Michael Poole followed Jasoft Parz, the strange bureaucrat from the future, through the entrails of the dead Spline.

They worked their way through gravity-free darkness broken only by the shifting, limited glow of the light globe Parz had rescued from his bizarre eyeball capsule; the semisentient device trailed Parz, doglike. The corridor they followed was circular in cross-section and a little more than head-high. Poole’s hands sank into walls of some grayish, oily substance, and he found himself worming his way past dark, floating ovals a foot or more wide. The ovals were harmless as long as he avoided them, but if he broke the crusty meniscus of any of them a thick, grainy blood-analogue flowed eagerly over his suit.

"Jesus," he muttered. "This is disgusting." Parz was a few yards ahead of him in the cloying darkness. He laughed, and spoke in his light, time-accented English. "No," he said. "This is life aboard the finest interstellar craft likely to be available to humans for generations to come — even after my time." Parz was a thin, dapper man of medium height; his receding hair was snow-white and his face was gloomy, downturned, his chin weak. He looked, Michael thought, like a caricature of an aging bureaucrat — a caricature saved only by his striking green eyes. Parz, in his clear, skintight environment suit, moved more easily through the claustrophobic, sticky conditions than did Poole in his bulky space-hardened gear; but Poole, watching Parz slide like a fish through the cloacal darkness, found himself relishing the cool dryness inside his suit, and would not have exchanged.

A fleshy flap a yard square opened in the floor of this tunnel-tube. Poole jumped back with a cry; ahead of him Parz halted and turned. Fist-sized globes of blood-analogue came quivering out of the flap, splashing stickily against Poole’s legs, and then out shot an antibody drone — one of the little robots that seemed to infest the carcass of this damn ship. This one was a flattened sphere about a foot across; it hurtled from wall to wall, rebounding. Then, for a moment, the drone hovered before Poole; tiny red laser-spots played over Poole’s shins and knees, and he tensed, expecting a lance of pain. But the laser-spots snapped away from him and played over the walls and blood globules like tiny searchlights.

The drone, jets sparkling, hurtled off down the passageway and out of sight.

Poole found himself trembling.

Parz laughed, irritatingly. "You shouldn’t worry about the drones. That one was just a simple maintenance unit—"

"With lasers."

"It was only using them for ranging information, Mr. Poole."

"And they couldn’t be used for any more offensive purposes, I suppose."

"Against us? The drones of this Spline are thoroughly used to humans, Mr. Poole. It probably thinks we’re part of a maintenance crew ourselves. They wouldn’t dream of attacking humans. Unless specifically ordered to, of course."

"That cheers me up," Poole said. "Anyway, what was it doing here? I thought you said the damn Spline is dead."

"Of course it is dead," Parz said with a trace of genteel impatience. "Ah, then, but what is death, to a being on this scale? The irruption of your GUT-drive craft into the heart of the Spline was enough to sever most of its command channels, disrupt most of its higher functions. Like snapping the spinal cord of a human. But—" Parz hesitated. "Mr. Poole, imagine putting a bullet in the brain of a tyrannosaurus. It’s effectively dead; its brain is destroyed. But how long will the processes of its body continue undirected, feedback loops striving blindly to restore some semblance of homeostasis? And the antibody drones are virtually autonomous — semisentient, some of them. With the extinguishing of the Spline’s consciousness they will be acting without central direction. Most of them will simply have ceased functioning. But the more advanced among them — like our little visitor just now — don’t have to wait to be told what to do; they actively prowl the body of the Spline, seeking out functions to perform, repairs to initiate. It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level… A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good." Parz’s laugh was delicate, almost effete, thought Poole. "Perhaps we should hope, as one sentient species considering another, that the drones find tasks sufficient to give their lives meaning while they remain aware."

Poole frowned, studying Parz’s round, serious face. He found Jasoft Parz oddly repellent, like an insect; his humor was too dry for Poole’s taste, and his view of the world somehow oversophisticated, ironic, detached from the direct, ordinary concerns of human perception.

Here is a man, Poole thought, who has distanced himself from his own emotions. He has become as alien as the Qax. The world is a game to him, an abstract puzzle to be solved — no, not even that — to be admired dustily, as one might marvel at the recorded moves of some ancient chess game.

No doubt it had been an effective survival strategy for someone in Parz’s line of work. Poole found a grain of pity in his heart for the man of the future.

Parz, proceeding ahead of Poole along the tunnel, continued to speak. "I’ve never been aboard a dead Spline before, Mr. Poole; I suspect it could be days before the normal functions close down completely. So you’ll continue to see signs of life for some time." He sniffed. "Eventually, of course, it will be unviable. The vacuum will penetrate its deepest recesses; we will witness a race between corruption and ice…" He hesitated. "There are other ships in the area that could take us off? Human ships of this era, I mean."

Poole laughed. "A whole flotilla of them, flying every flag in the system. A damn lot of use they’ve been." But the key battles had been over in minutes, long before most of the inner System worlds were even aware of the invasion of the future. But, Poole had learned, the space battles had made spectacular viewing, projected live in huge Virtuals in the skies of the planets… "We’ve asked them to hold off for a few more hours, until we finish this investigation; we wanted to make sure this thing is safe — dead, deactivated — before letting anyone else aboard."

"Oh, I think it’s safe," Parz said dryly. "If the Spline could still strike at you, be assured you’d be dead by now. Ah," he said, "here we are."

Abruptly the veinlike tunnel opened out around Jasoft. He drifted into empty space, his light globe following patiently. The white light of the globe shone feebly over the walls of a cavern that Poole, peering carefully forward from the tunnel, estimated to be about a quarter mile across. The walls were pink and shot through with crimson veins as thick as Poole’s arms; blood-analogue still pulsed along the wider tubes, he noticed, and quivering globes of the blood substance, some of them yards across, drifted like stately galleons through the darkness.

But there was damage. In the dim light cast by the globe lamp, Poole made out a spear of metal yards wide that lanced across the chamber, from one ripped wall to another: the spine of the embedded Crab. The lining of the chamber had done its best to seal itself around the entrance and exit wounds, so that a tide of flesh lapped around the Crab spine at each extremity. And even now Poole could make out the fleeting shadows of drones — dozens of them — drifting around the spine, sparking with reaction jets and laser light as they toiled, too late, to drive out this monstrous splinter. Poole stared up at the immense intrusion, the huge wounds, with a kind of wonder; even the spine’s straight lines seemed a violation, hard and painfully unnatural, in this soft place of curved walls and flesh.