Killeen cut it with a slicer bolt set on max. The main-mind rasped nastily but did not show signs of dying. “Ah,” he sighed.

Quite satisfactory. Ever since I have known them, the higher-order mechanicals have had quite good defenses against theft of their memories.

“Uh-huh.” He stripped away lightpipes to find the cluster-core.

A simple evolutionary development, really. This Crafter does not wish its expertise stolen by a competing class of machines, or by those serving a foreign city. So it is taught to fry itself before it can be interrogated.

Killeen half-listened to Arthur’s lecture running through his head as he snipped away the leads to the cluster-core. He never did understand much of what Arthur said, but when he was doing some job like this it was handy to have an Aspect up and running, ready to give advice. The trouble was getting them to shut up. Arthur had lived centuries before and ruminated endlessly about the old times. Killeen seldom had the patience for such talk. But he did like the chromatic emotional halo around Arthur’s Aspect, a cool distant certainty that insinuated into Killeen’s way of thinking.

Yet we caught this one. Odd. Probably there is some delay before they suicide. Elsewise, a sudden accident could convince it that it was being attacked. That would make it suicide unnecessarily. So this delay period when we caught it must mean that Crafters are programmed more against accident than against attack. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. I—

Killeen had his pliers near the core. He felt first a flash of heat in his hand. Then a quick rattling spurt jarred him. It was so loud he did not feel it as sound but as a force, like getting hit in the ear by a fist.

He staggered away. Numbed fingers dropped the pliers. Family members howled and covered their ears. They came tumbling off the Crafter body, scampering away with offended yips.

Killeen breathed deeply, dazed. His sensocenters were momentarily blitzed. He sucked in amplified musk and oil and rank sour chemwaste. Through a near-silent gray world he called, “Damn! What exploded?”

Nothing. That was not sound, though I admit your/our nervous system does not distinguish these very finely any longer. (A necessary adaptation, I fear, but one which loses a certain delicate thread of sensibility.)

“What the hell…”

A baying of complaint sounded through the cavern.

It was a powerful electromagnetic signal. I caught a dab of it. I gather it has the typical signature of the Crafter’s personality, its accumulated (though finely processed; trimmed of excess; admirably well edited) knowledge.

Killeen blinked. “Wha… Why?”

The Crafter was broadcasting to its home. Saving its heritage, I’ll wager. Now it can die.

Killeen staggered back to the Crafter carcass, his head ringing. His tongue felt fuzzy, his eyes kept trying to cross. He picked up the pliers and poked at the cluster-core.

“Hey! It’s got no power.”

The dead take their secrets with them.

“All?”

Anything that a competing mech civilization might find useful. Data on this territory, or on variant machines this Crafter has encountered. Skills it has acquired, perhaps. And of course a fragment of the personality this experience has generated in as advanced a mech as this.

Killeen followed almost none of this, but he didn’t bother to ask. A question would just bring more endless yammer winding through his mind. He could hear Arthur’s original voice, rather prissy and refined, but moving faster than real people could ever talk. When he called up an Aspect, it sat in the back of his mind like a monkey on the shoulder. It could chatter on, give technical help, and Killeen got a character-scent of the person behind the seated knowledge, like someone in the same room with him.

“Anything we can salvage?”

Let’s see… try that stimclat there.

Killeen had no idea what a “stimclat” might be. Arthur sensed this as he formed the word, and so provided a dancing green dot beside a flanged metal part. Killeen attached leads and did as Arthur’s green simulation said. In a moment he felt a quick darting pleasure-pain sensation behind his ears.

“What’s that?”

Some of the Crafter’s recent memory, I daresay. We might mine it for information.

“Heysay, I’m kinda tired.”

Actually, he was bored. Arthur would know that too, but something made him keep up a polite manner with the Aspect. After all, Arthur was an ancestor.

Rest, then. I’ll translate from mechspeak and show you results later.

Killeen did not rest, though he seemed to. He reclined on a mossy cushion of brown organo-refuse and fished forth a small slab of memorychip. It was ancient and showed cracks and gouges of use, though the pale polylithium was said to be surehardened.

He had been thinking of this for days. And especially he lusted for it in the chilled nights when the Family had to sleep on rough ground beneath the star-spattered sky. He would then look up into the orange and green and bluehot points of light, hundreds of thousands of them scattered like jewels in oil, wreathed by radiance that came from halos of dust and gas. Ample light streamed down, enough to walk and even read—if any of the Family could have read more than simple numbers and a few directions coded on mechs.

This was the only night he had ever known, a welcome halfdark after the blistering doubleday cast by the Eater and their own planet’s star, Denix. Yet he fled from it, too, when he could. Into the realms of the old dead times.

He found an output current plug in an autorepair slot. The cage walls were scarred and smeared from centuries of casual use by passing mechs. He spliced in the extra Amps and lay back and was at once in a gossamer finespun holotime of delight and transfigured brassy radiance.

It came to him as a shuddering series of exaltations and shimmering potentials. Ruby. Tingling. Pepperhot. Slowbuilding. Raspbreathed.

Spinning forever in a humming gyre… slicksliding grace beyond time or process… halfsleep and halfwake… this inner world filled his lungs with cottony pleasure. Brought him again and again to the long-thrusting ecstasy yet did not let him pass over into warm oblivion. Sweet resurrections…

Stark light. Rough swearing.

Killeen blinked. A hand grabbed his collar and lifted him. “Didnja hear? There’s a transmech outside.”

It was Cermo-the-Slow, his porepocked face orbiting against the overhead glare of the Trough. Cermo had disconnected Killeen from the power feed.

“I… was just…”

“I know whatcha doin’. Jes’ don’ let Ledroff catch you, is all.”

Cermo-the-Slow let go. Killeen dropped back into the acrid moss. He had an impulse to jack himself back into the wall, snatch a few minutes before somebody else came by to muster him And forced his hand away from the cable. That somebody might be Toby. Too many times the boy had already caught his Dad slacksack on the tether, volted out.

Slowly, slowly, Killeen put away the jack-tab, He had to remember that Fanny was gone. Everybody needed some refuge from the world’s rub, she’d said. She’d let him get away with some time on the jack. Some drinking, too.

Not anymore. Ledroff was decent, solid, but inexperienced. Until now, Killeen had devoted himself to looking after Toby, begrudging the time spent on Family business. That would have to change. But it would be hard.

Getting up, away from temptation, took all his blurred concentration. As he got creakily to his feet he heard Ledroff barking somewhere at Family who still lounged or slept. Killeen hurried to pull on his hydraulic boots.

He fidgeted clasps into fittings, making himself suit-ready. And Arthur broke in with:

I’ve analyzed that scrap of memory from the Crafter. Quite interesting, I think you’ll find.