Crank is more the tune. At staff meetings I keep nattering on about the Snark and Marginis and machine civilizations in the galaxy. All quite unverifiable, unsubstantial stuff. I …” He gathered himself, stopped rubbing his hands, and stood up straight.

“Nigel, you look tired.”

“Optical illusion. See here, let me throw some of that Grand Old Sod tonnage around and get you some extra people. I think I know the right lever to use.”

“Listen, I am sorry I messed up.”

“Carlotta, that wasn’t some sort of sly jab. I never thought I’d get away with it for long, anyway.”

“If I’d just thought of that one retrieval option, I …” She leaned against a bulkhead. “Madre de Dios.”

“You’re the one who needs the help. Extra work for the mission, Nikka’s scrape—I’ll get you a shift off.”

“No, really, I …” It was his turn to put an arm around her. “Nonsense. It’ll serve other uses, to boot. Just the sort of thing to get Ted’s attention. A touch of special influence peddling, quite the way a Grand Ole Schemer would.”

“Ummm,” she murmured wearily. “So?”

“It’ll make me seem a bit more active, stirring up ship politics and all.”

“Oh. Listen, I think the medmon won’t flag you until after this surface mission, anyway.”

He kissed her on the forehead. “Good. Any chance there’s a way round that, ah, ‘retrieval option’ in future?”

She frowned. “Well, if I … um, maybe.”

“Good. Might need it later. Can you make it look as though we never tried this dodge?”

“Well, if I move fast—Hey, you figuring you might need it again?”

He said lightly, “Could be.”

Ten

Nigel moves restlessly on the brow of the hill. He has been told to stay in place, hold his position. The first attempt at contact must be orchestrated with care and each person will cover a piece of this long, sloping valley, but still he has been the quiet, persistent pressure forcing Bob Millard and Ray Landon toward this attempt, and he feels he should make the try himself, he has a sense of these creatures. Now the moment approaches and he is in a fixed spot, ready to flank the converging swarm of EMs and reinforce Daffler’s moves, listening to the voices as they report in the EM movements, waiting with the rest. First chance I get, I’m off, he had told Nikka this morning, half in jest, but the years of working in teams have blunted somewhat his oblique skepticism, and so he clanks across the hillface, listening, servo’d into this carapace which casts a shadow like an insect on a nearby slate-gray valley wall. A passing mist has cleared the air of sulfur dust. Nigel can hear small animals reviving as the oxy-absorbing dust becomes mud. High clouds let pass a restless flickering of direct Ra light, giving the humped land a glow of sullen rot.

I’m leaving cover, comes from Daffler. There’s a group of them turning their eyes upward. I think they’re going to start sending.

Bob Millard’s drawl replies, Earth just rose above ’at big hill. You figure they’re charged up?

“I guarantee it,” Nigel called. “They’ve been hard by the volcano up there on the ridge.”

Working backward from the radio positions of the EMs, folding in the facts of their hunter patterns, the exobiology types have made sense of the EMs’ systematic forays out from their crude “villages”: excursions for game on the plains, for water in the muddy streams, for the shrubs and lichen they can pull from the ground, but most important, for the upwellings of current that came with the irregular volcanic spurts. They used every source for body mass and energy. When the dust came, scavenging oxygen from the air, they alone had the stored electrical energy to carry on, to continue the hunt for animals now grown sluggish. The rest of the Isis ecology was purely organic, without the semiconductor nervous system. An EM would radiate a focused beam at its prey, and then listen to the side-scattered emission, waiting for the slight shift in the absorption resonance which signaled a hit. Then it would fire its capacitors fully, burning down the prey before it could sense the warming of its tissues.

I’ve picked out one.

Bob says, Careful, now They’re singin’ up a storm.

Nigel listens intently to the chromatic layers as they build in the tiers of his radio display. The pauses between the darting blips of noise get shorter, modulating a weave of counterpointing themes, a gathering tempo overriding the booming voices, bringing a swelling percussive urgency. The EMs are tilted back, he can see them now as he moves down the face of the hill. They peer upward and sing in grand unison, calling out as they have been for years with a patient need that somehow comes through the oddly spaced clicks and ringing long notes. Their heads yawn, their legs move, they settle into position. A signal has gone down the valley. In the amber light Nigel sees other EMs stop and tilt and turn, all readying themselves for the soaring song that binds them together. Nigel surges forward, counting them, wanting to be closer to Daffler when he sends the answering pattern they have agreed upon. There are hundreds of EMs in the valley now, coming out from their caves to seek, to hunt, to sing in the clear fine air.

If Isis has a voice it is the wind. Nigel hears its reedy strumming, blowing across his carapace, and the hollow sound seems to blend with the tangled radio pulses until Nigel catches a resonance between them, a dim hint of the EM nature as counterpointing lines merge, oblique intersections of rhythm that come and ebb and volley down through the repeating weave, symphonic, measured, but plunging onward—

Moving down to my right.

—and the mood breaks. Nigel feels it slip through his hands, a trace of a summation he had begun to glimpse now falls away. The EMs apparently cannot hear the roiling winds of this place, anyway, the biomechs say, so the comparison is probably pointless. Nigel shrugs. It is difficult to get the sense of a world when it is necessarily divided up into detail, the facts piled up until, like an Impressionist painting done a dab at a time, the picture emerges—of life enmeshed and triumphant, for to live at all here was a victory in this globe-girdling, silent struggle against Ra’s heat engine. The biosphere is linked in subtle ways, they have found: the rate of carbon burial in the wetlands, in the muds of the continental shelves, is precisely what is needed to regulate the concentration of oxygen; nitrogen serves to build pressure to the useful breathing level, and to keep the fine dust aloft; methane regulates the oxygen levels and ventilates the oxygenless muds; the dust suppresses energy levels when it blew, giving the EMs their decisive electrodynamic edge, putting them atop a fragile pyramid.

I’ve picked out my spot. Range to the customer is—maybe two hundred meters. Daffler sounds sure of himself.

Good, Bob Millard answers. We copy you beyond its killin’ range.

Close observations have shown that an EM cannot focus and deliver fatal power levels at distances greater than 120 meters. This was of prime importance in designing Daffler’s tactics, and his suit. The fabric he wears will reflect above ninety percent of incident radiation at the EM hunter-killer wavelengths. Nigel surges over a field of broken gravel and through a sand lobe, trying to bring Daffler into view. There: he is coming out of a rutted gully, a thin figure in the wan light, kicking up puffs of ruby sand. Nigel can see other servo’d forms at distant spots, dispersed so that the EMs will not be disturbed if they notice something odd about the reflecting disguises the humans use.

Daffler stops, kneels, sets up his apparatus. Power okay.

The EM Daffler has selected is a stiff array of folded legs and body, still and waxy in the distance. Nigel suppresses the gathering EM chorus in order to hear Daffler. The EMs are singing out a complex form of darting spikes, coming down hard on a note which forms part of the word maybe, still a fragment from that old program from Earth. May … Daffler taps in his carrier wave; Nigel can hear its hum … beee

Here goes.

Daffler’s reply comes booming in. It starts the antique radio program over from the beginning: It’s Arrr-thur Godfrey time … and the notes roll out from the rutted valley.

Nigel is holding his breath, leaning forward so the pads butt against his shoulders, reminding him of where he is, encapsulated in Lancer, and the frozen forms down the amber valley show nothing.

Their chorus pulses on for a beat, two beats, and then there comes from the EMs a curious spiky scattering of notes, a rippling in the higher frequencies which cascades down into their central fugue, spreading noise and confusion through the next word whhh … until it loses coherence … whhheeerreee and dissolves in the foam of a thousand random buzzing, clicking jots.

As they have planned, Daffler switches to a new program, now that he has caught the attention of at least some of the aliens. He focuses forward, toward the nearest, and begins the signal. It is a simple code, a few pulses. Beneath it, keeping contact, Daffler sends the continuing program, the long-dead announcer brightly calling out the names of the guests and the background music coming up, piano, light like splashing water.

The nearest EM begins to lower its head. Down the valley the other stickwork shapes are moving, too, the great square heads tipping down from the shrouded red glow above, with its distant beckoning point of radio, alive with the babble of life, and the legs begin to work, tilting them erect as the nearest one suddenly jerks into motion, taking a step, and a new voice pours into the radio spectrum, sharp and clear: a fast chatter of blips that ripple and soar upward in amplitude, obviously something carrying a complex code.

Nigel instinctively starts forward, rocks clattering beneath him as he speeds down the hillside without thinking of the gradient, the hydraulics protesting with a wheezing churn. “It’s a framed”—he begins, and a rising tide of anxious clicks stutters across the radio spectrum—”reply,” he yells.

Daffler is transmitting his patient tutorial cues beneath the stretched syllables of the program, thaaattss … It is a simple arithmetic pattern with geometric implications, a form the exologic specialists thought general enough and even obvious.

Clank and suddenly Nigel slews to the left and spins, sensors abruptly canted uphill as he feels the treads and rocker arms lose their grip. Pebbles rattle against him, he slides into the wake of a small avalanche he has started, dust fogs the lenses and he falls, crunches against a boulder, his treads spit gravel, the center axis tilts, and he begins to tip over. He slams on the brake, lets the robot rock backward, and abruptly accelerates, throwing himself to the left as the treads spin, grapples fight for purchase, and the axis comes level. He thuds to a stop Christ Nigel what’re you suspended a third of the way over the lip of a gully.

In the last two seconds Daffler’s geometric hailing signal has spat out another amplitude-modulated spike ahhll … and a fresh piano note springs into the air, each fragment of time hangs, crystallized. The radio spectrum is a forest of uttering spikes, a pattern Nigel has not seen before, bunching and rebunching, in furious movement like bees swarming around the sober, bell-shaped linewidth that is the envelope of Daffler’s steady signal … whheee … Above it the piano note subsides, falling into a bass uuummmmm and Nigel sees the EMs have stopped broadcasting their piece of the old program, their energy is now converging and crowding into the shifting, darting turbulence which closes in on Daffler’s line.

Nigel peers out at the valley. The EM heads swivel toward Daffler. Their arms flail about, cutting the air in elaborate arcs. They lurch to their feet and the thin spindly legs stamp ritually at the ground, pounding, pounding. Some dart back and forth, heads jerking with anxious energy. Nigel pauses to watch but the soil beneath him crumbles, a shelf cracks and falls away under his forward struts. He clutches at a stone ledge, misses, grasps it, and sags farther over the edge. The gully is rocky and deep. If he falls—

“Daffler!” he sends. “I think they’re trying to get a coherent signal together.”

Yeah. Good. I’m getting through, at least. Just—

“They must have planned some reply, the same as we. They can triangulate on you so they know you’re local, but—

The ledge slumps and tumbles down the gully. Nigel pushes down on his forward arms, catching at the caked soil to gain an increment of momentum, and thrusts back, motors roaring as a plume of dust gushes from his threads. The steel links catch—slip—catch—and he surges back, scrabbling to safety as Bob’s voice repeats Christ Nigel what the hell is all ’at you’re to stay put—

“They’re excited, look at them—”

Yeah give Daffler a minute an’ we’ll see—

“No, I don’t—”

On the spectrum the spikes converge by the hundreds on Daffler’s thick line. The EMs are tuning their individual frequencies, flexing interior muscles to adjust the lengths of their metal-laced spines. Their signals sputter with detail, the amplitudes shifting on the carrier waves in complex patterns, spilling into Daffler’s line, caahhnnn … focusing on him, many of them performing the curious jittering back-and-forth dance, agitated in a way never seen before, seized with passion, expending their electric reserves in a spilling torrent, each straining toward Daffler, reaching out with their planned surging stutter.

Nigel senses them trying to see Daffler, to resolve him, to unmuddy the image, but their low frequencies cannot see detail shorter than their wavelengths, cannot pick out the spindly arms and legs which would distinguish Daffler from the native Isis animals, and so a storm of emissions moves to higher frequencies, seeking definition. The EMs are sending their preordained answer and at the same time they try to see Daffler, the bringer of tidings, tilting their heads swiftly, canting themselves at angles, pouring energy into the spectrum—

Daffler cries out.

Jesus—it’s—I’m regis—

A sputtering howl comes welling up from the man. He shrieks. Daffler topples, curling up. The parabolic dish beside him crashes over. Daffler writhes, puffs of dust obscure him. The shriek chokes off into a gurgle.

Nigel leaps a narrow ravine and roars down the hillside, scattering stones as the EM spectrum fills with discordant notes and the comm band says I’m not picking up insuit from him—Look I’m moving to flank that nearest bunch of ’em I don’t like—His equipment’s out—Can’t see anything try to move closer—Nigel you make out any movement, and the EM emissions recede, the spiky jumble dies. Nigel finds a sure path and surges down the slope, toward the pall of fine iron dust that shrouds the area. He approaches.

Daffler’s suit had metal framing at the stress points. It is gone now. The dish sags in its mounts. And Daffler … It is like an enormous fowl burned up in a neglected oven, greasy and blistered and seared a blackish brown all over, the whole face burned off, all the hair, even the ears. The stumps of arms and legs are bent at the knees and elbows, clenched rigid in the last moment of life, this ornament of some mother’s eye now reduced to a charred mass with wings and shanks sticking out of it.

Jesus look

Those bastards didn’t give him a chance, just

How long to bring that freezer in we could

Hadn’t counted on ’at, I’d give it ten minutes minimum

Cancel, the brain’s fried for sure no way we could

Jess burned him down never gave

Fuckin’ spiders!

Nigel watch out there these things could

Yeah well they’re not gettin’ a chance to

Lookit that one ’ere, still pointin’ at ’im

I say we break ’em up

Yeah ’at one near you Phillips

I’m on ’im got my grapplers out

“Wait, we don’t know what went on yet. I think they simply—”

Those two Guthridge the legs are the best I’d Lookit ’im go down, fuckin’ spiders cut the props out from under ’em

Goddammit they got excited, it’s a ghastly mistake—”

Holtz, swing round on that one

Chop it down chop it

Lookit ’em can’t tell what’s hittin’ ’em

Filthy goddamn bugs

You got ’im you got ’im look out it doesn’t fall on you.

Jess burned Daffler down like

They’re cuttin’ they’re runnin’

Bastards!—chop ever’ one that keeps focused

Yeah never know what these things

Fuckin’ spiders don’t look so great legs gone do they

Get ’at one it’s still

“—bloody idiots they—”

Cut ’im cut ’im he’s

Run ’em, run ’em ’at’s right

Shit that gunk jams up the grapplers where you break the legs watch that

Hey on the left

Fuckin’ spiders

Eleven

The rock wall of Ted’s office was cold to the touch. It had a low thermal conductivity, but the mass of stone and iron still allowed the chill beyond to seep into Lancer. Years of human occupation had not warmed the hollowed spaces.

Nigel sat in a low chair, leaning against the wall. Ted finished his work at the flatscreen, checking the functioning equipment left on the Isis surface. Bob Millard sat in silence on the other side of the room from Nigel. He looked up as Ted dropped his stylus on the desk.

“Well, Nigel,” Ted began, “your idea didn’t work.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” Bob parodied the English accent. “Ah’ll say perhaps, yeah. Daffler dead, his rig all melted down—”

“They became excited,” Nigel said slowly. “They each tried to send their answering signal. It seemed to be a compressed code.”

“Ah wondah what Daffler thaught.”

“I doubt he had time to think anything,” Nigel said.

Ted leaned forward over his desk. “The fact remains that they attacked him. Killed him.”

“They had expected a response to come from above, from Earth. When they realized Daffler was nearby, they tried to see him. Point is, to see by radar, you have to send. So hundreds of them tried to make him out, and the sum of them—A bad business,” he finished lamely.

“Mebee,” Bob whispered.

Nigel turned to him. “That’s the way it was.”

“Yeah? Then why didn’t you tell us beforehand? Huh? You were so all-fired hot on this plan, makin’ contact, why didn’t you figure—”

“Bloody hell, I hadn’t counted on everything. Especially on your mob running wild, cutting the EMs down like animals—”

“Wait.” Ted held up a palm. “You’re both getting carried away. I’ll admit the men on the ground got out of line.”

“Cut up sixteen a the bastards, scattered the rest— I’d say we saved your neck, Nigel.”

“My robot, perhaps. I was servo’d.”

“Well, some of us weren’t. The men figgered—”

“Okay, okay,” Ted said mildly. “My point is that our communication attempt failed.”

Nigel raised his eyebrows. “Not at all.”

“What do you mean?” Ted asked.

“The answering signal. We have that.”

“So what?” Ted said. “Nigel, I don’t think you understand the, ah, animosity this incident has stirred up. Daffler had a lot of friends. You—”

“I know. Coming on top of the losses before, this is—But look, let me work with the Exo-comm team. I suspect we can find some way of decoding it. Then—”

“Okay, okay. Do what you want. But you’re barred from surface work,” Ted said severely. “Understand?”

“Right,” Nigel said. “So long as you don’t get notions about going back for another gamble with those satellites,” He couldn’t resist grinding it in. “Just promise me that.”

Bob grimaced and said nothing.

The long strings of code were impacted, layered, complex, and yet keyed to a syntax which made the task barely possible; the EMs had done the difficult work of rendering their constructions into something resembling human language forms. The patterns emerged like distant signal lamps seen through an all-consuming cottony fog.

The mathematicians could not be sure where the narrative began or ended, so the pictures and symbols that came simply remained in a static way, the interrelations suggesting but not drawing lines of cause and effect.

One picture showed a single perfectly flat and motionless steel-colored sheet from which distant sticks and black stone arches leaped, marking perspective with their angular geometry of intersection, fixed and rigid. Something like a road came from the left and without perceptible slant slipped abruptly beneath the gray-and-blue surface, like a flat thin blade sliding obliquely into smooth flesh, guided by a delicate hand.

Nigel watched the picture build on the flatscreen and then, as more of the code came through, he felt the implied motion of the water, the sustained layers beneath in which brown currents carried wriggling, fishlike swarms. The bland and unhurried surface bore in spots a frothy green scum, sign of methane-rich outgassings, but otherwise screened the secret speed of the layer a meter down, streaming out from the distant shoreline and carrying the fat, triple-finned glowlife which hugged together in swarms for protection in the rust-rich waters. A sense of swimming, of the soft and sapphire-tinged swarms beneath, came to Nigel as the picture moved, and he caught a quiet warm feeling of contentment in this structure, in this serene plane as ideal as any Euclid ever dreamed, which stretched to the horizon and teemed with delicate ripplings of information about the foodlife which was being borne outward on the tidestream below.

The blank disk that squatted overhead, unmoving, was dull red softened by an atmospheric blue, where molecules of water scattered the light. This was Isis, at a seashore unlike any men had found, a beach sliding into a calm sea. When the thick slow viscid ridge of chocolate water formed at the bottom edge of the picture, Nigel knew he was seeing in some nonlinear way the world of the EMs as it had once been, and so the slow appearance of a spindly leg which rose and, plunged again into the stream did not surprise him. Arms worked into view, throwing nets. The lines tightened, surging up with a bulging load, and a mass of the softly glowing things appeared, fat and ready. So this was the EM heaven, Nigel thought. The contemplative serenity of this place could not be an error of translation. They had shown this because it was some vaulted memory, some touchstone image.

There were others like it. Some were unmistakably art works, and some suggested the passage of vast stretches of time. The astronomers knew that Isis was locked in tidal resonance with the outer gas giant planet, and the ceaseless churn in each world’s wind and water tugged Isis outward, closer to the massive, beckoning Jovian-class planet. Keeping careful track of the night sky shown in some of the decoded pictures, they found the apparent diameter of the gas giant and thus the date.

The pictures covered the span of hundreds of thousands of years. And then the images and symbols became mixed, and strange curled ships appeared—schematics, designs, clearly things the aliens had built themselves, to fly in vacuum. Spaceships. Then, abruptly, a picture of a gray-green Isis, and about it a swirling cloud of points like hot crackling cinders, which swelled into asteroids, all systematically descending on the eternal sunward-facing disc.

The long arcs down then blended into a moving view of a flat lake. Plants: saw-edged long stems, electric blue, which grew taller as Nigel watched and then began whipping back, parting as the picture moved forward in the familiar trawl for the swarming sea life below the water, so that sharp spikes thrust at the view like limber knives which cut—it seemed he could feel the shooting pains, the following bleeding moistness—and hampered the harvesting.

And here the mathematicians failed to make coherent the symbols and pictures hammering like hailstones at them, and simply gave them in the order they came: Of an era called the Flux Time, and of a relentless fire-consumed night when the skies were streaked with orange, and of curled profiles that leaped upward into that same night, aimed to destroy or deflect, amid rolling, hammering waves of sound like perpetual cannon-fire off over the flashing horizon. There were hot winds that rushed through black air. And then tangled angular images. And then silence.

He knows he is worn down to a nub of persistence, his muscles cramped from the computer interface booths, and his judgment says to leave Ted Landon’s office and rest, calculate, decide how best to report what has come out of the decoding. But in the same moment he knows he cannot do that, the moment must come to a point now, and so, sitting in a calculatedly casual way, nearly lounging, he tells it:

Something came out of interstellar space and perturbed the orbits of the asteroids near Isis. They came down as a slight oddity at first, and then with increasing mass and numbers, and the hammering went on for years. It blasted the surface, destroyed the strange cities of the EMs, threw dust and steam into the Isis air until the wan radiance of Ra was cut to nothing better than Moonlight on Earth. Without photosynthesis the food chains collapsed, destroying the life the EMs knew. They had lived as wading foragers, eating of the food that flowed continually through the rich seashore flatlands. Free of agriculture, they had nonetheless developed a mild technology, and even ships able to reach orbit. They had conducted a short, futile, and puny defense against the in-falling rock. In the end the entire subsolar point of Isis was hammered and blasted into a jumbled plain of fresh volcanoes, where the slumbering magma of Isis broke through as the crust itself fractured under the pounding, conjuring up deep tectonic thrashings that forever denied to life the moist birthing point at the warmest spot on the planet, and instead made the Eye.

Nigel pauses and feels the eyes of the others on him in the spaced silence that fills the office. He has been talking swiftly and with fragile momentum, not sure of all the connections but wanting to get it out so the others can work on it, test the fleeting images which have come to him, the greased pig, in the light of this they can test and refine and perhaps even disprove what he thinks he has glimpsed.

Ted says Seems funny I don’t and a geologist rushes in with You know that would match the dating on the cratering we found, it was planetwide we do know that and from Nigel’s left comes Now that you mention it the age of the satellite surface was about the same and softer, farther back in the crowded, sweaty office Christ at that scale of time you can’t deduce causality that’s absurd and Nikka beside him says suddenly, defiantly Would you mind giving him a chance to complete his but he waves her into silence, it’s true that events of a million years or more ago are dim notions now, fitful spectral dreams.

So he goes on, and in his mind’s eye sees the quiet calm lives of the stilt-legged creatures who swayed and stepped among breakers and tide rushes; seeking the floating ambient glowlife that fed them, that made possible time around fires at the shore, and from that brought into being some culture very distant from the hunter-based and forward-tilting human imperatives. By the Flux Time they knew much about themselves, had mastered the coiled code of DNA and molecular cookery. They survived the hammering from above and saw their world wither away, felt the animals and plants dying in the wan and unforgiving twilight of a dust-shrouded world, and sensed the coming into being of a new ecology built on the withered husk of the old. So their scraps of genetic knowledge were hammered into instruments for change, solutions titrated, molecules wrenched and reordered, and from themselves they made a new kind of self.

I dunno, sounds improbable to me, doing a lot of genetic tinkering on yourself and Look the vulcanism was increasing, no way they could carry on without the oxygen-rich air they’d had and All that sulfur pouring outta the volcanoes, might as well as the room grows warmer, the scent rises salty and strong But that’s plain impossible, writing into your own genetic code things like those transistor nerves and the capacitor storage you just can’t do that kind of and softer Yeah who says? with That’s old Muriel for ya, anything she doesn’t know howta do is a law of nature like God’s speed limit and Nigel sags into his chair, feeling the muscles in his back spasm from the hours of stiff sitting, should have bloody lounges those computer jockeys, math buffs never learned how to live, tangled up in their numbers It was the only way out maybe the other exo-logic types murmuring amongst themselves for they have run their own multifactorial analysis of the EM squirted codes At least thass an explanation for the lack of other electricity-storing life-forms in the biosphere and Nigel can see the math division does not quite agree with his explanation, but he shrugs, knowing that this initial smattering of impressions will not converge until more work is done but still the implications It would imply if I’m not mistaken Dr. London that the nominal superconducting “rooms” Bob’s group found are in fact artifacts of a million-year-old technology and frankly survival of any superconductor, even two-dimensional, I find incredible over that period of slowly the sweep of it seeps into them and at first they balk, unable to accept I mean how could they cling to just one high-tech bit like superconducting sheets and let everything else go jess go and have not felt yet the humbling sense of what it meant so long ago to change deliberately your own substance to go on living, to harness electrodynamic forces when the chemical pyramid of life failed and could not be revived, because the Eye was always there, the ancestral skies were now smothered with dust and wherever some remnant of technology fought the rust an arcing orange lance would hammer away until they were all dead, the machines broken, snapped, and finally rusted by the altered ecology of sulfur grains and wind-sculpted gnarled plants But why make it so complete doesn’t fit I’d say and the room dissolves into discussion, Nigel feeling the points emerge slowly as indeed they did with him Well radio was the only way to see in that windblown crap he presses Nikka’s hand, for it was she who saw the final dark connection Sure and I guess the only hope of communicating over interstellar distances crying bleak and hungry across the abyss My God all that just so they could survive a rickety bagful of working meat, pipes and pouches grown thick and waxy, soaked with juices, walking on jointed sticks as they peacefully waded through the cool shallows, life still hanging on, pulsing, flexing, bubbling, combusting, and doomed even with their slowed metabolism to lose their last charge and decompose into rustrun soils You know I’ve been thinking, using radio in a life-form that way it would be natural, so to speak, not a product of technology and Nigel, seeing they have made the last turn toward home, puts in a few phrases wearily Maybe that’s the point the Watchers a gathering fever of perception runs through them, a prickly closeness as each sees a fragment of it Sure wouldn’t regard it as technology at all, just a quirk of the life-form, some odd aspect of evolution and no Watcher could suspect that even the electromagnetic spectrum, refined over aeons, could give to a life-form pleasure, nature’s sign of approval, Well Occam’s razor alone would say the Watchers must’ve been the cause and now the Watchers skating endlessly across a murky ruin of a world I dunno seems like a string of ignoring small hints of life giving rise to technology again Still when you think about it hoarding energies over the aeons Damn getting stuffy in here Nigel you need to get out, rest, let no Makes you wonder if maybe we shouldn’t pull our servo’d vehicles out, or disperse ’em so’s they don’t attract attention no, he shrugs off her concern again Yeah ’at Watcher gets the idea we’re down there an’ a serious civilization or somethin ’we’re and Ted says calmly, to bring it all under control, that of course the teams will have to look into these ideas, there will be another meeting tomorrow at 1100 hours and he expects reports from each division and Nigel let me the room is thick and heavy with their sweat and concentration Don’t try to stand up but he does and finds the compacted mass of details in his mind does not allow him to move his feet properly, they will not catch his weight as it wishes to rush at the floor in this mild centrifugal gravity Damn he curses himself for being so negligent of his body but still there were no clear signs or did he miss them Hey what’s he crashes down, snapping a wrist and almost welcoming the stabbing pain which follows.

Twelve

He lay quietly as the machines sniffed and poked at him. Nikka said, “Fatigue, mostly, they think. But your blood chem is off, too.”

“Um,” Nigel grunted. “Imbalance in the antiaging potions, I suspect. I stayed away from the medmon, once my trick went sour.”

“You do look tired. But you got more out of those EM messages than the specialists, so maybe it was worth … What’s it doing now?”

“Um? Serving up pills,” The medmon pushed a tray toward him, humming.

Nikka asked, “What’s the orange one?”

He turned stiffly to see it. “Ah, the orange bugger.” Pharmacological peace. He lay with a feed in his nose, diagnostic discs on arms and chest, a thermometer and sampler in his anus, various leads and taps spotted over his belly. “That’s my aphrodisiac.”

Nikka smiled and the door peeled and Ted Landon came in. Nigel smiled wanly as the three of them went through the customary hospital-visiting remarks. Ted was nervous. To deflect him, Nigel asked about research.

“Oh, we’re pretty much sure that idea of yours was right,” Ted said. “The EMs must’ve tinkered with their genes to come up with that semiconductor and electrical storage system.”

“By building it into an ecology, they made it look natural? So they could get away with using radio?” Nikka asked.

“Maybe. Something kept the Watchers from attacking them.” Ted shrugged. He still seemed distracted.

“They found a loophole. Their radio is natural. The Watchers seem to he hunting down technology. Ergo, natural radio is safe.”

“Could be.”

“We’ll have to study them more to be sure,” Nikka said, “But it seems—”

“’Fraid not,” Ted stated flatly. “We’re moving on.”

“What!” Nigel spat out.

“Just got a long squirt from Earth. We have a new target star. A long trip.”

“Why?”

“Things have changed back there. There’s something in the oceans now. New life-forms.” Ted looked at them bleakly. “Looks like somebody dumped them there. That’s why Earth wants us to push on. Find out what we can from the EMs sure, but explore other systems, too.”

Nikka said slowly, “I don’t …”

“Somebody’s seeded our oceans. Using starships.”

Thirteen

2077 Deep Space

For weeks now, Lancer had been filled with the steady muted roar of the boosters. The huge, ornamented stone arced out from the sullen star, away from Isis, preparing for the ramscoop drive to cut in.

“Nigel? Nikka said I’d find you here.”

Nigel turned to find Ted Landon entering the view chamber. “Having a last look?”

“Um.”

“I haven’t seen you around Control lately.”

Nigel turned back to look at the distant ruddy disk of Isis. “I’d have been in the way.”

“Look, I know you don’t go along with the orders from Earthside, but I’m sure I can rely on you to pitch in where your talents are needed, especially—”

“Yes, right, team player and all that.” He folded his arms.

“You didn’t attend the community talks—didn’t think I’d notice, did you?”

“Hadn’t thought, actually.”

“Well, I did, and it was too bad your point of view wasn’t better represented there.”

“Would’ve made no difference. Earthside calls out, ‘Forge on, mates!’ and off we go.”

Ted allowed a flash of irritation to cross his face. “Okay, I agree those set-tos were pretty much pro forma, but—”

“Listen.” Nigel tapped his wrist. A slow but intricate strumming filled the view chamber, seeming to come from the imaging wall itself. “They’re sending their art, their history, the lot.”

“Well, yes, but in the form of myths and stories and a lot of indecipherable detail that—”

“That could be understood, in time. Particularly if we operated on the surface, where we could develop some visual signs to help break through the misunderstanding.”

“We need to see the pattern to all this, Nigel. That means exploring more than one system. Whatever happened here is long past. We need a line on the general picture, other stars—”

“I was willing to stay behind. A small team could—”

“Could starve to death, yeah. There won’t be a backup expedition for decades, maybe longer. I can’t spare crew.”

Nigel gestured. “They’ve been calling a long time. Now we’ve made contact, and then like a flash cut it off. Imagine what that will do to them.”

“Sure, and imagine what those Watchers could do to us. There’s more riding on Lancer than I can risk just to—”

“Shore up some scruffy washouts and have nought to show for it?”

“Damn! You’re a sore loser, aren’t you?”

“Right, now that you mention It. It’s a long way to the next stop, and I have to go whether I want to or not.”

Ted touched his front teeth together and rubbed them carefully back and forth, clearly calculating. “I’ll put you in charge of our continuing radio link with the EMs.”

Nigel sniffed. “A token. I’ll take it, but you know full well we’ll get damn little through the ramscoop noise.”

Ted shrugged. “Them’s the breaks.”

“The maths types have already determined that we’re the first contact the EMs have had. If we break off, even for a while the blow to their—”

“Nigel, the decision’s made.”

“By an array of experts.”

“Essentially, yeah. You got a better way? We can’t run Lancer as a seat-of-the-pants showboat. Everybody’s glad as hell to get away from the Watchers safely.”

“Something tells me they’re not a significant danger—”

“Changing your tune! Funny, I remember you were the one who warned us not to touch down on that Watcher, and now you’re—”

“As I was about to say, not significant unless they’re provoked.”

“Why? With dozens dead—?”

“A hunch.”

“I can’t run a ship on hunches,” Ted said sourly. “I need you to help process the data feed we’re just starting to get from the gravitational lens back Earthside. You can have your hunches on the side.”

Nigel smiled. “I’m getting too many votes in the ship-wide congress, eh?”

“I’m not worried.”

“I’d scarcely want your job anyway.”

“There’s always a faction that’ll follow your line of thinking. If you could bring them around—”

“Around to what? I’m not maneuvering against you, Ted.”

“If the people you influence don’t go along with our general policy, that’s divisive.”

“Uh-huh. Science is like that. Full of incorrigibles.”

“This isn’t science, it’s leadership we’re talking.”

“Maybe the best way to lead is to do nothing.”

“What in hell’s that mean?”

“You don’t see that Watcher jumping to conclusions.”

“I don’t see it doing anything.”

“Quite. Patience is a strategy, too.”

“I’m getting full up to here with you, Nigel.”

“You’re at the end of a long queue. My whole career’s been shot through with that sort of thing.”

“You’re pretty goddamn cavalier about it.”

“At my age you have to be.”

“Smug, aren’t you!”

“You’re not getting the message, Ted.”

“Which is?”

“Why can’t I get on with Americans? Lets put it this way—we’re not talking foreign policy, we’re talking alien policy. Listen to that EM song for a moment.”

“Yeah. Indecipherable without computers.”

“I doubt that computers alone could turn the trick. I doubt the Watcher did.”

“It’s had the time.”

“Right, but not the hormones, y’see.”

“So?”

“So maybe it’s not there to decipher at all. Think about the design of such a thing. It has to last millions of years. Sure, it can repair itself within limits—but who fixes the fixers? You can’t rely on redundancy alone for insurance. So your strategy becomes molelike. You make your Watcher careful, conservative. Don’t waste energy. Don’t risk damage of materials.”

“Then why not try to knock us all off, once it killed some of us?”

“Beyond repelling boarders, maybe there are more important objectives. Perhaps it had something more to learn.”

“Like what?”

“Where we came from? What we intend?”

“Look, there wasn’t time for that Watcher to trigger landings on Earth. Elementary—”

“Granted. So something knew before.”

“What?”

“Perhaps the Snark?”

“You know ISA doesn’t accept your interpretation of that.”

“Quite.”

“This is just a bunch of speculation, Nigel!”

“For once, I agree.”

“Not worth undermining my position.”

“I believe this is where I came in.”

Nigel stood silent, watching the dwindling light of Isis. “Look,” Ted said to break off, “I’ve got to run. Think all this over, huh? Come by for a drink.”

He left quickly. Nigel had let the soft swelling notes of the EM fugue fill the room, thinking it would have the same effect on Landon as it did on him, but the tactic had proved pointless. Others did not seem to hear the same plaintive wail in the widely spaced clicks and jarring clatter. The sounds would fade now, as Lancer boosted to near light speed. Perhaps he could have learned something from their songs of vast and empty times, the rolling centuries of sameness.

So now Lancer scratched a line across the darkness, fleeing the Watcher, which had won. In this strange strategy, Nigel glimpsed, information was worth more than mere bodies. It was in the nature of organic beings, forged by evolution’s hand, to survive for the moment. To flee. While the Watcher could track Lancer by its fusion flame. And no matter how swiftly Lancer flew, communications at light speed would always outrace her.