Killeen approached. The mech spun its lightweight treads. They caught and clacked against an eroded spur of peppery, chipped granite. Fore-lenses swiveled to study Killeen. It paused a long moment, seeming to think. Then it turned away, uninterested, and started off downhill, raising fine dust that hung in the low gravity like shimmering fog.

“Guess it’s okay,” Killeen said reluctantly.

“Can I vest it?” Toby said acoustically, landing with a wheeze and thump on the crumbling grainy granite.

“Harvest it? Thought you were full up with servos.”

Toby shrugged, jangling. Small spare parts dangled from staylines at his waist.

“You look like a walking scrapheap.”

“Guy needs ’placements,” Toby said defensively.

“Not more’n slow you down.”

“Aw—lemme! I got room.” Toby’s face screwed into a laughable mask of pretended pain.

“No” Killeen was himself surprised that he said it so sharply.

“But I—”

“No. Just no. Now get out on your point.”

Toby wasn’t striding point, but using the word made /his position seem larger. That pleased the boy and he shrugged, eyebrows knitted wryly. He bounded off, ignoring the navvy that jounced away downslope.

Killeen had long ago learned to listen when something nagged at him. He stood still for a long moment. He let his augmented senses sweep out, covering the slowmotion flow of the Family, the retreating navvy. Voices slurred and nipped, the steady background roundtalk of the Family.

They were making good time down the valley. The transporter mech bumped along the bed of a sand river. Killeen selected the viewpoint of an old man, Fowler, who swung on a basket tether aboard the mech. He heard Fowler’s querulous questions—When’ll we stop? Gotany that soursap from the Trough? Whatta mean, is gone? Suresay we had jugsful!—and the pebbles spitting from under the mech treads.

The valley lay quiet. Mechtrash dotted the rock-knobbed hills. Some rotted bioparts tainted the air. These random clumps of old parts littered all Snowglade, so common that Killeen barely noticed them. In outlands such as this, scavenger mechs did not bother to pick up rusted cowlings or heavy, broken axles for the long transport to smelters and factories. Over centuries the mess had gathered. As the mechs worked their changes in Snowglade’s weather, ice retreated, revealing even older junk from a time when mechs had run unknown things amid the old cold ages. These jumbles too blighted the land now, rust-red spots freckling the soil.

Among this plants struggled, a welcome sign. For hours now they all had been pleased by small signs of ripening, of spreading grass, of tawny growth.

Denix had set an hour before, and now the Eater was half-gnawed by the ragged hills. The shifting colors confused Killeen, making the least crag and gully brim with light-ripe illusions.

The Family moved stolidly and with a dogged rhythm that expected little. As they breasted each rise, talk ran and swirled, words forking in the grouptalk. For months they had followed an unmarked trek through exhausted, bleached-dry valleys. Only Troughs had succored them. The slowsmelling promise ahead gave spring to their pace.

Yet Killeen felt nothing awry, but the crosshatched navvy was odd enough to warrant remembering. He watched his son carefully and often rechecked their route.

In the middle of a topo survey, Arthur said:

I am enjoying the sight of greenery again.

Killeen was surprised. This Aspect was usually distant, factual, a cool savor in Killeen’s mind.

“Yeasay. I’ve tasted only Troughslop for so long….”

I doubt you could eat these. They are tough, fibrous growths.

“Must be ground water here.”

I suspect we are entering a Splash site.

Killeen brightened. “Yeasay you? It’ll get wetter?”

Perhaps. A Splash is the fracture zone surrounding a meteor strike. The cracked rock permits an upwelling of permafrost which has eluded the mechs’ efforts to dry out the planet. Sometimes there is even glacial ice buried beneath the shifting sands. Meteors are the only feature of Snowglade’s weather which the mechs do not appear to have mastered. Given our star’s orbit about the Eater, which is quite elliptical, I find it unsurprising that we encounter many meteors. We are plunging nearer the Eater now, and a standard Gaussian distribution for the density of small, meteor-sized debris would predict that we shall receive strikes at an exponentiating rate.

“Better weather?” Arthur had to truthsay, but sometimes the Aspect used a muddy, longtalk way to do it

Again, perhaps. The mechs seem to be altering the orbit of IR-246.

“Huh?”

Sorry. You call our star Denix, am I correct?

“That’s not what we call it, that’s what it is.”

To me this star is the 246th infrared source positively resolved near the Galactic Center. The catalog made as we approached the inner zone of the center specifically assigned—

“Heysay, that stuff sucks like a bucket of ticks. I—”

An interesting expression, that. I remember it had its origin in an ancient Earthside civilization now enshrined solely in the holorecords—

“Stuff the oldsay, heysay? I don’t understand—Denix is the sun, that’s what Denix’s name means.”

You call it such, yes. It is a simple star like the millions you see when neither Denix nor the Eater is in the sky. As now.

Killeen looked up, startled. The Eater was guttering into bloodred sleep beyond sawtooth peaks. High above in the darkening, pinpoints glowed in ambers, hard blues, opulent greens. Fine wisps threaded between the twinklings. Never had he thought they might be like Denix.

“All… those?”

There are approximately a million stars within a light-year of the Eater. Many have entered late stages of their evolution and display varied colors. Some vent streamers from their chromospheres. Advanced—

“Cut the jabber! You mean they’re all big?”

Some are larger than Denix—which after all is an Ml type, selected by your forefathers not for its beauty but rather because this planet was deep in a glacial age, and apparently of no abiding interest to the mech civilizations—while others—

Killeen let Arthur lecture away, unheeded. For him the sky was suddenly a vast bowl of unimaginable depths. Those were other suns. His whole life—of earnest childhood, of love and labor and lost hopes, of ravaged retreats—he now saw as abruptly dwarfed, as tiny motions on a bare scratched plain, beneath a night filled with eyes.

SIX

They marched on through the halfnight. Snowglade never saw true darkness, for the million pinprick fires above conspired to seed the sky with a dim, persistent radiance. There were no solid, certain shadows.

Yearly, distant blobs and swirls of twilight gas swept across the sky. Constellations of glowering stars changed in the span a boy took to grow to manhood. But stars were minor actors in the ruby-rich, storm-racked sky.

Killeen’s ancestors had adapted eyes, able to scan on a scale stretched further than the normal human logarithmic response. He could see the stars as glowing torches and then, by screwing tight one eye, wreath them in a murky shroud of ink. Mechs could see in any dim radiance, so humanity had long ago aped the machines by tailoring their eyes.

Toby sent, —Mech hive over that hill.—