Deft enough—he flicked, sucked, and tossed the shell away in under three seconds—but that couldn’t be much more than a morsel of meat. A lot of work for very small return.
He was bony as well as ragged, and small for a human. Perhaps young.
She thought he’d ask what shipwreck, and she would gesture vaguely over the bay, where the city had been, and say there were many. But he surprised her.
“Whatcha gonna do with them?” He wiped his mouth on a sandy paw, the broken knife projecting carelessly from the bottom of his fist.
“When I get enough, I’m going to make necklaces.” She spotted something under a tangle of the algae called dead man’s fingers, a glint of light, and began the laborious process of lowering herself to reach it, compensating by math for her malfunctioning gyroscopes.
The presumed-child watched avidly. “Nuh uh,” he said. “You can’t make a necklace outta that.”
“Why not?” She levered herself another decimeter down, balancing against the weight of her fused limb. She did not care to fall.
“I seed what you pick up. They’s all different.”
“So?” she asked, and managed another few centimeters. Her hydraulics whined. Someday, those hydraulics or her fuel cells would fail and she’d be stuck this way, a statue corroded by salt air and the sea, and the tide would roll in and roll over her. Her carapace was cracked, no longer water-tight.
“They’s not all beads.”
Her manipulator brushed aside the dead man’s fingers. She uncovered the treasure, a bit of blue-gray stone carved in the shape of a fat, merry man. It had no holes. Chalcedony balanced herself back upright and turned the figurine in the light. The stone was structurally sound.
She extruded a hair-fine diamond-tipped drill from the opposite manipulator and drilled a hole through the figurine, top to bottom. Then she threaded him on a twist of wire, looped the ends, work-hardened the loops, and added him to the garland of beads swinging against her disfigured chassis.
“So?”
The presumed-child brushed the little Buddha with his fingertip, setting it swinging against shattered ceramic plate. She levered herself up again, out of his reach. “I’s Belvedere,” he said.
“Hello,” Chalcedony said. “I’m Chalcedony.”
By sunset when the tide was lowest he scampered chattering in her wake, darting between flocking gulls to scoop up coquinas-by-the-fistful, which he rinsed in the surf before devouring raw. Chalcedony more or less ignored him as she activated her floods, concentrating their radiance along the tideline.
A few dragging steps later, another treasure caught her eye. It was a twist of chain with a few bright beads caught on it—glass, with scraps of gold and silver foil imbedded in their twists. Chalcedony initiated the laborious process of retrieval—
Only to halt as Belvedere jumped in front of her, grabbed the chain in a grubby broken-nailed hand, and snatched it up. Chalcedony locked in position, nearly overbalancing. She was about to reach out to snatch the treasure away from the child and knock him into the sea when he rose up on tiptoe and held it out to her, straining over his head. The flood lights cast his shadow black on the sand, illumined each thread of his hair and eyebrows in stark relief.
“It’s easier if I get that for you,” he said, as her fine manipulator closed tenderly on the tip of the chain.
She lifted the treasure to examine it in the floods. A good long segment, seven centimeters, four jewel-toned shiny beads. Her head creaked when she raised it, corrosion showering from the joints.
She hooked the chain onto the netting wrapped around her carapace. “Give me your bag,” she said.
Belvedere’s hand went to the soggy net full of raw bivalves dripping down his naked leg. “My bag?”
“Give it to me.” Chalcedony drew herself up, akilter because of the ruined limb but still two and a half meters taller than the child. She extended a manipulator, and from some disused file dredged up a protocol for dealing with civilian humans. “Please.”
He fumbled at the knot with rubbery fingers, tugged it loose from his rope belt, and held it out to her. She snagged it on a manipulator and brought it up. A sample revealed that the weave was cotton rather than nylon, so she folded it in her two larger manipulators and gave the contents a low-wattage microwave pulse.
She shouldn’t. It was a drain on her power cells, which she had no means to recharge, and she had a task to complete.
She shouldn’t—but she did.
Steam rose from her claws and the coquinas popped open, roasting in their own juices and the moisture of the seaweed with which he’d lined the net. Carefully, she swung the bag back to him, trying to preserve the fluids.
“Caution,” she urged. “It’s hot.”
He took the bag gingerly and flopped down to sit crosslegged at her feet. When he tugged back the seaweed, the coquinas lay like tiny jewels—pale orange, rose, yellow, green and blue—in their nest of glass-green Ulva, sea lettuce. He tasted one cautiously, and then began to slurp with great abandon, discarding shells in every direction.
“Eat the algae, too,” Chalcedony told him. “It is rich in important nutrients.”
When the tide came in, Chalcedony retreated up the beach like a great hunched crab with five legs amputated. She was beetle-backed under the moonlight, her treasures swinging and rustling on her netting, clicking one another like stones shivered in a palm.
The child followed.
“You should sleep,” Chalcedony said, as Belvedere settled beside her on the high, dry crescent of beach under towering mud cliffs, where the waves wouldn’t lap.
He didn’t answer, and her voice fuzzed and furred before clearing when she spoke again. “You should climb up off the beach. The cliffs are unstable. It is not safe beneath them.”
Belvedere hunkered closer, lower lip protruding. “You stay down here.”
“I have armor. And I cannot climb.” She thumped her fused leg on the sand, rocking her body forward and back on the two good legs to manage it.
“But your armor’s broke.”
“That doesn’t matter. You must climb.” She picked Belvedere up with both grabs and raised him over her head. He shrieked; at first she feared she’d damaged him, but the cries resolved into laughter before she set him down on a slanted ledge that would bring him to the top of the cliff.
She lit it with her floods. “Climb,” she said, and he climbed.
And returned in the morning.
Belvedere stayed ragged, but with Chalcedony’s help he waxed plumper. She snared and roasted seabirds for him, taught him how to construct and maintain fires, and ransacked her extensive databases for hints on how to keep him healthy as he grew—sometimes almost visibly, fractions of a millimeter a day. She researched and analyzed sea vegetables and hectored him into eating them, and he helped her reclaim treasures her manipulators could not otherwise grasp. Some shipwreck beads were hot, and made Chalcedony’s radiation detectors tick over. They were no threat to her, but for the first time she discarded them. She had a human ally; her program demanded she sustain him in health.
She told him stories. Her library was vast—and full of war stories and stories about sailing ships and starships, which he liked best for some inexplicable reason. Catharsis, she thought, and told him again of Roland, and King Arthur, and Honor Harrington, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and Horatio Hornblower and Captain Jack Aubrey. She projected the words on a monitor as she recited them, and—faster than she would have imagined—he began to mouth them along with her.