Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  “This stuff is a conductor, an antenna.” He turns. He is in a large fenced-in area, like a corral. Through the gloom he sees caves dug back into the rock, caves with oval openings, other blocky and square, some triangular. “It’s a village.” The popping, chiming radio pulses come from marks near the doorways, wook wook for the ovals, skaah skaah from the rectangular. Other marks bark and mutter from the bare rock. Street signs? Nigel thinks, almost tripping over indentations in the muddy ground, curved patterns that seem to make no sense. He clumps down the canyon, knowing the runon tapes will capture it all and a dozen specialists will have a dozen ideas about it by the time he is out of the servo’d pod.

  I’ve found another one, a very similar canyon. I estimate I’m about five hundred meters east. If you—

  “Wait.”

  Ahead hang woven strands, secured to the canyon walls and stretching across it about six meters above the ground. From the strands hang sheets of the silvery stuff, some of them giving off a chorus of radio sputter, others silent. Nigel approaches. “There something—” and Ther ing meth rees eesom thingther comes at him from the sheets, bouncing around the canyon, scrambling. “I think the”—inkth ti ti thi I kthelith—“super-conduc”—supduc con sup ducerco—“superconducting sheets—”

  He turns, flees, unwilling to give up his radio spectrum but confused by the mocking wall of echoes. A hundred meters away he stops, sheltered by a jut of stone, and says, “They’ve got some elaborate, well, rooms, I suppose. A way to get some privacy, I guess—No, that doesn’t make sense. Why make them reflecting? No, it must be some kind of amplifier, a way to, well, a public-address system? I don’t …”

  Nigel, you’re confused. Don’t you think you should—

  “Bugger that. Look, get a team down here to go over this, this village.”

  Sure, we will, just don’t get so—

  “It hasn’t bothered you yet, Herb?”

  Huh? What hasn’t—

  “Superconductors. How do EMs with no technology left, no cities left standing, make superconductors?”

  Oh. Well, there are those satellites. Maybe—

  “I got a good look at the sheets. They’re tarnished. They have cracks in them. They look as though they’ve been folded and refolded many, many times. They’re old, my good fellow. Old.”

  The next team is on in, let’s see, six running hours. I’ll ask for a biodate. But hang on, I want a look at your village, too. I’ll be there in—

  “Hold. Stay where you are. Or perhaps better, back away.”

  Why? It’s just a—

  “The EMs are out milling around, Alex says. We’ve just stumbled on something that resembles a village, correct? And odds on, the reason we haven’t seen one before is that they were always occupied. We didn’t want direct contact, so we missed the villages.”

  Sounds plausible. However, we can’t—

  “But no one really deserts a village. You leave behind—”

  Through the swirling gusts of russet mist a dark shape lurches. Nigel ducks behind a boulder, grimacing, and kills his radio transmissions. You leave behind the weak, the old, perhaps the children—but you don’t leave them unprotected.

  Nigel tucks his head down, knowing this movement has no analog for the craft he is driving, but does it anyway, aware that to distance himself from the machine in any way now will lessen his effectiveness. To hide, crouch down, avoid the licking radar of the approaching creature, hope the suit reflects like an uninteresting gray stone—

  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—<
br />
  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.

  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.

&nb
sp; 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 all: 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.