Toby sniffed. “Knowing techtricks is same as breathing, to Bishops.”
“True enough, down on the planets. The second-wave ‘Earthers,’ as you call them, they were important, mind. My wife, Nikka, used to say our problems were vast—and Earthers brought us plenty of half-vast solutions.”
Toby wasn’t used to this man’s deadpan way of making jokes. Bishops were more the thigh-slapper type. “Brit breed, you are,” he said reluctantly. No geezer was going to put one over on him, but something finally made him believe Walmsley was from Earth. Maybe it was the fact that Walmsley didn’t seem to care very much whether he did or not.
“The second wave boosted our numbers—which the mechs were always trimming, shall we say.”
“Even then?”
“Always and forever. A few interludes of cooperation, but we were tolerated at best. For a while, we could move fairly freely near True Center. They swatted us when they noticed us. We had plenty of help from the Old Ones, time to time. Capricious, but crucial.”
“Old Ones?”
“They were a form of intelligence descended from clay.”
“Clay? From dirt?”
“Electrostatic energy storage, in clay beds with saline solutions—on old seashores, I gather.”
Now Toby was annoyed. “You being from Earth, I can maybe believe that, but living dirt? You must think—”
“They came first of all. Have a squint.”
A three-dimensional plot shimmered in Toby’s sensorium. He sectioned it to read in 2D, which collapsed the nuances into a simple diagram. “Complexity?”
“The specialists term it ‘structure complexity.’ Clays built up complicated lattices that could replicate themselves. Harvested piezoelectrical currents, driven by pressures in crystals. Later on, they allowed algae to capture sunlight. They drew off the energy, rather like farmers.”
Toby had not the slightest idea how to take all this in. “So . . . dirt life, that’s the Old Ones?”
“Combined with magnetic structures, yes. Bit hard to describe, that ancient wedding. All long ago, of course.”
Toby gazed at the immense eras represented by simple lines, biological beings coming after the clays, intersecting the “magnetics kingdom,” and then mystifying lines labeled “Earth biologicals.” Of “memes” and “kenes” he knew nothing. From the time axis he guessed that all this had started over twelve billion years ago, when—what? the whole universe?—began.
Shaken by the implications of the simple diagram, he did not venture into the other dimensions, which expanded this simple 2D along axes of “fitness” and “pattern depth” and “netplex” and other terms he could not even read. Better get back to something simple.
“Then . . . how’d you get here in the first place?”
“Stole a ship, actually. Mech, fast cruiser.”
Toby had never heard of anyone doing something so audacious. It had been hard enough for the Bishops to use an old human craft, Argo. “Stole it? And just walked into True Center, easy as you please?”
“Umm, not quite.” Walmsley’s eyes were far away. “See, this is how it was.”
TWO
The Place of Angry Gods
You’ve got to remember, first, that we were limping along in an outdated mech ship. Dead slow, compared to what’s zipping around here now. A ramscoop, big blue-white tail dead straight, scratched across space.
Far better than our Earth ship had been, the knocked-together old Lancer. Bravely named, it was, but venturing out into the nearby stars that way was like Indians trying to explore Europe using birch bark canoes. The wrong way round, historically and technically.
Y’see, the mechs had explored us pretty well. They’d been in the solar system a long time ago, millions of years back. Some earlier, carbon-based life had fought a battle near Earth, against mechs. Presumably defending Earth when the primates were still sharpening their wits, edging up on being Homo sap.
They left a crashed starship on the moon. That’s how we knew this conflict had been going long before us. My wife, Nikka, was in on that. I came along later. Ancient history.
We went out together in the first human starship, Lancer. Got hammered by mechs. Barely survived.
Then we got lucky, stole a mech ship.
—Ah! Blithe understatement, quite Brit. In truth, there were two cowed alien species huddling beneath the ice of that world. Beings who could see electromagnetically in the microwave region. Turned out they’d been the cause of a wreck we’d found on our own moon, one I’d picked through, been changed by. I wanted so much to know what they were, how they thought.
But there were others, too. Whalelike things that glided serenely through murky depths, warmed by a radioactive core they had assembled in the moon’s core.
All immensely strange, yet all allies against the mech Watcher that loomed above. Together, two alien kind plus the constantly chattering chimpanzees, they attacked the Watcher and captured it. Sounds so easy now . . .
Um? Oh, sorry, must’ve let the mind wander. The mech ship?
Outfitted it with our gear, the life support equipment—anything that survived after the mechs tore into Lancer. Hard work.
Bravo. What next?
There we sat, a scrawny distance out from our home star. Lots of the crew—the surviving crew, rather—wanted to head home.
I saw no point. I was old enough by then to have very little left to lose. And little invested in grand old Earth, either—no children, or even close relatives.
But we knew Earth had already been attacked by mechs. Used a clever weapon, fishlike aliens dumped into our seas. Should we go back to help?
