“A satellite.”

“Yeah. In a polar orbit, crossing a little to the east of the Eye’s center. Here’s a closeup.”

An irregular rock, pale gray, with a grid of black clots scattered across the face. “Curious,” Nigel said. “Those spots, they’re not an artifact of the opticals?”

“No, that’s what everybody thought at first—some bug in the program. But they’re there, all right.”

“Artificial.”

“Yeah. A converted asteroid, I guess. And there’s another one.”

“Oh?” The images shifted again. A second dot traced out an equatorial orbit as the screen time-stepped. Close-up: Another chunky gray rock, gridded. “Um. In sum, they can survey every square centimeter of Isis. The minimum needed to give full coverage.”

“Right. We’ve run those orbits backward for nearly a million years. They’ve been stable that long, but if they were put up before that, they’ve had to make course corrections to stay in place.” Ted leaned forward over his desk, fingers laced together. “Got any comments?”

“How is it this wasn’t in the dailies?”

“Look, the techs work faster without the whole crew looking over their shoulder.”

“Um.” Nigel stared at the rough surface of the thing. “Some signs of old cratering, very nearly worn away. Are those scratches there? Perhaps some shock fracturing from old impacts. But the black dots were clearly put in long after that. What’s the mag on those?”

“Here.” The screen filled with black and then backed off to show some surrounding bright, scuffed rock. “Can’t resolve anything. Maybe they’re holes.”

“Tried active probing?”

“No, not yet, but Alex—”

“Don’t.”

“Huh? Why not? Alex says he can probably get a good look-see by tonight. His interferometry can give us twenty, maybe thirty pixels in that patch. Then—”

“You’re daft to tap on someone’s door without knowing who’s inside.”

“Inside? Good grief, Nigel—”

“I urge caution. This is the first piece of technology we’ve seen in Isis space.”

“Sure, but—”

“Let’s study the surface first.”

“Dammit, there’s nothing left down there. The erosion’s so fast. And the crater-count expert, Fraser, says there was an era of heavy meteorite bombardment roughly a million years ago, too. That’s wiped the slate clean of anything that could’ve put up those satellites.”

“No signs of cities?”

“Not yet. There’s damn-all down there, far as the IR and deepscan people can see. That’s why seems to me we should look at what’s been left in orbit. These two satellites are probably the only old stuff around Then, when we understand that, maybe those EM creatures will make more sense, and we can start—”

Nigel looked intently at Ted. “The cratering data, I haven’t looked at that yet. What’s the whole history?”

Ted waved a hand, his mind on something else. “Fraser’s still doping out the crater size versus frequency curves. He has to recalc for the fast erosion, and allow for different epochs.”

“How many epochs of crater making were there?”

“Oh, Fraser says there was the initial period, just like our solar system, but that was ’way back. He’s got that probe data from the moons around the gas giant, and that gives over five billion years ago, when the initial cratering stopped. But then there was this recent epoch, you can see it in the highland terrain on Isis. A lot of junk falling, all over.”

“About a million years ago?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Seems damned strange. After the planets swept their orbits clean of debris, vacuuming up the initial junk from the formation of the whole Ra solar system, there should have been an end to cratering.”

“Well, look, Nigel …” Ted leaned back in his net chair and began toying idly with a pen. “Isis has been moving outward from Ra, forced out by tidal forces, so who knows how that’s going to change bombardment? I mean, this is a whole new ball game here and the old rules of thumb don’t apply.”

“Precisely,” Nigel said in a clipped, introspective way.

“Meaning what?”

“Why assume the satellites are the last bit of whatever civilization the EMs had? Their orbital age is about the same as the last cratering epoch—but coincidence doesn’t mean causality.”

“Look, we’ll know more when we find some cities.”

“One supposes.” Nigel shrugged, and got up to leave. “Maybe the EMs never had any.”

But there were cities.

Or at least, buildings. Site Team #6 found the circular motif, using IR studies of a particular highland plateau. There was evidence of earlier ages with heavy dust dunes, but now a shift in the Eye winds had uncovered a plain that was, from radioisotope dating, 893,000 years old. Gently curving depressions ringed a central high spot, an ancient weathered hill. Lanes radiated from this point, spokes in a wheel. Excavation found buildings a mere fifteen meters below the dry, wind-scraped terrain. The ancient stones were rectangular and carried faint markings. The anthropologists on Lancer deduced little from these scratchings. They could trace the general outline of streets, an irrigation system, and a river valley ecology. There was no trace of fabricated or smelted metals, but then no one had expected any. What the rust did not claim, the winds rubbed away.

Four

Nigel watched the blood streaming out of him and yawned. Somehow it always made him sleepy. The first few dozen times it had made him pass out.

“Hey, I didn’t ask you wanted ta lay down. Wanna?”

“I’m inclined to it, yes,” Nigel said, but the medico didn’t smile. She simply lowered his operating chair with a quick, carelessly efficient wrist motion. Nigel watched the tubing carry away pink strands of his plasma into the medmon.

The hulking machine clicked as it moved on to another sampling diagnostic.

“Some skilled job,” the medico muttered. Nigel would have nodded sympathetically, except his upper arms, chest and neck were turned off. The medmon had to keep cardiovascular rhythm going despite the drop in pressure, and it was easier if the patient didn’t interfere. He could operate his mouth, though. “Let something go wrong and you’d be needed, you know that. Same as a pilot—”

“I only trained for this so, y’know, I could make crew. I was an engineer, best there was, but not the right category for shipwork. Only I noticed this jobclass and I figured it was nothing I couldn’t stack in on.”

Nigel contorted his lips in a way he hoped conveyed agreement. He peered at the medico’s thin, bored face and tried to read the woman’s mood accurately. If nothing else, this exercise took his mind off the unpleasant ringing in his ears which always came as the medmon began sucking harder, filtering the plasma out and keeping his red blood cells. The blocky machine mixed in artificial plasma at the same time, but still the ringing came. With the plasma presumably went the damaged blood cells, while new stuff flooded in. Antioxidants to wipe out free radicals. Microenzymes to unlink confused old DNA strands that had gotten tangled. Immunological boosters. Leaching agents to destroy aging cells which had lost the ability to reproduce themselves correctly. The antisenescent cocktail.

“Does seem rather a bore,” Nigel said carefully.

“Damn right,” she said, surly. “You know, hard to believe, but once doctors used to do this. It was a big deal.”

“Really?” Nigel tried to keep some interest in his voice, despite the fact that he could remember when doctors injected one with needles and thought eating meat was bad for you.

“Now a flush job’s just, uh …”

“Maintenance?”

“Yeah, right. I mean, I like to work with my hands, real on-line stuff, but this jacko—no offense, y’know, I mean I ken you need it, but it’s like being a hairdresser or somethin’.”

“You were an engineer.”

“Fact. Now they got me tracing plasmapheresis and slappin’ fixes on hormones and—”