Time collapsed for him. He felt a muscular sliding energy in his shoulders as he spun, lofting away his pack and snatching forth his tool kit.
The thing was plainly mech, crackling on the electromagnetic spectrum in Nigel’s ears, a sound like bacon frying on a chilly morning in England long ago—
—as Nigel’s hand went for his laser cutter and Nikka had just caught sight of it, her mouth agape, surprise in the inky shadows—
He launched himself on a leap lap to intersect the thing, as it rappelled somehow off a shiny steel bulkhead—
—He felt the mathematics of it in him, geometry as limpid as the fresh continent of Euclidean joy he had entered as a boy, sitting with fingers tucked under his legs as he studied at dawn in his chilly bedroom, keeping hands warm by turning the pages with his tongue—
—static buzz from it—
The snake-mech flexed itself and turned away from him. Headed for Nikka.
—distilling order from life’s rough jumble, that was what he had always hungered for, hyperbolic grace, to merge cleanly with life, not split the world into subject and object, no observer/observed, his arm bringing the laser cutter around smoothly, circular arc,
. . . so
slow . . .
atoms in concert, the old dim dualities of mind and matter lapping against the fragile yet inexorable momentum of this instant—
She was faster than he. She shot at it.
The pulse shimmered an instant in the mottled blue surface of the thing, like an argument conducted on its skin. Then the pulse skittered off, reflected. Nigel shot at it too and the thing forked away, split, was somehow two slippery helices now.
—so was it some odd visual pun?—this vision into helices, mimicking the key to organic life, DNA pairs spiraling off, the flag of life unfurling in a vacuum wind that rushed from a shadowed passage. A sliver of meaning, he felt it, seven blind men and a melting elephant, all describing, none understanding. His lungs whooshed dry air—
—enameled, spraying glow from the uncoiling thing—
It flexed again. Lashed out with a spiky electromagnetic lance. The shot hovered in vacuum, a discharge of reluctant electrons, spitting angry red radiation. Then it split.
One shaft struck Nikka. It burst across her in worms of acrid yellow. She went limp.
Go to ground. Nigel touched the steel bulkhead an instant before the lance reached him. He felt a jolt of megavolts.
—corroding through him, kiloamps rising. His shell clicked home and then he was inside the suddenly conducting surface of his skinsuit, the rub and stretch of potentials racing along a millimeter away from prickly hairs on his shivering flesh, breathing and being breathed, surges passing by, electromagnetic kiss, inductances fighting the ramping current, forcing jabbing current slivers through his shoulders and licking into his arm, the light touch of his hand enough to draw uncountable speedy electrons to seek another prey, all at frequencies he could not glimpse but the information sliding into him through portals he could never know, below perception a shaved second of intuition—
Before the rattling voltages had spoken their piece he fetched forth the punch gun with his left hand. Muscles clenched and he had to force his fingers to—
It snaked toward him. Nikka floated inert.
Nigel kicked away from the bulkhead, though that meant losing his electrical grounding. There might be a few seconds before the mech recharged.
—springing with the kickoff came feelings and desires forking like summer lightning across the inner unmoving vault of him, part of himself eating them as they flared across his mind, seeing them for what they were, messages from a fraction of himself finding a place absolutely blank and waiting for each moment to write upon it, time like water washing away the eruptions, scattershot angers and cutting fears far down in him—
He drove the punch gun ahead. Fired with great relish into the mech.
It was quick, a thing of bunched electrical energies, but the crude and rude sometimes worked.
—zig when they zag, leaving no opening he fires the laser cutter too, his right hand tracking the other aspect of the split mech, yin and yang, supple but not crude enough to deal with the sweaty urgencies of organic life-forms, the Darwinnowing of mech evolution selecting it for special tasks, narrowing it like a knife by perpetually sharpening, but to get an edge on a blade you had to subtract from it, and the loss was framed in the space of a single heartbeat as the dutiful stubby laser snapped out its jabbing pattern—
The divided mech died. Mere mechanical damage was undoubtedly beneath its program-function range. But potentials cannot build in sheaths mutilated and gouged, and its charge ejected itself down wrong pathways, into the innards, dissolving crystalline structures of intricate artistry. A jewel crushed by a muddy boot.
—he whipped the punch gun around and riddled the other for good measure, the buzzing trailing away, and he slammed into the other spindly riddled carcass, legs collecting recoil, breath whistling in his dry throat in a scatter of perishing light from the gutted mech—
—and he was off, pushing it to gain momentum toward Nikka—
—still drifting, Nikka—
SIX
Something Fatal
Nikka did not awaken for three days. Even then she was sluggish and vague, eyes watering, words like discordant lumps trying to make their way out of her throat.
Before she could sit up they had started to move inward again. They got the ship to resume its programmed course. Their handbuilt, tightbeam antenna for signaling Earth was a twisted wire mesh. No more infobursts for the home front. Now they had no mission, except the basic one: survive and learn.
By then they understood from a careful metallicity dating that the helical mech was quite old. It had probably lain in wait in the derelict for ages, in case something organic ventured aboard. A snare.
“Not the sort of thing the Snark would’ve done,” Nigel muttered to himself in the long vigils beside her. Though the Snark had been a mech, of sorts.
The brain repairs itself, with the right help, and her recovery was long.
In his time the very word “machinelike” had two meanings. One was “unfeeling, unconcerned,” while the other was “implacable, utterly committed.” No wonder that each suggested inhumanity and some rigid stupidity as well.
But here there was a third meaning, revealed in the immense, cool arabesques that filled the sky within a light-year of the black hole. Constructions vast and imponderable. Geometries unnatural and subtly alien.
Energies churned here, sleeting radiation and turbulence. Mechwork patterns floated obliviously through the storming masses. Implacable, unconcerned.
