Nigel turns back to the mottling, curious, reaches down—and suddenly sees the EM, sluggish but steady, legs jerking, coming dead toward him. The big head is fixed directly at him and Nigel hopes his radio blanket looks to the EM like a boring, typical rock. He inches backward, shuts down all carrier waves, braces—

But the EM halts, ignoring Nigel, head swiveling, and cants itself, settling downward, thrusting the lumpy black knobs in its abdomen, lowering itself until they make contact with the blue-green veins in the rock.

Its waxy skin ripples, it settles farther, the glazed blue of its skin begins to pulse with other colors, as soft purples seep from the abdomen, and Nigel reminds himself that in the Ra light this purple is in a fact a green, a biochem flag of a porphyrin derivative, but the colors wash away the thought as magentas and hard yellows and sprays of red curl across the body of the EM, flowing as boom the volcano above rips light through the hovering sheets of fine dust, a stream of lava splits the rock face fifty meters away with a sudden lance of orange, and the EM trembles, trembles, tilts lower, seems to shake with a kind of lust and hunger, not noticing the second and then a third large shape that emerge from the slow, spattering rain that now begins to fall, fat dollops of moist sulfur oxides, drops that streak the approaching, lurching shapes as they lower themselves in turn to the outcropping, ponderous, their mircrowaves filling and merging with a new and stronger weave, the scattershot clicks and barks of radio-shifting as the ground surges and a crashing explosion high up the mountain pours light into the gully, the EMs signal now, flowing into song, their boxlike heads tilting, scanning, a steady note emerging now as Nigel recognizes the long, low tone that is from the old Earth-side radio show.

They are joining together to point at the sky and send the slow mournful impulse that will wed with the other millions of EMs and stretch across the light-years toward the Earth, a mere dot in the sky that so long ago seemed to speak to these time-weary creatures.

A shower of bright orange blossoms at the abdomen of each EM. Sparks cut the air. Nigel backs away.

A crackling fills his pickups and the EM fugue grows, the huge bodies rocking slightly as the air cracks and snaps with energy, dancing singing joy forever, brimming, flying, the lava crashing over the ridge, prickly heat pours from it, and Nigel sees suddenly how the EMs live for this moment, the single time when they have enough swelling, filling life to burst forth and claw up at the sky that holds a speck of hope and promise, some possibility beyond the smothering sameness of their twilight rusting world.

They seek the volcanoes for food, not for warmth. The lava flows down thousands of meters of mountainside, a hot metallic conductor falling in the strong magnetic field of Isis, cutting the magnetic field lines and generating currents, electric fields, a vast circuit that cannot close easily because the rock around the lava is inert, a poor conductor, and so the electrical current builds as the lava flows, cutting across more field lines, gathering energy until it strikes a seam of metal-rich ore and suddenly the circuit can close, it is shorted, the vast currents run through the blue-green rock layers, seeking a return channel to the top of the mountain, to complete the loop, blind current following Faraday’s remorseless law.

As the currents find their way through metallic corridors, wandering, the EMs tap into an outcropping of the seam and drink of the rushing river of electrons, sucking in to charge their capacitor banks, feasting, spilling it into radio waves as they celebrate this renewal of themselves. They soak from the land itself the high-quality energy, without having to undergo the slow and painstaking process of finding chemical foods, digesting them, transferring molecular binding energy into stored electrical potentials.

A joyful strumming life swells and pours into the EMs. Nigel sees in the jagged leaping orange sparks the last link, sees how Isis swings around Ra, the long ellipse taking it now closer, now farther from its star, so that the tidal force first stretches and then compresses Isis, kneading and heating the planetary core like a thick pastry. The energy coming from the orbital angular momentum of the Isis-Ra system, an eternal energy source, endlessly churning the crust of Isis, subducting metals in the soil and then in turn thrusting them, molten, from the mouths of the mountains, the iron-rich rivers snaking and seeking the center of the planet again, driving currents, stripping electrons from the iron, a vast and perpetual generator changing gravitational energy to useful electrical forms, an energy which no other creature than the EMs can tap, giving them the edge they need on this sluggish rust-world, making possible their radio eye and with it a steady survey of the sky, searching for an answering strum of electromagnetic song, a vigil that had gone on now for aeons without machines or computers or the army of mindless servants men have made to help them. Here these creatures had harnessed the grinding workings of the planets themselves, all to survive, all to call a plaintive note into a still and silent sky.

Nigel moves softly away from them, lingering to see the solemn chorusing shapes, singing, bathed in bright sparking bonfires of electrowealth burning through the dusty murk, like rockets straining to lift off, where forever three or more shall gather together a syllable will be cast out into the night, and smiling, Nigel knows that the time has finally come to answer.

Eight

Ted Landon was pulling the meeting toward a reluctant conclusion. Nigel watched him, reflecting. Ted called up reports from the exploration teams, from planetary survey, from the subsection on Ra, from inboard systems. A flat wallscreen displayed alternatives; Ted went through the suggested missions, assigning weighted returns-versus-risks factors. Each time a section leader digressed into detail, or shifted the topic, Ted brought him back into line. The staccato cadences by which he disciplined came from his nervous system, immutable.

“Well, the big sweep we tried two days back—following on the Walmsley-Daffler discoveries—doesn’t seem to have paid off. Am I right?” Raised eyebrows, inquiring looks around the table. Nods. Nigel nodded, too, for indeed the men and women who swarmed over that volcanic zone had not learned anything more of importance. The EM “villages” were simple shelters and little more. Some of the caves held piles of artfully worked rock; others were bare, with only alcoves clogged with EM droppings to mark their use. In a few, elaborate designs were scratched into the walls and filled with scraps of superconducting stuff. To the EMs these might be art; just as easily, the complex spirals and jagged lines might be history, literature, or graffiti.

Ted segued smoothly into a summary of other missions on Isis surface. They were tracing the outline of a complex ecology, but there were still large holes to fill in. What happened to the ancient EM cities? Why were there no other semiconductor-type nervous systems in the Isis ecology?

“All very interesting,” Ted said mildly. “But to many of us”—his eyes swept the length of the table—“the standout puzzle is the two satellites. How did they get there? Are they all that is left of the EM technology? Why—”

“Look,” Nigel interrupted, “it’s clear where you’re headed. You want to pay a visit.”

“Well, you’re jumping the gun again, Nigel, but yes. We do.”

“That’s too flaming dangerous.”

“They’re ancient, Nigel. Spectrophotometry shows the artificial component of those satellites—the metals, any-way—were smelted and formed well over a million years ago.”