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alive, and I'll show you how to run the craft."
With care against overloads and voltage surges, the twin reactors might last
two years. "Likely longer than we will," Brong murmured. The sterilamps on
their flexing booms must be kept burning against the armor, the filter system
kept intact, the air pressure positive.
"Watch for rocks that could scratch us," he muttered. "Rocks on the ground or
out of the air the dragon bats dive-bomb intruders. Watch for mud rust can
start under it. Watch for your life!"
They dropped at last into a great U-shaped canyon carved by old glaciers, its
rust-mottled walls plunging up so far that even the starship was hidden. On a
level stretch of ice, Brong let him take the wheel.
Afraid at first that the heavy machine might lurch, in spite of him, into some
deadly rock, he soon learned to enjoy its immense responsive power. He was
almost sorry when Brong took over again to climb a long boulder-strewn
moraine. Before they reached its summit, the holocom began chirping for
attention.
"Take it, Crewman." Brong gestured at the tank. "Not that I look for good
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news."
Keth lit the tank and shrank from the blindly smiling image of a humanoid.
"At your service, Keth Kyrone," it lilted. "We advise you and your companions
to abandon your irrational attempt to evade our care. We urge you to wait
where you are until we can overtake you and escort you back to safety."
"We've seen your service, and we refuse it."
"But, sir, you cannot do that." Its sweet tones rose in mild protest. "Each
one of you has gamed forbidden knowledge or abetted forbidden behavior. You
will each, therefore, require our most attentive service so long as you
survive."
"You'll have to catch us first!"
"We can do that, sir," it assured him brightly. "We are following in three
vehicles which we have modified to double their power. We advise you most
urgently to stop and wait. Attempting to continue your reckless adventure, you
can only destroy your own vehicle and lose your lives.
"In obedience to our wise Prime Directive "
Brong's gold hand slashed at the switch, and the black image vanished.
"Let's not have the devils homing on our signal."
Beyond the moraine, they dived into that featureless fog. The world shrank
around them. A luminous blue in their lamps, the fog was blinding. Dark rock
masses loomed out of it, just meters ahead.
Reducing speed, Brong steered between dim greenish shad- ows that came and
went on the hooded screen of the sonar-scope. Keth found comfort in the cover
of the fog, but only for a moment. Nothing could blind the sightless
humanoids.
Vythle came down from the turret to look after Vorn. When he grudgingly
admitted his pain, she found supplies in an aid locker and changed the
dressing on his eyes. She wanted him to go back to a berth, but he sat
stubbornly at the signal station, silently brooding.
Keth explored the galley and heated food. Though Vythle tried to feed Vorn, he
would eat nothing. Brong took a few bites from the tray Keth brought, his gold
fingers nimble with fork and cup, his dead face intent on the screen's
greenish glow. The ventilators sighed. Transmission gears whined. The whole
craft quivered now and then to a muffled crunch of stone beneath the tracks.
Keth began to feel the fog would last forever.
"Machines!" Vorn muttered suddenly, perhaps to himself. "I always loved them.
A lovely little toy heat engine, on my fourth birthday. My first holoscope,
programmed with odes about the old heroes saving their cities back in the
Black Centuries. The private jet the fleet assigned us when I married. The
Vorn reactors, when I took charge of them, pouring out the power that made us
great. Our space machines. Even these golden sani-craft when I got to the
Zone, and all the linked equipment defending the perimeter. But now "
Keth heard his teeth grate.
"Humanoid machines!"
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37
Life A transient early stage in the evolution of mind.
Later, after Vythle had gone back to her berth, the blind Admiral spoke of
them.
"Misfits, both of us. I hated Greenpeak and the Academy. Silly rules and
stupid teachers. Discipline that killed everything alive. I hated most of the
Vorns I knew proud fools ruled by stale tradition, repeating history's dusty
blunders. I hated society the abject worship of status and money and power.
Even hated my wife, for loving all that."
He sat defiantly straight, empty hands flat on the signal board,
white-bandaged head flung back as if trying to see.
"So I came to Malili. Found most of what I wanted here in the Zone. A place
where rules were made to break, and guts meant more than names. And Vythle "
He sat a moment silent.
"I think the name's her own invention. Born down in the bilges where my wife
would have held her nose. Learned a game where you had to break the rules to
stay alive. Scratched her way to shipfolk status and the Navarch's staff. My
own sort of misfit; I knew her in a second when we met. We've had fine years
together. But now . . ."
His heavy body caved down upon the signal board.
"Now the humanoids are playing by their own mad rules."
He lay there silent, until Keth thought emotion had overcome him.
"History!" His slow voice rumbled again, more thoughtful than bitter. "Look at
man's history. A symbiosis, an ecologist might call it; bonds between machines
and men. Links with the axe and the reactor. The counting stick and the
computer. The raft and the starship. We took a million years to build the
humanoids the best machine of all!"
His chuckle was a hollow rattle that may have been a sob. A little later,
yielding stubbornly to fatigue and pain, he asked Keth to help him back to his
berth. At Brong's command, Keth went to his own. He lay down unwillingly,
expecting the lurching of the craft and the strain of the chase to keep him on
edge, but suddenly Vythle was shaking him awake. It was tune for them to
drive.
That tiny blue-lit fog-world still shut them in. He took the wheel, picking
their path among the shadowy masses on the sonar screen, while she ran the
inertia tracker and traced their path across the chart. Her quiet skill
surprised him.
"I think we've made it!" His spirits had risen. "If we ever get below the fog,
we'll surely meet the Leleyo "
"Nothing they can do." Her flat matter-of-factness astonished him again. "Our
world now is this machine. We die when it does." Smiling faintly in the
greenish glow of the screen, she looked cool and sure and lovely. "A fact you
have to take. After all, it's what we bargained for. All you had better
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expect."
She studied him, nodding gravely.
"The Bosun, of course, can hope for more. If he turns out to be immune."
Brong was driving again when they came down through the ceiling of cloud. Snow
and ice were gone. Though the somber greens and blues of rust still stained
the rocks around them, scarlet firegrass splashed a level meadow ahead, and
the lower hills that fell away beyond were yellow and gold, hazed blue beneath
the denser air.
Vythle climbed back into the fighting turret, and Keth took another driving
lesson. To his surprise, Brong seemed to be seeking out hazards, skirting the
lip of a cliff above a foaming river, sliding across a dangerous talus,
jolting needlessly around the rocky rim of another inviting firegrass glade.
"Trying to hide our trail?"
"Or set a trap." Brong had pushed up his goggles to scowl at the maptank.
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