Creations (29 page)

“After you,” Safi said.

He pulled it open, blinking as the harsh light flooded in, then stepped out onto the small rear platform and down onto the ground. He moved away to give Safi room to get out, and turned to take in what lay around him.

The Sun was high in the sky, and would be for whole days to come as the Moon slowly spun on its axis. The glare of the sunlight was intense, and he soon had to reach up and pull down the gold plated outer visor of his helmet. Then, and only then, was he able to look up into the sky and see for himself the sight that had captivated everyone who had ever travelled to this place.

Just above the southern horizon, hanging in space, was the Earth. From here it looked small enough to cover with his thumb but somehow, packed onto the surface of that blue and brown sphere, the whole of human history had taken place. Only for the last hundred years had people been able to leave it behind, turn around, and take it all in with one glance. Max counted himself lucky to be among them.

It was hard to tell which part of it he was looking at now; most of it seemed to be in darkness and only a thin crescent of land and sea could be seen. It could have been the tip of South America that was visible, or it could equally well have been Africa. However, even as the Earth went through its phases, from new to full then new again, its position in the sky never changed. As the Moon kept one face permanently pointed at its parent, the position of the Earth as seen from Mare Crisium stayed fixed over the horizon. It was this effect that had given the twenty sites of the Crisium research project their name: Earthrise.

“Come on, Max! Let’s go say hello to this thing!” Safi was bounding away from the rover, almost hopping from foot to foot in a series of long slow jumps. She was laughing as she went, obviously loving every minute of it now that she was outside. It occurred to Max that he’d never really seen her look happy until they’d taken this trip and left Earth behind. Maybe, somehow, she was meant to be here, he thought. He broke himself away from the view and tried to walk after her, but soon found himself moving the same way she was just to keep up. The unfamiliar motion was surprisingly tiring, as rarely used muscles woke up within his legs.

“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here,” Safi said.

The robot was coming toward them as they approached it, adding another straight line to the parallel rows it had already made. They kept off to the side as it went past them, watching it closely as it motored along on its large wheels. Its colour was almost the same as the soil it was moving over.

“It’s built out of basalt,” Safi said. “The same trick we used.”

“Basalt? You mean rock? How come?”

“It’s the one thing you’ve got most of round here. You can melt it down and mould it, just like metal. You can even make it flexible if you spin it into fibres. Look at the tyres.”

Max looked closely at the wheels as the back end of the trailer slowly went past. They were made of a woven mesh of the same grey material as the rest of the thing, flexing slightly with its weight. “Clever,” he said.

“That’s our first bit of evidence,” she said. “Using lunar basalt in this many ways was an Obispo idea. We were the first to make it work and now they’ve helped themselves to it.”

Interesting, she was calling Obispo “us” and ESOS “them”, Max thought. It hadn’t taken long for her to finally settle her loyalties.

She reached into a suit pouch at that point and brought out her omni, the slim silver bracelet looking somehow incongruous
in her bulky, gloved hand.

“Is that thing okay out here?” Max said.

“Sure, it’s vacuum hardened. I had it custom built.” Somehow that didn’t surprise Max at all. His own was still round his neck under his suit, and probably wouldn’t last five minutes if he’d brought it out here. “We need pictures after all,” she said. “That’s what we came for isn’t it?”

She started walking alongside the machine, levelling the omni at it, having presumably set some video or photographic function running. She went in close a couple of times too, getting detailed shots of the tyres and the various mechanisms that seemed to support the wheels. Then she ran round to the front of the machine, overtaking it easily, and stopped right in its path.

“Safi, be careful,” Ariel’s voice came over the radio link.

“I’ll be fine, I just want to see what it does.”

The robot got within five feet of her, stopped for a second, then turned off to the side and neatly bypassed her before continuing on its original course.

“Collision avoidance sensors on the front,” she said. “Thought so. I told you I’d be okay.”

They examined the machine for the next five minutes as it slowly dug the dirt, moving down the slope the whole time. As soon as they looked up close at its surface they could see how it had been constructed. The stepped appearance of the layers it had been built from was familiar to both of them.

“And there’s our next proof,” Safi said. “Your friend Doug would be very interested to see this.”

“I think he would. Let’s get some shots of that too.”

“Strange though,” Safi said as she took the pictures. “It doesn’t look as if it can replicate. It’s just a mining machine, unless it’s way more complex than it looks.”

“So we’re not looking at a Prospector with wheels then.”

“I guess not.”

Suddenly Damon’s voice came across from the rover. “Can
you see inside the trailer?” he said. “See what it’s collecting?”

“No, it’s sealed,” Safi said. “There are some attachment points at the back though. Looks like it’s meant to dock onto something and unload.”

“So where does it go when it’s full?”

“Home, I guess,” Harris said.

Just then, almost as if it had heard them, it broke away from the straight path it had been steering and headed up the incline, straight over the pattern of lines it had previously laid down. They watched it as it reached the top of the ridge then disappeared down the other side.

“I think it’s going back where it came from,” Max said to Safi.

“We should follow it.”

“Are you sure? With this machine, pretty much every bit of proof we need is right here, even if we just take pictures.”

“It’s not a replicator though. It’s the core technology we need to find evidence of, not just some peripheral bit of machinery. Come on, let’s go.”

It took around five minutes to climb back inside the rover and get through the airlock. They opened up their inner visors, but didn’t bother getting out of the suits. “If we see anything else we’ll only want to go outside again,” Safi said. “Just don’t get dirt onto any of the panels.”

They caught up with the robot easily as it moved off to the north. Alongside the wheel marks it was making was another track, presumably the one it had left on the way down.

“If we follow those marks we can get there ahead of it, wherever it’s going,” Max said.

“Sure,” Harris said. “Better than following it at this crawl.”

The tracks led them north for another half hour. If they’d stayed next to the service line then they would have reached the ESOS buildings by now, according to Ariel. As it was, they’d missed the settlement completely, passing it by way off to the side. The number of wheel tracks they were seeing had increased
significantly, small ones like the one they were following, plus some larger ones, clearly made by rovers like their own.

“We should be careful here,” Ariel said. “It looks like they come through here sometimes.”

They carried on further, seeing more and more tracks coming in from the sides and taking the same route as them. Harris slowed down almost to a standstill as they went over one low hill after another to ensure they weren’t taken by surprise by anything that might be on the other side. Then, as they reached the top of one of the slopes, he brought them to a halt and looked out through the binoculars.

“Is that what you’re looking for?” he said.

Directly ahead of them, in the floor of a wide valley, was what looked like a cross between a chemical refinery and a grove of palm trees. Low cylindrical structures dominated the scene, different heights and widths all nestled together, with pipes and ducts connecting them. They all had flat circular roofs, but on top of some of them were narrow vertical girders, sprouting up and heading into the sky. Each one branched outward at the top into a collection of broad, flat surfaces, tilted toward the sun. To Max they almost looked like leaves.

“I bet those are solar panels, those things at the top.”

“I think you’re right,” Safi said. “Shall we go and look?”

“Let’s wait first, see if anyone is around.”

“Max is right,” Ariel said. “It would be wise to wait.” From Ariel that almost sounded like glowing praise.

They waited and watched for over ten minutes, looking out for rovers or other signs of human activity. All they saw was four mining robots like the one they’d left behind, coming in from different directions then backing up against a hatch on one of the buildings for a minute or so before heading off. “I guess that’s how they unload,” Safi had said. Watching the robots also gave them a chance to judge the scale of the place. It wasn’t large at all, maybe three hundred yards across, and twenty feet tall at its
highest point. None of the structures seemed to have airtight doors or windows in them.

“We can assume nobody lives in there,” Ariel said. “What about transmissions?”

“Very few,” Damon said. “Certainly no voice comms or high data rates.”

“Good, it’s safe. Let’s go.”

They warily drove down the hill and parked off to the side, away from where they’d seen the mining robots unloading. Ariel, Harris and Damon decided to come out too this time, so they climbed out of their seats and started to suit up at the back. Then they went outside.

The overwhelming impression they got when they saw the place up close was of a city in miniature, a city populated by robots. The mining machines they’d seen already were just one variety of what must have been over a dozen different types, most of them operating within the boundaries of the structure. Some of them were mobile, shuttling around the hardened surfaces that joined the cylinders, carrying parts and materials, while others were fixed in place, barely visible through gaps in the walls as they carried out what looked like manufacturing tasks. None of them were any larger than the mining machines they’d already seen.

“I know what this place is,” Max said as realisation dawned. “It’s an anthill, a termite nest. These are the workers.”

“You may be right,” Safi said. “It would explain why they can’t replicate themselves.”

“So how
do
they replicate?” Ariel said. “That is what they’re meant to do, right?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“If this is an anthill, maybe we should look for the queen,” Damon suggested.

Max looked in toward the centre. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I think I’ve found it.”

Right at the core, visible through gaps in the surrounding structures, was the largest of the cylindrical blocks, like a wide gas tank sitting on its end. The outer surface wasn’t continuous, but instead was peppered with gaps and spaces, those near the ground providing access for the mobile robots that were moving in and out of them. Max was crouching down to get the best possible view through one of these gaps, trying to make out what was happening inside. The other four gathered alongside to see what he was seeing.

The inside of the structure was in near darkness, but light from gaps in the roof gave enough illumination to guess what it contained. The details were hidden, but within the shadows some kind of mechanism could be seen moving rapidly back and forth over a shape that they recognised as one half of a mining robot, lying on its side.

“It’s a 3D printer,” Safi said. “Just like we used, just like on a Prospector. That’s how it builds the robots. Told you.”

“Listen, people,” Ariel said. “If you don’t want us to be discovered here then we shouldn’t stay too long. We need to work quickly, then go.”

“You’re right,” Safi said, standing up straight. “If we take pictures of everything, then we can look them over back at the base. Everyone agreed?”

Max and Safi spent the next twenty minutes walking round the perimeter, Safi filming everything they saw, pointing her omni into any gaps or spaces that might contain anything interesting. When they got back to their starting point the five of them returned to the rover and got out of their suits. They drove round the perimeter once more, then retraced their route back to the base.

A message to call Ross had arrived while they’d been gone, via Ariel’s office comms as Safi had arranged. Ariel took them to a private room, then left them alone as they set up the secure call. Ross’s familiar grinning face appeared on the screen when the connection got through.

“Hi, you two, how are things?”

“Hi, Ross, we’re good,” Safi said.

“So what’s it like to be back there?”

“Amazing, just unbelievable.”

“I bet it is. You guys are so lucky, I wish I’d been able to go too. How about you, Max, how are you finding it?”

“It’s incredible, this place is breathtaking,” he said, and he meant it.

“So what can we do for you, Ross?” Safi said.

“Oh, just giving you an update. Things are okay at the moment, the weather’s pretty hot, the food’s pretty average, the simulation group are winning the atlatl spear throwing league I started in your honour, Max. Oh, and I thought you might want to hear the news; Victor sank all the Prospectors yesterday.”

Safi seemed to almost choke. “He did what?”

“He’s worried people are taking an interest in the island. Ever since that bug was found he’s been checking and rechecking every angle in case someone somewhere is acting on what they saw. It wouldn’t take much to figure out what we were doing, so he had the control room send the deactivation signal early.”

“Wow. I guess that proves the Prospectors were only a pilot. If they were the main event, Victor would never cut production that quickly. So where were you when he did it?”

“He called us in to see it. He sent the termination command through the boundary transmitters, then we just sat back and watched them sail home.”