He eased over into the group around Ted Landon and waited until a break came. It still all came through to him as overlapping voices, so even his own sounded involuntary, part of a stream.

—Ted, we’ve got to go down there and have a look.

—Hold your horses, gosh, this isn’t the best place to go over the technical details, Nigel; if you came to the briefings you’d be more up to speed—

—They take too long, never understood why you call them briefings, but I do run through the tapes.

—Glad to hear that, and of course we are doing a study of all the ramifications, looking for a safe way to do it.

—Seems a trifle obvious, actually.

—Well, some are advocating an active recon mode— you know, where we use remote radar sensing to interrogate the internal biochem of the EMs for—

—Sounds bloody awful.

—Ah, there’s the alternative, a passive mode which I incidentally favor, which is to station servo’d eyes in well-sheltered spots, and watch the EMs if they pass nearby. We’ve had good staff review of that proposal.

—Mere eyes? Use walkers. We’ll need mobility.

—In the long run, sure. We’ve got walkers in the ready equipment. Lord, were prepared for anything Earthside could anticipate. There’re even submersibles in storage, in case Isis was an all-ocean planet.

Bob appeared at Ted’s elbow and nodded vigorously.

—Walkers? Ah like that bettern sittin’ still.

—Ted, I should think it’s technically feasible to make a radio-reflecting blanket. One we could throw over a standard walker.

—What about it, Bob?

—Sure. You thinkin’ to calibrate them till they reflect the EMs’s own signals back?

—Dead on. But scatter their pulses to the side, the same way ordinary rocks do.

—Bettuh than hunckerin’ down, waitin’ for EMs to come strollin’ by.

—Perhaps program the blanket in some way, make its reflectivity change with time? That way the EMs won’t register a same-shaped object following them about.

—Mebbe possible. Have to look at the specs.

—Grand. I’ll pitch in whatever talents I have.

—Whoa there, Nigel. That’s Bob’s section. I can’t—

—Fine then. Bob, I’m on for the first go.

—Jess a minit now—

—My idea, lads. I should get some fraction of the action, as the slang puts it.

—I dunno about ground team. I mean, assumin’ the approach works. Dunno if you’re up to physical specs, Nigel.

—Undoubtedly. But most of those walkers are servo’d, true?

—Sure. Havta be. Can’t afford to put a big team on the ground. Ted’s Operations study showed—

—That’s okay, Bob, don’t need to bother Nigel about details.

—Must keep surveillance maximized, Ted. Your own study showed that.

—How’d you get to read that part? It isn’t due for release until—

—Mere rumor, I assure you.

—Huh. Sounds like we got a big leak somewhere, Bob. Okay, since you got the dope anyway—We’ll land enough guys to service the equipment, then have teams From here servo’d to the hardware. Saves logistical problems. Five-hour shifts.

—Good. But there’s bound to be dead time there. No one can take a lot of being tied into machines, not on that long a circuit, ship-to-surface. So peg up a short shift, occasional sods like me. We can stand watch, keep an eye for anything odd. Patrol duty.

—Well, I don’t know as I like—

—He’s got a point, Ted. Long’s he’s just standin’ watch, nothin’ special—

—Thanks very much, Bob, I do appreciate it.

—Hey, now, I didn’t say definite you could.

—Awfully good of you.

—Nigel, we’re out of the rum already and—

—It’s not rum, luv, it’s spidmeer.

—Hey, now—

—Well, anyway we’re out and if you could—

—Certainly. Brilliant interruption. You look as if you’re deplorably empty there, Bob, I’ll just nip in and get you—

—But hey

—No trouble really, Ted you ought to come have some of the—

—Hey—

Two

Nigel stirs restlessly, itchy from the encasing probes and pickups attached to him. He is moored to this electroneural net and feels the cramped capsule only dimly.

He waits for Isis to unfurl into him. There— it begins. Throughout, he will be trapped in a suffocating machine’s clasp, but he is willing to set aside the unpleasant overtones of this in return for the experience it opens to him.

There—

He shuffles out of the storage and maintenance shed, his suit clanking. Hydraulics wheeze and he steps onto the crusted face of Isis.

It is blurred browns and pinks, the dust whipping by with a lingering gusty ferocity as it slowly ebbs, the cyclone whirl from the Eye losing its force after these three days of lashing storm. Everywhere, a pink cloak. He can see perhaps ten meters in the optical, thirty in IR, in the UV nothing farther than his gloves.

Where are the EMs? Off that way, his pulsing faceplate display says. Beyond the beeping reference tabs the earlier teams have left, lighthouses in the murk. He revectors. The suit swerves with the usual oversteer, huge paws biting into the caked silicates, the sliding ceramic plates at arms and legs rasping in the pressing silence.

Nigel receives split signals from his two worlds. Encased in the hushed module aboard Lancer, he feels the subtle clutching flex of servos responding to him, amplifying each movement. Simultaneously, across kiloklicks of space, the feedback exosenses and senceivers give him the rub and clank of the hydrasteel robot, striding over hummocks and stones, two locomotors thrusting forward as two stabilizers seize the crumbly turf. All this spills into the run-on tapes as he gathers data and checks for landmarks—spots now familiar to Command but coming fresh and crisp to him, his first time on this storm-worn place.

Rustworld. Grains of iron blow by, licking at his lenses, and sulfur dioxides make white tracers in the ruddy sleet, so much oxygen locked up forever in the land, stirred by the winds. A sudden burst of IR flickers over the ridgeline he is mounting and Nigel thumbs for amplification, the lightpipes gathering in photons and processing them, filtering turbulence in the air and the surges of dust, narrowing the reception cone and the scale, for he knows this opening in the clouds will pass, so he has only moments to grid an overview; he sees the valley he has memorized, checks it against the overlay that flashes on his faceplate and shifts to follow his head turning, the distant scarp looming like a rough-edged knife, the black basalt flow fanning out beneath him, scraggly bushes dotting the gullies where the brown, matlike grass clusters, clinging to heavy topsoil that the winds cannot snatch away. He angles downslope, boots clank clank on metal-rich stones, Ra’s steady glow making the sky momentarily brim in echo to the strawberry tinge of the soil. The curling smoke to leftward rises from the shank of the mountain. He sees the slumbering heat in the massive shoulder of rock to the east, the oven which can rumble forth with fitful streams of lava and boiling ammonia, steam rising from the caldera, new moisture free at last to wet the winds and stem the tide of dust from the Eye. He crunches forward and suddenly there comes a shift in the insistent singsong that he half listens to, the radio stutter altering. It is a chromatic weave, that much they have learned, not the diatonic tones of Western music, so Nigel cannot seem to feel the scattershot clicks and shifts as music at all, even if he could assemble it in his mind after eliminating the long pauses between each quick darting blip, and yet now something changing in it draws his attention. The buzzing in the radio spectrum—he flashes a time-summed display, watches it evolve—is quickening, new amplitude-modulated pulses adding to the steady pattern.

Where are they? Regional sensos, buried in crevices to elude the EMs’s notice, report to him in a flurry of data points. There: a few EMs are active, beaming their labored signal skyward, toward the distant, invisible Earth, which for a few hours now peers around Ra. But most are dormant, their tracers static, though a few show sluggish movement on the 3-D-projected map. Nigel thumbs a flash-forward of his recon path, sees that he will not reach the vicinity of the EM creatures for some hours, and without hesitation stamps down, the suit reinforcing the motion, sending him arcing over a gray boulder and down the opposite face of the blunted ridgeline, gyros keeping him from tumbling at this new surge, and he lands crump and is off again, keeping the leaps low to avoid attracting Command’s attention, but moving fast, attention riveted to the murk ahead as the dust closes in again, the stubby wire-trees scooting by below. His acoustics pick up the persistent immemorial breath of the Eye winds and higher, a chippering, a rustic of frantic scurryings as small things scatter before him. They run only a few meters and then stop, exhausted and listening, conserving their muscles’ reserves as they scavenge the dust-laden air for oxygen. This new sulfur-swollen storm from the Eve has robbed the air of more oxygen than usual and beneath the gale, life becomes torpid, sluggish. Skimming, he runs. Below passes one of the curious cairns, its stones sliced with hacksaw lines, not a representation of anything men can make out, but made by the EMs, they are sure of that. Several of the creatures have lingered near the cairns, rearranging the stones, murmuring in the microwave.