This was how it might be for the Watchers, and the machine labyrinths that had made them. Patient and calculating, in principle like life in their analytic function and in the laws of evolution that acted equally on silicon-germanium as it did on DNA, yet they were not fully in the world as life was, they had not risen from the crusted bonds of molecular law, did not thrive in the universe of essences—as the Snark had put it, groping for a human term to tell what it felt lay forever beyond its cybernetic grasp—and thus feared and hated the organic things that had given birth to them and died in turn.

Or perhaps the words hate and fear could not penetrate the cool world where thought did not stir hormones to love or flee or fight, where analysis reigned and built with bricks of syllogism a world that knew the hard hand of competition but not the organic wholeness that came out of an enduring mortality.

Yet the Watchers had things in common with organic life. A loyalty to their kind.

They had destroyed utterly the world around Wolf 359, and patrolled it still. But they did not oversee the dutiful robots who chipped bergs from the outer ice moons and sent them spiraling in, to crash on what was once their home world. A Watcher circled that world, to guard against any organic form that might arise when the vapor and liquid brought sunward finally collected into ponds and seas.

It would have been simpler to destroy those robots too, leaving all barren and without hope. The Watcher allowed those simple servants to continue, knowing they would someday err in their self-replication as they repaired themselves, and in that moment begin machine evolution anew.

So the machines wanted their own diversity to spill over and bring fresh forms to the galaxy—all the while guarding against a new biosphere, which the patient, loyal robots labored to make—so that machine societies would not be static and thus in the end vulnerable no matter how strong now.

They needed the many functions, echoing life—the oil carriers who voyaged to some distant metropolis, the Snarks to explore and report and dream in their long exile, the Watchers who hammered worlds again and again with asteroids.

Yet they must know of the chemical feast within the giant molecular clouds that Lancer had brushed by. Know that every world would be seeded perpetually by the swelling massive clouds. Know, then, that the conflict would go on for eternity; there was no victory but only bitter war.

If the machines crushed life where they could, why had humanity arisen at all? Something must have guarded them.

The Watchers kept sentinel for signs of spacegoing life, signaling to each other as the one at Isis had sent a microwave burst past Lancer, to Ross 128. The Marginis wreck was evidence that Earth’s Watcher had been destroyed by someone, a race now gone a million years.

The pre-EMs? The race that remade itself at Isis?

The thought came suddenly. Perhaps. So much was lost in time …

Whoever had come to that ancient earth had left fluxlife, a sure sign that the Marginis wreck carried organic beings, for only they would use a thing that reproduced itself with a molecular genetic code. And fluxlife was the sign and the gift: an opening to the stars.

The pulsing in him was becoming a song and the harmonics of it called up the long weary wail of the EMs, in a timeless weave that blended this huge blind creature into the same slow, ponderous hymn of life in the galaxy, weighed and hammered down yet still with an abiding hope, a need, a calling.

He felt his mind clearing.

He checked his medcomp. It was good, no trace of the runaway reactions. He gingerly detached from the silent solid mass. Pulled out the sharpened pipe.

The tendrils holding the frame jerked away in a spasm of rejection. The frame shuddered and came free.

The medmon tumbled out of the pipe brace. Nigel twisted around and snatched, gasping. Caught it.

He grabbed for the frame, too, and pain shot through his arm. He held.

Stretched between two charging horses, he thought wildly. The frame wrenched sideways. His joints popped. Can’t take much of this. By the dim suit lamp he saw the slowly turning struts. Limp bags trailed it. Most of the floaters were crushed.

Falling. Above, the vast bulk faded in the dimming amber light and yet it was so large that it did not seem to grow smaller as the distance increased. He could not see the sides of it.

Nigel fought for a hold with his boots. The frame tumbled. Currents plucked at him, trying to snatch away the medfilter, to loosen his hand on the pipe.

He fought—and then realized he did not need the frame any longer. It was falling too, floaters useless. He simply let go. Darkness swallowed the skeletal shape.

His final security was gone. He was falling in absolute hard black, clutching his faintly ludicrous filter, invisible currents swirling and gurgling.

He came back from the blurred pain in his arms, to hear the ragged lines of argument from Lancer’s consensus meeting.

Swarmers had something to do with it everything to do with it of course don’t be a fool

But there’s no evidence not clear evidence anyway

Plain as the nose on your face they were the advance party

Yeah these ships in orbit now they look like the ones the Swarmers came in just look at the

All mixed in together

Nikka’s voice broke in, Nigel! Nigel! Time is “Yes, I hear.”

You had your reasons I’m sure but too much is happening, I’m frightened, I don’t want you out there when—

“Of course. I … I’m sorry. I was shagged out, dead bushed, and this seemed the only way to finally … I haven’t been on a planetary surface, I’ve had no chance to ever really, to … I …” His voice trailed away as he felt the old block, the inability to communicate deep recesses that lay beyond language.

Turn on your tracer. It works, doesn’t it?

“Done, I’m falling,” he added mildly.

How did—

“A boring long tale.”

We’re coming. You’re picking up the Lancer comm? I piped it through on open circuit.

“Yes. Dead awful.” He could think of nothing more to say. The full weight of it would come on him later, he knew. The mind did what it must to survive.

I’ve got you fixed a few klicks away but you’re moving fast nothing nearby

Jesus we’ll have to catch him how can we

Nigel relaxed, spread-eagling himself to offer the most flow resistance. His ears popped. Suit adjustment.

It’s impossible, we don’t have that kind of maneuvering ability

Shut up, he’ll hear you, Carlos

But it—look, we can get there but Madre Dios it’ll take ten minutes minimum and we’ll be moving too fast.

Knobbed joints grumbling with pain, muscles whining, heart thumping dumbly in the converging dark.

“Get—get under me. Then … deploy … a sac.”

Gliding in the soft night. Coasting. What was coming depended on relaxation, reaching out with the senses. He could not tighten up or the frail ol’ muscles would tire before they were needed. He had to let go.

Six

Decades ago, after Alexandria’s death, Mr. Ichino had said to him, I wish you the strength to let go.

He needed that now. Until he saw the submersible and knew which direction to bank toward, there was nothing productive he could do. Either they would snag him in time, or else he would fall farther in this cold murk, into higher pressures, and his suit would fail. He would squash like a grape.

From the Lancer meeting came

Obviously those goddamn Swarmers started it Yeah the Trojan horse

Dunno how the nukes got going but when those Swarmers started coming ashore what was China supposed to do. Matter of survival if what they say about the Americans is true