“Boy?” he yelled into the mine.
For a long time there was no sound, then Charles felt a peculiar twitch, like the mountain had shrugged. The air itself contracted, and his ears popped.
He shook his head. Whatever else was going on, he could not be swayed.
“Boy?” he shouted again.
A voice came from far back in the mine. “Daddy?” it cried. “Is that you, Daddy?”
Small feet splashed through the mud, growing louder.
“I knew you’d come, Daddy,” the voice exclaimed, very close now.
Charles stood by the door out of sight, his hammer raised high, paused above him. When the boy stepped out, he would bring it down. Oh, yes he would. He would end it here.
And all would be right.
THE LAST AGE SHOULD KNOW YOUR HEART
Marvell checked his clock and power supply. Fourteen thousand years had passed, and the beach-ball sized maintenance machine had six minutes stored before he would have to enter sleep mode again. Other figures flicked through his engineered consciousness: two percent less of the twenty-seven hundred square miles of his photoelectric grid was active than had been there the last wake time, but most of the bad sectors were much farther than six minutes away. They showed as tiny black dots on the power grid’s smooth green representation in his display, almost all of them to his west. The sun’s energy output had reduced too, by .04 percent. His sensors displayed it as a dull red plain on the other side of the grid, filling half the sky, only a dozen miles above, its wrinkled, gassy surface sliding by at orbital velocity. If nothing else changed, he’d be out for seventeen thousand years, clinging to the sun-encircling grid, gradually storing energy, before waking again. Could he get to the nearest bad sector and at least repair it before shut down?
And where was ThreeAndrea?
At the cost of ten seconds of wakefulness, he powered up the locator. She was on the west edge of her grid, fifteen minutes away, inactive. Somewhat closer than she had been fourteen thousand years ago. What were the odds they would ever be awake at the same time? Sacrificing a few more seconds, he ran a diagnostic on her grid. Nearly the same rate of degradation.
He set course for the nearest bad sector to his east, uncoupled from the system, the copper crimps snapping open in unison, then released the pulse that would send him toward the repair. To conserve time, everything on him powered down, except his awareness, but that drew the most energy. He recited poetry during the drift, from billions of years earlier, his favorite works in a long dead language from a long dead species, whose connection to the Makers was lost in history. Had they once traded? Had there been interstellar commerce? Were the Makers their descendants who’d moved from sun to sun, carrying the poetry with them until it ended up here? There was no way to know. The authors were gone, their star not even a distant memory. Only the literature lasted, not the lengthy path it had taken to end up within him.
Marvell’s memory banks were extensive, and in the super cold on the grid’s shadow side, he only needed to expend a nanowatt to plumb his memory’s depths. “Had we but world enough, and time,” he thought, and he let the words cycle over and over. Then he threaded another line through it, “the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace.” Marvell had taken to mixing and matching his poetry, choosing favorite lines only, since there was hardly the luxury of the entire poem. Funny, to long for embracing, he thought.
He tried to remember if he’d dreamed. It seemed unreasonable that in fourteen thousand years of sleep he hadn’t dreamed, but he couldn’t come up with a single image in the silent time while he’d been shut down. He wouldn’t know the time had passed at all except his clock reminded him, and that in the blink the power grid had gained a few more black spots, but he felt it, hanging on him, like a heavy ebony blanket, the psychic time of the years passing while he clung beneath the grid, millions of years old, much closer to the end of his life than the beginning.
The timer told him he had arrived. Visuals brightened. Above him, the power grid glided past, a great, opaque sheet between him and the sun, capturing every stray radiation, converting it to electricity and storing it in his batteries, but now there was almost nothing to capture. The sun was only mildly warmer than the space around it. He slowed himself, unlimbered his arms. As always, links were broken in the fabric above. Time was cruel. The Makers had built the grid to last forever, and it had certainly outlasted them, but forever is an unreachable goal. His sensor-laden fingers found the ruptures, wove them together in automatic competence, measured their capacity.
If he could have shrugged, he would have. All the grid’s connections were thinning, breaking down, the essence of their mass sublimating slowly. He paused while his subtle intelligence did the calculations. Idly, as he waited, he scanned the system. On each corner of his orbiting fiefdom rose the old power transmitters that used to beam the gathered energy to the Makers’ planet beyond, but he’d long since lost contact with them. No heat from it. No light. There was no way to sense it, and there hadn’t been for millions of years. The towers remained, their mechanisms useless. He recited a bit of verse: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
The calculations finished. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” he thought. “Old time is still a-flying.” If he was lucky, he might wake up another three or four times. The race was between the sun reducing to so little output that the grid couldn’t convert it into electricity, or the grid itself failing utterly.
His arms folded back into his shell. The crimps reanchored. He wondered if ThreeAndrea would see that he’d moved closer to their shared border. Would she do the same calculations and come to the same conclusion. When was the last time he’d talked to her? There wasn’t time to access his records. Screens faded to black. Sensors powered down.
Just before his six minutes ended, he said to himself, “That age is best which is the first, when youth and blood are warmer; but being spent, the worse, and worst times still succeed the former.”
Seventeen thousand years, almost exactly, and he only had five minutes. More of the grid was down. As it had been for several of the last cycles, it was falling apart faster than he could repair it. His duty was clear. The bulk of bad sectors was to the west. The most efficient plan would be to head for the heaviest concentration and begin repairing there. Already he’d mapped out the best course. He could extend the grid’s life by thousands on thousands of years. The sun would go out eventually, but it was dying at a slower rate than the grid, and it was possible that it could flicker into renewed life, that deep inside, where the gravity-tortured physics became unlikely, the chain reactions could push themselves into momentary brightness. Not long-lived, for sure, but the sun could pulse. It had before, and if it did, the power would flow. He’d be able to stay alert indefinitely to completely repair the system.
His job was to outlast the dormant periods.
He scanned for ThreeAndrea. She was on the west edge of her grid, only four minutes away. She must have headed straight toward him during her last active period.
Oh, for the heady days when the sun glowed brightly and energy flowed in abundance! He never slept then, cruising along the grid’s protected side, making sure the towers beamed their power to the Maker’s planet safely below them. Then, a chain of grids encircled the star like a huge ribbon, and there were thousands of mechanisms like him, sentient, self-aware, independent machines devoted to repairing the inevitable breakdowns. He’d seen pictures of the sun as viewed from the Maker’s planet, a beautiful, bright light in the sky with a narrow stripe cut through its middle, the grid’s shadow. Now, as far as he could tell, ThreeAndrea and he were the only ones left, two small robots, mending their sections. Then they had power to spare, in constant communication, swapping poems, conversing about their jobs, about their lives. No one lives a limited life, he thought. Our lives are as important as any. He felt a longing to hold onto his, lonely as it was.