“Why?”
“To make sure we’re the only ones on it. We don’t know what’s down here, remember?”
“Oh yeah, I remember. That little detail I definitely remember.”
Larry didn’t reply to that. “Fifty meters,” his voice said. “Forty. Thirty. Slowing again. Twenty. Ten. Slowing again. Three. One meter off the ground, full stop. Everybody out.”
Lucian got up from his crash couch, moving carefully. He looked over the edge of the cage. “That’s more than one meter,” he objected. “More like two.”
The TO. turned and looked at Lucian. “So jump,” Larry’s voice said. “Would you rather they guessed wrong the other way and came to a stop two meters under the surface?”
Lucian grunted, shuffled carefully to the edge of the platform, and jumped down. Under the Moon’s leisurely gravity, there shouldn’t have been much of an impact when he landed, but still it knocked the wind out of him for a second, and he lost his balance. He held his arms out to break his fall, and ended up with his face a hands-breadth from the ground. “I’ve just made my first discovery about the surface down here,” he announced. “It’s very dark in color. And it’s crunchy.”
The T.O. lowered a pack full of gear to the ground on a rope and jumped down itself, even more clumsily than Lucian, landing on its hands and knees. “I don’t have the best fine-tactile sensations through this thing,” it said. “What do you mean, crunchy?”
Lucian stood up. “I mean crunchy. Like walking through leaves when the park is in autumn mode. The whole surface is sort of a dark rust color, all dried and shriveled up in discrete layers. Step on it and you crunch through all the upper layers to whatever is underneath.”
“It looks like dead snakeskin, somehow. And there’s junk everywhere,” Larry’s voice said, speaking more for the recorders on the surface than for Lucian’s benefit. “Broken things, or dead, or something. Bits and pieces I can’t quite identify. Some the rust color of the surface, some bits that look more metallic.”
The T.O. stood up and looked around. “So far it looks quiet enough.”
The Caller felt the mildest twinge of oddity. For a long moment it did not understand. It felt something, two somethings, moving about in its skin—but these were not units under its control. It should have also felt, seen, tasted whatever the remote units felt and did. But there was nothing.
In times past, the Caller would have immediately blocked the unexplained data out, refused to accept it as factual. But the Caller was growing, changing. The awakening of its own remote units from their long slumbers, the bustle of maintenance servants providing it with outside input, the sensations arriving from the other planets had all required it to see more, to remember once again how to learn. These new things required investigation.
No sophisticated remote units were in the area, just a few small parts-scavengers working through the detritus of the Caller’s own dead outer skin for usable parts and materials. They would be of no help at all in this situation.
Two larger laborers were not far away. It would send them to get a look. And to defend the Caller, if it came to that.
For the Universe was a hostile place.
Lucian stood up, framed by the lights on the elevator cage, and tried to see out past his own looming shadow. Suddenly the light shifted and his shadow fell away as the elevator cage rose again. The light from the cage, which had been extremely oblique, now was coming straight down on them. Wide-angle lamps on the cage illuminated the sides of the chamber.
The two of them were standing in a huge tunnel. It suddenly struck Lucian that this was the Wheel’s tunnel. He could set off down that tunnel, straight ahead, and walk clear around the Moon, from North Pole to South and back. Weirder still, he was standing on the Wheel, standing on a world-girdling thing far below the Lunar surface.
“Company, Lucian,” Larry’s voice announced in quiet tones.
Lucian’s stomach froze and he turned around slowly to look the way the T.O. was pointing.
Something about the size of a large rabbit was bustling through the debris on the surface. It was gleaming silver in color, and moved on lots of small, stubby legs. Lucian could see that some of the broken junk on the surface matched the shape of this thing. Parts that could be its carapace, parts that could fit inside it.
The bustling little thing continued to examine each broken bit it found with a pair of long, graceful tentacles. It picked bits and pieces off some of the objects it found, and dropped them into a slot on its back. Lucian could not tell if the slot was a mouth or a storage bin. “Is that alive or is it a machine?” he asked, not really expecting an answer.
The teleoperator with Larry’s voice turned to him, raised its mechanical arms, touched one of them to its chest, and asked, “Which am I?”
“Get serious,” Lucian asked. There was something about Larry’s tone of voice that unnerved him.
“I am serious. Think about it.”
Lucian considered the question. “Both, I guess. You’re a living thing that’s controlling a machine.”
“Exactly. And that’s what these are. Except the data from Mars sounded like it was machines controlling the living things sometimes. Maybe they don’t make the distinction between life and machine that we make.”
That was an unsettling thought. Lucian was about to reply when he spotted another of the shuffling creatures coming through the debris. The two things sensed each other and moved together. Their tentacles touched, and then each started reaching into the slot on the back of the other, removing small objects and transferring them to its own carry-slot. The tentacles flitted over the two bodies faster than the eye could see, doing things Lucian could not quite follow. But when the two creatures moved away, one seemed to have traded a pair of its legs for the other’s left tentacle. “Jesus,” Lucian said. “Modular animals? Mix and match parts? Come on, let’s get busy with the gee-wave sensors before something that wants to trade parts with us comes along.”
The T.O. picked up the equipment bag and hooked it onto the front of its body. It rummaged through the bag until it found the gravity-wave sensor, the same device Larry had used to find the Rabbit Hole in the first place. Now it was adjusted to point them toward areas where the induction tap could find a strong enough signal to work on. “My God,” Larry’s voice said. “We could just dump the taps on the surface, Lucian. The gee-wave fields are strong as hell.”
“Can we do that?” Lucian asked. “Wouldn’t those little digger things mess them up?”
“We could probably get away with it. They’re pretty well sealed and armored. And the tapping team just told me they’re already getting signals from the things. Still, we really ought to—”
“Behind you!” Lucian said.
The T.O. whirled about to see.
“Oh my God,” Lucian said. There were two of them, and for once they looked indisputably like robots. Animals did not have wheels. Each of the things had a low cylindrical body held horizontal to the ground by two pairs of wheels. Each had four manipulator arms; long, hard-looking, fierce-gleaming metal, the end clamps cruel and sharp. The two of them paused for a moment about fifty meters from Larry and Lucian.