“Exactly. Where were the Watchers for those extra two hundred thousand years?”

Nigel was helping cool down a greenhouse compartment when Carlotta found him. He watched the winter landscape form as the cool air forced a rapid cycle. The condensation of mere moisture, he reflected, was an infinite source of beauty. First frost made her sketches on the panes of the observing station. Curled leaves applauded the winter wind. Fall came, setting forth ice like the best bone china.

“I dropped the ball,” Carlotta said. He glanced up at her and she shrugged. “Your self-serve is revoked. I thought I had all the admin programs blocked, but—”

“Ah, well. Cheeky of me, anyway, wanting to slip out from under the microscope.”

She put her arm around him. “Think they’ll pull you out of servo work?”

“Depends on my next physical.” He rubbed his hands together, studying the knuckles. “The joints have been protesting lately.”

“Naw, they’ll keep on the Grand Old Man.”

“Grand Old Crank is more the tune. At staff meetings I keep nattering on about the Snark and Marginis and machine civilizations in the galaxy. All quite unverifiable, unsubstantial stuff. I …” He gathered himself, stopped rubbing his hands, and stood up straight.

“Nigel, you look tired.”

“Optical illusion. See here, let me throw some of that Grand Old Sod tonnage around and get you some extra people. I think I know the right lever to use.”

“Listen, I am sorry I messed up.”

“Carlotta, that wasn’t some sort of sly jab. I never thought I’d get away with it for long, anyway.”

“If I’d just thought of that one retrieval option, I …” She leaned against a bulkhead. “Madre de Dios.”

“You’re the one who needs the help. Extra work for the mission, Nikka’s scrape—I’ll get you a shift off.”

“No, really, I …” It was his turn to put an arm around her. “Nonsense. It’ll serve other uses, to boot. Just the sort of thing to get Ted’s attention. A touch of special influence peddling, quite the way a Grand Ole Schemer would.”

“Ummm,” she murmured wearily. “So?”

“It’ll make me seem a bit more active, stirring up ship politics and all.”

“Oh. Listen, I think the medmon won’t flag you until after this surface mission, anyway.”

He kissed her on the forehead. “Good. Any chance there’s a way round that, ah, ‘retrieval option’ in future?”

She frowned. “Well, if I … um, maybe.”

“Good. Might need it later. Can you make it look as though we never tried this dodge?”

“Well, if I move fast—Hey, you figuring you might need it again?”

He said lightly, “Could be.”

Ten

Nigel moves restlessly on the brow of the hill. He has been told to stay in place, hold his position. The first attempt at contact must be orchestrated with care and each person will cover a piece of this long, sloping valley, but still he has been the quiet, persistent pressure forcing Bob Millard and Ray Landon toward this attempt, and he feels he should make the try himself, he has a sense of these creatures. Now the moment approaches and he is in a fixed spot, ready to flank the converging swarm of EMs and reinforce Daffler’s moves, listening to the voices as they report in the EM movements, waiting with the rest. First chance I get, I’m off, he had told Nikka this morning, half in jest, but the years of working in teams have blunted somewhat his oblique skepticism, and so he clanks across the hillface, listening, servo’d into this carapace which casts a shadow like an insect on a nearby slate-gray valley wall. A passing mist has cleared the air of sulfur dust. Nigel can hear small animals reviving as the oxy-absorbing dust becomes mud. High clouds let pass a restless flickering of direct Ra light, giving the humped land a glow of sullen rot.

I’m leaving cover, comes from Daffler. There’s a group of them turning their eyes upward. I think they’re going to start sending.

Bob Millard’s drawl replies, Earth just rose above ’at big hill. You figure they’re charged up?

“I guarantee it,” Nigel called. “They’ve been hard by the volcano up there on the ridge.”

Working backward from the radio positions of the EMs, folding in the facts of their hunter patterns, the exobiology types have made sense of the EMs’ systematic forays out from their crude “villages”: excursions for game on the plains, for water in the muddy streams, for the shrubs and lichen they can pull from the ground, but most important, for the upwellings of current that came with the irregular volcanic spurts. They used every source for body mass and energy. When the dust came, scavenging oxygen from the air, they alone had the stored electrical energy to carry on, to continue the hunt for animals now grown sluggish. The rest of the Isis ecology was purely organic, without the semiconductor nervous system. An EM would radiate a focused beam at its prey, and then listen to the side-scattered emission, waiting for the slight shift in the absorption resonance which signaled a hit. Then it would fire its capacitors fully, burning down the prey before it could sense the warming of its tissues.

I’ve picked out one.

Bob says, Careful, now They’re singin’ up a storm.

Nigel listens intently to the chromatic layers as they build in the tiers of his radio display. The pauses between the darting blips of noise get shorter, modulating a weave of counterpointing themes, a gathering tempo overriding the booming voices, bringing a swelling percussive urgency. The EMs are tilted back, he can see them now as he moves down the face of the hill. They peer upward and sing in grand unison, calling out as they have been for years with a patient need that somehow comes through the oddly spaced clicks and ringing long notes. Their heads yawn, their legs move, they settle into position. A signal has gone down the valley. In the amber light Nigel sees other EMs stop and tilt and turn, all readying themselves for the soaring song that binds them together. Nigel surges forward, counting them, wanting to be closer to Daffler when he sends the answering pattern they have agreed upon. There are hundreds of EMs in the valley now, coming out from their caves to seek, to hunt, to sing in the clear fine air.

If Isis has a voice it is the wind. Nigel hears its reedy strumming, blowing across his carapace, and the hollow sound seems to blend with the tangled radio pulses until Nigel catches a resonance between them, a dim hint of the EM nature as counterpointing lines merge, oblique intersections of rhythm that come and ebb and volley down through the repeating weave, symphonic, measured, but plunging onward—

Moving down to my right.

—and the mood breaks. Nigel feels it slip through his hands, a trace of a summation he had begun to glimpse now falls away. The EMs apparently cannot hear the roiling winds of this place, anyway, the biomechs say, so the comparison is probably pointless. Nigel shrugs. It is difficult to get the sense of a world when it is necessarily divided up into detail, the facts piled up until, like an Impressionist painting done a dab at a time, the picture emerges—of life enmeshed and triumphant, for to live at all here was a victory in this globe-girdling, silent struggle against Ra’s heat engine. The biosphere is linked in subtle ways, they have found: the rate of carbon burial in the wetlands, in the muds of the continental shelves, is precisely what is needed to regulate the concentration of oxygen; nitrogen serves to build pressure to the useful breathing level, and to keep the fine dust aloft; methane regulates the oxygen levels and ventilates the oxygenless muds; the dust suppresses energy levels when it blew, giving the EMs their decisive electrodynamic edge, putting them atop a fragile pyramid.

I’ve picked out my spot. Range to the customer is—maybe two hundred meters. Daffler sounds sure of himself.