Eventually molecules would snag other links and make a crude copy, driven in this inward ocean to grow, clustered around the mock sun at the core of the world, amid crushing pressures and stinging dark, without lightning to hasten the brew or streaming baths of light from the sky, but merely and simply from the silent churn of nuclear decay, the way life springs from a heap of moist humus in a forgotten back corner, making use of energy from below in an ocean capped by ice, thermal cells mixing the chemicals which sought each other in their passion—at first plants innocent of photosynthesis, and then predators and prey who basked in the rich streams of life that were born amid the continual upwelling of free radicals. Sulfur compounds, like those bubbling from the volcanic vents in Earth’s oceans, could metabolize this brawling jungle with restless energy.

The nature of life here was to be always rejected, forced up by the thermals, into the upper blackness, pushed away from the molecular fire, a biosphere doomed to seek the searing dark. When the core ebbed, the long radioactive half-lives done, there came cutting competition, a narrowing event like the ancient drought in Africa that had sharpened the wits of primates. As the crimson corefires damped, at first life must have merely fought for places near the bubbling fires, but in time some being saw that the heat could be clasped, moved, used to push—upward through the weightless rigid black, against the ice, and into it, and then beyond—scavenging the crusty rocks that held radioactives, seeking in the hostile vacuum and searing cold.

There must have been a time when they struggled to understand their ice surface, perhaps managed to discover electricity and begin to tinker with radio, a time when the pre-EMs came, when the races met. A first, tenuous contact. But those first sputters announced their presence in a swelling bubble moving at light speed.

So there appeared above in the brilliant night a gray thing ancient and knowing, which hurled down rock and pitted the icelands and drove the creatures back, forced them retreating through the vent into the inward sea, where now with crude tools they kept watch, their brute sciences used to cup some rock from the core and buoy it, to make the upwellings and warm spots in the crust that would keep the vents wide, allow a shred of possibility that these huge things needed and would not let slip from them.

So the impasse came, with the slow tick of time running against these blind things, against the pre-EMs who had fled downward with them. For a while they would be safe from the passive Watcher. Ten kilometers of ice could stop any thermonuclear blast, absorb the slamming punch of an asteroid, withstand the furious bursting of its sun going nova—which the machine civilizations had used before in Aquila; Nigel knew that from the Marginis records, though the conventional astronomers had another explanation—and so the Watcher waited.

Impasse. They remained, enduring and yet trapped, sealed into their bleak sea with the certainty that the stone above would win in the end. Without the freedom to crawl out, to learn the Newtonian web of laws that governed life in freedom from water but enslaved to gravity, they could not hope to match and destroy the Watcher.

So in their songs there had to be tales of a brave and foolish time when gallant ones had sought the vacuum, been pounded and destroyed, and so dragged back down to make their tales and rage against the thing that waited at the top of the long vents. Yet the fact that they kept the vents open, tending them like fires that must never go out, meant that the tales still lived and the harsh judgment of history had not bowed them down, not driven them finally back to the core, where they would cluster about the embers and die.

Okay keep looking but I tell you he’s gone.

Stay at this depth, Carlos, I’m not leaving—

Okay okay, but I want to hear the report.

Shut up—hey—no light in the cabin!—I can’t see with—

I just want to—

Shut up

He felt a slackness in his legs. Every movement took enormous energy. He reached over, got a grip on the medfilter. It looked okay. The plug-ins—

He swore. The canister of interfaces was gone. The hoses where it clamped to the side were open, bare. Hitting this creature had ripped it away.

So he was finished. Within an hour the buildup of residue in his blood would lead from nausea to spasms and then into a merciful coma. Without a receiving system, some fine-webbed fiber to accept the sludge that the medfilter leached from him, the device would not work.

Nigel sighed. Betrayed in the end by a malf. No philosophical lesson here, unless it was the eternal one: We die from entropy.

He peered down. No sign of the ship. He would call them now. If they could find him in time, all well and good. It had been a temporary gesture, irrational at best, an attempt, he now saw, to make some fleeting contact with the life he knew must lurk in the shadows beyond the lights. He smiled at his own folly. So—

Something made him turn to the mottled, pitted hide beside him. It stretched away, filling half of space, mute as stone waiting for the chisel. He frowned.

Jesus you hear that Madre Dios a war

If there was the right kind of fiber under the skin …

Ninety percent destruction a full nuclear exchange all four major powers Jesus

Where’s the message from then

Orbital stations they’re still alive but they say there’s no way they can continue transmission for long the power requirements are too much now but Jesus

Nigel hung, letting the news wash over him, and for a long time could not think. Humanity driven to its knees. And by its own hand.

Talk flooded through him, from the submersible and then a full comm from the Lancer meeting. He listened and yet the weight of it could not fully come to bear. His instinctive defenses blunted the news, the details, the train of numbers and blasted cities and death counts, of nations erased and lands turned to cinder.

Slowly he began to move again. He blocked the stream of talk. He drew back into himself and made his hands do what he knew they had to do, despite the chaos of emotions that ran through him.

Unclamp the medfilter. Cut some piping from the frame sharpen the pipe to a point, using the laser cutter.

Attach the tubing. Issue start-up commands.

Even at these pressures and in this chill, the system came up to full mode. He hooked it into the med inputs in his suit. A simple vein tap was enough for now.

The wall of flesh glistened beneath his working phosphors. It writhed with soft hands of pale crimson and purple. Intricate patterns, arabesques of line and big, mottled patches. So he had been wrong: In this ocean that was a world lived something that could see such patterns, or else they would not have evolved. Perhaps the swift self-luminous thing they saw earlier? There had to be a vast, complex ecology here, schools of fish-like things to feed on, a pyramid of life. The submersible had probably frightened them away.

He realized he was theorizing, delaying. The knowing of it released him from the storm of emotion he was repressing and he gave himself over to it.

He drove the point of the pipe full into the mass of flesh. The movement cast a shadow, lunging and enormous across the plain.

It went halfway. Nigel pushed hard and buried it farther. He felt no response, no tremor, no sign of pain. Moving sluggishly, he completed the hookup. Turned on the pumps. Relaxed into a dazed and empty state, a strange pulse flowing in him.

Five

Inert. Drifting. Disconnected from glands and the singing of blood. Awake but not fully aware.