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.