Are you picking this up, Nigel? Some sputtering on two hundred megahertz.

“Right, a trifle below sixteen degrees bearing from here.”

I make it seventeen point two. Close.

“Lets home on it.”

He stamps down. The servos transpond the movement into a leap that takes him/it over a canyon of brown vegetation, bringing him down crump on a shoulder of burnished basalt. The feet skid but the robot rights itself in time. Five meters visibility in the optical. Rain fogs his lenses. He leaps again, getting a boost as the back hydraulics come in with a whoosh, and he skims over twisted blue-green stumps of plants—slimy, sagging under boughs thick with mud. The radio overlay sputters, orange-tinted vectors pointing dead ahead—not one source, he can see that now, but scattered blotches and patches of radio noise, emitting around two hundred megahertz but not frequency-fixed, some giving off prickly hisses, others booming out long patterns that Nigel’s step-down electronics shape into acoustic rattles, the whole bunch sounding like a crowd tromping on broken glass.

Just checked with Alex. There are no EMs within a klick. This must be some other life-form.

“Weak signal. That might explain why Alex can’t pick it up. But still …”

Through the dusky swirl a rocky ledge appears. Nigel angles to the left, thumbing to IR. Visibility improves. He can see down a long canyon, dim in the bloodred wash of Ra light. “Rocks here look as though they’ve been worked.” He steps forward gingerly. No life-forms visible. The canyon walls are streaked and carved, long gouges weaving together. He switches back to two hundred megahertz and the snaps and pops leap out at him, coming from the cuts in the rock. “Looks like art, maybe.” The seams are lined with odd silvery stuff. Nigel reaches out a maniple, scratches it.

“This stuff is a conductor, an antenna.” He turns. He is in a large fenced-in area, like a corral. Through the gloom he sees caves dug back into the rock, caves with oval openings, other blocky and square, some triangular. “It’s a village.” The popping, chiming radio pulses come from marks near the doorways, wook wook for the ovals, skaah skaah from the rectangular. Other marks bark and mutter from the bare rock. Street signs? Nigel thinks, almost tripping over indentations in the muddy ground, curved patterns that seem to make no sense. He clumps down the canyon, knowing the runon tapes will capture it all and a dozen specialists will have a dozen ideas about it by the time he is out of the servo’d pod.

I’ve found another one, a very similar canyon. I estimate I’m about five hundred meters east. If you—

“Wait.”

Ahead hang woven strands, secured to the canyon walls and stretching across it about six meters above the ground. From the strands hang sheets of the silvery stuff, some of them giving off a chorus of radio sputter, others silent. Nigel approaches. “There something—” and Ther ing meth rees eesom thingther comes at him from the sheets, bouncing around the canyon, scrambling. “I think the”—inkth ti ti thi I kthelith—“super-conduc”—supduc con sup ducerco—“superconducting sheets—”

He turns, flees, unwilling to give up his radio spectrum but confused by the mocking wall of echoes. A hundred meters away he stops, sheltered by a jut of stone, and says, “They’ve got some elaborate, well, rooms, I suppose. A way to get some privacy, I guess—No, that doesn’t make sense. Why make them reflecting? No, it must be some kind of amplifier, a way to, well, a public-address system? I don’t …”

Nigel, you’re confused. Don’t you think you should—

“Bugger that. Look, get a team down here to go over this, this village.”

Sure, we will, just don’t get so—

“It hasn’t bothered you yet, Herb?”

Huh? What hasn’t—

“Superconductors. How do EMs with no technology left, no cities left standing, make superconductors?”

Oh. Well, there are those satellites. Maybe—

“I got a good look at the sheets. They’re tarnished. They have cracks in them. They look as though they’ve been folded and refolded many, many times. They’re old, my good fellow. Old.”

The next team is on in, let’s see, six running hours. I’ll ask for a biodate. But hang on, I want a look at your village, too. I’ll be there in—

“Hold. Stay where you are. Or perhaps better, back away.”

Why? It’s just a—

“The EMs are out milling around, Alex says. We’ve just stumbled on something that resembles a village, correct? And odds on, the reason we haven’t seen one before is that they were always occupied. We didn’t want direct contact, so we missed the villages.”

Sounds plausible. However, we can’t—

“But no one really deserts a village. You leave behind—”

Through the swirling gusts of russet mist a dark shape lurches. Nigel ducks behind a boulder, grimacing, and kills his radio transmissions. You leave behind the weak, the old, perhaps the children—but you don’t leave them unprotected.

Nigel tucks his head down, knowing this movement has no analog for the craft he is driving, but does it anyway, aware that to distance himself from the machine in any way now will lessen his effectiveness. To hide, crouch down, avoid the licking radar of the approaching creature, hope the suit reflects like an uninteresting gray stone—

A webbed foot comes down on his foredeck. The EM creature surges up, clumbering over the rocks, head swiveling and tracking, its foot pressing down. Plates buckle on the ribbed foredeck. A motor whines in protest and abruptly goes silent. Circuits buzz, warning. Nigel feels the blunt pressure turn to a cutting, jarring pain. He fights against his impulse to back away, to scramble out from under.

I’ve switched to K-band, Nigel, hope you’re getting this. Your Mayday beeper just cut in. Should I head into that canyon?

Nigel decides to risk a transmission. If Daffler comes into view, moving, the EM creature will surely catch on, will know there are odd moving rocks in the village. He clicks to K-band and sends “Stop!”

A frozen moment. The EM halts, teetering, two feet on Nigel’s groaning deck. Some side band of the K-band wave must have gotten through to it, although the EMs seem to broadcast and receive on a much longer wavelength.

The EM tilts forward hesitantly, feeling its way. A foot lifts. Then the other. It moves off, farther up the canyon. Nigel picks up warbling radio bursts as it echolocates itself, endlessly sending its “name” and receiving back the reflected and scrambled world-picture painted by the same “name”—the canyon, the metallic scratchings, the superconductor sheets, the sky above which is a blank except for a low mutter from Ra. Nigel wonders, watching its aching slow progress, what effect this way of seeing must have on how the EM thinks— if “think” was the right word at all. To it the world responded eternally with fragments of its own name, like a constant reassuring chorus which both tells the EM what it needs to know and reassures it of its own individuality, its importance in the very act of defining the world. If the EM did not call out its name, the world was a cipher, a silence. Yet if it spoke, the universe itself leapt into being. Only fellow EMs were emitters. Each sends on a slightly different wavelength, so the babble of the community does not blind all. Nigel wonders how a solitary EM had discovered Earth’s faint whisper, a voice which appears periodically as a weak dot in the sky not far from Ra’s deadening murmur. Perhaps an EM alone, meditating, had seen it, probed it, guessed the existence of other intelligences in the yawning vacancy.

Nigel, Bob wants me to move in on you. I’m coming up the canyon, bearing north at thirty-eight. Your subsystems signal damage in—