Where’s the message from then
Orbital stations they’re still alive but they say there’s no way they can continue transmission for long the power requirements are too much now but Jesus
Nigel hung, letting the news wash over him, and for a long time could not think. Humanity driven to its knees. And by its own hand.
Talk flooded through him, from the submersible and then a full comm from the Lancer meeting. He listened and yet the weight of it could not fully come to bear. His instinctive defenses blunted the news, the details, the train of numbers and blasted cities and death counts, of nations erased and lands turned to cinder.
Slowly he began to move again. He blocked the stream of talk. He drew back into himself and made his hands do what he knew they had to do, despite the chaos of emotions that ran through him.
Unclamp the medfilter. Cut some piping from the frame sharpen the pipe to a point, using the laser cutter.
Attach the tubing. Issue start-up commands.
Even at these pressures and in this chill, the system came up to full mode. He hooked it into the med inputs in his suit. A simple vein tap was enough for now.
The wall of flesh glistened beneath his working phosphors. It writhed with soft hands of pale crimson and purple. Intricate patterns, arabesques of line and big, mottled patches. So he had been wrong: In this ocean that was a world lived something that could see such patterns, or else they would not have evolved. Perhaps the swift self-luminous thing they saw earlier? There had to be a vast, complex ecology here, schools of fish-like things to feed on, a pyramid of life. The submersible had probably frightened them away.
He realized he was theorizing, delaying. The knowing of it released him from the storm of emotion he was repressing and he gave himself over to it.
He drove the point of the pipe full into the mass of flesh. The movement cast a shadow, lunging and enormous across the plain.
It went halfway. Nigel pushed hard and buried it farther. He felt no response, no tremor, no sign of pain. Moving sluggishly, he completed the hookup. Turned on the pumps. Relaxed into a dazed and empty state, a strange pulse flowing in him.
Five
Inert. Drifting. Disconnected from glands and the singing of blood. Awake but not fully aware.
This was how it might be for the Watchers, and the machine labyrinths that had made them. Patient and calculating, in principle like life in their analytic function and in the laws of evolution that acted equally on silicon-germanium as it did on DNA, yet they were not fully in the world as life was, they had not risen from the crusted bonds of molecular law, did not thrive in the universe of essences—as the Snark had put it, groping for a human term to tell what it felt lay forever beyond its cybernetic grasp—and thus feared and hated the organic things that had given birth to them and died in turn.
Or perhaps the words hate and fear could not penetrate the cool world where thought did not stir hormones to love or flee or fight, where analysis reigned and built with bricks of syllogism a world that knew the hard hand of competition but not the organic wholeness that came out of an enduring mortality.
Yet the Watchers had things in common with organic life. A loyalty to their kind.
They had destroyed utterly the world around Wolf 359, and patrolled it still. But they did not oversee the dutiful robots who chipped bergs from the outer ice moons and sent them spiraling in, to crash on what was once their home world. A Watcher circled that world, to guard against any organic form that might arise when the vapor and liquid brought sunward finally collected into ponds and seas.
It would have been simpler to destroy those robots too, leaving all barren and without hope. The Watcher allowed those simple servants to continue, knowing they would someday err in their self-replication as they repaired themselves, and in that moment begin machine evolution anew.
So the machines wanted their own diversity to spill over and bring fresh forms to the galaxy—all the while guarding against a new biosphere, which the patient, loyal robots labored to make—so that machine societies would not be static and thus in the end vulnerable no matter how strong now.
They needed the many functions, echoing life—the oil carriers who voyaged to some distant metropolis, the Snarks to explore and report and dream in their long exile, the Watchers who hammered worlds again and again with asteroids.
Yet they must know of the chemical feast within the giant molecular clouds that Lancer had brushed by. Know that every world would be seeded perpetually by the swelling massive clouds. Know, then, that the conflict would go on for eternity; there was no victory but only bitter war.
If the machines crushed life where they could, why had humanity arisen at all? Something must have guarded them.
The Watchers kept sentinel for signs of spacegoing life, signaling to each other as the one at Isis had sent a microwave burst past Lancer, to Ross 128. The Marginis wreck was evidence that Earth’s Watcher had been destroyed by someone, a race now gone a million years.
The pre-EMs? The race that remade itself at Isis?
The thought came suddenly. Perhaps. So much was lost in time …
Whoever had come to that ancient earth had left fluxlife, a sure sign that the Marginis wreck carried organic beings, for only they would use a thing that reproduced itself with a molecular genetic code. And fluxlife was the sign and the gift: an opening to the stars.
The pulsing in him was becoming a song and the harmonics of it called up the long weary wail of the EMs, in a timeless weave that blended this huge blind creature into the same slow, ponderous hymn of life in the galaxy, weighed and hammered down yet still with an abiding hope, a need, a calling.
He felt his mind clearing.
He checked his medcomp. It was good, no trace of the runaway reactions. He gingerly detached from the silent solid mass. Pulled out the sharpened pipe.
The tendrils holding the frame jerked away in a spasm of rejection. The frame shuddered and came free.
The medmon tumbled out of the pipe brace. Nigel twisted around and snatched, gasping. Caught it.
He grabbed for the frame, too, and pain shot through his arm. He held.
Stretched between two charging horses, he thought wildly. The frame wrenched sideways. His joints popped. Can’t take much of this. By the dim suit lamp he saw the slowly turning struts. Limp bags trailed it. Most of the floaters were crushed.
Falling. Above, the vast bulk faded in the dimming amber light and yet it was so large that it did not seem to grow smaller as the distance increased. He could not see the sides of it.
Nigel fought for a hold with his boots. The frame tumbled. Currents plucked at him, trying to snatch away the medfilter, to loosen his hand on the pipe.
He fought—and then realized he did not need the frame any longer. It was falling too, floaters useless. He simply let go. Darkness swallowed the skeletal shape.
His final security was gone. He was falling in absolute hard black, clutching his faintly ludicrous filter, invisible currents swirling and gurgling.
He came back from the blurred pain in his arms, to hear the ragged lines of argument from Lancer’s consensus meeting.
Swarmers had something to do with it everything to do with it of course don’t be a fool
But there’s no evidence not clear evidence anyway
Plain as the nose on your face they were the advance party