Daffler’s suit had metal framing at the stress points. It is gone now. The dish sags in its mounts. And Daffler … It is like an enormous fowl burned up in a neglected oven, greasy and blistered and seared a blackish brown all over, the whole face burned off, all the hair, even the ears. The stumps of arms and legs are bent at the knees and elbows, clenched rigid in the last moment of life, this ornament of some mother’s eye now reduced to a charred mass with wings and shanks sticking out of it.

Jesus look

Those bastards didn’t give him a chance, just

How long to bring that freezer in we could

Hadn’t counted on ’at, I’d give it ten minutes minimum

Cancel, the brain’s fried for sure no way we could

Jess burned him down never gave

Fuckin’ spiders!

Nigel watch out there these things could

Yeah well they’re not gettin’ a chance to

Lookit that one ’ere, still pointin’ at ’im

I say we break ’em up

Yeah ’at one near you Phillips

I’m on ’im got my grapplers out

“Wait, we don’t know what went on yet. I think they simply—”

Those two Guthridge the legs are the best I’d Lookit ’im go down, fuckin’ spiders cut the props out from under ’em

Goddammit they got excited, it’s a ghastly mistake—”

Holtz, swing round on that one

Chop it down chop it

Lookit ’em can’t tell what’s hittin’ ’em

Filthy goddamn bugs

You got ’im you got ’im look out it doesn’t fall on you.

Jess burned Daffler down like

They’re cuttin’ they’re runnin’

Bastards!—chop ever’ one that keeps focused

Yeah never know what these things

Fuckin’ spiders don’t look so great legs gone do they

Get ’at one it’s still

“—bloody idiots they—”

Cut ’im cut ’im he’s

Run ’em, run ’em ’at’s right

Shit that gunk jams up the grapplers where you break the legs watch that

Hey on the left

Fuckin’ spiders

Eleven

The rock wall of Ted’s office was cold to the touch. It had a low thermal conductivity, but the mass of stone and iron still allowed the chill beyond to seep into Lancer. Years of human occupation had not warmed the hollowed spaces.

Nigel sat in a low chair, leaning against the wall. Ted finished his work at the flatscreen, checking the functioning equipment left on the Isis surface. Bob Millard sat in silence on the other side of the room from Nigel. He looked up as Ted dropped his stylus on the desk.

“Well, Nigel,” Ted began, “your idea didn’t work.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” Bob parodied the English accent. “Ah’ll say perhaps, yeah. Daffler dead, his rig all melted down—”

“They became excited,” Nigel said slowly. “They each tried to send their answering signal. It seemed to be a compressed code.”

“Ah wondah what Daffler thaught.”

“I doubt he had time to think anything,” Nigel said.

Ted leaned forward over his desk. “The fact remains that they attacked him. Killed him.”

“They had expected a response to come from above, from Earth. When they realized Daffler was nearby, they tried to see him. Point is, to see by radar, you have to send. So hundreds of them tried to make him out, and the sum of them—A bad business,” he finished lamely.

“Mebee,” Bob whispered.

Nigel turned to him. “That’s the way it was.”

“Yeah? Then why didn’t you tell us beforehand? Huh? You were so all-fired hot on this plan, makin’ contact, why didn’t you figure—”

“Bloody hell, I hadn’t counted on everything. Especially on your mob running wild, cutting the EMs down like animals—”

“Wait.” Ted held up a palm. “You’re both getting carried away. I’ll admit the men on the ground got out of line.”

“Cut up sixteen a the bastards, scattered the rest— I’d say we saved your neck, Nigel.”

“My robot, perhaps. I was servo’d.”

“Well, some of us weren’t. The men figgered—”

“Okay, okay,” Ted said mildly. “My point is that our communication attempt failed.”

Nigel raised his eyebrows. “Not at all.”

“What do you mean?” Ted asked.

“The answering signal. We have that.”

“So what?” Ted said. “Nigel, I don’t think you understand the, ah, animosity this incident has stirred up. Daffler had a lot of friends. You—”

“I know. Coming on top of the losses before, this is—But look, let me work with the Exo-comm team. I suspect we can find some way of decoding it. Then—”

“Okay, okay. Do what you want. But you’re barred from surface work,” Ted said severely. “Understand?”

“Right,” Nigel said. “So long as you don’t get notions about going back for another gamble with those satellites,” He couldn’t resist grinding it in. “Just promise me that.”

Bob grimaced and said nothing.

The long strings of code were impacted, layered, complex, and yet keyed to a syntax which made the task barely possible; the EMs had done the difficult work of rendering their constructions into something resembling human language forms. The patterns emerged like distant signal lamps seen through an all-consuming cottony fog.

The mathematicians could not be sure where the narrative began or ended, so the pictures and symbols that came simply remained in a static way, the interrelations suggesting but not drawing lines of cause and effect.

One picture showed a single perfectly flat and motionless steel-colored sheet from which distant sticks and black stone arches leaped, marking perspective with their angular geometry of intersection, fixed and rigid. Something like a road came from the left and without perceptible slant slipped abruptly beneath the gray-and-blue surface, like a flat thin blade sliding obliquely into smooth flesh, guided by a delicate hand.

Nigel watched the picture build on the flatscreen and then, as more of the code came through, he felt the implied motion of the water, the sustained layers beneath in which brown currents carried wriggling, fishlike swarms. The bland and unhurried surface bore in spots a frothy green scum, sign of methane-rich outgassings, but otherwise screened the secret speed of the layer a meter down, streaming out from the distant shoreline and carrying the fat, triple-finned glowlife which hugged together in swarms for protection in the rust-rich waters. A sense of swimming, of the soft and sapphire-tinged swarms beneath, came to Nigel as the picture moved, and he caught a quiet warm feeling of contentment in this structure, in this serene plane as ideal as any Euclid ever dreamed, which stretched to the horizon and teemed with delicate ripplings of information about the foodlife which was being borne outward on the tidestream below.

The blank disk that squatted overhead, unmoving, was dull red softened by an atmospheric blue, where molecules of water scattered the light. This was Isis, at a seashore unlike any men had found, a beach sliding into a calm sea. When the thick slow viscid ridge of chocolate water formed at the bottom edge of the picture, Nigel knew he was seeing in some nonlinear way the world of the EMs as it had once been, and so the slow appearance of a spindly leg which rose and, plunged again into the stream did not surprise him. Arms worked into view, throwing nets. The lines tightened, surging up with a bulging load, and a mass of the softly glowing things appeared, fat and ready. So this was the EM heaven, Nigel thought. The contemplative serenity of this place could not be an error of translation. They had shown this because it was some vaulted memory, some touchstone image.