Three more struck Mandelbrot at once, and the impact, combined with Mandelbrot’s bad leg, knocked the robot entirely over. He fell into the fire, clasping two of the attacking wolf-creatures. Sparks flared and snapped; the wolves howled in fear and pain as they struggled to get away from the robot’s steel grasp. Mandelbrot let them go at last and the wolves yelped and fled, their fur scorched and burning. Mandelbrot struggled to get back on his feet, sending glowing embers flying through the air.
Then everything was confused. Derec had dragged the gun from its holster. He squeezed the trigger at anything moving beyond the campfire; the gun bucked in his hand. Something big and horribly strong hit him from behind and he went down, shouting with pain and nearly losing consciousness as he landed on his bad arm. He couldn’t see anything; his head was full of exploding blotches. Somehow Derec held onto the gun and fired blindly. He couldn’t tell if he hit anything or not, but all at once the battle was over. One of the wolves gave a short, high bark; the others dropped the attack and fled into the woods.
Derec felt a metallic hand on his shoulder. “Master Derec?”
“Wolves are afraid of fire, huh?”
“I have made the correction in my data bank.”
“Good. Wonderful. Now help me up.”
The camp was a mess. Bumming logs were scattered around the area; the tent had collapsed. There was a long rip in one of the packs, and several cans of food had spilled out. “Great,” Derec sighed. “We’ll be up half the night fixing things. If our friends don’t make a return visit,” he added. “Man’s best friend, they aren’t.”
They found the body in the morning as they began their trek once more. Derec nearly stumbled over it in the underbrush. “What the-” he began, then stopped.
“Oh, no,” Derec said breathlessly. “Please, no.”
“What is it, Master Derec?” Mandelbrot said, limping over.
Derec didn’t answer. He only stared.
The wolf-creature had evidently caught one of the stray darts Derec had fired the night before. Itwas a young one, a female who had evidently been watching the fight from the cover of the trees. She certainly had not been involved herself.
She couldn’t have, even if she’d wanted to. Lashed around her body with vines was a primitive travois built of trimmed sticks, a carrier. And in one hand, uselessly, she clenched a stone knife the chipped edges of which showed the mastery of a flint knapper.
“By any god you care to name…” Derec breathed. “Mandelbrot, you were right. The wolves-they’re sentient.”
Derec looked at the body, stricken. “And I killed one.”
Chapter 17. In The Hill Of Stars
She bayed a challenge to Central from the nearest hill, for no kin would go into battle with an equal without first warning them.
There was no answer. She hadn’t expected one.
Packing along the hills at the edge of the city, SilverSide watched for several minutes, paying careful attention to the movements of the nearest WalkingStones and listening to their voices in her head.
There were several types that seemed to roam freely through the streets. SilverSide left the heights and moved down from the trees to get a closer look at them. She ran quickly across the cleared area around the spreading city and into the shadows of the buildings. When one of the WalkingStones passed her hiding place, SilverSide quickly memorized its shape and walk; once it was gone, SilverSide willed her body to change once more, patterning herself after the WalkingStone. Her head became round and smooth; her body straightened and she stood upright, letting the markings of the kin disappear.
When it was done, she took the necklace of wires from her head and laid the token of her first victory on a ledge. She walked onto the hard stone walkways and eternal daylight of the city.
SilverSide watched and listened carefully for any sign of recognition or alarm in the first few WalkingStones she passed, but none of them paid her any attention at all. As she went deeper into the steel canyons of this place, the WalkingStones became more numerous. Soon SilverSide was moving in great crowds of them, of all manner of shapes and sizes. This was certainly not the forest, where a kin could-at need-wander for a day or more without seeing another of the kin. LifeCrier’s analogy, which had first sparked this idea in her, seemed more and more apt. These were krajal, hive-insects. They could not exist without each other. They had no individuality at all. They existed only to serve Central, and without Central they were nothing.
Their society seemed very wrong to SilverSide. Her decision now gave her no pause at all. It was right to destroy this place, despite the sophisticated technology it showed. It spoke of intelligence, yes, but of intelligence used in the wrong way. This was not logical, she decided. This was not the way of humans.
SilverSide continued on. The kin, she knew, would have been puzzled by the silence of the city: there were few noises at all beyond the hum of machinery and the sound of the WalkingStones’ passage. None of them spoke in what the kin would have considered an audible range. But SilverSide heard the racket of their thousands. She listened to the WalkingStones’ endless chatter in her head. Already she was missing the good smell of earth and foliage and the sounds of life. This was a dead place. This was a sterile and horrible place, and she was headed for the very heart of it.
The Hill of Stars. There, Central would be waiting for her. LifeCrier had said that the Hill of Stars was the first thing the WalkingStones had built. The krajal always built first a room for their queen.
The different species of WalkingStones all used different frequencies to communicate with Central-SilverSide knew that without understanding frequencies or bandwidths: each species resonated in a slightly different place in her head. Janet Anastasi had also built into her robot a primitive location device: SilverSide could listen to Central and know from which direction the transmission came.
It was easy enough to walk the streets and listen, tracking Central. None of the workers even questioned her right to be there; they ignored her, going about their own tasks.
Central was concerned about her, though. SilverSide heard a continuous stream of unanswered queries directed to the Hunters. As she approached the Hill of Stars itself, Central ordered a group of workers into the forest to seek the Hunters. SilverSide felt satisfaction at that, for it meant that Central either had no more Hunters to send or that it was not going to expend more of them until it understood what had happened. Either way, it meant that the other kin were relatively safe for the moment.