He knew there had to be more.
She made us and She put us in the crater to defend it. She must have given us the ability to defend it, something extra beyond ourselves, and he wondered how and when it would show. He watched himself moving among the spiders—just like a real living Sakhran, he thought wryly—and then it occurred to him that just as he made the spiders look slow and clumsy, so had Her spiders, each one a match for at least six of theirs until they…
Then he knew, and smiled to himself. On the Bridge screen, which had focussed on him in closeup as he was the last of them left, he smiled back at himself from the crater.
•
In the crater the spiders Thahl had disabled were strewn around him, most of them limbless or broken-limbed but still rocking backwards and forwards to get at him. Now others had entered the crater and surrounded him: nine, ten, eleven. They made cautious feints to draw him out, but did not yet attack directly. More were joining them.
That was when he had smiled to himself.
I’d like to have lived longer, he thought, which is reasonable considering how they made me. They gave me self-awareness, and all my memories and motives. He might have added, And my soul, but Sakhrans—perhaps because of how they reproduced, or how they organised themselves socially—were not particularly religious. So not Soul, he thought, but my sense of what I am. And because they made me like this, I can do what comes next more easily. It won’t be as complete as dying, because I also live over there.
He became still. He folded his arms across his chest, and collapsed into himself.
The process began at the top of his head and worked down through his body to his feet, like an ice-sculpture melting. He turned, from his head downwards, into liquid silver. Because it started at his head, his consciousness dissolved away while the rest of him was still collapsing. His last thought was They didn’t make us telepathic. I wish I could tell them over there that our opponent is not just a Her or an It, there are people living here. Perhaps they’ll find out. Even see them.
The liquid silver which had been his head cascaded down his body, which in turn cascaded down his legs to pool at his feet, which in turn became part of the pool. When Thahl was gone, the same thing happened to the bodies of the others. Cyr, Foord, Kaang and Smithson collapsed into themselves, leaving silver pools; five pools, including the one which had been Thahl. Suggestions of rainbow colours swirled across their surfaces, but otherwise the pools were inert. The spiders peered and poked at them, indifferently, because they did not signify opposition.
Simultaneously the five pools burst into thousands of separate silver beads, each the size of a fingernail. For a moment they stood apart from each other, quivering; then flicked across the floor of the crater, between and around the clacking feet of the spiders, combining and recombining until they became a single thing: a floorcovering of rippling silver, only molecules deep. Its shape was like a map, defined by the spiders around which it flowed and formed. It moved back into the depths of the crater, through the out-of-focus dark curtain, to where the silver-grey coils of the Rope festooned the walls. It rose and touched the Rope’s coils, welcoming it down from the walls and into itself; the coils entered it, and continued and continued to enter. Then it flowed back towards the mouth of the crater.
Its volume had increased. Now it covered the entire floor, to a depth of inches.
•
On the Bridge, Foord cried out as he watched Thahl die in the crater. He had stayed outwardly impassive when the others went down, even himself, but now he could not look across the Bridge at Thahl; they were both embarrassed.
He watched the pools become beads, and the beads combine and recombine.
“Get us out of here, Kaang.”
“Commander, our spiders—”
“Forget them, Cyr, they’re already finished. Get us out of here, Kaang. Now.”
The Charles Manson’s manoeuvre jets fountained, a gesture of parting. It turned away, engaged its ion drive at seventy percent, and ran. We keep moving backwards and forwards, thought Foord, like masturbation.
•
The carpet of liquid silver stretched continuously from the mouth of the crater to its recesses, where the darkness hung. Points on its surface rose into small conical shapes or sank into small conical depressions, within a vertical range of no more than plus or minus an inch; they formed and disappeared randomly, as though caused by the first isolated drops of a rainstorm. Colours—cobalt, violet, burgundy, dark bluish grey—swirled across its surface like cloud shadows.
About thirty spiders were in the crater; the others still floated outside. They walked through the silver liquid—it no longer flowed around them—picking their steps with human delicacy, swivelling to find recognisable shapes of opposition but seeing none. They saw the Charles Manson turn away from them and run, but it meant nothing to them; its location was not in their mission parameters, not until they had done what they came to do and were ready to leave Her.
Near the mouth of the crater a small conical point rose to about an inch above the surface, but did not subside. It continued to rise, drawing more liquid up after it. It was still silver but grew duller as it solidified and cohered and became the shape Foord had expected: man-sized, a triangular body with three jointed limbs pushing up and out from each corner, and no face.
If there was a moment when it could be said to have started its existence, it was when it stepped clear of the silver liquid, leaving a hole behind it which closed Plop, and pivoted to survey the Charles Manson’s spiders around it. They looked back impassively. Rising on first one corner of its body and then another, moving in spasms of right-angles and diagonals like a new chessboard figure, it plunged amongst the dark spiders and shredded three of them before they could react. A fourth, remembering the earlier encounters on the Charles Manson, snipped a joint off one of its legs, but this time the silver spider did not subdivide down to nothing. It stopped and looked, facelessly, into the recesses of the crater, where others like itself were forming.
Initially there were three more. The silver closed Plop behind them, Plop Plop, as they stepped clear of it and started their existence without ceremony. They joined the first and arranged themselves into a diamond, moving with stop-go oddness. They shifted from one direction to another, and from stillness to speed and back to stillness, with an abruptness which made the Charles Manson’s spiders look human.
•
The Bridge screen, without being told to, had maintained its local magnification on the crater as they ran. At a hundred and fifty thousand feet Kaang stopped the Charles Manson and turned it in its own length to face Her.
The screen showed more silver spiders forming. As they rose up out of the liquid carpet, the remains of their opponents—dismembered swiftly and without mess or passion by the original four—were dissolving down into the silver. It welcomed them.
The crater was now full of silver spiders. It seethed with the oddness of their movements as they stepped clear of the silver liquid; the Plops of the liquid closing behind them, if the Bridge screen had transmitted sounds, would have been like a choir of sphincters. Sideways, forwards, diagonally, they flicked themselves into diamond formations, four to a diamond, and made their way to the mouth of the crater, where they fired their onboard motors in sequence and launched themselves outwards.