Perhaps it was cowardice, Manadgi thought, that held him from going down to the valley. Perhaps it was prudence that argued, in the quiet he saw settle about the buildings as the sun set, that watching and thinking through the night might grant him some useful understanding.
One building had windows. Most did not. The size and the height of the windows was ambiguous with distance. He saw the isolated movements of living beings between the buildings, toward twilight, and occasionally after.
He saw the predating machines, prowling about the desolation they had made. None came near him, perhaps because he had settled himself well away from such tracks, which evidently it was the purpose of such machines to make, all about the area, a net of them, as if there were less intent to reach any specific place than to have as many routes as possible within the immediate sight of these buildings.
But did they need devastation on which to walk?
Or was there some purpose to this stripping of the land that made sense to moon-folk? They feared the approach of enemies, perhaps. Perhaps they wished to afford no cover to spies.
Perhaps they wished to demonstrate the devastation, or—one hated to imagine—found such destruction aesthetic.
He might walk up to the buildings as he had purposed and present himself to some authority. But aesthetic destruction… that thought gave him considerable pause.
A machine passed below his hiding-place, casting light as bright as the vanished sun along the rutted ground and over the grass along the edge of the devastation. It had no wheels, but linked plates on which it crawled. Its forepart was a claw, which it held rigid. It might be for digging or for stripping the ground. It might be a weapon.
Certainly one did not want to walk up to that and ask its inclinations.
A beam of light hit the rocks and ran along the hill, and Manadgi held his breath, not daring to move. Someone surely sat in mastery of that machine, he told himself, but there was something so disturbingly clockwork about the swing of those lights that watching it made his flesh crawl.
What, he asked himself, if they were clockwork, such machines? What if the owners simply turned them loose to destroy, committing them to fortune and not caring what or whom they laid waste?
A spear of light stabbed backward from the clanking machine. Too close, Manadgi said to himself, and drew back from his position—then stopped cold as he saw the sheen of glass and smooth metal among the brush and the grass of the slope just below him.
An eye, he thought, a machine’s single eye thrust up through the grass, as yet not moving, perhaps not cognizant of him.
He had come here to make considerate approach. But not to this. Not to this. He held his breath, wondering if he dared move, or if it would move, or how long this eye had been there until the light from the machine showed it to him.
The area of brush where the clawed machine had disappeared was dark, now, and he sat in an awkward crouch, half ready to move away, doubting whether he dared, wondering if there was another such machine lurking with mechanical patience, or if such eyes might be threaded all through the grass and the rocks, and he had somehow blundered through them unseen. He trembled to think, considering that it was himself on whom the fortunes of greater people leaned, and that on his auspicious or inauspicious choice, on a sum of strange participants whose number he could not at all reckon, chance was delicately balanced, awaiting his decision one way or the other to tip events into motion, for good or for ill to the aiji, whose interests bound up many, many lives.
Clearly the moon-folk had no right intruding on Tachi land, within the aiji’s power. They had done damage in their arrogance and their power and challenged the people of the whole Earth—and it was on him to decide what to do, whether to risk this eye developing legs and running to report, or a voice, to alert other eyes, and to call the clawed machine back to this slope.
It had done neither, so far. Perhaps it was shut down. Perhaps it was not a whole machine, in itself, only a part from a damaged one. If they fell from the sky, perhaps a petal-sail had failed, and one had smashed itself on the rocks.
He could scarcely get his next breath, as he moved himself ever so silently backward and backward, straining his mortal eyes into the dark toward the eye and asking himself if the eye might have ears to hear the whisper of cloth or the drawing of his breaths or—it seemed possible to him—the hammering of his heart. But the eye sat in darkness, perhaps blind, perhaps asleep—or feigning it. Did clockwork things hear, or smell, or think?
Or how did they know to move? Did they turn on and off their own switches? That seemed impossible.
It stayed inert, at least. He gained his feet, moving with what stealth he could, uphill, encountering, at least, no other eyes in the grass.
He settled into a nook higher on the hill, there to tuck up among the yet unravaged rocks, to catch his breath and regain his composure.
The aiji, he told himself, should have sent one of his assassins, not a speaker—should have sent some one of his guard accustomed to hazardous actions, who would know how to move silently and how to judge the hazards of this situation.
And perhaps having seen clearly that it was a matter outside his judgment, his wisest course would be to withdraw with what he had seen, and to advise the aiji and the hasdrawad to send someone with the skill to penetrate this devastation. He saw no safe approach.
Yet had any machine attacked him? Had the machines harmed the children, or could the Tachi prove such wandering machines had killed any of their herds?
He had to admit fear had swayed his judgment a moment ago. The clockwork machines had wreaked havoc on the land, but not, though given opportunity, attacked people or livestock. The children that had reported machines had escaped unharmed, and nothing had tracked them to their village. The herdsmen that had spied on the landing places of the petal-sails had escaped, alive and well, without the machines of the moon-folk following them.
So perhaps the machines were deaf and even witless things, and he had been foolish to run, just now.
He was certainly glad no one was here to witness his dilemma, huddled in a hole in the dark, shivering, and not with the cold.
Was that the story he wanted to tell the aiji and his court, how he had fled, without any closer observation? He had confidence in his skills as an observer and as a negotiator. And could he fail to gather at least an assessment of numbers and position, which would be useful as the hasdrawad debated and the aiji arranged another, more aggressive, mission?
He dared not carry back a mistaken report, or ask for assassins, and perhaps, in an assassin’s too-quick reaction to threat, push the whole situation to hostilities that might not be anyone’s intention. He had come here plainly to ask the moon-folk what they were doing, and to have an answer from them for the aiji. He had always realized the chance of dying by error or by hostile action. It was a risk he had been willing to run, when the aiji asked him the question in the safety of the aiji’s apartments.
Could he retreat now, claiming the machines had threatened him—his only excuse but cowardice—knowing that report would be taken as a reasoned conclusion, and that it would loose irremediable consequences?
No. He could not. He could not remotely justify it. The aiji had seen applicability in his skills to make him the aiji’s considered choice for this mission.
He hoped the aiji had also seen intelligence, and judgment, and resourcefulness, not alone for the honor of the aiji’s opinion, but because his personal resources seemed very scant just now, and the night was very cold, and nothing in his life had prepared him for this.