"Ask it," I said impatiently, because I was running out of patience with Harry.
"The question is this: Why did we bring our lander to the surface of this object? Why did we not remain in orbit and conduct our explorations from there?"
Harry's jaw dropped. "Hey, Markie, he's right," he said irritably. "We'd be able to see a lot more from orbit, wouldn't we?"
And of course we would. I realized that right away.
I hesitated before I spoke, unsure of what to say. I didn't say, "The flight plan wasn't mine," although that was true. I didn't even say, "I was not consulted about it," although that was true, too. I only said, "You are correct," and left it at that, and began powering up the lander for the return to orbit.
That was the second time in my existence someone else had been right and I wrong. I liked it even less than the first.
V
A lander's default program is to take off in the direction of the planet's rotation. I saw no reason to override it, so we kept going eastward, dispatching an exploration pattern out over the easterly parts that had been hidden from us. It was dark to the east now, but that made no difference to our sensors. Or to Harry. At each new site we checked his responses were the same. "No. Nope. No, nothing looks familiar here, Markie. No."
Harry's endless negatives got old fast, because I saw no end to them in reasonable time.
Let me define what I mean by "reasonable time." Our spacecraft was in a hundred-minute orbit, which meant that was how long it would take us to scan the entire planet. So we were condemned to go on doing that job, with all its unbearable tedium, for all those wholly unreasonable six million milliseconds.
Harry found it all almost as boring as I did. That had a small benefit, because he relieved tedium the way he always did, by eating, and so I had some distraction in cooking some particularly ornate dishes for him. Some of them were fairly fancy—a soufflé with true balsamic vinegar, the poisonous Japanese puffer fish they call torafugu, desserts that required more artistry than I usually wasted on Harry. A sea battle, for instance. Maybe it was Trafalgar—I didn't bother with historical accuracy, since Harry would never know the difference. I created spun-sugar wave tops on a lime-custard sea, with white-chocolate sailors firing marzipan cannon out of gingerbread ships with marshmallow sails. Harry watched the construction interestedly enough, but when I told him it was done he took no time at all to swallow the whole thing. Then he said, fairly politely, "Hey, Markie, enough with the sweet stuff, all right? How about a nice roast beef?"
"Sure," I said and set about making it. A proper roast presents challenges. I aimed for perfection, from the red-rare middle of the meat to the crispy charred fat at the edges, with particular care for the Maillard reactions. They're what give the meat its perfect taste; the big molecules break up into the tiny, good-tasting ones at about 413 kelvins; a few kelvins too many and there's charcoal mixed in with the fat, a few too few and you don't bring out all the taste. I did it just right this time. Harry thought so too, because he grunted approvingly.
Then something happened.
We were across the ocean and coming into the daylight side again. Harry pushed the last forkful of beef aside and said, with genuine interest, "Markie, do you see what's out there?'
Of course I did, in a literal sense. What I didn't see was why the spectacle of the sun appearing before us was worth commenting on. "It's a sunrise, Markie!" he said. "It's the first one I've seen in forever. Can't you see how beautiful it is?"
The truth was that I couldn't. I have no systems for the recognition of visual beauty unless it relates to the presentation of food. I could easily identify all the colors involved, which ranged from the pale pink of sweetbreads before they are poached to the deep crimson of a boiled lobster shell, but those were nothing more than the natural frequencies of visible light that has been refracted through water droplets of the appropriate sizes, in the appropriate position relative to the sun. What was special enough about that to make Harry ignore his food I could not say.
Then he made a noise I had never heard from him before. He jumped to his feet, knocking his table over and spilling everything on the floor. He was pointing toward the horizon with the hand that held a fork. He cried, "Look there! It's where we lived, Markie! Come on, I'm going down to take a look."
I automatically erased the mess he had made as I saw what he was looking at. To be honest, the prospect did not excite me nearly as much as it did Harry, but as he was projecting himself to the surface I followed.
I would have identified the place at once, without any help from Harry, because as soon as we were down I could see the hulk of an old, abandoned lander from a Five resting at the edge of a swamp. The wreck was almost overgrown by rushes, but it definitely was nothing that had grown there naturally. The ground rose steeply away from the marshland to a group of rocky hills, and Harry pointed out a ledge with an opening below it: "That's where we mostly lived! That cave! And look over there— that's the blind we made to catch bugs in the cold weather." He was pointing to what was left of a sort of tepee of rushes, just where the muddy swamp margin began to turn into dark, sludgy open water. "We'd climb into the blind just before daylight," he was telling me excitedly. "Then when the bugs came out to feed we'd jump them. Had to have the blind, though. They were pretty antsy. If we tried to come at them from the shore they'd be gone before we were within five meters of them. And all up along the hillside—see?—are the trees with the leaves we could eat. And you can't see them from here, but under the tree branches there were things like mushrooms, and—"
And so on and on.
I am not lacking in friendship for Harry. It is part of my programming to be obliging, when feasible, to persons, machine-stored or otherwise. So I allow Harry to use up much of my time and even some of my skills without complaint. But our spacecraft was orbiting more than three degrees of longitude every minute. True, a minute is a very long time to us, but there was also very much to investigate in an entire planet. Harry didn't want to leave. "We could land, Markie," he said. "Why not? Hey, be reasonable, okay? We can check the rest of this Arabella dump out any time, for God's sake!"
I didn't say anything to that. I just didn't do anything, and since I was the one with the override for the lander I just kept on in orbit, while Harry sulked.
Maybe he would have kept on sulking for all those interminable six thousand seconds that a single orbit would take, except that then we did see something down in a valley that didn't belong there.
More than anything else, it looked like some crumbling old castle out of Earth's organic history, big enough for a Caesar, surrounded by gardens grandiose enough for a French king, next to a patch of greenery, perfectly round, not much more than a kilometer across. And in the middle of it was a perfectly round pond.
My first thought was that maybe the Kugels hadn't destroyed every trace of that old culture they had killed off. It only took a moment for me to see that that couldn't have been the way it was.
It was a castle, all right, and it wasn't old at all. It just looked that way. Then it showed us pretty conclusively that it was quite up to date in important ways. A pair of what had looked like fruit trellises pulled back from where they had seemed to grow right out of the roof. They hadn't. When they moved away, they revealed shiny metallic things that were definitely not a bit old. Even more definitely, they were traversing toward our orbiting lander. Most definitely of all, they were particle-beam weapons very like the ones that Thor Hammerhurler kept poised for any possible problem with the Kugelblitz.