The lights flashed on. "Is this pain?"
"No." He shook his head and began to laugh, which set allof Anne's board lights to flickering.
"Define, define."
He forced calm. "That's laughing. You've heard laughing before now." A delay. "I find no record."
"But you heard it just then. Record it. That's pleasure, Anne." Facelights blinked. There were six now. "Recorded."
He patted her metal shoulder. She swiveled her head to regard his hand. "Do you feel that, Anne
?"
The face turned back to him. "Feel is in reference to humans."
"You can use the word. Do you feel that?"
"I feel a pressure of one point seven kilos. This does not affect my equilibrium." He patted her arm gently then, sadly. "That's all right. I didn't think it would."
"Are you still happy, Warren?"
He hesitated, having a moment's queasiness, a moment's chill. "Yes," he said. It seemed wisest to say.
4
He stopped on a small rise not far from the ship and the pseudosome went rigid at his side. They stood knee-deep in grass. A few fleecy clouds drifted in the sky. The forest stretched green and lush before them.
"Do you perceive any animate life, Anne?"
"Negative native animate life."
"Is there any record — of a world with vegetation of this sort, that had no animate life?"
"Negative. Further information: there is viral life here. This is not in my sensor range, but I have abundant data in my files regarding—"
"Cancel statement. Maybe this world was inhabited by something once and the virus killed it."
"I have no data on that proposal."
"No animals. Burlin said it."
"Define: it."
"Cancel." Warren adjusted his pack on his shoulders, pointed ahead, a gesture Anneunderstood.
"We'll walk as far as the river."
"Define: river."
"See where the trees—the large vegetation starts? There's water there. A river is a moving body of water on a planetary surface. You have maps in your files. You've got rivers on them. Why don't you know rivers?"
Anne's facial sensors winked. "Maps are in library storage. I don't have access to this data."
"Well, there's one there. A river."
"My sensors have recorded the presence of water in the original survey. Free water is abundant on this world."
Dutifully she kept pace with him, still talking as he started off, metal limbs tireless. He stopped from time to time, deviated this way and that, walked round the scattered few bushes, investigated bare spots in the grass, which proved only stony outcrops. Nothing. Nothing, in all his searching.
"Assistance?" Anneasked when he stopped.
"No, Anne." He looked back at her, hesitant. "Do you, Anne—ever perceive. . . any other human?"
"Negative. You are my only human."
He bit his lip, nerved himself, finally. "When I was in bed—did Sax ever come back?" The sensors blinked. "I find no record."
He found that ambiguous, tried to think a new way through the question. He looked toward the river, back again. "Has he ever come back?"
"I find no record."
Warren let go a small breath, shook his head. "He's not functioning. I'm sure of it."
"Recorded."
He hitched the pack, started walking again. "His body's out here somewhere."
"I find no record."
"I want to find him, Anne. Shouldn't have left him out here. He could have come back and needed me. And I couldn't answer. I want to find him. I owe him that."
"Recorded."
They came to the trees finally, to shade, in the straightest line from the ship, which seemed most worth searching. Trees. A small slope of eroded sand down to the river, which flowed about fifty meters wide, deep and sluggish. A stream, broad and brown.
He stopped, and Annedid. Drew a breath of the scented air, forgetful for the moment of Sax, of what had brought him. Here was beauty, unsuspected, a part of the world he had not seen from the ship— secrets underwater and growing round it, trees that relieved the sameness and made evershifting lattices that compressed distances into their back-and-forth tangle. No straight lines here. No scour of wind. Coolness. Complexity.
Life, perhaps, lurking in the river. One fish, one crawling thing, and the parameters of the world had to be revised. One fish. . . and it meant life everywhere.
"Stand where you are," he told Anne, starting down the bank. "I don't think swimming is in your program."
"Define: swimming. Ifind no record."
He laughed soundlessly, left her by the trees and walked through the pathless tangle to the shady bank. Trees with trailing, moss-hung branches arched out over the sluggish current. Flowers bloomed, white and starlike, on the far margin, where the trees grew larger still and it was twilight at midafternoon. He squatted down by the water and looked into the shallows where the current swirled mosses.
Annecame to life, motors whirring. Brush cracked. He sprang up, saw her coming down the slope, precariously balanced in the descent.
"Stop— Anne, stop."
Anneplanted her feet at the bottom, waistdeep in brush, lights flashing. "Warren, danger." Panic surged. He had brought no gun on this search. Did not trust himself. "Specify—danger."
"The river is dangerous."
The breath went out of him. He halfway laughed. "No, Verb: swim, to travel through water safely. I can swim, Anne. I'm safe. No danger."
"Please consider this carefully, Warren."
He grinned, took a vial from his sample kit and knelt, taking up a specimen of water. He had the whole of the labs to use; he had had the basics, and it was a project, something to do, something with promise, this time.
"I can't assist you in the water, Warren."
"I don't need assistance." He capped the vial and replaced it in the kit, wiped his fingers with a disinfectant towelette and stowed it. "I'll come back to you in a moment." She made small whirring sounds, cameras busy.
He stood up, turned to face her, waved a hand toward the bank. "Turn your sensors over there, far focus, will you? See if you can see anything."
"Vegetation. Trees."
"Yes." He put his hands into his pockets, stood staring into the forest a long time, watching the wind stir the leaves on the far bank.
So the world had a limit. Annedid. There. The ship had a raft, two of them; but curiosity was not worth the risk to the pseudosome. There were the other directions—flat and grassy; there was the land-crawler for crossing them.
But there was nothing in those distances but more grass and more distance. He shrugged, half a shiver, and turned his back on the river and the forest, climbed back to Anne
, pulled branches away from her silvery body and held them out of her way.
"Come on. Let's go home."
"Yes, Warren." She swiveled smartly and reoriented, cracking branches with each metal tread, followed him through the tangle until they had come out of the brush again, walking side by side toward the plain, toward the ship.
No sign of Sax. It was useless. Sax would have drowned in the river if his fever had carried him this way; drowned and been swept out to some brush heap elsewhere. Or seaward.