Foreigner

So he was here, because papa couldn’t be, and mama wouldn’t, without papa: the station and the Movement needed them where they were, if that lander was going to pass a council vote.

What the Guild reasoned now, he didn’t know. Or care. Thank God, hereafter the politics of the Movement, and who was in charge, and who led and who followed (being an administrator’s son, he’d heard all the arguments for and against his being down here, and suffered personally from some of them) and what steps were first and what their policy would be in dealing with the Guild—none of that was his problem anymore. He was down here to practice the science he’d become fascinated with at age eight… and realized when the Guild brats ridiculed him that he’d have no real chance of doing anything with it as a job.

But papa’s dream had been an of-course to him, even at eight… that was why he’d spoken out without thinking, of coursethey’d go to the world, of coursethey’d walk down there someday.

And now he did walk the planetary surface, now he did Lenoir’s work, hedid it, and for Lenoir’s reasons: all the collections, the taxonomies, the equivalencies that might let them extrapolate from the natural system in the data storage to deal with a living one. He was laying the foundation for a natural science of this world and a means of dealing with this world and protecting it from their own mistakes—because, dammit, they had to; sooner or later they had to be here. Lenoir was right—the world might have a higher life form already, and the world already and for thousands of years had surely had a name, in someone or something’s language—but humanity had come to this solar system without a choice, and it was equally inevitable that they deal with the world, before it was space-faring or after, because Maudette was not their choice, and they knew Maudette was not even the Guild’s choice—just a way to get the Guild’s worker-drones away from the only planet that gave them options. The world had become their hope and their way of securing their freedom and their identity, before they had ever set foot on it.

Until here he was, in a place generations had worked to reach, and, one way or the other, he wouldn’t be admitting defeat. He wouldn’t be going back Upstairs, rescued from starvation by some Guild ship.

And he damned sure wouldn’t be gathered up and transported to airless Maudette, on Guild terms.

Too late for that now, everlastingly too late.

Speaking of late…

It was Julio in the window, shadow against the light.

Shadow that ducked its head in a sudden sneeze.

III

« ^ »

Perhaps it was cowardice, Manadgi thought, that held him from going down to the valley. Perhaps it was prudence that argued, in the quiet he saw settle about the buildings as the sun set, that watching and thinking through the night might grant him some useful understanding.

One building had windows. Most did not. The size and the height of the windows was ambiguous with distance. He saw the isolated movements of living beings between the buildings, toward twilight, and occasionally after.

He saw the predating machines, prowling about the desolation they had made. None came near him, perhaps because he had settled himself well away from such tracks, which evidently it was the purpose of such machines to make, all about the area, a net of them, as if there were less intent to reach any specific place than to have as many routes as possible within the immediate sight of these buildings.

But did they need devastation on which to walk?

Or was there some purpose to this stripping of the land that made sense to moon-folk? They feared the approach of enemies, perhaps. Perhaps they wished to afford no cover to spies.

Perhaps they wished to demonstrate the devastation, or—one hated to imagine—found such destruction aesthetic.

He might walk up to the buildings as he had purposed and present himself to some authority. But aesthetic destruction… that thought gave him considerable pause.

A machine passed below his hiding-place, casting light as bright as the vanished sun along the rutted ground and over the grass along the edge of the devastation. It had no wheels, but linked plates on which it crawled. Its forepart was a claw, which it held rigid. It might be for digging or for stripping the ground. It might be a weapon.

Certainly one did not want to walk up to thatand ask its inclinations.

A beam of light hit the rocks and ran along the hill, and Manadgi held his breath, not daring to move. Someonesurely sat in mastery of that machine, he told himself, but there was something so disturbingly clockwork about the swing of those lights that watching it made his flesh crawl.

What, he asked himself, if they wereclockwork, such machines? What if the owners simply turned them loose to destroy, committing them to fortune and not caring what or whom they laid waste?

A spear of light stabbed backward from the clanking machine. Too close, Manadgi said to himself, and drew back from his position—then stopped cold as he saw the sheen of glass and smooth metal among the brush and the grass of the slope just below him.

An eye, he thought, a machine’s single eye thrust up through the grass, as yet not moving, perhaps not cognizant of him.

He had come here to make considerate approach. But not to this. Notto this. He held his breath, wondering if he dared move, or if it would move, or how long this eye had been there until the light from the machine showed it to him.

The area of brush where the clawed machine had disappeared was dark, now, and he sat in an awkward crouch, half ready to move away, doubting whether he dared, wondering if there was another such machine lurking with mechanical patience, or if such eyes might be threaded all through the grass and the rocks, and he had somehow blundered through them unseen. He trembled to think, considering that it was himself on whom the fortunes of greater people leaned, and that on his auspicious or inauspicious choice, on a sum of strange participants whose number he could not at all reckon, chance was delicately balanced, awaiting his decision one way or the other to tip events into motion, for good or for ill to the aiji, whose interests bound up many, many lives.

Clearly the moon-folk had no right intruding on Tachi land, within the aiji’s power. They had done damage in their arrogance and their power and challenged the people of the whole Earth—and it was on himto decide what to do, whether to risk this eye developing legs and ru

It had done neither, so far. Perhaps it was shut down. Perhaps it was not a whole machine, in itself, only a part from a damaged one. If they fell from the sky, perhaps a petal-sail had failed, and one had smashed itself on the rocks.

He could scarcely get his next breath, as he moved himself ever so silently backward and backward, straining his mortal eyes into the dark toward the eye and asking himself if the eye might have ears to hear the whisper of cloth or the drawing of his breaths or—it seemed possible to him—the hammering of his heart. But the eye sat in darkness, perhaps blind, perhaps asleep—or feigning it. Didclockwork things hear, or smell, or think?

Or how did they know to move? Did they turn on and off their own switches? That seemed impossible.

It stayed inert, at least. He gained his feet, moving with what stealth he could, uphill, encountering, at least, no other eyes in the grass.

He settled into a nook higher on the hill, there to tuck up among the yet unravaged rocks, to catch his breath and regain his composure.