Robots

by Jack Dann

  Laramie is dead. I couldn't save her.

  I know.

  What happened at the dig?

  I'm not sure. I've only got secondhand information, but I think that the secret policeman coerced Gurney into sabotaging the place. I think he threatened to hurt his family. It was a bomb. A big bomb. Probably chemical. Everybody died, not just. Not just Laramie.

  So. I'm sorry. So. Who are these people?

  Andrew laughs. It has been so, sò long. That dry laugh. A harsh, fair laugh, out of place before, perhaps, but suited now to these harsh times.

  These are Rangers of the United States Park Service. They live here. In the tops of the old growth. We guard the forest.

  We?

  Somehow or another, I've become the head ranger.

  Winter, and the rangers bundle in the nooks of their firs and hemlocks, their spruces and cedars. The digger must remain on the ground, but using the mu, Orf can venture up to their village in the trees.

  In the highest tree, in the upper branches, Andrew has slung his hammock. Orf and he spend many days there, talking, discussing how things were, how they might be. Politics have shifted in the outside world, and Andrew is part of them now, seeking a place for his band of outcast civil servants that has become a family, and then a tribe.

  The rangers hold the center of the Peninsula against Mattie and logger, or against the remains of them. There is to be no clearing of the forest, and no worship of it, either, but a conservation and guard, a stewardship and a waiting. Rangers defend the woods. They take no permanent mates and have no children. The young ones Orf had seen before were stolen children, taken from Matties and loggers. Ranger women in their constant vigilance could not afford to be pregnant, and if they did, took fungal herbs that induced abortion. All must be given to. the watching.

  Winter, spring. Another year. Years. The fortunes of the rangers ebb and flow, but always the forests are held. Orf comes to their aid often with the mu and, when the situation is very dire, with the whirling blades of the digger.

  Andrew hopes to open the mohole back up one day, when all is secure, to continue the dig—especially in light of Oif's discovery of ... whatever it is that is down there. But now there are politics and fighting, and that time never comes. Andrew was right, and tribes, strange tribes, arise in the outside world. Governments crumble and disappear. Soon it is rangers alone who keep a kind of learning and history alive, and who come to preserve more than trees.

  In any case, Andrew's heart seems to have gone out of the project. Somewhere below his love is buried, deeper than any man's has ever been buried before. If he goes back down, he may come upon her yet. Andrew is a brave man, Orf knows. But maybe not that brave.

  And always Orf hears rumors of a bad man and killer who appears here and there, sometimes in the service of the Matties, sometimes working for logger clans. But Orf never finds Neilsen Birchbranch. Never even discovers his real name. And a time comes when the rumors cease.

  Many years. Andrew grows old. Orf does not grow old. The digger's nuclear fusion pile will not run down. Only a malfunction could keep Orf from living a thousand years. Perhaps a thousand more.

  One morning, in the mu, Orf climbs to Andrew's hammock and finds that Andrew has died in the night.

  Gently, Orf envelops the man in the mu's arms; gently, he carries the body down from the trees. And walks through the forest. And crosses a divide. And another. To the valley of the Elwha. And up the Lillian River, to a basalt stela that, curiously, has no foramens in its makeup. That speaks of deep things, from far under the earth. That this land—strange peninsula between two salt waters—may be the place to dig and find what those things are.

  At its base, Orf buries his friend, Andrew Hutton.

  And then, Orf—digger and mu—returns to the long-abandoned work sité. Orf clears the rocky entrance, finds the old passage. Orf digs down into the earth, and closes the path behind him.

  in the heart of the great horseshoe twist of the Olympic Peninsula, in the heart of the mountains themselves, there lives a monster, a giant, who some say is also a god. A ranger, hunting in some hidden dale, or along the banks of a nameless rivulet flowing from the snow's spring runoff, will feel the presence of another, watching. The ranger will turn, and catch—what?—the flash of tarnished metal, the glint of wan sun off a glassy eye? Then the spirit, the presence, will be gone from the ranger's senses, and he will question whether he felt anything at all. Such sightings happen only once or twice in a fortnight of years.

  But there is a rock, black and tall, in the deepest, oldest wood, up a secret tributary of the Elwha River, where young rangers, seeking their visions, will deliberately go. Some do not return from that high valley. Others come back reporting a strange and wonderful thing: On a particular night in October, when the moon is new and all the land is shrouded, they say the monster emerges from a hole in the mountains—but never the same hole—and closes the way behind. The monster travels to the rock on the Lillian.

  The earth rumbles like distant thunder, and trees are gently bent out of the monster's way as if they were thin branches. And at that rock on the Lillian River, the monster stays for a time, shining darkly under the stars. The monster stays and is utterly silent. The reasons why are lost to legend, but at that time young rangers with strong and empty hearts are given waking dreams and prophesies to fill them.

  Then, not long before sunrise, the monster moves, pivots on its great bulk, and returns from whence it came. There are those who follow, who are called to track the monster back to its lair. These are seldom the strongest or the bravest, and they are not particularly missed. Some say the monster eats them or tortures them in fires of liquid stone. But others say that the monster leads them to a new land, wider and deeper than any humans can conceive, under the mountain, that the earth is bigger on the inside than on the outside. No one knows. No one knows, because they do not return to tell the tale, and the world falls further into ruin, and the monster—or god—no longer speaks.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Itsy Bitsy Spider

  Robots Don't Cry

  London, Paris, Banana

  La Macchina

  Warmth

  Ancient Engines

  Jimmy Guangs House of Gladmech

  Droplet

  Counting Cats in Zanzibar

  The Birds of Isla Ntujeres

  Heirs of the Perisphere

  The Robots Twilight Companion