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 alclass="underline" 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.