Still, it worked pretty well. As long as you kept still you were hard to see — just a mistiness, a slight distortion here and there that might easily be mistaken for a bit of heat shimmer. You could huddle against a rocky outcrop, ensuring that you presented only your least visible angles to any prey. You even had fur, transparent-like fiber-optic cable, which transmitted bits of background color to baffle your prey further.

But even so, few species had adopted the stratagem, for invisibility was a blight.

Every invisible was blind, of course. No transparent retina could trap light. On top of that the creature’s biochemistry, limited by the use of transparent substances, was a lot less efficient. And there was no shielding, even for its innermost parts, from the ferocious light, heat, and ultraviolet radiation from the sun, or from the cosmic radiation that had always battered the planet despite its great shield of magnetism. Its organs were transparent, but not transparent enough to let through all the damaging radiation.

Already Cactus’s killer was in agony, and soon the cancers developing in its transparent gut would kill it. And it was neotenous. It would die without reaching puberty. None of the invisible kind had ever lived long enough to breed true, nor would their genetic material, damaged by radiation, ever have been able to produce a viable offspring.

Sickly, helpless from birth, these wretched creatures began dying before they emerged from their eggs.

But that didn’t matter, not from the point of view of the genes, for the family benefited.

This amphibian species had reached a compromise. Most of its young were born as they always had been. But perhaps one in ten was born invisible. Like the sterile workers in a hive, the invisible lived through its brief, painful life and died young, all for a single purpose: to retrieve food for its siblings. Through them — through their offspring, not its own — the invisible’s genetic legacy would live on.

It was an expensive strategy. But it was better to sacrifice one in ten of each generation to a brief life of agony than to succumb to extinction.

The presence of food in its stomach and waste in its lower gut made the invisible easy to spot, of course. So when they were hungry again its siblings would starve it, waiting for all the waste to pass out of its system, rendering it as transparent as possible. And then they would set it to work once more, under the lethal sun, hoping to have it snatch one more meal for them before it died.

The sphere had made its own observations of these events.

The sphere was a living thing, and yet it was not. It was an artifact — and yet it was not that either. The sphere had no name for itself, or for its kind. Yet it was conscious.

It was one of a great horde that now spanned the stars, in a great belt of colonization that swept around the Galaxy’s limb. And yet the sphere had come here, to this ruined world, seeking answers.

Memories stretched deep. Among the sphere’s kind, identity was a fluid thing, to be split and shared and passed on through components and blueprints. The sphere could think back, deep through thousands of generations, but it was a memory trail that ended in mist. The replicating hordes had forgotten where they came from.

In its way, the sphere longed to know. How had this great star-spanning swarm of robots first originated? Had there been some form of spontaneous mechanical emergence, cogs and circuits coming together on some metallic asteroid? Or had there been a Designer, some other, who had brought the progenitors of these swarming masses into being?

For a million years the sphere had studied the distribution of the replicators through the Galaxy. It wasn’t easy, for the great disk had rotated twice since the origin of its kind, and the stars had swum about, smearing the robot colonists across the sky. Great mathematical models had been built to reverse that great turning, to restore the stars as they once must have been, to map back the replicators’ half-forgotten expansion.

And at last the sphere had converged on this system, this world — amid a handful of others — as the putative origin. It had found a world of organic chemistry and creatures interesting in their way. But it was a dying world, overheated by its sun, the life-forms restricted to the fringes of a desert continent. There was no sign of organized intelligence.

And yet, here and there, the ancient rocks of the supercontinent had been marked deliberately, it seemed to the sphere, with cuts and gouges and great pits. Once there had been mind here, perhaps. But if so it was vanished from these wretched, crawling creatures.

The sphere represented a new order of life. And yet it was like a child, wistfully seeking its lost father. The last traces of the Martian robots’ original blueprint, assembled by long-dead NASA engineers in computer laboratories in California and New England and much modified since, had been lost. It was somehow appropriate that this greatest, and strangest, of all of mankind’s legacies should have been created entirely accidentally — and that those created should have been abandoned to their fate.

There was nothing more to be learned here. With an equivalent of a sigh, the sphere leapt to the stars. The small world dwindled behind it.

Ultimate huddled in the dirt until the scavenging siblings had finished feeding. Then she stumbled away, clutching her baby, not even noticing that the sphere had vanished.

Ultimate kept heading west, away from the borametz quarry.

At night she wedged herself with her infant into crevices between rocks, trying to emulate the comforting enclosure of the Tree’s cocoon. She ate whatever she could find — half-desiccated toads and frogs buried in the mud, lizards, scorpions, the flesh and roots of cacti. She fed the child a chewed-up pulp of meat and vegetable matter. But the child spat out the coarse stuff. She was still missing her belly-root, and she mewled and complained.

Ultimate walked, and walked and walked.

She had no strategy in mind save to keep moving, to keep her infant out of the chemical clutches of the Tree, and to wait to see what turned up. If her thinking had been sophisticated enough she might have hoped to find more people, somewhere she could stay, maybe even a community that lived independently of the Trees.

It would have been a futile hope, for there were no more such communities anywhere on Earth. She didn’t know it, but she had nowhere to go.

The land began to rise slowly. Ultimate found herself walking on coarse sand and gravel fans.

After half a day of this she came to a place of low, smooth-shouldered hills. She could see how these eroded stumps went marching off to the horizon, to north and south, for kilometer after kilometer, all the way to the dust-laden horizon and beyond. She was walking through the remnant of a once-great mountain chain, thrown up by the ancient stitching together of the continents. But the dust-laden winds of New Pangaea had long since worn down the mountains to these meaningless stumps.

When she looked back she could see her own footprints, accompanied by the scraping of knuckles, marked by the messy places where she had stopped to feed or make waste or sleep. They were the only trail through these silent hills.

It took her two days to cross the mountains.

After that the land began to descend again.

On the plain, a little more vegetation grew. There were spiky trees with gnarled branches and clumps of needlelike leaves, like bristlecone pines. Around their roots sheltered a few leaping mice — hardy rodent survivors, ferocious conservers of water — and many, many lizards and insects. She chased tiny things like geckos and iguanas, and munched their flesh. But on this looser ground Ultimate had to be cautious, watching for rat-mouths embedded in the ground, and for the quivering, invisible mass of an ambush hunter.