“I don’t like though.”

He knew what she meant. Life under a benign umbrella would always hint of distant eyes.

Slowly she let her eyes stray from the stars visible out the window. She looked at him aslant, speculatively. A thin knowing smile illuminated the smooth planes of her face.

“The interlock commands I had. The sexcen modifications. They’re gone.”

She said nothing, just smiled.

He kissed her neck, face, mouth. All tasted of the air and soil but the mouth was stronger, deeper, moist. His knees dropped him to the rough dirt floor. His teeth searched for the pullstring of her jumper. The weave was harsh and his beard scraped a purr from it. The cloth came free and slid easy and she locked her legs over his back. The small room was twilight cool and had no bed. They rolled over twice on the fragrant lumpy dirt. His saliva soaked through the cloth before he got it all off her using only his mouth. He would not give up his hold on her, or she hers. They rolled again, this time against the wall, stubbing toes, bumping knees.

She wriggled away. A popping sound, snaps. She slid free of her exskell.

Then he encountered in the gathering dark her hip, her marvelous compact breasts. His tongue discovered her back, sharp shoulder blades, furred nape of the neck. Kneading. Rubbing away the riverrun layered silt of tension and fear that had built up in them both. He felt thick years of it shimmer and dissolve. Her teeth plucked delicious pain from his lips. His chin bristled in her hair. A wind blew down from her great nostril mountains. Layers peeled away and he felt deep within an old Aspect of his, a woman, sliding down his arms and into his fingers. He had not felt it this way before, with Veronica or Jocelyn. A soft womanly weight came into his touch. Going layers down. Access. Slow nudges. Rolling down slow tremors together, they moved in a hovering hush. Her legs enclosed him. Cradled heat burst into his mouth. Grab, release, return, circle. A liberating toss of the hip brought bone to bone. Bellies opened and a shoulder fell through to the vexed heart. The woman in him felt her trip-hammer pulse quicken, ebb, come again. A hushed audience seemed to attend each movement, the slick slice of him and her together ramifying up into higher chords. Fit snug. Passages widened as muscles stuttered. He grasped and suspended himself, felt her spiral up. Heat lifted her hair.

Twists and twinges set off sure long motions and he felt in the instant the meaning of the grotesque statuary he had seen back in the mechplex. The tortured coiling thing reflected his need for this and yet in its relentless plunging power and opening fissures managed to get the whole thing profoundly wrong. The Mantis would never know them. There was a press of essences beyond the digital romance. A deep-buried spirit filled organic life. It came from origins in the way the universe was made, and generated out of itself the life each mortal being felt throbbing in every sliding moment. The Mantis had robbed such moments as this from the suspended minds of the suredead but it could not surecopy this; Killeen knew this fact solidly and forever in the mere passing twist and twinge of a second. She felt it too, gave him a flex and thrust that brought moist skirtings into him. She loosened a knot in his wrist so it snapped up into his elbow, whizzed through his shoulder, wakened a hollowness behind his right ear. She kissed him, sinking teeth into soft gums. Their tongues slid rough over each other, finding the slick underside. Hothearted, she nicked him higher. Something had unlocked him and he felt the secret source of the power he had that day in the bowl, the push behind his solid words. Life regenerate. As he was his father had been and Toby would be: tongue into ear, moist brush of seabreeze. His father lived. He passed the movement back to her and her teeth drew red lines down his throat. A bead grew from a slow delirium firepoint. Centripetal violence clasped them both. It hit him hard.

EPILOG Argo

ONE

The Argo lay buried beneath a knobby hill that looked completely natural. The entrance portals were under a deep gully half-filled with gravel. Killeen had been the first to go in because the portal was keyed to accept only an authentic human handprint. It had some way to check his genetic coding, too, searching for key configurations that showed he descended from the humans who had pioneered Snowglade.

The mechs had figured this out but that was all. No mech simulacrum would have made it in. It was easy for him though and no safety triggers or alarms went off. The portals led through tunnels to a huge enclosure under the hill.

Killeen spent time afterward on the brow above the steadily expanding excavation, looking out across a shallow broad stream and the plain beyond that rose into blue mountains. There were snowy peaks in the mountains and the water ran down from them painfully cold. This place was halfway around Snowglade from the speck that was man’s Metropolis and here he could see the advance of the mech climate. He had to wear doubleweave jacket and leggings or else his feet would ache. He and Toby spent hours down by the stream listening to the sound of it on the pebbles and boulders that lay smoothed and night-black in the channels. The water streamed clear and swift with a tinge of blue in it. Toby picked thin plates of ice from the eddies at the bank and skipped them like stones across the broad fast water and then yowled at the stinging cold in his hands.

The mechs liked the cold. Legions of them went by the stream and up to the hill and the dust they raised filmed the sharp air. The large shell-shaped enclosure they had now uncovered was streaked with the rust of ages and the slow settling of it had powdered the ship within. Killeen and Toby had watched the mechs carefully cut the dirt away from the enclosure’s interlocking framework and then peel it back to reveal the hard stark whiteness of the Argo. Long columns of mechs marched in complex formations to rake back stone and soil systematically, searching for remnant traces of whoever had left the ship. They treated it like an archaeological site of a long-dead culture.

The Argo was buried in a metal-rich area so no simple detector could pick it out from above. Whoever had left it had intended it to stay a long time and had provided against quakes and seepage. Several times mechs had prospected this area for ore but had never found the ship.

The squads of mechs raised more dust that fell on the Argo and for the first two days that was the only thing that touched the broad bone-white skin of it. The ship was like two palms cupped together. The palms joined seamlessly but fore and aft translucent cowlings covered complex extrusions. The mechs seemed to know what these things were and treated them very gingerly as they rolled back the cowlings.

Then the Mantis had ceased its directing of the mech army and come to the small encampment of humans. It needed two people who could enter the ship’s locks. Again only a human hand could trigger the right response. Killeen could tell that the Mantis had tried a number of ways to unlock the mechanisms but had failed and was momentarily mystified. He thought the Mantis was surprised that humans had once devised something a mech could not quickly crack, but when he said this in passing the Mantis replied: