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—