“I’ve got it, quite, young lord.” Gothon made the collar closure. “I’ve been handling these things longer than—”
Explosion thumped somewhere away. Gothon looked up. All motion stopped. And the air-rush died in the ducts.
“The oxygen system—” Bothogi exclaimed. “O damn them—!”
“We have,” said Desan coldly. He made no haste. Each final fitting of the suit he made with care. Suit-drill; example to the young: The lord-navigator, youngsters, demonstrates his skill. Pay attention. “And we’ve just had our answer from the lords-magistrate. We need to get to that AI and shut it down. Let’s have no panic here. Assume that my shuttle has cleared atmosphere—”
—well above the gray clouds, the horror of the surface. Silver needle aimed at the heart of the lords-magistrate.
Alert, alert, it would shriek, alert, alert, alert—With its transmission relying on no satellites, with its message shoved out in one high-powered bow-wave. Crew on the world is in danger. And, code that no lord-navigator had ever hoped to transmit, a series of numbers in syntaxical link: Treachery; the lords-magistrate are traitors; aid and rescue—Alert, alert, alert—
—anguished scream from a world of dust; a place of skulls; the grave of the search.
Treachery, alert, alert, alert!
Desan was not a violent man; he had never thought of himself as violent. He was a searcher, a man with a quest.
He knew nothing of certainty. He believed a woman a quarter of a million years old, because—because Gothon was Gothon. He cried traitor and let loose havoc all the while knowing that here might be the traitor, this gentle-eyed woman, this collector of skulls.
O Gothon, he would ask if he dared, which of you is false? To force the lords-magistrate to strike with violence enough to damn them—Is that what you wish? Against a quarter million years of unabated life—what are my five incarnations: mere genetic congruency, without memory. I am helpless to know your perspectives.
Have you planned this a thousand years, ten thousand?
Do you stand in this place and think in the mind of creatures dead longer even than you have lived? Do you hold their skulls and think their thoughts?
Was it purpose eight million years ago?
Was it, is it—horror upon horror—a mistake on both sides?
“Lord Desan,” said Bothogi, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Lord Desan, we have a master key. We have weapons. We’re waiting, Lord Desan.”
Above them the holocaust.
IT WAS ONLY a service robot. It had never known its termination. Not like the base AI, in the director’s office, which had fought them with locked doors and release of atmosphere, to the misfortune of the director—
“Tragedy, tragedy,” said Bothogi, standing by the small dented corpse, there on the ocher sand before the buildings. Smoke rolled up from a sabotaged lifesupport plant to the right of the domes—the world’s air had rolled outward and inward and mingled with the breaching of the central dome—the AI transport’s initial act of sabotage, ramming the plastic walls. “Microorganisms let loose on this world—the fools, the arrogant fools!”
It was not the microorganisms Desan feared. It was the AI eight-wheeled transport, maneuvering itself for another attack on the cold-sleep facilities. Prudent to have set themselves inside a locked room with the rest of the scientists and hope for rescue from offworld; but the AI would batter itself against the plastic walls, and living targets kept it distracted from the sleeping, helpless clones—Gothon’s juniormost; Bothogi’s; those of a dozen senior staffers.
And keeping it distracted became more and more difficult.
Hour upon hour they had evaded its rushes, clumsy attacks and retreats in their encumbering suits. They had done it damage where they could while staff struggled to come up with something that might slow it . . . it limped along now with a great lot of metal wire wrapped around its rearmost right wheel.
“Damn!” cried a young biologist as it maneuvered for her position. It was the agile young who played this game; and one aging lord-navigator who was the only fighter in the lot.
Dodge, dodge and dodge. “It’s going to catch you against the oxy-plant, youngster! This way!” Desan’s heart thudded as the young woman thumped along in the cumbersome suit in a losing race with the transport. “Oh, damn, it’s got it figured! Bothogi!”
Desan grasped his probe-spear and jogged on—“Divert it!” he yelled. Diverting it was all they could hope for.
It turned their way, a whine of the motor, a serpentine flex of its metal body and a flurry of sand from its eight-wheeled drive. “Run, lord!” Bothogi gasped beside him; and it was still turning—it aimed for them now, and at another tangent a white-suited figure hurled a rock, to distract it yet again.
It kept coming at them. AI. An eight-wheeled, flex-bodied intelligence that had suddenly decided its behavior was not working and altered the program, refusing distraction. A pressure-windowed juggernaut tracking every turn they made.
Closer and closer. “Sensors!” Desan cried, turning on the slick dust—his footing failed him and he caught himself, gripped the probe and aimed it straight at the sensor array clustered beneath the front window.
Thum-p! The dusty sky went blue and he was on his back, skidding in the sand with the great ballon tires churning sand on either side of him.
The suit, he thought with a spaceman’s horror of the abrading, while it dawned on him at the same time he was being dragged beneath the AI, and that every joint and nerve center was throbbing with the high voltage shock of the probe.
Things became very peaceful then, a cessation of commotion. He lay dazed, staring up at a rusty blue sky, and seeing it laced with a silver thread.
They’re coming, he thought, and thought of his eldest clone, sleeping at a well-educated twenty years of age. Handsome lad. He talked to the boy from time to time.
Poor lad, the lordship is yours. Your predecessor was a fool—
A shadow passed above his face. It was another suited face peering down into his. A weight rested on his chest.
“Get off,” he said.
“He’s alive!” Bothogi’s voice cried. “Dr. Gothon, he’s still alive!”
THE WORLD SHOWED no more scars than it had at the beginning—red and ocher where clouds failed. The algae continued its struggle in sea and tidal pools and lakes and rivers—with whatever microscopic addenda the breached dome had let loose in the world. The insects and the worms continued their blind ascent to space, dominant life on this poor, cratered globe. The research station was in function again, repairs complete.
Desan gazed on the world from his ship: It hung as a sphere in the holotank by his command station. A wave of his hand might show him the darkness of space; the floodlit shapes of ten hunting ships, lately returned from the deep and about to seek it again in continuation of the Mission, sleek fish rising and sinking again in a figurative black sea. A good many suns had shone on their hulls, but this one sun had seen them more often than any since their launching.
Home.
The space station was returning to function. Corpses were consigned to the sun the Mission had sought for so long. And power over the Mission rested solely at present in the hands of the lord-navigator, in the unprecedented circumstance of the demise of all five lords-magistrate simultaneously. Their clones were not yet activated to begin their years of majority—“Later will be time to wake the new lords-magistrate,” Desan decreed, “at some further world of the search. Let them hear this event as history.”