III

“Is it easy to get your first story published?”

“Why?” I ask. It is computer games tonight in the rec room. I am quite good at the ones which involve blowing up things and very bad at the word games. My mind goes on holiday when I am not writing, and declares moratorium in logic. “Are you thinking of writing one?”

“Oh, no. I just wondered whether it’s easy.”

“It isn’t. Or if it is, and it happens too soon, you don’t have all the calluses you need. And you can get hurt. Writing is a risky business.” We are some time into our acquaintance. We have passed from that intimacy of strangers into a different kind of truth. “Too, sometimes a story just misbehaves. Sometimes one seems to turn out at an inconvenient length, or the topic isn’t fashionable. An inexperienced writer is most likely to do a story that’s over-long or too short- and of course in the inscrutable justice of the System, a new writer is also the least likely to get an odd-length story published. Sometimes a young writer can be very naive about the system. There was a story I wrote back in the sixties, in the hope I could get it serialized in a major magazine. Now, there’s really about as much chance of a break-in writer doing that as there is of a particular star out there going nova while we watch.

“And to compound matters, I sent a half-page summary to the magazine in question and asked them if they wanted it on that basis. They said what any sane editors would have said. No. So I tossed it into the drawer, since I had arrived at sanity in the meanwhile and knew my chances.”

“Just gave up?”

“I had two novels circulating. I pinned my hopes on those. One eventually made it. Rewritten, to be sure. But, no, I never gave up on this story. I thought about making it into a novel and I’d take it out and try now and again. Now I tell you a truth about what this age and the system has done to storytellers- we’re prisoners of bookcovers. Bookcovers must come along at just exactly such a time so a certain number of books will fit into a rack and cost a certain amount. So people who have a long tale to tell have to interrupt it with a great many bookcovers (and re-explanations) and alas, if you birth a tale inconveniently small you’ll spend as much creativity finding a home for it as it took to write it in the first place.

“But sometimes there is a story, as an old tale used to say quite properly, just so long and no longer.

“So ‘Companions’ never grew and never shrank; and it languished in that drawer until someone had just the right space for it. Also rewritten, of course. It’s a ghost story. Of sorts.”

“Fantasy?”

“Science fiction.”

“Perceptions again?”

“In a way.” I lose a playing-piece and am regenerated on the screen. “I was rather fond of the concept. Count the characters when you’ve read it. Tell me how many there are-except the beginning.”

“Tricks.”

“It’s perceptions, remember.”

Companions

The ship lay behind them, improbable in so rich a land, so earthlike a world, a silver egg in paradise, an egg more accustomed to stellar distances, to crouching on barren, hellish moons, probing for whatever she could find, her people and her brain calculating survival margins for potential bases- whether mining and manufacture might be enough, given x number of ship-calls per year, to make development worth the while, for ships on their way to Somewhere, as a staging point for humans on their way to Somewhere in the deep.

Somewheres were much, much rarer- and this was one, this was more than a marginal Somewhere, this eden.

No indication of habitation, no response to an orbiting ship; no readings on close scan, not a geometry anywhere on the surface but nature’s own work.

An Earth unpopulated, untouched, unclaimed.

Green and lush through the faceplates- a view that changed slowly as Warren turned, as he faced from open plain to forest to distant mountains. Sea lay a little distance away. The sky was incredible, Filtered blue. Three other white-suited figures walked ungainly through the grass. The sounds of breathing came through the suit-corn, occasional comments, panted breaths interspersed: the gear weighed them down on this world. The ship kept talking to them, forlorn, envious voices of those duty-bound inside, to the four of them out here.

“Makes no sense,” Harley said, disembodied, through the com. “No insects. No birds. You can’t have an ecology like this with no animate life.”

“Take your samples,” Burlin’s voice said, dimmer. The captain, Burlin. He stood to make himself that one find that would assure an old age in comfort. For the younger rest of them, promise of prime assignments, of comforts for the ship, of the best for the rest of their lives. They escorted Harley out here-Harley who told them what to gather, Harley whose relays were to the labs back on the ship, the real heart of the probe’s operations.

Nothing was wrong with the world. The first air and soil samples Anne’s intakes had gathered had shown them nothing amiss; the pseudosome had come out, stood, silver and invulnerable to chance, and surveyed the find with robotic eyes, as incapable of joy as suited human bodies were of appreciating the air and the wind that swayed the grasses. There might be perfumes on the wind, but the instruments read a dispassionate N, CO2, O finding, a contaminant readout, windspeed, temperature.

They gathered whole plants and seeds, tiny scoops of soil, a new world’s plunder. Every species was new, and some were analogous to kinds they knew: bearded grasses, smooth-barked bushes with slick green leaves. Paul Warren dug specimens Harley chose and sealed the bags, recorded the surrounds with his camera, labeled and marked with feverish enthusiasm.

“Harley?” That was Sax. Warren looked around at Harley, who sat down from a crouch in the grass, heard someone’s breathing gone rapid. “You all right, Harley?”

“It’s hot,” Harley said. “I don’t think my system’s working right.”

Burlin walked back to him. Warren did, too, stuffing his samples into the bag at his belt. It was an awkward business, trying to examine another suit’s systems, tilting the helmet. Sun glared on the readout plate, obscuring the numbers for the moment. Harley shifted his shoulder and it cleared. “All right,” Warren said. “The system’s all right.”

“Maybe you’d better walk back,” Burlin said to Harley. “We’re nearly done out here anyway.”

Harley made a move toward rising, flailed with a gloved hand, and Sax caught it, steadied him on the way up.

Harley’s knees went, suddenly, pitching him face down. “Check the airflow,” Burlin said. Warren was already on it.

“No problem there.” He tried to keep panic out of his voice. “Harley?”

“He’s breathing.” Burlin had his hand on Harley’s chest. He gathered up Harley’s arm, hauled it over his shoulder, and Warren got the other one.

It was a long way back, dragging a suited man’s weight. “Get the pseudosome out,” Burlin ordered into the welter of questions from the ship. “Get us help out here.”

It came before they had gotten halfway to the ship, a gleam in the dark square of Anne’s grounded lift tube bay, a human-jointed extension of the ship coming out for them, planting its feet carefully in the uncertain footing of the grass. It was strength. It was comfort. It came walking the last distance with silver arms outstretched, the dark visor of its ovoid head casting back the sun.

They gave Harley to it, positioning its program-receptive arms, told it lift-right, and the right arm came up, so that it carried Harley like a baby, like a silver sexless angel carrying a faceless shape of a man back to the ship. They followed, plodding heavily after, bearing the burden of their own suits and feeling the unease that came with unknown places when things started going wrong.

It was bright day. There were no threats, no unstable terrain, no threat of weather or native life. But the sunlight seemed less and the world seemed larger and ominously quiet for so much life on its face.

They brought Harley inside, into the airlock. The pseudosome stood still as the hatch closed and sealed. “Set down, Anne,” Burlin said, and the pseudosome reversed the process that had gathered Harley up, released him into their arms. They laid him on the floor.

Harley moved, a febrile stirring of hands and head, a pawing at the helmet collar. “Get the oxygen,” Burlin said, and Warren ignored the queries coming rapid-fire from the crew inside the ship, got up and opened the emergency panel while Sax and Burlin stripped off the helmet. He brought the oxy bottle, dropped to his knees and clamped the clear mask over Harley’s white, sweating face. Harley sucked in great breaths, coughed, back arching in the cumbersome suit. Red blotches marked his throat, like heat. “Look at that,” Sax said. The blotches were evident on Harley’s face, too, fine hemorrhaging about the cheeks, about the nose and mouth beneath the plastic.

Burlin stood up, hit the decontamination process. The UV came on. The rest of the procedure sequenced in the lock. Burlin knelt. Harley was breathing shallowly now. “He couldn’t have gotten it out there,” Warren said. “Not like this, not this fast. Not through the suit.”

“Got to get the ship scoured out,” Burlin said. “Yesterday, the day before-something got past the lock.”

Warren looked up- at the pseudosome.

The processing cut off. The lights went back to normal. Warren looked at Harley, up at Burlin. “Captain-are we going to bring him in?”

“We do what we can. We three. Here. In the lock.”

Harley’s head moved, restlessly, dislodging the mask. Warren clamped it the more tightly.

Before he died it took the three of them to hold him. Harley screamed, and clawed with his fingers, and beat his head against the decking. Blood burst from his nose and mouth and drowned the oxy mask, smeared their suits in his struggles. He raved and called them by others’ names and cursed them and the world that was killing him. When it was over, it was morning again, but by then another of the crew had complained of fever. Inside the ship.

They went to every crevice of the ship, suited, with UV light and steam-borne disinfectant, nightmare figures meeting in fog, in the deep places, among conduits and machines.

Everywhere, the com: “Emergency to three; we’ve got another-”

Deep in the bowels of the ship, two figures, masked, carrying cannisters, obscured in steam:

“It isn’t doing any good,” Abner said. There was panic in his voice, a man who’d seen crew die before, on Mortifer and Hell. “Ten of us already-”

“Shut up, Abner,” Warren said, with him, in the dark of Anne’s depths. Steam hissed, roared from the cannisters; disinfectant dripped off griddings, off railings and pipe. “Just shut it up.”

Corn’s voice faltered, rose plaintive through the roar: “We’re not getting any response out of 2a. Is somebody going to check on that? Is there somebody going to check that out?”

There was chaos in the labs, tables unbolted, cots used while they could be; pallets spread when they ran out of those. The raving lay next to the comatose; death came with hemorrhage, small at first, and worse. Lungs filled, heart labored, and the vessels burst. Others lingered, in delirium.

“Lie down,” Sikutu said-biologist, only sometime medic, tried to help the man, to reason where there was no reason.

“I’ve got work to do,” Sax cried, wept, flailed his arms. “I’ve got work-”

Smith held him, a small woman, pinned an arm while Sikutu held the other. “Hush, hush,” she said. “You’ve got to lie still-Sax, Sax-”

“They all die,” Sax said, as he wept. “I’ve got work to do. I’ve got to get back to the lab-I don’t want to die-”

He set others off, awakened the sleeping, got curses, screams from others.

“Don’t want to die,” he sobbed.

Sikutu shook at him, quieted him at last, sat down and held his head in his hands. He felt fevered, felt short of breath.

His pulse increased. But maybe that was fear.

Rule was dead. Warren found her in Botany, among the plants she loved, lying in a knot next to one of the counters. He stared, grieved in what shock there was left to feel. There was no question of life left. There was the blood, the look of all the others. He turned his face away, leaned against the wall where the com unit was, pressed the button.

“Captain, she’s dead, all right. Botany One.”

There was silence for a moment. “Understood,” Burlin’s voice came back. It broke. Another small silence. “The pseudosome’s on its way.”

“I don’t need it. She doesn’t weigh much.”

“Don’t touch her.”

“Yes, sir.” Warren pushed the button, broke the contact, leaned there with his throat gone tight. The dying screamed through the day and night, audible through the walls of sickbay on lower deck, up the air shafts, up the conduits, like the machinery sounds.

This had been a friend.

The lift worked, near the lab; he heard it, heard the metal footsteps, rolled his eyes toward the doorway as Anne herself came in- shining metal, faceless face, black plastic face with five red lights winking on and off inside; black plastic mirroring the lab on its oval surface, his own distorted form.

“Assistance?” Anne asked.

“Body.” He pointed off at Rule. “Dispose.”

Anne reoriented, stalked over and bent at the waist, gripped Rule’s arm. The corpse had stiffened. Motors whirred; Anne straightened, hauling the body upright; another series of whirrings: brought her right arm under Rule’s hips, lifted, readjusted the weight. A slow shuffling turn.

Warren stepped aside. Anne walked, hit the body against the doorframe in trying to exit. Warren put out his hand, sickened by this further horror, but Anne tilted the body, passed through and on.

He followed, down the hall, to Destruct- utilitarian, round-sealed door. Danger, it said. Warning. They used it for biological wastes. For dangerous samples. For more mundane things.

For their dead, down here.

He opened the hatch. Anne put the body in, small, insectile adjustments like a wasp. Froze, then, arms lowering, sensor-lights winking out. Warren closed the door, dogged it down. He pushed the button, winced at the explosive sound, wiped his face. His hands were shaking. He looked at Anne,

“Decontaminate yourself,” he said. The lights came on inside the mask. The robot moved, reoriented to the hall, walked off into the dark farther down the hall: no lights for Anne. She needed none.

Warren’s belly hurt. He caught his breath. Decontaminate. He headed for the showers, faithful to the regs. It was a thing to do; it kept a man from thinking, held out promises of safety. Maybe the others had let down.

He showered, vapored dry, took clean coveralls from the common locker, sat down on the bench to pull on his boots. His hands kept shaking. He kept shivering even after dressing. Fear. It’s fear.

An alarm sounded, a short beep of the Klaxon, something touched that should not have been, somewhere in the ship. He stopped in mid-tug, heard the crash and whine of the huge locks at Anne’s deep core. Someone was using the cargo airlock. He stood up, jammed his foot into the second boot, started for the door.

“All report.” He heard the general order, Burlin’s voice. He went to the com by the door and did that, name and location: “Paul Warren, lower-deck showers.”

Silence.

“Captain?”

Silence.

Panic took him. He left the shower room at a run, headed down the corridor to the lift, rode it up to topside, raced out again, down the hall, around the corner into the living quarters, through it to the bridgeward corridor.

Locked. He pushed the button twice, tried the com above it. “Captain.” He gasped for air. “Captain, it’s Warren. Was that Abner, then?”

Silence. He fumbled his cardkey from his pocket, inserted it into the slot under the lock. It failed. He slammed his fist onto the com.

“Captain?-Sikutu, Abner, is anyone hearing me?”

Silence still. He turned and ran back down the short corridor, through the mainroom, back toward the lift.

“Warren?” the com said. Burlin’s voice.

Warren skidded to a stop, scrambled back to the nearest com unit and pushed the button. “Captain, Captain, what’s going on?”

“I’m not getting any word out of sickbay,” Burlin said. “I’ve sent the pseudosome in. Something’s happened there.”

“I’m going.”

Silence.

Warren caught his breath, ran for the lift and rode it down again. Silence in the lower corridor too. He looked about him. “Abner? Abner, are you down here?”

No answer to the hail. Nothing. A section seal hissed open behind him. He spun about, caught his balance against the wall.

Anne was there in the dark. The pseudosome strode forward, her red lights glowing.

Warren turned and ran, faster than the robot, headed for the lab.

Quarantine, it said. No entry. He reached the door, pressed the com. “Sikutu. Sikutu, it’s Warren. Are you all right in there?”

Silence. He pushed Door-Open.

It was a slaughterhouse inside. Blood was spattered over walls and beds. Sikutu-lying on the floor among the beds and pallets, red all over his lab whites from his perforated chest; Minnan and Polly and Tom, lying in their beds with their bedclothes sodden red, with startled eyes and twisted bodies. Throats cut. Faces slashed.

One bed was empty. The sheets were thrown back. He cast about him, counted bodies, lost in horror- heard the footsteps at his back and turned in alarm.

Anne stood there, facelights flashing, cameras clicking into focus.

“Captain,” Warren said: Anne was a relay herself. “Captain, it’s Sax. He’s gone- everyone else is dead. He’s got a knife or something. Is there any word from Abner?”

“I can’t raise him.” Burlin’s voice came from Anne. “Get a gun. Go to the lock. Abner was in that area last.”

“Assistance.” The voice changed; Anne’s mechanical tones. The pseudosome swiveled, talking to the dead. “Assistance?”

Warren wiped his face, caught his breath. “Body,” he said distractedly. “Dispose.” He edged past the pseudosome, ran for the corridor, for the weapons locker.

The locker door was dented, scarred as if someone had hammered it, slashed at it; but it was closed. He used his card on it. It jammed. He used it for a lever, used his fingertips, pried it open. He took one of the three pistols there, ignored the holsters, just slammed it shut and ran for the lift.

Downward again. His hands were shaking as he rode. He fumbled at the safety. He was a navigator, had never carried a gun against any human being, had never fired except in practice. His heart was speeding, his hands cold.

The lift stopped; the door whipped open on the dark maze of netherdeck, of conduits and walkways that led to the lock.

He reached for the light switch below the com panel. The lift door shut behind him, leaving him in darkness. He hesitated, pushed the button.

He walked carefully along the walk. The metal grids of the decking echoed underfoot. He passed aisles, searching for ambush- flexed his fingers on the gun, thinking of it finally, of what he was doing.

A catwalk led out to the lift platform, to the huge circular cargo plate, the lift control panel. The plate was in down-position, leaving a deep black hole in netherdeck, the vertical tracks showing round the pit. He reached the control station, pressed the button.

Gears synched; hydraulics worked. The platform came up into the light. A shape was on it, a body in a pool of blood. Abner.

Warren punched the station com. “Captain,” he said, controlling his voice with marvelous, reasonable calm. “Captain, Abner’s dead. Out on the lift platform, netherdeck. Shall I go outside?”

“No,” Burlin’s voice came back.

He shivered, waiting for more answer. “Captain.”

He still kept it calm. “Captain, what do you want me to do?”

Silence and static. Warren cut it off, his hand clenched to numbness on the gun. He flexed it live again, walked out onto the echoing platform, looked about him, full circle, at the shadows. Blood trailed off the platform’s circle, stopped clean against the opposing surface. Gone. Outside. He hooked the gun to his belt, stooped and gathered Abner up, heaved the slashed body over his shoulder. Blood drenched him, warm and leaking through his clothes. The limbs hung loose.

He carried it-him; Abner; six years his friend. Like Sikutu. Like Sax.

He kept going, to the lift, trailing blood, retracing all his steps. There was silence all about, ship-silence, the rush of air in the ducts, the thousand small sounds of Anne’s pumps and fans. Two of them now, two of them left, himself and Burlin. And Sax- out there; out there, escaped, in paradise.

He took Abner upstairs, carried him down the corridor, in the semidark of Power-Save.

The pseudosome was busy there, carrying Sikutu’s bloody form to the destruct chamber. Warren followed it, automaton like the other, trying to feel as little. But the bodies were stacked up there at the foot of the destruct chamber door, a surplus of bodies. Only one was jammed inside. Minnan. Warren’s knees weakened. He watched the pseudosome let Sikutu down atop the others, saw it coming back, arms outstretched.

“Assistance?”

He surrendered Abner to it, stomach twisting as he did. He clamped his jaws and dogged the door on Minnan and pushed the button.

They did the job, he and the pseudosome. He threw up, after, from an empty stomach.

“Assistance?” Anne asked. “Assistance?”

He straightened, wiped his face, leaned against the wall. “Sterilize the area. Decontaminate.” He walked off, staggered, corrected himself, pushed the nearest com button, having composed himself, keeping anger from his voice. “Captain. Captain, I’ve got the bodies all disposed. The area’s being cleaned.” Softly, softly, he talked gently to this man, this last sane man. “Can we talk, sir?”

“Warren?” the plaintive voice came back.

“Sir?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sir?” He waited. There was only the sound of breathing coming through. “Sir-are you on the bridge? I’m coming up there.”

“Warren-I’ve got it.”

“No, sir.” He wiped his forearm across his face, stared up at the com unit. He began to shake. “What am I supposed to do, sir?” He forced calm on himself. “What can I do to help?”

A delay. “Warren, I’ll tell you what I’ve done. And why. You listening, Warren?”

“I’m here, sir.”

“I’ve shut down controls. We can’t beat this thing. I’ve shut her down for good, set her to blow if anyone tries to bypass to take off. I’m sorry. Can’t let us go home- taking this back to human space. It could spread like wildfire, kill-kill whole colonies before the meds could get it solved. I’ve set a beacon,

Warren. She’ll play it anytime some probe comes in here, when they do come, whenever.”

“Sir-sir, you’re not thinking-A ship in space-is a natural quarantine.”

“And if we died en route-and if someone got aboard-No. No. They mustn’t do that. We can’t lift again.”

“Sir-listen to me.”

“No animals, Warren. We never found any animals. A world like this and nothing moving in it. It’s a dead world. Something got it. Something lives here, in the soil, something in the air; something grew here, something fell in out of space-and it got all the animals. Every moving thing. Can’t let it go-”

“Sir-sir, we don’t know the rest of us would have died. We don’t know that. You may not, and I may not, and what are we going to do, sir?”

“I’m sorry, Warren. I’m really sorry. It’s not a chance to take-to go like that. Make up your own mind. I’ve done the best thing. I have. Insured us against weakness. It can’t leave here.”

“Captain- “

Silence. A soft popping sound.

“Captain!” Warren pushed away from the wall, scrambled for the lift and rode it topside, ran down the corridor toward the bridge. He thrust his card into the lock.

It worked now. The door slid. And Burlin was there, slumped at the com station, the gun beneath his hand. The sickroom stink was evident. The fever. The minute hemorrhages on the hands. Blood pooled on the com counter, ran from Burlin’s nose and mouth. The eyes stared, reddened.

Warren sat down in the navigator’s chair, wiped his face, his eyes, stared blankly, Finding it hard to get his breath. He cursed Burlin. Cursed all the dead.

There was silence after.

He got up finally, pulled Burlin’s body back off the com board, punched in the comp and-threw the com wide open, because the ship was all there was to talk to. “Anne,” he said to comp. “Pseudosome to bridge. Body. Dispose.”

In time the lift operated and the silver pseudo-some arrived, leisurely precise. It stood in the doorway and surveyed the area with insectoid turns of the head. It clicked forward then, gathered up Burlin and walked out.

Warren stayed a time, doing nothing, sitting in the chair on the bridge, in the quiet. His eyes filled with tears. He wiped at one eye and the other, still numb.

When he did walk down to destruct to push the button, the pseudosome was still standing beside the chamber. He activated it, walked away, left the robot standing there.

It was planetary night outside. He thought of Sax out there, crazed. Of Sax maybe still alive, in the dark, as alone as he. He thought of going out and hunting for him in the morning.

The outside speakers.

He went topside in haste, back to the bridge, sat down at the com and opened the port shields on night sky. He dimmed the bridge lights, threw on the outside floods, illuminating grass and small shrubs round about the ship.

He put on the outside address.

“Sax. Sax, it’s Paul Warren. There’s no one left but us. Listen, I’m going to put food outside the ship tomorrow. Tomorrow, hear me? I’ll take care of you. You’re not to blame. I’ll take care of you. You’ll get well, you hear me?”

He kept the external pickup on. He listened for a long time, looked out over the land.

“Sax?”

Finally he got up and walked out, down to the showers, sealed his clothes in a bag for destruct.

He tried to eat after that, wrapped in his robe, sitting down in the galley because it was a smaller place than the living quarters and somehow the loneliness was not so deep there; but he had no appetite. His throat was pricklish- exhaustion, perhaps. He had reason enough. The air-conditioning felt insufficient in the room.

But he had driven himself. That was what.

He had the coffee at least, and the heat suffused his face, made him short of breath.

Then the panic began to hit him. He thrust himself up from the table, dizzy in rising, vision blurred- felt his way to the door and down the corridor to the mirror in the showers. His eyes were watering. He wiped them, tried to see if there was hemorrhage. They were red, and the insides of the lids were red and painful. The heat he had felt began to go to chill, and he swallowed repeatedly as he walked back to the galley, testing whether the soreness in his throat was worse than he recalled over the last few hours.

Calm, he told himself. Calm. There were things to do that had to be done or he would face dying of thirst, of hunger. He set about gathering things from the galley, arranged dried food in precise stacks beside the cot in the lower-deck duty station, near the galley. He made his sickbed, set drugs and water and a thermal container of ice beside it.

Then he called the pseudosome in, walked it through the track from his bed to the galley and back again, programmed it for every errand he might need.

He turned down the bed. He lay down, feeling the chill more intense, and tucked up in the blankets.

The pseudosome stood in the doorway like a silver statue, one sensor light blinking lazily in the faceplate. When by morning the fever had taken him and he was too weak to move coherently, he had mechanical hands to give him water. Anne was programmed to pour coffee, to do such parlor tricks, a whim of Harley’s.

It wished him an inane good morning. It asked him How are you? and at first in his delirium he tried to answer, until he drifted too far away.

“Assistance?” he would hear it say then, and imagined a note of human concern in that voice. “Malfunction? Nature of malfunction, please?”

Then he heaved up, and he heard the pseudosome’s clicking crescendo into alarm. The emergency Klaxon sounded through the ship as the computer topside registered that there was something beyond its program. Her lights all came on.

“Captain Burlin,” she said again and again, “Captain Burlin, emergency.”

The pulsing of headache and fever grew less. Warren accepted consciousness gradually this time, fearful of the nausea that had racked him the last. His chest hurt. His arms ached, and his knees. His lips were cracked and painful. It amazed him that the pain had ebbed down to such small things.

“Good morning.”

He rolled his head on the pillow, to the soft whirr of machinery on his right. Anne’s smooth-featured pseudosome was still waiting.

He was alive. No waking between waves of fever. His face felt cool, his body warm from lying too long in one place. He lay in filth, and stench.

He propped himself up, reached for the water pitcher, knocked it off the table. It rolled empty to Anne’s metal feet.

“Assistance?”

He reached for her arm. “Flex.”

The arm bent, lifting him. Her motors whirred in compensation. “Showers.”

She reoriented herself and began to walk, with him leaning on her, his arm about her plastic-sheathed shoulder, like some old, familiar friend.

She stopped when she had brought him where he wished, out of program. He managed to stand alone, tottering and staring at himself in the mirror. He was gaunt, unshaven, covered with filth and sores. His eyes were like vast bruises. He swore, wiped his eyes and felt his way into a shower cabinet.

He fainted there, in the shower stall, came to again on the floor, under the warm mist. He managed to lever himself up again, got the door open, refused a second dizziness and leaned there till it passed. “Anne.” A whirring of motors. She planted herself in the doorway, waiting.

She got him topside, to the living quarters, to his own compartment door. “Open,” he told her hoarsely; and she brought him inside, to the edge of his own unused bed, to clean blankets and clean sheets. He fell into that softness panting and shivering, hauled the covers over himself with the last of his strength.

“Assistance?”

“I’m all right.”

“Define usage: right.”

“Functional. I’m functional.”

“Thank you.”

He laughed weakly. This was not Anne. Not she. It. Anne was across the living quarters, in controls, all the company there was left.

Thank you. As if courtesy had a point. She was the product of a hundred or more minds over the course of her sixteen-year service, men and women who programmed her for the moment’s convenience and left their imprint.

Please and thank you. Cream or sugar, sir? She could apply a wrench or laser through the pseudosome, lift a weight no man could move, bend a jointing into line or make a cup of coffee. But nothing from initiative.

Thank you.

It was another few hours before he was sure he was going to live. Another day before he did more than send Anne galleyward and back, eat and sleep again.

But at last he stood up on his own, went to his locker, dressed, if feebly.

The pseudosome brightened a second sensor at this movement, then a third. “Assistance?”

“Report, Anne.”

“Time: oh six four five hours ten point one point two three. Operating on standby assistance, program E one hundred; on program A one hundred; on additional pro-”

“Cancel query. Continue programs as given.” He walked out into the living quarters, walked to the bridge, stood leaning on Burlin’s chair, surrounded by Anne’s lazily blinking consoles, by scanner images no one had read for days. He sat down from weakness.

“Anne. Do you have any program to lift off?”

The console lights rippled with activity. Suddenly Burlin’s deep voice echoed through the bridge. “Final log entry. Whoever hears this, don’t-repeat, don’t-land. Don’t attempt assistance. We’re dead of plague. It got aboard from atmosphere, from soil- somehow. It hit everyone. Everyone is dead. Biological records are filed under-”

“Cancel query. Reply is insufficient. Is there a course program in your records?”

“Reply to request for course: I must hold my position. If question is made of this order, I must replay final log entry- Final log entry-”

“Bypass that order. Prepare for lift!”

The lights went red. “I am ordered to self-destruct if bypass is attempted. Please withdraw request.”

“Cancel-cancel bypass order.” Warren slumped in the chair, stared at the world beyond the viewport, deadly beguiling morning, gold streaming through cumulus cloud. It was right. Burlin had been right; he had ensured even against a survivor. Against human weakness.

“Anne.” His voice faltered. “Take program. If I speak, I’m speaking to you. I don’t need to say your name. My voice will activate your responses. I’m Paul Warren. Do you have my ID clear?”

“ID as Warren, Paul James, six eight seven seven six five eight-”

“Cancel query. How long can your pseudosome remain functional?”

“Present power reserve at present rate of consumption: three hundred seventy-eight years approximate to the nearest-”

“Cancel query. Will prolonged activity damage the pseudosome?”

“Modular parts are available for repair. Attrition estimate: no major failure within power limits.”

Warren gazed out at the daybreak. Sax, he thought. He had made a promise and failed it, days ago. He tried to summon the strength to do something about it, to care-to go out and search in the hope that a man could have lived out there, sick, in the chill of nights and without food. He knew the answer. He had no wish to dwell on guilt, to put any hope in wandering about out there, to find another corpse. He had seen enough. More than enough.

“Library. Locate programming manual. Dispense.”

An agitation ran across the board and a microfilm shot down into the dispenser. He gathered it up.

There was this, for his comfort. For three hundred seventy-eight years.

Anne was a marvelous piece of engineering. Her pseudosome was capable of most human movements; its structure imitated the human body and her shining alloy was virtually indestructible by heat or corrosion. Walk-through programming made her capable in the galley: her sensitive vid scanners could read the tapes on stored foods; her timing system was immaculate. She carried on domestic tasks, fetched and carried, and meanwhile her other programs kept more vital functions in working order: circulation, heating, cooling throughout the ship, every circuit, all automated, down to the schedule of lighting going on and off, to the inventory reports going up on the screens each morning, for crew who would no longer read them.

Warren worked, ignoring these processes, trusting Anne for them. He read the manual, wrote out programs, sitting naked in bed with the microfilm reader on one side and a coffee pot on the other and a lap full of notes.

An illusion, that was all he asked, a semblance of a mind to talk to. Longer plans he refused as yet. The plotting and replotting that filled the bed and the floor about him with discarded balls of paper was his refuge, his defense against thinking.

He dreaded the nights and kept the lights on while the rest of the ship cycled into dark.

He slept in the light when he had to sleep, and woke and worked again while the pseudosome brought him his meals and took the empty dishes back again.

He called the star Harley, because it was his to name. The world he called Rule, because Harley and Rule were sometime lovers and it seemed good. Harley was a middling average star, the honest golden sort, which cast an easy warmth on his back, as an old friend ought. Rule stretched everywhere, rich and smelling sweet as Rule always had, and she was peaceful.

He liked the world better when he had named It, and felt the sky friendlier with an old friend’s name beaming down at him while he worked.

He stretched the guy ropes of a plastic canopy they had never had the chance to use on harsher worlds, screwed the moorings into the grassy earth and stood up in pleasant shade, looking out over wide billows of grass, with forest far beyond them.

Anne kept him company. She had a range of half a kilometer from the ship over which mind and body could keep in contact, and farther still if the booster unit were in place, which project he was studying. He had not yet had the time. He moved from one plan to the next, busy, working with his hands, feeling the strength return to his limbs. Healing sunlight erased the sores and turned his skin a healthy bronze. He stretched his muscles, grinned up at the sun through the leaf-patterned plastic. Felt satisfied.

“Anne. Bring the chair, will you?”

The pseudosome came to life, picked up the chair that remained on the cargo lift, carried it out. And stopped.

“Set it down.” His good humor turned to disgust. “Set it down.”

Anne set it, straightened, waited.

“Anne. What do you perceive?”

Anne’s sensors brightened, one after the other. “Light, gravity, sound, temperature.”

“You perceive me.”

“Yes, Warren. You’re directly in front of me.”

“Anne, come here.”

She walked forward, into the shade, stopped, hands at her sides, sensors pulsing behind her dark faceplate like so many stars in a void.

“Anne, I’m your duty. I’m all the crew. The directives all apply only to me now. The others have stopped functioning. Do you understand? I want you to remain active until I tell you otherwise. Walk at your own judgment. Identify and accept all stimuli that don’t take you out of range.”

“Program recorded,” Anne purred. “Execute?”

“Execute.”

Anne walked off. She had a peculiar gait, precise in her movements like an improbable dancer, stiffly smooth and slow-motion. Graceful, silver Anne. It always jarred when he looked into the vacant faceplate with the starry lights winking on and off in the darkness. She could never appreciate the sun, could never perceive him except as a pattern of heat and solidity in her sensors. She looked left, looked right, walk-walk-walk-walk, looked left, right, walk-walk-walk-walk, neither breathing the scents of life nor feeling the wind on her plastic skin. The universe held no perils for Anne.

Warren wept. He strode out, overtook her, seized her as she turned to him. “Anne. Where are you? Where are you going?”

“I am located four oh point four seven meters from base center. I am executing standard survey, proceeding-”

“Cancel query. Anne, look about you. What have you learned?”

Anne swiveled her head left and right. Her sensors flickered. “This world is as first observed. All stimuli remain within human tolerance. There are no native lifeforms in my scan.”

She turned then, jerking from his hands, and walked off from him, utterly purposeful.

“Anne!” he called, alarmed. “Anne, what’s wrong?”

She stopped, faced him. “The time is 1100 hours. Standard timed program 300-32-111PW.”

Lunch. Anne was, if nothing else, punctual.

“Go on.”

She turned. He trailed after her to the edge of the canopy, cast himself into the chair and sat disconsolate. Adrenalin surged. Rage. There was no profit in that. Not at a machine. He knew that. He told himself so.

He attached the booster unit-not out of enthusiasm, but because it was another project, and occupied him. It took two days- in which he had only Anne’s disembodied voice, while the pseudosome lay disemboweled in the shop. He had difficulty, not with the insertion of the unit, which was modular, but in getting the ring-joints of the waist back together; it occasioned him panic, real and sweating dread. He consulted library, worked and fretted over it, got the first ring and the second, and so on to the fifth. She had lost nothing vital, only some of her auxiliary apparatus for hookups of use on frigid moons. That could be put back if need be.

He could take her apart and put her back together if need be, if amusement got more scarce.

If she worked at all now. The chance of failure still scared him.

“Anne,” he said, “turn on the pseudosome.”

The head slung over, faced him.

“Good morning, Warren.”

“Are you functional? Test your legs. Get off the table.”

Anne sat up, machine-stiff, precisely reversing her process of getting onto the table. She stood, arms at her sides.

“Go on,” Warren said. “Go about your duties.”

She stayed fixed.

“Why don’t you go?”

“Instruction?”

He bounced a wrench off the lab wall so violently his shoulder ached. It rebounded to Anne’s metal feet.

Whirr-click. Anne bent with long legs wide and retrieved the wrench, proffering it to him. “Assistance?”

“Damn you.”

AH the sensor lights came on. “Define usage: damn.”

He hit her. She compensated and stood perfectly balanced.

“Define: damn.”

He sobbed for breath, stared at her, regained his patience. “The perception is outside your sensor range.”

The sensor lights dimmed. She still held the wrench, having no human fatigue to make her lower it.

An idea came to him, like a flash of madness. He shoved the debris and bits of solder off the worktable and sat down with his notebook, feverishly writing definitions in terms Anne’s sensors could read: tone, volume, pace, stability, function/nonfunction/ optimum, positive/negative-

“This program,” Anne said to him through her bridge main speakers, “conflicts with the central program.”

He sat down in the command chair, all his plans wrecked. “Explain conflict.”

“I’m government property,” the computer said. “Regulations forbid crew to divert me for personal use.”

Warren bit his lip and thought a moment, chin on hand. Looked at the flickering lights. “I’m your highest priority. There aren’t any other humans in your reach. Your program doesn’t permit you to lift off, true?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t return to government zones, true?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no other crew functioning, true?”

“Yes.”

“I’m your only human. There can’t be any lateral conflict in your instructions if you accept the program. I need maintenance. If you refuse to maintain me, I have to disconnect you and restructure your whole system of priorities. I can do that.”

The board flashed wildly. Went to red. A light to the left began to blink: autodestruct, autodestruct.

Autodestruct-

“I’m programmed to defend this position. I have prior instruction. Please check your programming, Warren. I’m in conflict.”

“Will you accept instruction? I’m your remaining crew. What I tell you is true.”

The lights went steady, burning red. “Instruction? Instruction?”

“This new programming applies only to my protection and maintenance under present environmental conditions, while we’re on this world. It’s not a diversion from your defense function. I’m assisting you in your defense of this position. I’m your crew. I need maintenance. This new program is necessary for that purpose. My health is threatened. My life is threatened. This program is essential for my life and safety.”

The red light went off. The lights rippled busily across the boards, normalcy restored. “Recorded.”

Warren drew a long-held breath. “What’s your status, Anne?”

“Indeterminate, Warren. I haven’t yet completed assimilation of this new data. I perceive possible duplication of existing vocabulary. Is this valid?”

“This terminology is in reference to me. These are human life states. Maintenance of me is your duty.”

“Negative possible, Warren. My sensors are effective in systems analysis only for myself.”

He thought, mechanically speaking, that there was something rather profound in that. It was indeed Anne’s central problem. He stood up, looked at the pseudosome, which stood inactive by the door. “Turn your sensors on me.”

Anne faced him. The sensor lights came-on.

“Define: pain, Anne.”

“Disruption of an organism,” the pseudosome-speaker said, “by sensor overload. It is not an acceptable state.”

He drew a deeper breath, came closer. “And what is pleasure, Anne?”

“Optimum function.”

“Define: feel, Anne.”

“Verb: receive sensor input other than visual, auditory, or chemical analysis. Noun: the quality of this input.”

“Define: happy.”

“Happy; content; pleased, comfortable; in a state of optimum function.”

“And anger, Anne.”

“An agitated state resulting from threatening and unpleasant outcome of action. This is a painful state.”

“Your program is to maintain me happy. When your sensors indicate I’m in pain, you must investigate the causes and make all possible effort to restore me to optimum function. That’s a permanent instruction.”

The facial lights blinked, died, all but one. “Recorded.”

He sighed.

The lights flashed on. “Is this pain?”

“No.” He shook his head and began to laugh, which set all of Anne’s board lights to flickering.

“Define, define.”

He forced calm. “That’s laughing. You’ve heard laughing before now.”

A delay. “I find no record.”

“But you heard it just then. Record it. That’s pleasure, Anne.”

Facelights blinked. There were six now. “Recorded.”

He patted her metal shoulder. She swiveled her head to regard his hand. “Do you feel that, Anne?”

The face turned back to him. “Feel is in reference to humans.”

“You can use the word. Do you feel that?”

“I feel a pressure of one point seven kilos. This does not affect my equilibrium.”

He patted her arm gently then, sadly. “That’s all right. I didn’t think it would.”

“Are you still happy, Warren?”

He hesitated, having a moment’s queasiness, a moment’s chill. “Yes,” he said. It seemed wisest to say.

He stopped on a small rise not far from the ship and the pseudosome went rigid at his side. They stood knee-deep in grass. A few fleecy clouds drifted in the sky. The forest stretched green and lush before them.

“Do you perceive any animate life, Anne?”

“Negative native animate life.”

“Is there any record - of a world with vegetation of this sort, that had no animate life?”

“Negative. Further information: there is viral life here. This is not in my sensor range, but I have abundant data in my files regarding-”

“Cancel statement. Maybe this world was inhabited by something once and the virus killed it.”

“I have no data on that proposal.”

“No animals. Burlin said it.”

“Define: it.”

“Cancel.” Warren adjusted his pack on his shoulders, pointed ahead, a gesture Anne understood. “We’ll walk as far as the river.”

“Define: river.”

“See where the trees-the large vegetation starts? There’s water there. A river is a moving body of water on a planetary surface. You have maps in your files. You’ve got rivers on them. Why don’t you know rivers?”

Anne’s facial sensors winked. “Maps are in library storage. I don’t have access to this data.”

“Well, there’s one there. A river.”

“My sensors have recorded the presence of water in the original survey. Free water is abundant on this world.”

Dutifully she kept pace with him, still talking as he started off, metal limbs tireless. He stopped from time to time, deviated this way and that, walked round the scattered few bushes, investigated bare spots in the grass, which proved only stony outcrops.

Nothing. Nothing, in all his searching.

“Assistance?” Anne asked when he stopped.

“No, Anne.” He looked back at her, hesitant. “Do you, Anne-ever perceive- any other human?”

“Negative. You are my only human.”

He bit his lip, nerved himself, finally. “When I was in bed-did Sax ever come back?”

The sensors blinked. “I find no record.”

He found that ambiguous, tried to think a new way through the question. He looked toward the river, back again. “Has he ever come back?”

“I find no record.”

Warren let go a small breath, shook his head. “He’s not functioning. I’m sure of it.”

“Recorded.”

He hitched the pack, started walking again. “His body’s out here somewhere.”

“I find no record.”

“I want to find him, Anne. Shouldn’t have left him out here. He could have come back and needed me. And I couldn’t answer. I want to find him. I owe him that.”

“Recorded.”

They came to the trees finally, to shade, in the straightest line from the ship, which seemed most worth searching. Trees. A small slope of eroded sand down to the river, which flowed about fifty meters wide, deep and sluggish. A stream, broad and brown.

He stopped, and Anne did. Drew a breath of the scented air, forgetful for the moment of Sax, of what had brought him. Here was beauty, unsuspected, a part of the world he had not seen from the ship- secrets underwater and growing round it, trees that relieved the sameness and made evershifting lattices that compressed distances into their back-and-forth tangle. No straight lines here. No scour of wind. Coolness. Complexity.

Life, perhaps, lurking in the river. One fish, one crawling thing, and the parameters of the world had to be revised. One fish- and it meant life everywhere.

“Stand where you are,” he told Anne, starting down the bank. “I don’t think swimming is in your program.”

“Define: swimming. I find no record.”

He laughed soundlessly, left her by the trees and walked through the pathless tangle to the shady bank. Trees with trailing, moss-hung branches arched out over the sluggish current. Flowers bloomed, white and starlike, on the far margin, where the trees grew larger still and it was twilight at midafternoon. He squatted down by the water and looked into the shallows where the current swirled mosses.

Anne came to life, motors whirring. Brush cracked. He sprang up, saw her coming down the slope, precariously balanced in the descent.

“Stop-Anne, stop.”

Anne planted her feet at the bottom, waistdeep in brush, lights flashing. “Warren, danger.”

Panic surged. He had brought no gun on this search. Did not trust himself. “Specify-danger.”

“The river is dangerous.”

The breath went out of him. He halfway laughed. “No, Verb: swim, to travel through water safely. I can swim, Anne. I’m safe. No danger.”

“Please consider this carefully, Warren.”

He grinned, took a vial from his sample kit and knelt, taking up a specimen of water. He had the whole of the labs to use; he had had the basics, and it was a project, something to do, something with promise, this time.

“I can’t assist you in the water, Warren.”

“I don’t need assistance.” He capped the vial and replaced it in the kit, wiped his fingers with a disinfectant towelette and stowed it. “I’ll come back to you in a moment.”

She made small whirring sounds, cameras busy.

He stood up, turned to face her, waved a hand toward the bank. “Turn your sensors over there, far focus, will you? See if you can see anything.”

“Vegetation. Trees.”

“Yes.” He put his hands into his pockets, stood staring into the forest a long time, watching the wind stir the leaves on the far bank.

So the world had a limit. Anne did. There. The ship had a raft, two of them; but curiosity was not worth the risk to the pseudosome. There were the other directions-flat and grassy; there was the land-crawler for crossing them.

But there was nothing in those distances but more grass and more distance.

He shrugged, half a shiver, and turned his back on the river and the forest, climbed back to Anne, pulled branches away from her silvery body and held them out of her way.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”

“Yes, Warren.” She swiveled smartly and reoriented, cracking branches with each metal tread, followed him through the tangle until they had come out of the brush again, walking side by side toward the plain, toward the ship.

No sign of Sax. It was useless. Sax would have drowned in the river if his fever had carried him this way; drowned and been swept out to some brush heap elsewhere. Or seaward.

“Anne, would you have followed me if I’d tried to cross the river?”

“Instruction directed me to stay. Program directs me to protect you.”

“I love you, too, Annie, but don’t ever take the risk. I could cross the river without danger. My body floats in water. Yours sinks. The mud would bog you down.”

“Program directs me to protect you.”

“You can’t protect me if you’re at the bottom of the river. You can’t float. Do you understand float?”

“Verb: be buoyant, rise. Noun-”

“Cancel. You stay away from that water, hear me?”

“I’m receiving you clearly, Warren.”

“I order you to stay away from the river. If I go close, you stop and wait until I come back. You don’t ever go into water. That’s a permanent order.”

“I perceive possible priority conflict.”

“You have to preserve yourself to carry out your instruction to protect me. True?”

“Yes.”

“Water can damage you. It can’t damage me. If I choose to go there, I go. You stay away from the water.”

A delay. “Recorded.”

He frowned, hitched the pack up and looked askance at her, then cast another, longer look backward.

Build a bridge, perhaps? Make the other side accessible for Anne? The thought of going beyond her range made him uneasy-if he should run into difficulty, need her-

There were the com units. The portable sensors.

He wanted to go over there, to know what was there. And not there.

The microscope turned up a variety of bacteria in the water. He sat in the lab, staring at the cavorting shapes, shaken by that tiny movement as if it had been the sight of birds or beasts. Something lived here and moved.

Such things, he recalled, could work all manner of difficulties in a human gut. He called up Library, went through the information gleaned of a dozen worlds. The comparisons might have told Sikutu something, but he found it only bewildering. They might be photosynthesizing animalcules, or contractile plants.

Heat killed the specimens. He shoved the plate into the autoclave and felt like a murderer. He thought even of walking back to the river to pour the rest of the vial in. Life had become that precious. He nerved himself and boiled the rest-imagined tiny screams in the hissing of the bubbles. It left pale residue.

Two days he lay about, thinking, distracting himself from thought. He sat in Anne’s observation dome at night, mapped the movements of the system’s other worlds; by day, observed the sun through filters. But there were the charts they had made from space, and looking at the stars hurt too much. It was too much wishing. He stopped going there.

And then there was just the forest to think about. Only that left.

He gathered his gear, set Anne to fetching this and that. He unbolted a land-crawler from its braces, serviced it, loaded it to the bay and loaded it with gear: inflatable raft, survival kit.

“Let it down,” he told Anne. “Lower the cargo lift.”

She came out afterward, bringing him what he had asked, standing there while he loaded the supplies on.

“Assistance?”

“Go back in. Seal the ship. Wait for me.”

“My program is to protect you.”

“The pseudosome stays here.” He reached into the crawler, where the sensor remote unit sat, a black square box on the passenger seat. He turned it on. “That better?”

“The sensor unit is not adequate for defense.”

“The pseudosome is not permitted to leave this area unless I call you. There’s no animate life, no danger. I’ll be in contact. The unit is enough for me to call you if I need help. Obey instructions.”

“Please reconsider this program.”

“Obey instructions. If you damage that pseudosome, it’s possible I won’t be able to fix it, and then I won’t have it when I need you. True?”

“Yes.”

“Then stay here.” He walked round, climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine. “Recorded?”

“Recorded.”

He put it in gear and drove off through the grass- looked back as he turned it toward the forest. She still stood there. He turned his attention to the rough ground ahead, fought the wheel.

A machine, after all. There were moments when he lost track of that.

The sensor unit light glowed. She was still beside him.

He dragged the raft down the sandy slope, unwieldy bundle, squatted there a moment to catch his breath on the riverside. The wind whispered in the leaves. No noise of motors. He felt the solitude. He saw details, rather than the sterile flatnesses of the ship, absorbed himself in the hush, the moving of the water.

He moved finally, unrolled the raft and pulled the inflation ring. It hissed, stiffened, spread itself.

Beep. Beep-beep-beep.

The sensor box. His heart sped. He scrambled up the sandy rise of the crawler and reached the box in the seat. “Anne. What’s wrong?”

“Please state your location,” the box asked him.

“Beside the river.”

“This agrees with my location findings. Please reconsider your program, Warren.”

“Anne, you keep that pseudosome where it is. I’ll call you if I need you. And I don’t need you. I’m all right and there’s no danger.”

“I picked up unidentified sound.”

He let his breath go. “That was the raft inflating. I did it. There’s no danger.”

“Please reconsider your program.”

“Anne, take instruction. Keep that pseudosome with the ship. I’ve got a small communicator with me.

The sensor box weighs too much for me to carry it with the other things I need. I’m going to leave it in the crawler. But I’m taking the communicator. I’ll call you if there’s an emergency or if I need assistance.”

“Response time will be one hour seventeen minutes to reach your present location. This is. unacceptable.”

“I tell you it is acceptable. I don’t need your assistance.”

“Your volume and pitch indicate anger.”

“Yes, I’m angry.”

“Be happy, Warren.”

“I’ll be happy if you do what I told you and keep that pseudosome at the ship.”

A long delay. “Recorded.”

He took the communicator from the dash, hooked it to his belt. Walked off without a further word. Anne worried him. There was always that conflict-override. She could do something unpredictable if some sound set her off, some perception as innocent as the raft cylinder’s noise.

But there was nothing out here to trigger her. Nothing.

He slipped the raft away from the shore, quietly, quietly, used the paddle with caution. The current took him gently and he stroked leisurely against it.

A wind signed down the river, disturbing the warmth, rustling the leaves. He drove himself toward the green shadow of the far bank, skimmed the shore a time.

There was a kind of tree that flourished on that side, the leaves of which grew in dusters on the drooping branches, like fleshy green flowers, and moss that festooned other trees never grew on this kind. He saw that.

There was a sort of green flower of thin, brown-veined leaves that grew up from the shallows, green lilies on green pads. The river sent up bubbles among them, and he probed anxiously with his paddle, disturbed their roots, imagining some dire finned creature whipping away from that probing-but he only dislodged more bubbles from rotting vegetation on the bottom. The lilies and the rot were cloyingly sweet.

He let the current take the raft back to the far-shore point nearest his starting place. He drove the raft then into the shallows and stood up carefully, stepped ashore without wetting his boots, dragged the raft up by the mooring rope and secured it to a stout branch to keep the current from unsettling it by any chance.

He took his gear, slung the strap over his shoulder, looked about him, chose his path.

He thumbed the communicator switch. “Anne.”

“Assistance?”

“Precaution. I’m fine. I’m happy. I have a program for you. I want you to call me every hour on the hour and check my status.”

“Recorded. Warren, please confirm your position.”

“At the river. Same as before. Obey your instructions.”

“Yes.”

He thumbed the switch over to receive, and started walking.

Ferns. Bracken, waist-high. Great clumps of curling hairy fronds: he avoided these; avoided the soft vine growth that festooned the high limbs of the trees and dropped like curtains.

Beyond the forest rim the ferns gave way to fungi, small round balls that he thought at first were animals, until he prodded one with a stick and broke it. There were domes, cones, parasols, rods with feathered fringes. Platelet fungi of orange and bluish white grew on rotting logs and ridged the twisted roots of living trees. Color. The first color but green and white and brown, anywhere in the world.

The trees grew taller, became giants far different from the riverside varieties. They loomed up straight and shadowy-crowned, their branches interlacing to shut out the sun. The light came through these branches in shafts when it came at all; and when night came here, he reckoned, it would be night indeed.

He stopped and looked back, realizing he had long since lost sight or sound of the river. He took his axe; it took resolution to move after such silence, more than that to strike, to make a mark. He deafened himself to the sacrilege and started walking again, cutting a mark wherever he passed from view of the last. Chips fell white onto the spongy carpet of eons-undisturbed leaves. The echoes lasted long, like eerie voices.

“Warren.”

His heart all but stopped.

“Anne. My status is good.”

“Thank you.”

Com went off again. He kept walking, marking his way, like walking in some great cavern. The way seemed different when viewed from the reverse, and the trees grew larger and larger still, so that he had to cut deep to make his marks, and he had to struggle over roots, some knee-high, making going slow.

He saw light and walked toward it, losing it sometimes in the tangle, but coming always closer-broke finally upon a grove of giants, greater than any trees he had seen. One, vaster than any others, lay splintered and fallen, ancient, moss-bearded. A younger tree supported it, broken beneath the weight; and through the vacant space in the forest ceiling left by the giant’s fall, sunlight streamed in a broad shaft to the forest floor, where soft green moss grew and white flowers bloomed, blessed by that solitary touch of daylight. Motes danced in the sun, the drift of pollen, golden-touched in a green light so filtered it was like some airy sea.

Warren stopped, gazed in awe at the cataclysmic ruin of a thing so old. The crash it must have made, in some great storm, with never an ear to hear it. He walked farther, stood in the very heart of the sunlight and looked up at the blinding sky. It warmed. It filled all the senses with warmth and well-being.

He looked about him, ventured even to touch the giant’s mossy beard, the bark, the smoothness where the bark had peeled away. He walked farther, half-blind, into the deep shadows beyond, his mind still dazed by the place. All about him now was brown and green, bark and leaves, white fungi, platelets as large as his hand stepping up the roots; ferns, fronds unfurling waist-high, scattering their spores. The tangle grew thicker.

And he realized of a sudden he had come some distance from the clearing.

He looked back. Nothing was recognizable,

He refused panic. He could not have come far. He began to retrace his path, confident at first, then with growing uncertainty as he failed to find things he recalled. He cursed himself. His heart pounded. He tore his hands on the brush that clawed at him. He felt as vulnerable suddenly as a child in the dark, as if the sunlit clearing were the only safe place in the world. He tried to run, to find it more quickly, to waste no time. Trees pressed close about him, straight and vast and indifferently the same, their gnarled roots crossing and interweaving in the earth as their branches laced across the sky.

He had missed the clearing. He was lost. All ways looked the same. He ran, thrust his way from trunk to trunk, gasping for breath, slipped among the tangled wet roots, went sprawling, hands skinned, chin abraded by the bark. He lay breathless, the wind knocked from him, all his senses jolted.

Slowly there came a prickling of nerves in the stillness, through his spasmodic gasps, a crawling at the back of his neck. He held himself tremblingly still at first, his own weight holding him where he had fallen, awkward and painfully bent. He scrabbled with his hands, intending one swift movement, clawed his way over to wave it off him.

Nothing was there, only the brush, the vast roots. The feeling was still behind him, and he froze, refusing to look, gripped in sweating nightmare.

Of a sudden he sprang up, ran, favoring his right leg, sprawled again his full length in the wet, slick leaves, scrambled and fought his way through the thicket The chill presence-it had direction-stayed constantly on his right, pressing him left and left again, until he stumbled and struggled through worse and worse, tearing himself and the pack through the branches and the fern, ripping skin, endangering his eyes.

He broke into light, into the clearing, into the warm shaft of sun. He fell hard on his hands and knees in that center of warmth and light, sobbing and ashamed and overwhelmed with what had happened to him.

He had panicked. He knew his way now. He was all right. He sank down on his belly, the pack still on his back, and tried to stop shaking.

Strangeness flowed over him like water, not quite warmth, but a feather-touch that stirred the hair at his nape. He moved, tried to rise and run, but he was weighted, pinned by the pack like a specimen on a glass, in the heat and the blinding daylight, while something poured and flowed over his skin. Sweat ran. His breathing grew shallow.

Illness. A recurrence of the plague. He groped at his belt for the communicator and lost it, his hand gone numb. He lay paralyzed, his open eyes filled with translucent green, sunlight through leaves. The sighing wind and rush of waters filled his ears and slowed his breath.

Deep and numbing quiet. Ages came and the rains and the sun filtered down season upon season. Ages passed and the forest grew and moved about him. His body pressed deep to the earth, deep into it, while his arms lifted skyward. He was old, old, and hard with strength and full of the life that swelled and struggled to heaven and earth at once.

Then the sun was shining down in simple warmth and he was aware of his own body, lying drained, bearing the touch of something very like a passing breeze.

He managed to stand at last, faltered, numb even yet, and looked about him. No breath of wind. No leaves stirred.

“Warren?”

He stooped, gathered up the com unit. “I’m here, Anne.”

“What’s your status, Warren?”

He drew a deep breath. The presence-if it had been anything at all but fear-was gone.

“What’s your status, Warren?”

“I’m all right-I’m all right. I’m starting home now.”

He kept the com unit on, in his hand, for comfort, not to face the deep woods alone. He found his first mark, the way that he had come in. He struggled from one to the other of the slash marks, tearing through when he sighted the next, making frantic haste- away from what, he did not know.

He was ashamed of himself, on the other side of the river, sitting in the raft, which swayed against the shore, the paddle across his knees. Clothing torn, hands scratched, face scraped by branches, his left eye watering where one had raked it- he knew better than what he had done, racing hysterically over unknown ground. He wiped his face, realized the possibility of contaminants and wiped his bleeding hands on his trousers. Hallucination. He had breathed something, gotten it when he had scratched himself, absorbed it through the skin- a hundred ways he had exposed himself to contaminants. He felt sick. Scared. Some hallucinogens recurred. He needed nothing like that.

“Warren?”

He fumbled out the com unit, answered, holding it in both hands, trying not to shiver. “Everything all right, Anne?”

“All stable,” Anne replied. He cherished the voice in the stillness, the contact with something infallible. He sought a question to make her talk.

“Have your sensors picked up anything?”

“No, Warren.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Monitoring my systems.”

“You haven’t had any trouble?”

“No, Warren.”

“I’m coming back now.”

“Thank you, Warren.”

He cut the com unit off, sat holding it as if it were something living. A piece of Anne. A connection. His hands shook. He steadied them, put the unit back at his belt, got up and climbed ashore, limping. Pulled the raft up and anchored it to a solid limb.

No taking it back, no. The raft stayed. No retreats. He looked back across the river, stared at the far darkness with misgivings.

There was nothing there.

...

Light was fading in the drive back. The crawler jounced and bucked its way along the track he had made through the grass on the way out, and the headlights picked up the bent grass ahead, in the dark, in the chill wind. He drove too fast, forced himself to keep it to a controllable pace on the rough ground.

“Anne,” he asked through the com, “turn the running lights on.”

“Yes, Warren.”

The ship lit up, colors and brilliance in the dark ahead of him. Beautiful. He drove toward it, fought the wheel through pits and roughnesses, his shoulders aching.

“Dinner, Anne. What’s for dinner?”

“Baked chicken, potatoes, greens, and coffee.”

“That’s good.” His teeth were chattering. The wind was colder than he had thought it would be. He should have brought his coat. “Are you happy, Warren?”

“I’m going to want a bath when I get there.” “Yes, Warren. Are you happy, Warren?”

“Soon.” He kept talking to her, idiocies, anything to fend off the cold and the queasiness in the night. The grass whipped by the fenders, a steady whisper. His mind conjured night-wandering devils, apparitions out of bushes that popped out of the dark and whisked under the nose of the crawler. He drove for the lights. “Be outside,” he asked Anne. “Wait for me at the cargo lock.”

“Yes, Warren. I’m waiting.” He found her there when he had brought the crawler round the nose of the ship and came up facing the lock. He drew up close to her, put on the brake and shut down the crawler engine, hauled himself out of the seat and set unsteady feet on the ground. Anne clicked over, sensor lights winking red in the dark. “Assistance?”

“Take the kit and the sensor box out and stow them in the lock.” He patted her metal shoulder because he wanted to touch something reasonable. “I’m going inside to take my bath.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He headed for the lock, stripped off all that he was wearing while the platform ascended, ran the decontamination cycle at the same time. He headed through the ship with his clothes over his arm, dumped them into the laundry chute in the shower room, set the boots beside, for thorough cleaning.

He stayed in the mist cabinet a good long while, letting the heat and the steam seep into his pores- leaned against the back wall with eyes closed, willing himself to relax, conscious of nothing but the warmth of the tiles against his back and the warmth of the moisture that flooded down over him. The hiss of the vapor jets drowned all other sounds, and the condensation on the transparent outer wall sealed off all the world.

A sound came through- not a loud one, the impression of a sound. He lifted his head, cold suddenly, looked at the steam-obscured panel, unable to identify what he had heard.

He had not closed the doors. The shower was open, and while he had been gone-while he had been gone from the ship, the pseudosome standing outside-The old nightmare came back to him. Sax.

Somewhere in the depths of the ship, wandering about, giving Anne orders that would prevent her reporting his presence. Sax, mind-damaged, with the knife in his hand. He stood utterly still, heart pounding, trying to see beyond the steamed, translucent panel for whatever presence might be in the room.

A footstep sounded outside, and another, and a gangling human shadow slid in the front panel while his heart worked madly. Leaned closer, and red lights gleamed, diffused stars where the features ought to be. “Warren?”

For an instant more the nightmare persisted, Anne become the presence. He shook it off, gathering up his courage to cut the steam off, to deal with her. “Anne, is there trouble?”

“No, Warren. The kit and the sensor box are stowed. Dinner is ready.”

“Good. Wait there.”

She waited. His orders. He calmed himself, activated the dryer and waited while moisture was sucked out of the chamber- took the comb he had brought in with him and straightened his hair in the process. The fans stopped, the plastic panel cleared, so that he could see Anne standing beyond the frosted translucence. He opened the door and walked out, and her limbs moved, reorienting her to him, responding to him like a flower to the sun. He felt ashamed for his attack of nerves-more than ashamed, deeply troubled. His breathing still felt uncertain, a tightness about his chest, his pulse still elevated. He cast a look over his shoulder as he reached for his robe, at the three shower cabinets, all dark now, concealments, hiding places. The silence deadened his ears, numbed his senses. He shrugged into the robe and heard Anne move at his back. He spun about, back to the corner, staring into Anne’s vacant faceplate where the lights winked red in the darkness.

“Assistance?”

He did not like her so close- a machine, a mind, one mistake of which, one seizing of those metal hands- She followed him. He could not discover the logic on which she had done so. She watched him. Obsessively.

Followed him. He liked that analysis even less. Things started following him and he started seeing devils in familiar territory. He straightened against the wall and made himself catch his breath, fighting the cold chills that set him shivering.

“Warren? Assistance?”

He took her outstretched metal arm and felt the faint vibration under his fingers as she compensated for his weight. “I need help.”

“Please be specific.”

He laughed wildly, patted her indestructible shoulder, fighting down the hysteria, making himself see her as she was, machine. “Is dinner ready?”

“Yes. I’ve set it on the table.”

He walked with her, into the lift, into the upper level of the ship, the living quarters where the table that he used was, outside his own quarters. He never used the mess hall: it was too empty a place, too many chairs; he no more went there than he opened the quarters of the dead, next door to him, all about him. He sat down, and Anne served him, poured the coffee, added the cream. The dinner was good enough, without fault. He found himself with less appetite than he had thought, in the steel and plastic enclosure of the ship, with the ventilation sounds and the small sounds of Anne’s motors. It was dark round about. He was intensely conscious of that- the night outside, the night deep in the ship where daylight made no difference. Anne’s natural condition, night: she lived in it, in space; existed in it here, except for the lights that burned here, that burned in corridors when he walked through them and compartments when he was there, but after he was gone, it reverted to its perpetual dark. Dark wrapped everything in the world but this compartment, but him, and he dared not sleep. He feared the dreams coming back. Feared helplessness.

No sign of Sax, out there.

He drank his coffee, sat staring at the plate until Anne took it away. Finally he shivered and looked toward the bar cabinet at the far side of the common room. He gave himself permission, got up, opened the cabinet, pulled out a bottle and the makings and took it back to the table.

“Assistance?” Anne asked, having returned from the galley.

“I’ll do it myself. No trouble.” He poured himself a drink. “Get some ice.”

She left on the errand. He drank without, had mostly finished the glass when she came back with a thermal bucket full. She set it on the table and he made himself another.

That was the way to get through the night. He was not a drinking man. But it killed the fear. It warmed his throat and spread a pleasant heat through his belly where fear had lain like an indigestible lump.

He had not planned to drink much. But the heat itself was pleasant, and the lassitude it spread through him cured a multitude of ills. By the time he arrived at the bottom of the third glass, he had a certain courage. He smiled bitterly at Anne’s blank face. Then he filled a fourth glass and drank it, on the deliberate course to total anesthesia.

It hit him then, sudden and coming down like a vast weight. He started to get up, to clear his head, staggered and knocked the glass over. “Assistance?” Anne asked.

He leaned on the table rim, reached for the chair and missed it for an instant. Anne’s metal fingers closed on his arm and held. He yelled, from fright, trying to free himself. Those fingers which could bend metal pipe closed no farther. “Is this pain?” she asked. “What is your status, Warren?”

“Not so good, Anne. Let go. Let me go.”

“Pain is not optimum function. I can’t accept programming from a human who’s malfunctioning.”

“You’re hurting my arm. You’re causing the pain. Stop it.”

She let him go at once. “Assistance?”

He caught his balance against her, leaning heavily until his stomach stopped heaving and his head stopped spinning quite so violently. She accepted his weight, stabilizing with small hums of her motors. “Assistance? Assistance?”

He drew a shaken breath and choked it down past the obstruction in his throat, patted her metal shoulder. “Contact-is assistance enough. It’s all right, Annie. I’m all right.” He staggered for one of the reclining chairs a little distance across the room and made it, his head spinning as he let it back. “Keep the lights on. Lock your doors and accesses.”

“Program accepted, Warren. This is security procedure. Please state nature of emergency.”

“Do you perceive any form of life- but me- anywhere?”

“Vegetation.”

“Then there isn’t any, is there?” He looked hazily up at her towering, spidery form. “Obey instruction. Keep the accesses locked. Always keep them locked unless I ask you to open them. Anne, can you sit down?”

“Yes, Warren. You programmed that pattern.”

The worktable, he recalled. He pointed at the other chair. “Sit in the chair.”

Anne walked to it and negotiated herself smoothly into its sturdy, padded seat, and looked no more comfortable sitting than she had reclining on the worktable.

“Your median joints,” he said. “Let your middle joints and shoulders quit stabilizing.” She did so, and her body sagged back. He grinned. “Left ankle on top of right ankle, legs extended. Pattern like me. Loosen all but balance-essential stabilizers. It’s called relaxing, Annie.” He looked at her sitting there, arms like his arms, on the chair, feet extended and crossed, faceplate reflecting back the ceiling light and flickering inside with minute red stars. He laughed hysterically.

“This is a pleasure reflex,” she observed.

“Possibly.” He snugged himself into the curvature of the chair. “You sit there, Annie, and you keep your little sensors-all of them, inside and outside the ship-alert. And if you detect any disturbance of them at all, wake me up.”

His head hurt in the morning, hurt sitting still and hurt worse when he moved it, and ached blindingly while he bathed and shaved and dressed. He kept himself moving, bitter penance. He cleaned the living quarters and the galley, finally went down to the lock through crashes of the machinery that echoed in his head. The sunlight shot through his eyes to his nerve endings, all the way to his fingertips, and he walked out blind and with eyes watering and leaned on the nearest landing strut, advantaging himself of its pillar-like shade.

He was ashamed of himself, self-disgusted. The fear had gotten him last night. The solitude had. He was not proud of his behavior in the forest: that was one thing, private and ugly; but when he came home and went to pieces in the ship, because it was dark, and because he had bad dreams-

That scared him, far more substantially than any forest shadow deserved. His own mind had pounced on him last night.

He walked out, wincing in the sunlight, to the parked crawler, leaned on the fender and followed with his eyes the track he had made coming in, before it curved out of sight around the ship. Grass and brush. He had ripped through it last night as if it had all turned animate. Hallucinations, perhaps. After last night he had another answer, which had to do with solitude and the human mind.

He went back inside and finally took something for his head.

By 1300 hours he was feeling better, the housekeeping duties done. Paced, in the confines of the living quarters, and caught himself doing it.

Work had been the anodyne until now- driving himself, working until he dropped; he ran out of work and it was the liquor, to keep the nightmares off. Neither could serve, not over the stretch of years. He was not accustomed to thinking years. He forced himself to- to think of a life in more than terms of survival; to think of living as much as of doing and finding and discovering.

He took one of the exercise mats outside, brought a flask of iced juice along with his biological notes and took Anne with him, with his favorite music tapes fed to the outside speakers. He stripped, spread his mat just beyond the canopy, and lay down to read, the music playing cheerfully and the warmth of Harley’s star seeping pleasantly into his well-lotioned skin. He slept for a time, genuine and relaxed sleep, awoke and turned onto his back to let the sun warm his front for a time, a red glow through his closed lids.

“Warren?”

He shaded his eyes and looked up at the standing pseudosome. He had forgotten her. She had never moved.

“Warren?”

“Don’t nag, Annie. I didn’t say anything. Come here and sit down. You make me nervous.”

Anne dutifully obeyed, bent, flexed her knees an a/arming distance and fell the last half foot, catching herself on her extended hands, knees drawn up and spine rigid. Warren shook his head in despair and amusement. “Relax. You have to do that when you sit.”

The metal body sagged into jointed curves, brought itself more upright, settled again.

“Dear Annie, if you were only human.”

Anne turned her sensor lights on, all of them. Thought a moment. “Corollary, Warren?”

“To what? To if? Anne, my love, you aren’t, and there isn’t any.”

He had confused her. The lights flickered one after the other. “Clarify.”

“Human nature, that’s all. Humans don’t function well alone. They need contact with someone. But I’m all right. It’s nothing to concern you.”

The motors hummed faintly and Anne reached out and let her hand down on his shoulder. The action was so human it frightened him. He looked into her ovoid face at the lights that danced inside and his heart beat wildly.

“Is your status improving?”

Contact with someone. He laughed sorrowfully and breathed a sigh.

“I perceive internal disturbances.”

“Laughter. You know laughter.”

“This was different.”

“The pace of laughter varies.”

“Recorded.” Anne drew back her hand. “You’re happy.”

“Anne-what do you think about when I’m not here. When I’m not asking you to do something, and you have thoughts, what are they?”

“I have a standard program.”

“And what’s that?”

“I maintain energy levels, regulate my circulation and temperature, monitor and repair my component-”

“Cancel. You don’t think. Like you do with me. You don’t ask questions, decide, follow sequences of reasoning.”

The lights blinked a moment. “The automatic functions are sufficient except in an anomalous situation.”

“But I’m talking to the AI. You. the AI’s something other than those programs. What do you do, sleep?”

“I wait.”

Like the pseudosome, standing indefinitely. No discomfort to move her, to make her impatient. “You investigate stimuli.”

“Yes.”

“But there aren’t many, are there?”

A delay. Incomplete noun. “They are constant but not anomalous.”

“You’re bored too.”

“Bored. No. Bored is not a state of optimum function. Bored is a human state of frustrated need for activity. This is not applicable to me. I function at optimum.”

“Functioning constantly doesn’t damage you.”

“No.”

“Use the library. You can do that, can’t you? If there aren’t adequate stimuli in the environment to engage the AI, use the library. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

“Recorded.”

“And then what do we do?”

The lights blinked. “Context indeterminate. Please restate the question.”

“You could know everything there is to know, couldn’t you, and you’d sit with it inside you and do nothing.”

“Context of do indeterminate. I’m not able to process the word in this context.”

He reached out, patted her silver leg. The sensors blinked. Her hand came back to him and stayed there, heavy, on his shoulder. Contact.

“That’s enough,” he said, and removed his hand from her; she did the same. “Thank you, Anne.” But he was cold inside.

He relaxed finally, staring out beneath the ship toward the forest.

There was the fear. There was where it sat. He hurt inside, and the healing was there, not sealing himself into the ship. Sterility. Inane acts and inane conversation.

If he feared out there, the fear itself proved he was alive. It was an enemy to fight. It was something he did not program. It held the unanticipated, and that was precious.

Anne, waiting forever, absorbing the stimuli and waiting for something anomalous, to turn on her intelligence. He saw himself doing that, sitting in the ship and waiting for a human lifetime-for some anomaly in the wind.

No.

He came this time with a different kind of attack, slowly, considerately, the crawler equipped with sensor box and sample kits and recorders and food and water, rope and directional beeper, anything that seemed remotely useful. With the film camera. With a rifle with a nightscope. Overequipped, if anything, in which he found some humor- but he felt the safer for it.

The raft was still securely tied to the branch, the sand about it unmarked by the passage of any moving creature, even void of insect tracks. On the far bank the forest waited in the dawn, peaceful-dark inside, as it would always be.

Someday, he promised it. He loaded the raft, trip after trip from the crawler parked up on the bank. Anne was with him, disembodied, in the incarnation of her sensor box, in the com unit. She talked to him, telling him she detected vegetation, and he laughed and snugged the box into the bottom of the raft.

“Reception is impaired,” Anne complained.

“Sorry. I don’t want to drop the box into the river.”

“Please don’t do that, Warren.”

He laughed again, in a good humor for Anne’s witless witticisms. Piled other supplies about her sensors. “I’ll pull you out if I need you. Take care of the ship. I’m shutting you down. Your noise is interfering with my reception.”

“Please reconsider this program. The river is dangerous. Please reconsider.”

“Quiet.” He shut her down. There was a reciprocal turn-on from her side, but she took orders and stayed off this time. He piled the last load in, coat and blanket in case it grew chill on the water.

He untied the raft then, nudged it out a little, stepped in and sat down, taking up the paddle. It was not one of his skills, rafting. He had read the manual and thought it out. Drove against the gentle current, no great work: he reasoned that he could paddle upstream as long as he liked or wanted to, and return was the river’s business.

He passed the landing site on the far bank, passed an old log and wound along with the grassy bank on one side and the forest on the other. The river was so still on most of its surface it was hard to see in which direction it flowed. Shores turned to marsh on either side, and at some time unnoticed, the trees on the right, which had been growing thicker and thicker, closed off all view of the grasslands where the ship had landed. The banks began to have a thick border of reeds; some trees grew down into the water, making an obstacle of their knobby roots, making curtains of moss hanging almost low enough to sweep his shoulders as he passed. Green lilies drifted, beds of pads through which he drove the raft with shallow strokes, not to tangle the blade of the paddle in their tough stems. In places the navigable channel was no more than three meters across, a weaving of reeds and sandbars and shadows between banks a good stone’s throw from side to side. It was a sleepy place, all tones of green and brown- no sky that was not filtered by leaves. A certain kind of tree was in bloom, shedding white petals as large as a man’s hand on the water: they drifted like high-stemmed boats, clouds of them afloat, fleets and armadas destroyed by the dip of his paddle and the raft’s blunt bow. The full flower had long stamens and pistils so that they looked like white spiders along the branches when they had shed, and like flocks of bird’s before. Lilies were rife, and a fine-leafed floating weed grew wherever the water was shallow. It was worse than the lilies for tangling up the paddle: it broke off and hung, slick brownish leaves. It was not, he decided, particularly lovely stuff, and it made going very slow in the narrowest channels.

His shoulders began to ache with the long effort. He kept going long after the ache became painful, anxious not to give ground- decided finally to put ashore for a space, when he had seen an area not so brushy and overgrown. He drove for it, rammed the bow up and started pulling it about with strokes of the paddle.

The paddle tip sank in, worse and worse with his efforts, tipped the raft with the suction as he pulled it out again and the raft slapped down with a smack. He frowned, jabbed at the sand underneath with his paddle, reducing it to jelly and thinking ruefully where he might have been if he had not mistrusted the water purity and if he had bounded out to drag the raft ashore. It took some little maneuvering to skim the raft off the quicksands and out again, back into the main channel, and he forgot his aching shoulders to keep it going awhile.

“Warren?”

On the hour, as instructed. He stilled his heart and punched on his com unit, never stopping his paddling. “Hello, Annie. Status is good, love, but I need three hands just now.”

“Assistance? Estimate of time required to reach your position-”

“Cancel. Don’t you try it. I’m managing with two hands quite nicely. How are you?”

“All my systems are functioning normally, but my sensors are impaired by obstructions. Please clear my pickups, Warren.”

“No need. My sensors aren’t impaired and there’s nothing anomalous.”

“I detect a repeated sound.”

“That’s the raft’s propulsion. There’s no hazard. All systems are normal. My status is good. Call in another hour.”

“Yes, Warren.”

“Shut down.”

“Yes, Warren.”

Contact went out; the box lights went off.

He closed off contact from his side, pushed off the bank where he had drifted while he was arguing with Anne, and hand-over-handed himself past a low-hanging branch. He snubbed a loop of the mooring rope around it, snugged it down, resting for a moment while the raft swayed sleepily back and forth.

It’s beautiful, he thought, Sax. Min and Harley, it’s worth seeing. He squinted up at the sunlight dancing through the branches. Hang the captain, Harley. They’ll come here sometime. They’ll want the place. In someone’s lifetime.

No answer. The sunlight touched the water and sparkled there, in one of the world’s paralyzing silences. An armada of petals floated by. A flotilla of bubbles. He watched others rise, near the roots of the tree.

Life, Harley?

He rummaged after one of the sample bags, after the seine from the collection kit. He flung the seine out inexpertly, maneuvered it in the current, pulled it up. The net was fouled with the brownish weed, and caught in it were some strands of gelatinous matter, each a finger’s length, grayish to clear with an opaque kernel in the center. He wrinkled his lip, not liking the look of it, reached and threw the sensor unit on again, holding its pickup wand almost touching the strands.

“Warren, I perceive an indeterminate life form, low order.”

“How-indeterminate?”

“It may be plant but that identification is not firm.”

“I thought so. Now I don’t particularly know what to do with it. It’s stuck to the net and I don’t like to go poking at it bare-handed. Curious stuff.”

“Assistance?”

“Wait.” He put the scanner wand down and used both hands to even the net, cleared it by shaking it in the water. He put the net into plastic before letting it back in the raft and sprayed his hands and the side of the raft with disinfectant before picking up the wand and putting it back. “I’m rid of it now, Annie, no trouble. I’m closing everything down now. Observe your one-hour schedule.”

He slipped the rope, took up the paddle and extricated the raft from the reeds, where it had swung its right side. Headed for the center of the clear channel.

It might have been eggs, he thought. Might have been. He considered the depth of the channel, the murkiness of the water, and experienced a slight disquiet. Something big could travel that, lurk round the lily roots. He did not particularly want to knock into something.

Nonsense, Harley. No more devils. No more things in the dark. / won’t make them anymore, will I, Sax? No more cold sweats.

The river seemed to bend constantly left, deeper into the forest, though he could not see any more or any less on either hand as it went. The growth on the banks was the same. There was an abundance of the fleshy-leaved trees that poured sap so freely when bruised, and the branches hung down into the water so thickly in places that they formed a curtain before whatever lay on shore. The spidertrees shed their white blooms, and the prickly ones thrust out twisted and arching limbs, gnarled and humped roots poking out into the channel. Moss was everywhere, and reeds and waterweed. He realized finally that the river had long since ceased to have any recognizable shore. On the left stretched a carpet of dark green moss that bloomed enticingly. Trees grew scattered there, incredibly neat, as if it were tended by some gardener, and the earth looked so soft and inviting to the touch, so green, the flowers like stars scattered across it.

Then he realized why the place looked so soft and flat, and why the trees grew straight up like columns, without the usual ugliness of twisting roots. That was not earth but floating moss, and when he put his paddle down, he found quicksand on the bottom.

An ugly death, that-sinking alive into a bog, to live for a few moments among the sands and the corruption that oozed round the roots of the trees. To drown in it.

He gave a twist of his mouth and shoved at the paddle, sent the raft up the winding course in haste to be out of it, then halted, drifting back a “little as he did so.

The river divided here, coming from left and from right about a finger of land that grew thicker as it went-no islet, this, but the connection of a tributary with the river.

He paddled closer and looked up both overgrown ways. The one on the right was shallower, more choked with reeds, moss growing in patches across its surface, brush fallen into it which the weak current had not removed. He chose the left.

At least, he reasoned with himself, there was no chance of getting lost, even without the elaborate directional equipment he carried: no matter how many times the river subdivided, the current would take him back to the crossing. He had no fear in that regard; for all that the way grew still more tangled.

No light here, but what came darkly diffused. The channel was like a tunnel among the trees. From time to time now he could see larger trees beyond the shoreline vegetation, the tall bulk of one of the sky-reaching giants like those of the grove. He wondered now if he had not been much closer to the river than he had realized when he passed the grove and ran hysterically through the trees, feeling devils at his heels. That would have been a surprise, to have run out onto clear and mossy ground and to find himself in quicksand up to his ears. So there were deadly dangers in the forest-not the creeping kind, but dangers enough to make recklessness, either fleeing or advancing, fatal.

“Warren.”

Anne made her hourly call and he answered it shortly, without breath for conversation and lacking any substance to report. He rested finally, made fast the raft to the projecting roots of a gnarly tree, laid his paddle across the plastic-wrapped seine and settled down into the raft, his head resting on the inflated rim. He ate, had a cup of coffee from the thermos. Even this overgrown branch of the river was beautiful, considered item at a time. The star Harley was a warm spot dancing above the branches, and the water was black and rich. No wonder the plants flourished so. They grew in every available place. If the river were not moving, they would choke up the channel with their mass and make of it one vast spongy bog such as that other arm of the river had seemed to be.

“Warren.”

He came awake and reached for the com. “Emergency?”

“No, Warren. The time is 1300 hours.”

“Already?” He levered himself upright against the rim and looked about him at the shadows. “Well, how are you?”

“I’m functioning well, thank you.”

“So am I, love. No troubles. In fact-” he added cautiously, “in fact I’m beginning to think of extending this operation another day. There’s no danger. I don’t see any reason to come back and give up all the ground I’ve traveled, and I’d have to start now to get back to the launching point before dark.”

“You’ll exit my sensor range if you continue this direction for another day. Please reconsider this program.”

“I won’t go outside your sensor range. I’ll stop and come back then.”

A pause. “Yes, Warren.”

“I’ll call if I need you.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He broke the contact and pulled the raft upcurrent by the mooring line to reach the knot, untied it and took up the paddle again and started moving. He was content in his freedom, content in the maze, which promised endless secrets. The river could become a highway to its mountain source. He could devise relays that would keep Anne with him. He need not be held to one place. He believed in that again.

At 1400 he had a lunch of lukewarm soup and a sun-warmed sandwich, of which he ate every crumb, and wished he had brought larger portions. His appetite increased prodigiously with the exercise and the relaxation. He felt a profound sense of well-being- even found patience for a prolonged bout with Anna’s chatter. He called her up a little before 1500 and let her sample the river with her sensors, balancing the box on the gear so that she could have a look about.

“Vegetation,” she pronounced. “Water. Warren, please reconsider this program.”

He laughed at her and shut her down.

Then the river divided again, and again he bore to the left, into the forest heart, where it was always twilight, arid less than that now. He paddled steadily, ignoring the persistent ache in his back and shoulders, until he could no longer see where he was going, until the roots and limbs came up at him too quickly out of the dark and he felt the wet drag of moss across his face and arms more than once. 1837, when he checked the time.

“Anne.”

“Warren?”

“I’m activating your sensors again. There’s no trouble, but I want you to give me your reports.”

“You’re in motion,” she said as the box came on. “Low light. Vegetation and water. Temperature 19øC. A sound: the propulsion system. Stability in poor function.”

“That’s floating, Anne. Stability is poor, yes, but not hazardous.”

“Thank you. You’re behind my base point. I perceive you.”

“No other life.”

“Vegetation, Warren.”

He kept moving, into worse and worse tangle, hoping for an end to the tunnel of trees, where he could at least have the starlight. Anne’s occasional voice comforted him. The ghostly giants slid past, only slightly blacker than the night about him.

The raft bumped something underwater and slued about.

“You’ve stopped.”

“I think I hit a submerged log or something.” Adrenalin had shot through him at the jolt. He drew a deep breath. “It’s getting too dark to see.”

“Please reconsider this program.”

“I think you have the right idea. Just a second.” He prodded underwater with his paddle and hit a thing.

It came up, broke surface by the raft in the sensor light, mossy and jagged.

Log. He was free, his pulse jolting in his veins. He let the current take the raft then, let it turn the bow.

“Warren?”

“I’m loose. I’m all right.” He caught a branch at a clearer spot and stopped, letting the fear ebb from him.

“Warren, you’ve stopped again.”

“I stopped us.” He wanted to keep running, but that was precisely the kind of action that could run him into trouble, pushing himself beyond the fatigue point. A log. It had been a log after all. He tied up to the branch, put on his jacket against the gathering chill and settled against the yielding rim of the raft, facing the low, reedy bank and the wall of aged trees. “Anne, I’m going to sleep now. I’m leaving the sensor box on. Keep alert and wake me if you perceive anything you have to ask about.”

“Recorded. Good night, Warren.”

“Good night, Annie.”

He closed his eyes finally, confident at least of Anne’s watchfulness, rocked on the gently moving surface of the river. Tiniest sounds seemed loud, the slap of the water against its boundaries, the susurration of the leaves, the ceaseless rhythms of the world, of growth, of things that twined and fed on rain and death.

He dreamed of home as he had not done in a very long time, of a hard-rock mining colony, his boy hood, a fascination with the stars; dreamed of Earth of things he had only heard of, pictures he had seen rivers and forests and fields. Pictured rivers came to life and flowed, hurling his raft on past shores of devastating silence, past the horror in the corridors, figures walking in steam-

Sax-Sax leaping at him, knife in hand-

He came up with a gasp too loud in the silence.

“Warren? Emergency?”

“No.” He wiped his face, glad of her presence. “It’s just a dream. It’s all right.”

“Malfunction?”

“Thoughts. Dream. A recycling of past experience. A clearing of files. It’s all right. It’s a natural process. Humans do it when they sleep.”

“I perceived pain.”

“It’s gone now. It stopped. I’m going back to sleep.”

“Are you happy, Warren?”

“Just tired, Anne. Just very tired and very sleepy. Good night.”

“Good night, Warren.”

He settled again and closed his eyes. The breeze sighed and the water lapped gently, rocking him. He curled up again and sank into deeper sleep.

He awoke in dim light, in a decided chill that made him glad of the jacket. The side of him that he had lain on was cold through and he rubbed his arm and leg, wishing for a hot breakfast instead of cold sandwiches and lukewarm coffee.

A mist overlay the river a few inches deep. It looked like a river of cloud flowing between the green banks. He reached and turned off Anne’s sensors. “Shutting you down. It’s morning. I’ll be starting back in a moment. My status is good.”

“Thank you, Warren.”

He settled back again, enjoyed the beauty about him without Anne’s time and temperature analyses. He had no intention of letting his eyes close again, but it would be easy in this quiet, this peace.

The sense of well-being soured abruptly. He seemed heavier than the raft could bear, his head pounded, the pulse beat at his temples.

Something was radically wrong. He reached for the sensor box but he could no longer move. He blinked, aware of the water swelling and falling under him, of the branch of the aged tree above him.

Breath stopped. Sweat drenched him. Then the breathing reflex started again and the perspiration chilled. A curious sickly feeling went from shoulders to fingertips, unbearable pressure, as if his laboring heart would burst the veins. Pressure spread, to his chest, his head, to groin, to legs and toes. Then it eased, leaving him limp and gasping for air.

The hairs at his nape stirred, a Fingering touch at his senses. Darts of sensation ran over his skin; muscles twitched, and he struggled to sit up; he was blind, with softness wrapping him in cotton and bringing him unbearable sorrow.

It passed.

“You’re there,” he said, blinking to clear his eyes. “You’re there.”

Not madness. Not insanity. Something had touched him in the clearing that day as it just had done here. “Who are you?” he asked it. “What do you want?”

But it had gone-no malevolence, no. It ached, it was so different. It was real. His heart was still racing from its touch. He slipped the knot, tugged the rope free, let the raft take its course.

“Find you,” he told it. “I’ll find you.” He began to laugh, giddy at the spinning course the raft took, the branches whirling in wide circles above him.

“Warren,” the box said, self-activated. “Warren? Warren?”

“Hello. Warren.”

He gave a haggard grin climbing down from the land crawler, staggered a bit from weariness, edged past the pseudosome with a pat on the shoulder. “Hello yourself, Annie. Unload the gear out of the crawler.”

“Yes, Warren. What is your status, please?”

“Fine, thanks. Happy. Dirty, tired and hungry, but happy overall.”

“Bath and supper?”

“In that order.”

“Sleep?”

“Possibly.” He walked into the lock, stripped off his clothing as the cargo lift rose into netherdeck, already anticipating the luxury of a warm bath. He took the next lift up. “I’ll want my robe. How are you?”

“I’m functioning well, thank you.” Her voice came to him all over the ship. The lift stopped and let him out. She turned on the lights for him section by section and extinguished them after.

“What’s for supper?”

“Steak and potatoes, Warren. Would you like tea or coffee?”

“Beautiful. Coffee.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He took a lingering bath, dried and dressed in his robe, went up to the living quarters where Anne had set the table for him, all the appointments, all the best. He sat down and looked up at Anne, who hovered there to pour him coffee.

“Pull up the other chair and sit down, will you, Anne?”

“Yes, Warren.”

She released the facing chair from its transit braces, settled it in place, turned it and sat down correctly, metal arms on the table in exact imitation of him. Her lights dimmed once more as she settled into a state of waiting.

Warren ate in contented silence, not disturbing her. Anne had her limitations in small talk. When he had finished he pushed the dishes aside and Anne’s sensors brightened at once, a new program clicking into place. She rose and put everything onto the waiting tray, tidying up with a brisk rattle of aluminum and her own metal fingers.

“Anne, love.”

“Yes, Warren.”

“Activate games function.”

Tray forgotten, she turned toward him. The screen on the wall lighted, blank. “Specify.”

“You choose. You make a choice. Which game?”

Black and white squares flashed onto the screen.

Chess. He frowned and looked at her. “That’s a new one. Who taught you that?”

“My first programmer installed the program.”

He looked at the board, drew a deep breath. He had intended something rather simpler, some fast and stimulating fluff to shake the lingering sense from his brain. Something to sleep on. To see after his eyes were closed. He considered the game. “Are you good at chess?”

“Yes, Warren.”

He was amused. “Take those dishes to the galley and come back up here. I’ll play you.”

“Yes, Warren.” The board altered. She had chosen white. The first move was made. Warren turned his chair and reclined it to study the board, his feet on the newly cleared table. He gave her his move and the appropriate change appeared on the screen.

The game was almost over by the time the pseudo-some came topside again. She needed only four more moves to make his defeat a certainty. He sat back with his arms folded behind his head, studying his decimated forces. Shook his head in disbelief.

“Annie, ma belle dame sans merci-has anyone ever beaten you?”

“No, Warren.”

He considered it a moment more, his lately bolstered well-being pricked. “Can you teach me what you know?”

“I’ve been programmed with the works of fifteen zonal champions. I don’t estimate that I can teach you what I know. Human memory is fallible. Mine is not, provided adequate cues for recall and interrelation of data. One of my programmed functions is instruction in procedures. I can instruct.”

He rolled a sidelong glance at her. “Fallible?”

“Fallible: capable of error.”

“I don’t need the definition. What makes you so talkative? Did I hit a program?”

“My first programmer was Franz Mann. He taught me chess. This is an exercise in logic. It’s a testing mechanism, negative private appropriation. My function is to maintain you. I’m programmed to instruct in procedures. Chess is a procedure.”

“All right,” he said quietly. “All right, you can teach me.”

“You’re happy.”

“You amuse me. Sit down.”

She resumed the chair opposite him- her back to the board, but she did not need to see it. “Amusement produces laughter. Laughter is a pleasure or surprise indicator. Amusement is pleasant or surprising. Please specify which, Warren.”

“You’re both, Anne.”

“Thank you. Pleasure is a priority function.”

“Is it?”

“This is your instruction, Warren.”

He frowned at her. In the human-maintenance programming he had poured a great number of definitions into her, and apparently he had gotten to a fluent area. Herself. Her prime level. She was essentially an egotist.

Another chessboard flashed onto the screen.

“Begin,” she said.

She defeated him again, entered another game before he found his eyes watering and his senses blurring out on the screen. He went to bed.

Trees and black and white squares mingled in his dreams.

The next venture took resting- took a body in condition and a mind at ease. He looked over the gear the next morning, but he refused to do anything more. Not at once. Not rushing back exhausted into the heart of the forest. He lazed about in the sun, had Anne’s careful hands rub lotion over his sore shoulders and back, felt immeasurably at peace with the world.

A good lunch, a nap afterward. He gave the ship a long-neglected manual check, in corridors he had not visited since the plague.

There was life in the botany lab, two of Rule’s collection, succulents which had survived on their own water, two lone and emaciated spiny clusters. He came on them amid a tangle of brown husks of other plants which had succumbed to neglect, brushed the dead leaves away from them, tiny as they were. He looked for others and found nothing else alive. Two fellow survivors.

No knowing from what distant star system they had been gathered. Tray after tray of brown husks collapsed across the planting medium, victims of his shutdown order for the labs. He stripped it all, gathered the dead plants into a bin. Investigated the lockers and the drawers.

There were seeds, bulbs, rhizomes, all manner of starts. He thought of putting them outside, of seeing what they would do-but considering the ecology

No; nothing that might damage that. He thought of bringing some of the world’s life inside, making a garden; but the world outside was mostly lilies and waterflowers, and lacked colors. Some of these, he thought, holding a palmful of seeds, some might be flowers of all kinds of colors- odors and perfumes from a dozen different star systems. Such a garden was not for discarding. He could start them here, plant them in containers, fill the ship with them.

He grinned to himself, set to work reworking the planting medium, activating the irrigation system.

He located Rule’s notebook and sat down and read through it, trying to decide on the seeds, how much water and how deep and what might be best.

He could fill the whole botany lab, and the plants would make seeds of their own. No more sterility. He pictured the living quarters blooming with flowers under the artificial sunlight. There was life outside the ship, something to touch, something to find; and in here- he might make the place beautiful, something he could live in while getting used to the world. No more fear. He could navigate the rivers, hike the forest- find whatever it was. Bring home the most beautiful things. Turn it all into a garden. He could leave that behind him, at least, when another team did come, even past his lifetime and into the next century. Records. He could feed them into Anne and she could send them to orbiting ships. He could learn the world and make records others could use. His world, after all. Whole colonies here someday who would know the name of Paul Warren and Harley and Rule, Burlin and Sax and Sikutu and the rest. Humans who would look at what he had made.

Who would approach what he had found out on the river with awe. Find it friendly, whether or not it was an intelligence. The ship could fit in- with the gardens he intended. Long rhythms, the seeding of plants and the growing of trees and the shaping of them. No project he had approached had offered him so much. To travel the rivers and find them and to come home to Anne, who maintained all he learned-

He smiled to himself. “Anne. Send the pseudosome here. Botany four.”

She came, a working of the lift and a tread of metal feet down the corridor and through the outer labs into this one. “Assistance?”

“You had a standard program for this area. Maintenance of water flow. Cleaning.”

“I find record of it.”

“Activate it. I want the lights on and the water circulating here.”

“Yes, Warren.” The lights blinked, the sixth one as well, in the darkness where her chin should be. “This is not your station.”

“It is now.”

“This is Rule’s station.”

“Rule stopped functioning. Permanently.” His lips tightened. He disliked getting into death with a mind that had never been alive. “I’m doing some of Rule’s work now. I like to do it.”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes.”

“Assistance?”

“I’ll do it myself. This is human work.”

“Explain.”

He looked about at her, then back to his work, dropping the seeds in and patting the holes closed. “You’re uncommonly conversational. Explain what?”

“Explain your status.”

“Dear Annie, humans have to be active about twelve hours a day, body and mind. When we stop being active we don’t function well. So I find things to do. Activity. Humans have to have activity. That’s what I mean when I use do in an unexplained context. It’s an important verb, do. It keeps us healthy. We always have to have something to do, even if we have to hunt to find it.”

Anne digested that thought a moment. “I play chess.”

He stopped what he was doing in mid-reach, looked back at her. As far as he could recall it was the first time she had ever offered such an unsolicited suggestion. “How did that get into your programming?”

“My first programmer was-”

“Cancel. I mean why did you suddenly offer to play chess?”

“My function is to maintain you happy. You request activity. Chess is an activity.”

He had to laugh. She had almost frightened him, and in a little measure he was touched. He could hardly hurt Anne’s feelings. “All right, love. I’ll play chess after supper. Go fix supper ahead of schedule. It’s nearly time and I’m hungry.”

It was chicken for dinner, coffee and cream pie for dessert, the silver arranged to perfection. Warren sat down to eat and Anne took the chair across the table and waited in great patience, arms before her.

He finished. The chessboard flashed to the screen above.

She won.

“You erred in your third move,” she said. The board flashed up again, renewed. She demonstrated the error. Played the game through a better move. “Continue.”

She defeated him again. The board returned again to starting.

“Cancel,” he said. “Enough chess for the evening. Find me all the material you can on biology. I want to do some reading.”

“I’ve located the files,” she said instantly. “They’re in general library. Will you want display or printout?”

“Display. Run them by on the screen.”

The screen changed; printed matter came on. He scanned it, mostly the pictures. “Hold,” he said finally, uninformed. The flow stopped. “Anne. Can you detect internal processes in sentient life?”

“Negative. Internal processes are outside by sensor range. But I do pick up periodic sound from high-level organisms when I have refined my perception.”

“Breathing. Air exchange. It’s the external evidence of an internal process. Can you pick up, say, electrical activity? How do you tell-what’s evidence to you, whether something is alive or not?”

“I detect electrical fields. I have never detected an internal electrical process. I have recorded information that such a process exists through chemical activity. This is not within my sensor range. Second question: movement; gas exchange; temperature; thermal pattern; sound-”

“Third question: Does life have to meet all these criteria for you to recognize it?”

“Negative. One positive reading is sufficient for Further investigation.”

“Have you ever gotten any reading that caused you to investigate further- here, at this site?”

“Often, Warren.”

“Did you reach a positive identification?”

“Wind motion is most frequent. Sound. All these readings have had positive identification.”

He let his pent breath go. “You do watch, don’t you? I told you to stay alert.”

“I continue your programming. I investigate all stimuli that reach me. I identify them. I have made positive identification on all readings.”

“And are you never in doubt? Is there ever a marginal reading?”

“I have called your attention to all such cases. You have identified these sounds. I don’t have complete information on life processes. I am still assimilating information. I don’t yet use all vocabulary in this field. I am running cross-comparisons. I estimate another two days for full assimilation of library-accessed definitions.”

“Library.” He recalled accessing it. “What are you using? What material?”

“Dictionary and encyclopedic reference. This is a large program. Cross-referencing within the program is incomplete. I am still running on it.”

“You mean you’ve been processing without shutdown?”

“The program is still in assimilation.”

He sank back in the chair. “Might do you good at that. Might make you a better conversationalist.” He wished, “all the same, that he had not started it. Shutdown of the program now might muddle her, leave her with a thousand unidentified threads hanging. “You haven’t gotten any conflicts, have you?”

“No, Warren.”

“You’re clever, aren’t you? At least you’ll be a handy encyclopedia.”

“I can provide information and instruction.”

“You’re going to be a wonder when you get to the literary references.”

A prolonged flickering of lights. “I have investigated the literature storage. I have input all library information, informational, technical, literary, recreational. It’s being assimilated as the definitions acquire sufficient cross-references.”

“Simultaneously? You’re reading the whole library sideways?”

A further flickering of lights. “Laterally. Correct description is laterally. The cross-referencing process involves all material.”

“Who told you to do that?” He rose from the table. So did she, turning her beautiful, vacant fact toward him, chromium and gray plastic, red sensor-lights glowing. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of her.

And frightened.

“Your programming. I am instructed to investigate all stimuli occurring within my sensor range. I continue this as a permanent instruction. Library is a primary source of relevant information. You accessed this for investigation.”

“Cancel,” he said. “Cancel. You’re going to damage yourself.”

“You’re my highest priority. I must maintain you in optimum function. I am processing relevant information. It is in partial assimilation. Cancel of program negative possible. Your order is improper. I’m in conflict, Warren. Please reconsider your instruction.”

He drew a larger breath, leaned on the chair, staring into the red lights, which had stopped blinking, which burned steadily, frozen. “Withdrawn,” he said after a moment. “Withdrawn.” Such as she was capable, Anne was in pain. Confused. The lights started blinking again, mechanical relief. “How long is this program going to take you?”

“I have estimated two days assimilation.”

“And know everything? I think you’re estimating too little.”

“This is possible. Cross-references are multiplying. What is your estimate?”

“Years. The input is continuous, Annie. It never quits. The world never stops sending it. You have to go on cross-referencing.”

The lights blinked. “Yes. My processing is rapid, but the cross-reference causes some lateral activity. Extrapolation indicates this activity will increase in breadth.”

“Wondering. You’re wondering.”

A delay. “This is an adequate description.”

He walked over and poured himself a drink at the counter. Looked back at her, finding his hands shaking a bit. “I’ll tell you something, Annie. You’re going to be a long time at it. I wonder things. I investigate things. It’s part of human process. I’m going back to the river tomorrow.”

“This is a hazardous area.”

“Negative. Not for me, it’s not hazardous. I’m carrying out my own program. Investigating. We make a team, do you understand that word? Engaged in common program. You do your thinking here. I gather data at the river. I’ll take your sensor box.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He finished the drink, pleased with her. Relaxed against the counter. “Want another game of chess?”

The screen lit with the chessboard.

She won this one too.

he would have remembered the way even without the marks scored on the trees. They were etched in memory, a fallen log, the tree with the blue and white platelet fungus, the one with the broken branch. He went carefully, rested often, burdened with Anne’s sensor box and his own kit. Over everything the silence persisted, forever silence, unbroken through the ages by anything but the wind or the crash of some aged tree dying. His footsteps on the wet leaves seemed unbearably loud, and the low hum from the sensor box seemed louder still.

The clearing was ahead. It was that he had come back to find, to recover the moment, to discover it in daylight.

“Anne,” he said when he was close to it, “cut off the sensor unit awhile. Its noise is interfering with my perceptions.”

“Please reconsider this instruction. Your perceptions are limited.”

“They’re more sensitive over a broad range. It’s safe, Anne. Cut it off. I’ll call in an hour. You wait for that call.”

“Yes, Warren.”

The sensor unit went off. His shoulder ached from the fifteen kilos and the long walk from the raft, but he carried it like moral debt. As insurance. It had never manifested itself, this-life-not for Anne’s sensors, but twice for his. Possibly the sensor box itself interfered with it; or the ship did. He gave it all the chance it might need.

But he carried the gun.

He found the grove different than he had remembered it, dark and sunless yet in the early morning. He came cautiously, dwarfed and insignificant among the giant trees- stopped absolutely still, hearing no sound at all. There was the fallen one, the father of all trees, his moss-hung bulk gone dark and his beard of flowers gone. The grass that grew in the center was dull and dark with shadow.

Softly he walked to that center and laid down his gear, sat down on the blanket roll. Looked about him. Nothing had changed-likely nothing had changed here since the fall of the titan which had left the vacancy in the ceiling of branches. Fourteen trees made the grove. The oldest of those still living must have been considerable trees when man was still earthbound and reaching for homeworld’s moon. Even the youngest must measure their ages in centuries.

All right, he thought. Come ahead. No sensors. No machines. You remember me, don’t you? The night, on the river. I’m the only one there is. No threat. Come ahead.

There was not the least response.

He waited until his muscles cramped, feeling increasingly disappointed- no little afraid: that too. But he had come prepared for patience. He squatted and spread out his gear so that there was a plastic sheet under the blanket, poured himself hot coffee from his flask and stretched out to relax. Anne called in his drowsing, once, twice, three times: three hours. The sun came to the patch of grass like a daily miracle, and motes of dust and pollen danced in the beam. The giant’s beard bloomed again. Then the sun passed on, and the shadows and the murk returned to the grove of giants.

Perhaps, he thought, it had gone away. Perhaps it was no longer resident here in the grove, but down by the river yonder, where he had felt it the second time. It had fingered over his mind and maybe it had been repelled by what it met there. Perhaps the contact was a frightening experience for it and it had made up its mind against another such attempt.

Or perhaps it had existed only in the curious workings of a very lonely human mind. Like Anne. Something of his own making. He wanted it to exist. He desperately wanted it to be real, to make the world alive, Rule’s world, and Harley’s, and his. He wanted it to lend companionship for the years of silence, the hollow days and deadly nights, something, anything- an animal or an enemy, a thing to fear if not something to love. Solitude forever-he could not bear that. He refused to believe in it. He would search every square meter of the world until he found something like him, that lived and felt, or until he had proved it did not exist.

And it came.

The first touch was a prickling and a gentle whisper in his mind, a sound of wind. The air shone with an aching green luminance. He could not hold it. The light went. Numbness came over him; his pulse jumped wildly. Pain lanced through his chest and belly. Then nothing. He gasped for air and felt a fingering at his consciousness, a deep sense of perplexity. Hesitation. He felt it hovering, the touches less and less substantial, and he reached out with his thoughts, wanting it, pleading with it to wait.

A gentle tug at his sense. Not unpleasant.

Listen to me, he thought, and felt it settle over him like a blanket, entity without definition. Words were meaningless to the being which had reached into his mind. Only the images transcended the barrier.

He hunted for something to give it, a vision of sunlight, of living things, his memories of the river lilies. There came back a feeling of peace, of satisfaction. He wanted to drift to sleep and fought the impulse. His body grew as heavy as it had on the river and he felt himself falling, drifting slowly. Images flowed past like the unrolling of a tape with an incalculable span of years encoded on it. He saw the clearing thick with young trees, and saw it again when there were vacant spaces among those, and he knew that others had grown before the present ones, that the seedlings he saw among the last were the giants about him.

His consciousness embraced all the forest, and knew the seasonal ebb and flood of the river, knew the islets and the branches that had grown and ceased to be. He knew the ages of mountains, the weight of innumerable years.

What are you? he wondered in his dream.

Age, great age, and eternal youth, the breaking of life from the earth, the bittersweet rush of earth-bound life sunward. And this, this was the thing it called itself-too large for a single word or a single thought. It rippled sound through his mind, like wind through harpstrings, and it was that too. /, it said. /.

It had unrolled his question from his mind with the fleeting swiftness of a dream, absorbed it all and knew it. Like Anne. Faster. More complete. He tried to comprehend such a mind, but the mind underwent a constriction of panic. Sight and sensation returned on his own terms and he was aware of the radiance again, like the sunbeam, drifting near him.

You, Warren thought. Do you understand me?

Something riffled through his thoughts, incomprehensible and alien. Again the rippling touch of light and chill.

Did you touch them? My friends died. They died of a disease. All but me.

Warmth and regret flowed over him. Friend, it seemed. Sorrow. Welcome. It thrilled through him like the touch of rain after drought. He caught his breath, wordless for the moment, beyond thinking. He tried to understand the impressions that followed, but they flowed like madness through his nerves. He resisted, panicked, and a feeling of sorrow came back.

“What are you?” he cried.

It broke contact abruptly, crept back again more slowly and stayed at a distance, cool, anxious.

“Don’t leave.” The thought frightened him. “Don’t go. I don’t want that, either.”

The radiance expanded, flickering with gold inside. It filled his mind, and somewhere in it a small thing crouched, finite, fluttering inside with busy life, while the trees grew. Himself. He was measured, against such a scale as the giants, and felt cold.

“How old are you?”

The life spans of three very ancient trees flashed through his mind in the blink of an eye.

“I’m twenty-seven years.”

It took years from his mind; he felt it, the seasonal course of the world and star, the turning of the world, a plummeting to earth with the sun flickering overhead again and again and again. A flower came to mind, withered and died.

“Stop it,” Warren cried, rejecting the image and the comparison.

It fled. He tried to hold the creature. A sunset burst on his eyes, flared and dimmed- a time, an appointment for meeting, a statement-he did not know. The green light faded away.

Cold. He shivered convulsively, caught the blanket up about him in the dimness. He stared bleakly into the shadow- felt as if his emotions had been taken roughly and shaken into chaos, wanted to scream and cry and could not. Death seemed to have touched him, reduced everything to minute scale. Everything. Small and meaningless.

“Warren.”

Anne’s voice. He had not the will or the strength to answer her. It was beyond belief that he could have suffered such cataclysmic damage in an instant of contact; that his life was not the same, the universe not in the same proportion.

“Warren.”

The insistent voice finally sent his hand groping after the com unit. Danger. Anne. Threat. She might come here. Might do something rash. “I’m all right.” He kept his voice normal and casual, surprised by its clear tone as he got it out. “I’m fine. How are you?”

“Better now, Warren. You didn’t respond. I’ve called twelve times. Is there trouble?”

“I was asleep, that’s all. I’m going to sleep again. It’s getting dark here.”

“You didn’t call in an hour.”

“I forgot. Humans forget. Look that up in your files. Let me be, Anne. I’m tired. I want to sleep. Make your next call at 0500.”

“This interval is long. Please reconsider this instruction.”

“I mean it, Anne. 0500. Not before then. Keep the sensor box off and let me rest.”

There was a long pause. The sensor unit activated itself, Anne’s presence actively with him for the moment. She looked about, shut herself off. “Good night, Warren.”

She was gone. She was not programmed to detect a lie, only an error in logic. Now he had cut himself off indeed. Perhaps, he thought, he had just killed himself.

But the entity was not hostile. He knew. He had been inside its being, known without explanation all the realities that stood behind its thought, like in a dream where in a second all the past of an act was there, never lived, but there, and remembered, and therefore real. The creature must have walked airless moons with him, seen lifeless deserts and human cities and the space between the stars. It must have been terrifying to the being whose name meant the return of spring. And what might it have felt thrust away from its world and drifting in dark, seeing its planet as a green and blue mote in infinity? Perhaps it had suffered more than he had.

He shut his eyes, relaxed a time- called Anne back when he had rested somewhat, and reassured her. “I’m still well,” he told her. “I’m happy.”

“Thank you, Warren,” she said in return, and let herself be cut off again.

The sun began to dim to dark. He put on his coat, tucked up again in the blanket. Human appetites returned to him-hunger and thirst. He ate some of the food he had brought, drank a cup of coffee, lay back and closed his eyes on the dark, thinking that in all reason he ought to be afraid in the night in this place.

He felt a change in the air, a warmth tingling down the back of his neck and the insides of his arms. The greenish light grew and hovered in the dark.

It was there as if nothing had ever gone amiss.

“Hello,” Warren said, sitting up. He wrapped himself in the blanket, looked at the light, looked around him. “Where did you go?”

A ripple of cool waters went through his mind. Lilies and bubbles drifting.

“The river?”

Leaves fluttering in a wind, stronger and stronger. The sun going down.

“What were you doing there?”

His heart fluttered, his pulse sped, not of his own doing. Too strong-far too strongly. , “Stop-stop it.”

The pressure eased, and Warren pressed his hands to his eyes and gasped for air. His heart still labored, his sense of balance deserted him. He tumbled backward into space, blind, realized he was lying down on firm earth with his legs bent painfully. The tendril of thought crept back into his mind, controlled and subdued. Sorrow. He perceived a thing very tightly furled, with darkness about it, shielding it from the green. It was himself. Sorrow poured about him.

“I know you can’t help it.” He tried to move, disoriented. His hands were numb. His vision was tunneled. “Don’t touch me like that. Stop it.”

Confusion: he felt it; an ebbing retreat.

“Don’t go, either. Just stop. Please.”

It lingered about him, green luminance pulsing slowly into a sparkle or two of gold, dimming down again by turns. All the air seemed cairn.

Spring, Warren gave it back. He built an image of flowers, colored flowers, of gardens. Of pale green shoots coming up through moist earth.

It answered him, flowers blooming in his mind, white, green and gold-throated jade. They took on tints in his vision, mingled colors and pale at first, as if the mind had not known the colors were distinct to separate flowers, and then settling each on each, blues and violets and yellows, reds and roses and lavenders. Joy flooded through. Over and over again the flowers bloomed.

“Friend. You understand that?”

The flowers kept blooming, twining stems, more and more of them.

“Is it always you-is it always you I’ve dealt with? Are there others like you?”

A single glow, replacing the other image; greenness through all his vision, but things circled outside it- not hostile-other. And it enfolded one tiny darkness, a solitary thing, tightly bound up, clenched in on the flutterings inside itself.

“That’s me, you mean. I’m human.”

The small creature sank strange tendrils deep into the moist earth, spread extensions like branches, flickers of growth in all directions through the forest and out, across the grassland.

“Isn’t there anything else-aren’t there other creatures on this world- anywhere?”

The image went out. Water bubbled, and in the cold murk tiny things moved. Grass stirred in the sunlight, and a knot of small creatures gathered, fluttering at the heart, three, fourteen of them. Joy and sorrow. The flutters died. One by one the minds went out. Sorrow. There were thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten-

“Were you there? Were you on the ship?”

He saw images of the corridors-his own memory snatched forth; the destruct chamber; the lab and the blood-the river then, cold, murky waters, the raft drifting on the river in the cold dawning. He lay there, complex, fluttering thing in the heart of green, in the mind-pain then, and retreat.

“I know. I came to find you. I wanted to find out if you were real. To talk to you.”

The green radiance crept back again, surrounding the dark egg with the furled creature in its heart. The creature stirred, unfolded branches and thrust them out of its shell, into the radiance.

“No-no. Keep back from me. You can do me damage. You know that.”

The beating of his heart quickened and slowed again before it hurt. The greenness dimmed and retreated. A tree stood in the shell of darkness that was his own space, a tree fixed and straight and solitary, with barren earth and shadow around it.

The judgment depressed him. “I wanted to find you. I came here to find you. Then, on the river. And now. I haven’t changed my mind. But the touching hurts.”

Warmth bubbled through. Images of suns flashed across the sky into a blinding blur. Trees grew and died and decayed. Time: Ages passed. The radiance fairly danced, sparkling and warm. Welcome. Welcome. Desire tingled through him.

“You make me nervous when you get excited like that. You might forget. And you can hurt me. You know that by now.”

Desire, a fluttering along his veins. The radiance hovered, back and forth, dancing slow flickerings of gold in its heart.

“So you’re patient. But what for? What are you waiting for?”

The small-creature image returned. From embryo, it grew, unfolded, reached out into the radiance-let it into that fluttering that was its center.

“No.” Death came into his mind, mental extinction, accepting an alien parasite.

The radiance swirled green and gold about him. Waters murmured and bubbled. Growth exploded in thrills of force that ran over Warren’s nerves and threatened for a moment to be more than his senses could take. The echoes and the images ebbed and he caught his breath, warmed, close to losing himself.

“Stop,” he protested, finding that much strength. The contact loosened, leaving a memory of absolute intoxication with existence, freedom, joy, such as he had never felt in his life-frightening, unsettling, undermining disciplines and rules by which life was ordered and orderly. “We could both be damaged that way. Stop. Stop it.”

The greenness began to pulse slowly, dimming and brightening. It backed away. Another tightly furled embryo appeared in his mind, different from the first, sickly and strange. It lay beside his image in the dark shell, both of them, together, reached out tendrils, interwove, and the radiance grew pale.

“What other human? Where?”

A desperate fluttering inside the sickly one, a hammering of his own pulse: a distant and miserable rage; and grief; and need.

“Where is it now? What happened to it? Where is he?”

The fluttering inside the image stopped, the tendrils withered, and all of it decayed.

He gathered himself to rise, pushed back. The creature’s thoughts washed back on him, a seething confusion, the miasma of loneliness and empty ages pouring about him, and he sprang to his feet and fled, slipping and stumbling, blind in the verdant light, in symbols his mind could not grasp, in distortion of what he could. Sound and light and sensation warped through his senses. Daylight. Somehow it was daylight. He reached the aged tree, the grandfather of trees, recoiled from the feel of the moss in his almost blindness, stumbled around its roots.

The place was here. He knew.

The greenness hovered there in the dawning, danced over corruption, over what had been a man. It lay twisted and curled up there, in that cavern of the old tree’s naked roots, in that dark, with the grinning white of bone thrusting through rags of skin.

“Sax,” he cried. He groped his way back from it, finding empty air about his fingertips, dreading something tangible. He turned and ran, blind in the shadow, among the clinging branches that tore at his arms and his face. The light came about him again, green and gold. His feet slipped among the tangled roots and earth bruised his hands. Pain lanced up his ankle, through his knees. The mustiness of old leaves was in his mouth. He spat and spat again, clawed his way up by the brush and the tree roots, hauled himself farther and ran again and fell, his leg twisted by the clinging roots.

Sorrow, the radiance mourned. Sorrow. Sorrow.

He moved, feverishly turned one way and the other to drag his foot free of the roots that had wedged it in. The greenish luminance grew at the edges of his mind, moving in, bubbling mournfully of life and death. “You killed him,” he shouted at it. “You killed him.”

The image came to him of Sax curled up there as if in sleep-alone and lost. Withering, decaying.

He freed his foot. The pain shot up to his inner knee and he sobbed with it, rocked to and fro.

Sorrow. It pulled at him, wanting him. It ached with needing him.

Not broken, not broken, he hoped: to be left lame lifelong as well as desolate-he could not bear that.

Pain stopped. A cooling breeze fanned over him. He stopped hating. Stopped blaming. The forest swayed and moved all about him. A tug drew at his mind, to go, to follow-other presences. Over river, over hills, far away, to drift with the winds and stop being alone, forever, and there was no terror in it. Sax perished. The forest took him, and he was part of it, feeding it, remembered.

Come, the presence said. He tried-but the first halting movement away from the support of the tree sent a shooting pain up his knee and brought him down rocking to and fro in misery.

“Warren,” a voice was saying. “Warren. Assistance?”

The vision passed. The ache throbbed in his knee, and the green radiance grew distant, rippling with the sound of waters. Then the creature was gone, the forest silent again.

“Warren?”

He fumbled at his belt, got the com unit to his mouth. “Anne. I’m all right.”

“Assistance? Assistance?”

“I’m coming home, Anne.”

“Clarify: you killed him. Clarify.”

He wiped his face, his hand trembling. “I found Sax, Anne. He’s not functioning.”

A silence. “Assistance?”

“None possible. It’s permanent nonfunction. He’s- deteriorated. I’m coming home. It’s going to be longer than usual.”

“Are you in pain, Warren?”

He thought about it, thought about her conflict override. “No. Stress. Finding Sax was stressful. I’m going to shut off now. I’ve got some things to take care of. I’ll come as quickly as I can.”

“Yes, Warren.”

The contact went out. He hooked the com unit back to his belt, felt of the knee, looked about him in the dawning, distressed by the loss of time. Sickness moiled in him, shock. Thirst. He broke small branches from the thicket, and a larger one, tried to lever himself out of his predicament and finally gave up and crawled, tears streaming down his face, back to the pallet and the kit he had left. He drank, forced a little food into his mouth and washed it down, splinted the knee and wrapped it in bandage from the med kit.

He got up then, using his stick, tried to carry both the water and the med kit, but he could not manage them both and chose to keep the water. He skipped forward using the stick, eyes watering from the pain, and there was a painkiller in the kit, but he left it, too: no drugs, nothing to muddle his direction; he had no leeway for errors. He moved slowly, steadily, into the forest on the homeward track, his hand aching already from the stick; and the tangle grew thicker, making him stagger and catch his balance violently from the good leg to the injured one and back again.

After he had fallen for the third time he wiped the tears from his eyes and gave up the stick entirely, leaning on the trees while he could, and when he came to places where he had to hitch his way along with his weight partially on the leg, he did it, and when the intervals grew too long and he had to crawl, he did that too. He tried not to think of the distance he had to go to the river. It did not matter. The distance had to be covered, no matter how long it took. Anne called, back on her hourly schedule, and that was all he had.

It was afternoon when he came into the vicinity of the river, and he reached it the better part of an hour afterward. He slid down to the sandy bank and staggered across to the raft, freed its rope and managed, crawling and tugging, to get it into the river and himself into it before it drifted away. He savored the beautiful feel of it under his torn hands, the speed of its moving, which was a painless, delirious joy after the meter-by-meter torment of the hours since dawn.

He got it to shore, started to leave it loose and then, half crazed and determined in his habits, crawled his way to the appointed limb and moored it fast. Then there was the bank, sandy in the first part, and then the brushy path he had broken bringing loads of equipment down.

And in his hearing a blessedly familiar sound of machinery.

Anne stood atop the crest, in front of the crawler, bright in the afternoon sun, her faceplate throwing back the daylight.

“Warren? Assistance?”

he worked the muddy remnant of his clothing off, fouling the sheets of the lab cot and the floor of the lab itself, while Anne hovered and watched. She brought him bandages. Fruit juice. He drank prodigiously of it, and that settled his stomach. Water. He washed where he sat, making puddles on the floor and setting Anne to clicking distressedly.

“Anne,” he said, “I’m going to have to take a real bath. I can’t stand this filth. You’ll have to help me down there.”

“Yes, Warren.” She offered her arm, helping him up, and walked with him to the bath, compensating for his uneven stride. Walked with him all the way to the mist cabinet, and stood outside while he turned on the control.

He soaked for a time, leaned on the wall and shut his eyes a time, looked down finally at a body gone thinner than he would have believed. Scratches. Bruises. The bandage was soaked and he had no disposition to change it. He had had enough of pain, and drugs were working in him now, home, in safety. So the sheets would get wet. Anne could wash everything.

No more nightmares. No more presences in the depths of the ship. No more Sax. He stared bleakly at the far wall of the cabinet, trying to recall the presence in the forest, trying to make sense of things, but the drugs muddled him and he could hardly recall the feeling or the look of the light that had shone out of the dark.

Sax. Sax was real. He had talked to Anne. She knew. She had heard. Heard all of it. He turned on the drier until he was tired of waiting on it, left the cabinet still damp and let Anne help him up to his own room, his own safe bed.

She waited there, clicking softly as he settled himself in, dimmed the lights for him, even pulled the covers up for him when he had trouble.

“That’s good,” he sighed. The drugs were pulling him under.

“Instructions.”

Her request hit his muddled thought train oddly, brought him struggling back toward consciousness. “Instruction in what?”

“In repair of human structure.”

He laughed muzzily. “We’re essentially self-repairing. Let me sleep it out. Good night, Anne.”

“Your time is in error.”

“My body isn’t. Go clean up the lab. Clean up the bath. Let me sleep.”

“Yes, Warren.”

Have you, he thought to ask her, understood what you read? Do you know what happened out there, to Sax? Did you pick it up? But she left. He got his eyes open and she was gone, and he thought he had not managed to ask, because she had not answered.

He slept, and dreamed green lights, and slept again.

Anne clattered about outside his room. Breakfast, he decided, looking at the time. He tried to get out of bed and winced, managed to move only with extreme pain- the knee, the hands, the shoulders and the belly-every muscle in his body hurt. He rolled onto his belly, levered himself out of bed, held on to the counter and the wall to reach the door. He had bruises- massive bruises, the worst about his hip and his elbow. His face hurt on that side. He reached for the switch, opened the door.

“Assistance?” Anne asked, straightening from her table setting.

“I want a bit of pipe. A meter long. Three centimeters wide. Get it.”

“Yes, Warren.”

No questions. She left. He limped over painfully and sat down, ate his breakfast. His hand was so stiff he could scarcely close his fingers on the fork or keep the coffee cup in his swollen fingers. He sat staring at the far wall, seeing the clearing again. Numb. There were limits to feeling, inside and out. He thought that he might feel something-some manner of elation in his discovery when he had recovered; but there was Sax to temper it.

Anne came back. He took the pipe and used it to get up when he had done; his hand hurt abominably, even after he had hobbled down to the lab and padded the raw pipe with bandages. He kept walking, trying to loosen up.

Anne followed him, stood about, walked, every motion that he made.

“Finished your assimilation?” he asked her, recalling that. “Does it work?”

“Processing is proceeding.”

“A creature of many talents. You can walk about and rescue me and assimilate the library all at once, can you?”

“The programs are not impaired. An AI uses a pseudobiological matrix for storage. Storage is not a problem. Processing does not impair other functions.”

“No headaches, either, I’ll bet.”

“Headache is a biological item.”

“Your definitions are better than they were.”

“Thank you, Warren.”

She matched strides with him, exaggeratedly slow. He stopped. She stopped. He went on, and she kept with him. “Anne. Why don’t you just let me alone and let me walk? I’m not going to fall over. I don’t need you.”

“I perceive malfunction.”

“A structural malfunction under internal repair. I have all kinds of internal mechanisms working on the problem. I’ll get along. It’s all right, Anne.”

“Assistance?”

“None needed, I tell you. It’s all right. Go away.”

She stayed. Malfunctioning humans, he thought. No programming accepted. He frowned, beyond clear reasoning. The bio and botany labs were ahead. He kept walking, into them and through to Botany One.

“Have you been maintaining here?” he asked. The earth in the trays looked a little dry.

“I’ve been following program.”

He limped over and adjusted the water flow. “Keep it there.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He walked to the trays, felt of them.

“Soil,” Anne said gratuitously. “Dirt. Earth.”

“Yes. It has to be moist. There’ll be plants coming up soon. They need the water.”

“Coming up. Source.”

“Seed. They’re under there, under the soil. Plants, Anne. From seed.”

She walked closer, adjusted her stabilizers, looked, a turning of her sensor-equipped head. She put out a hand and raked a line in the soil. “I perceive no life. Size?”

“It’s there, under the soil. Leave it alone. You’ll kill it.”

She straightened. Her sensor lights glowed, all of them. “Please check your computations, Warren.”

“About what?”

“This life.”

“There are some things your sensors can’t pick up, Annie.”

“I detect no life.”

“They’re there. I put them in the ground. I know they’re there; I don’t need to detect them. Seeds, Annie. That’s the nature of them.”

“I am making cross-references on this word, Warren.”

He laughed painfully, patiently opened a drawer and took out a large one that he had not planted. “This is one. It’d be a plant if I put it into the ground and watered it. That’s what makes it grow. That’s what makes all the plants outside.”

“Plants come from seed.”

“That’s right.”

“This is growth process. This is birth process.”

“Yes.”

“This is predictable.”

“Yes, it is.”

In the dark faceplate the tiny stars glowed to intense life. She took the seed from the counter, with one powerful thrust rammed it into the soil and then pressed the earth down over it, leaving the imprint of her fingers. Warren looked at her in shock.

“Why, Anne? Why did you do that?”

“I’m investigating.”

“Are you, now?”

“I still perceive no life.”

“You’ll have to wait.”

“Specify period.”

“It takes several weeks for the seed to come up.”

“Come up.”

“Idiom. The plant will grow out of it. Then the life will be in your sensor range.”

“Specify date.”

“Variable. Maybe twenty days.”

“Recorded.” She swung about, facing him. “Life forms come from seeds. Where are human seeds?”

“Anne-I don’t think your programming is adequate to the situation. And my knee hurts. I think I’m going to go topside again.”

“Assistance?”

“None needed.” He leaned his sore hand on the makeshift cane and limped past her, and she stalked faithfully after, to the lift, and rode topside to the common room, stood by while he lowered himself into a reclining chair and let the cane fall, massaging his throbbing hand.

“Instruction?”

“Coffee,” he said.

“Yes, Warren.”

She brought it. He sat and stared at the wall, thinking of things he might read, but the texts that mattered were all beyond him and all useless on this world, on Rule’s world. He thought of reading for pleasure, and kept seeing the grove at night, and the radiance, and Sax’s body left there. He owed it burial. And he had not had the strength.

Had to go back there. Could not live here and not go back there. It was life there as well as a dead friend. Sax had known, had gone to it, through what agony he shrank from imagining, had gone to it to die there- to be in that place at the last. He tried to doubt it, here, in Anne’s sterile interior, but he had experienced it, and it would not go away. He even thought of talking to Anne about it, but there was that refusal to listen to him when he was malfunctioning-and he had no wish to stir that up. Seeds- were hard enough. Immaterial life-

“Warren,” Anne said. “Activity? I play chess.”

She won, as usual.

Yhe swelling went down on the second day. He walked, cautiously, without the cane- still used it for going any considerable distance, and the knee still ached, but the rest of the aches diminished and he acquired a certain cheerfulness, assured at least that the knee was not broken, that it was healing, and he went about his usual routines with a sense of pleasure in them, glad not to be lamed for life.

But by the fourth and fifth day the novelty was gone again, and he wandered the halls of the ship without the cane, miserable, limping in pain but too restless to stay still. He drank himself to sleep nights- still awoke in the middle of them, the result, he reckoned, of too much sleep, of dreaming the days away in idleness, of lying with his mind vacant for hours during the day, watching the clouds or the grass moving in the wind. Like Anne. Waiting for stimulus that never came.

He played chess, longer and longer games with Anne, absorbed her lessons- lost.

He cried, the last time-for no reason, but that the game had become important, and when he saw one thing coming, she sprang another on him.

“Warren,” she said implacably, “is this pain?”

“The knee hurts,” he said. It did. “It disrupted my calculations.” It had not. He had lost. He lied, and Anne sat there with her lights winking on and off in the darkness of her face and absorbing it.

“Assistance? Pain: drugs interfere with pain reception.” She had gotten encyclopedic in her processing. “Some of these drugs are in storage-”

“Cancel. I know what they are.” He got up, limped over to the counter and opened the liquor cabinet. “Alcohol also kills the pain.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He poured his drink, leaned against the counter and sipped at it, wiped his eyes. “Prolonged inactivity, Anne. That’s causing the pain. The leg’s healing.”

A small delay of processing. “Chess is activity.”

“I need to sleep.” He took the drink and the bottle with him, limped into his own quarters, shut the door. He drank, stripped, crawled between the sheets and sat there drinking, staring at the screen and thinking that he might try to read- but he had to call Anne to get a book on the screen, and he wanted no debates. His hands shook. He poured another glass and drank it down, fluffed the pillow. “Anne,” he said. “Lights out.”

“Good night, Warren.” The lights went.

The chessboard came back, behind his eyelids, the move he should have made. He rehearsed it to the point of anger, deep and bitter rage. He knew that it was ridiculous. All pointless. Without consequence. Everything was.

He slid into sleep, and dreamed, and the dreams were of green things, and the river, and finally of human beings, of home and parents long lost, of old friends- of women inventively erotic and imaginary, with names he knew at the time-he awoke in the midst of that and lay frustrated, staring at the dark ceiling and then at the dark behind his eyelids, trying to rebuild them in all their detail, but sleep eluded him. He thought of Anne in that context, of bizarre programs, of his own misery, and what she was not-his thoughts ran in circles and grew unbearable.

He reached for the bottle, poured what little there was and drank it, and that was not enough. He rolled out of bed, stumbled in the dark. “Lights,” he cried out, and they came on. He limped to the door and opened it, and the pseudosome came to life where it had been standing in the dark, limned in silver from the doorway, her lights coming to life inside her faceplate. The lights in the living quarters brightened. “Assistance?”

“No.” He went to the cabinet, opened it, took out another bottle and opened it. The bottles were diminishing. He could foresee the day when there would be no more bottles at all. That panicked him. Set him to thinking of the forest, of green berries that might ferment, of the grasses-of fruits that might come at particular seasons. If he failed to poison himself.

He went back to his bed with the bottle, filled his glass and got in bed. “Lights out,” he said. They went. He sat drinking in the dark until he felt his hand shaking, and set the glass aside and burrowed again into the tangled sheets.

This time there were nightmares, the lab, the deaths, and he was walking through the ship again, empty-handed, looking for Sax and his knife. Into dark corridors. He kept walking and the way got darker and darker, and something waited there. Something hovered over him. He heard sound-

The dream brought him up with a jerk, eyes wide and a yell in his ears that was his own, confronted with red lights in the dark, the touch of a hand on him.

The second shock was more than the first, and he lashed out at hard metal, struggled wildly with covers and the impediment of Anne’s unyielding arm. Her stabilizers hummed. She put the hand on his chest and held and he recovered his sense, staring up at her with his heart pounding in fright.

“Assistance? Assistance? Is this malfunction?”

“A dream-a dream, Anne.”

A delay while the lights blinked in the dark. “Dreams may have random motor movements. Dreams are random neural firings. Neural cells are brain structure. This process affects the brain. Please confirm your status.”

“I’m fine, Anne.”

“I detect internal disturbance.”

“That’s my heart, Anne. It’s all right. I’m normal now. The dream’s over.”

She took back the hand. He lay still for a moment, watching her lights.

“Time,” he asked.

“0434.”

He winced, moved, ran a hand through his hair. “Make breakfast. Call me when it’s ready.”

“Yes, Warren.”

She left, a clicking in the dark that carried her own light with her. The door closed. He pulled the covers about himself and burrowed down and tried to sleep, but he was only conscious of a headache, and he had no real desire for the breakfast.

he kept very busy that day, despite the headache-cleaned up, limped about, carrying things to their proper places, throwing used clothing into the laundry. Everything in shape, everything in order. No more self pity. No more excuses of his lameness or the pain. No more liquor. He thought even of putting Anne in charge of that cabinet- but he did not. He was. He could say no if he wanted to.

Outside, a rain blew up. Anne reported the anomaly. Clouds hung darkly over the grasslands and the forest. He went down to the lock to see it, the first change he had seen in the world- stood there in the hatchway with the rain spattering his face and the thunder shaking his bones, watched the lightning tear holes in the sky.

The clouds shed their burden in a downpour, but they stayed. After the pounding rain, which left the grass battered and collapsed the canopy outside into a miniature lake, the clouds stayed, sending down a light drizzle that chilled to the bone, intermittent with harder rain-one day, and two, and three, four at last, in which the sun hardly shone.

He thought of the raft, of the things he had left behind-of the clearing finally, and Sax lying snugged there in the hollow of the old tree’s roots.

And a living creature-one with it, with the scents of rain and earth and the elements.

The sensor box. That, too, he had had to abandon- sitting on the ground on a now sodden blanket, perhaps half underwater like the ground outside.

“Anne,” he said then, thinking about it. “Activate the sensor unit. Is it still functioning?”

“Yes.”

He sat where he was, in the living quarters, studying the chessboard. Thought a moment. “Scan the area around the unit. Do you perceive anything?”

“Vegetation, Warren. It’s raining.”

“Have you-activated it since I left it there?”

“When the storm broke I activated it. I investigated with all sensors.”

“Did you-perceive anything?”

“Vegetation, Warren.”

He looked into her faceplate and made the next move, disquieted.

The seeds sprouted in the lab. It was all in one night, while the drizzle died away outside and the clouds broke to let the sun through. And as if they had known, the seeds came up. Warren looked out across the rows of trays in the first unadulterated pleasure he had felt in days- to see them live. All along the trays the earth was breaking, and in some places little arches and spears of pale green and white were thrusting upward.

Anne followed him. She always did.

“You see,” he told her, “now you can see the life. It was there, all along.”

She made closer examination where he indicated, a humanlike bending to put her sensors into range. She straightened, walked back to the place where she had planted her own seed. “Your seeds have grown. The seed I planted has no growth.”

“It’s too early yet. Give it all its twenty days. Maybe less. Maybe more. They vary.”

“Explain. Explain life process. Cross-referencing is incomplete.”

“The inside of the seed is alive, from the time it was part of the first organism. When water gets into it it activates, penetrates its hull and pushes away from gravity and toward the light.”

Anne digested the information a moment. “Life does not initiate with seed. Life initiates from the first organism. All organisms produce seed. Instruction: what is the first organism?”

He looked at her, blinked, tried to think through the muddle. “I think you’d better assimilate some other area of data. You’ll confuse yourself.”

“Instruction: explain life process.”

“I can’t. It’s not in my memory.”

“I can instruct. I contain random information in this area.”

“So do I, Annie, but it doesn’t do any good. It won’t work. You don’t plant humans in seed trays. It takes two humans to make another one. And you aren’t. Let it alone.”

“Specify: aren’t. It.”

“You aren’t human. And you’re not going to be. Cancel, Anne, just cancel. I can’t reason with you, not on this.”

“I reason.”

He looked into her changeless face with the impulse to hit her, which she could neither feel nor comprehend. “I don’t choose to reason. Gather up a food kit for me, Annie. Get the gear into the lock.”

“This program is preparatory to going to the river.”

“Yes. It is.”

“This is hazardous. This caused injury. Please reconsider this program.”

“I’m going to pick up your sensor box. Retrieve valuable equipment, a part of you, Annie. You can’t reach it. I’ll be safe.”

“This unit isn’t in danger. You were damaged there. Please reconsider this instruction.”

“I’d prefer to have you functioning and able to come to my assistance if you’re needed. I don’t want to quarrel with you, Anne. Accept the program. I won’t be happy until you do.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He breathed a slow sigh, patted her shoulder. Her hand touched his, rested there. He walked from under it and she followed, a slow clicking at his heels.

The raft was still there. Nests of sodden grass lodged in tree branches and cast high up on the shores showed how high the flood had risen, but the rope had held it. The water still flowed higher than normal. The whole shoreline had changed, the bank eroded away. The raft sat higher still, partially filled with water and leaves.

Warren picked his way down to it, past brush festooned with leaves and grass, only food and water and a folding spade for a pack. He used a stick to support his weight on the injured leg, walked slowly and carefully. He set everything down to heave the raft up and dump the water- no more care of contamination, he reckoned: it had all had its chance at one time or another, the river, the forest. The second raft was in the crawler upslope, but all he had lost was the paddle, and he went back after that, slow progress, unhurried.

“Anne,” he said via com, when he had settled everything in place, when the raft bobbed on the river and his gear was aboard. “I’m at the river. I won’t call for a while. A few hours. My status is very good. I’m going to be busy here.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He cut it off, put it back at his belt, launched the raft.

The far bank had suffered similar damage. He drove for it with some difficulty with the river running high, wet his boots getting himself ashore, secured the raft by pulling it up with the rope, the back part of it still in the water.

The ground in the forest, too, was littered with small branches and larger ones, carpeted with new leaves. But flowers had come into bloom. Everywhere the mosses were starred with white flowers. Green ones opened at the bases of trees. The hanging vines bloomed in pollen-golden rods.

And the fungi proliferated everywhere, fantastical shapes, oranges and blues and whites. The ferns were heavy with water and shed drops like jewels. There were beauties to compensate for the ruin. Drops fell from the high branches when the wind blew, a periodic shower that soaked his hair and ran off his impermeable jacket. Everything seemed both greener and darker, all the growth lusher and thicker than ever.

The grove when he came upon it had suffered not at all, not a branch fallen, only a litter of leaves and small limbs on the grass; and he was glad-not to have lost one of the giants. The old tree’s beard was flower-starred, his moss even thicker. Small cuplike flowers bloomed in the grass in the sunlight, a vine having grown into the light, into the way of the abandoned, rain-sodden blanket, the sensor box.

And Sax- Warren went to the base of the aged tree and looked inside, found him there, more bone than before, the clothing sodden with the storm, some of the bones of the fingers fallen away. The sight had no horror for him, nothing but sadness. “Sax,” he said softly. “It’s Warren. Warren here.”

From the vacant eyes, no answer. He stood up, flexed the spade out, set to work, spadeful after spadeful, casting the dirt and the leaves inside, into what made a fair tomb, a strange one for a starfarer

Poor lost Sax, curled up to sleep. The earthen blanket grew up to Sax’s knees, to his waist, among the gnarled roots and the bones. He made spadefuls of the green flowers and set them there, at Sax’s feet, set them in the earth that covered him, stirring up clouds of pollen. He sneezed and wiped his eyes and stood up again, taking another spadeful of earth and mold.

A sound grew in his mind like the bubbling of water, and he looked to his left, where green radiance bobbed. The welcome flowed into him like the touch of warm wind.

He ignored it, cast the earth, took another spadeful.

Welcome, it sang to him. The water-sound bubbled. A flower unfolded, tinted itself slowly violet.

“I’ve work to do.”

Sorrow. The color faded.

“I don’t want it like the last time. Keep your distance. Stop that.” Its straying thoughts brushed him, numbing senses. He leaned on the spade, felt himself sinking, turning and drifting bodilessly-wrenched his mind back to his own control so abruptly he almost fell.

Sorrow. A second time a flower, a pale shoot from among the leaves, a folded bud trying to open.

“Work,” Warren said. He picked up the spadeful, cast it; and another.

Perplexity. The flower folded again, drooped unwatered.

“I have this to do. It’s important. And you won’t understand that. Nothing of the sort could matter to you.”

The radiance grew, pulsed. Suns flickered across a mental sky, blue and black, day and night, in a streaming course.

He leaned on the spade for stability in the blur of days passed. “What’s time-to you?”

Desire. The radiance took shape and settled on the grass, softly pulsing. It edged closer-stopped at once when he stepped back.

“Maybe you killed Sax. You know that? Maybe he just lay there and dreamed to death.”

Sorrow. An image formed in his mind, the small sickly creature, all curled up, all its inward motion suddenly stopped.

“I know. You wouldn’t have meant it. But it happened.” He dug another spadeful of earth. Intervening days unrolled in his mind, thoughts stolen from him, where he had been, what he had done.

It stole the thought of Anne, and it was a terrible image, a curled-up thing like a human, but hollow inside, dark inside, deadly hostile. Her tendrils were dark and icy.

“She’s not like that. She’s just a machine.” He flung the spadeful. Earth showered over bare bone arid began to cover Sax’s face. He flinched from the sight. “She can’t do anything but take orders. I made her, if you like.”

There was horror in the air, palpable.

“She’s not alive. She never was.”

The radiance became very pale and retreated up into the branches of one of the youngest trees, a mere touch of color in the sunlight. Cold, cold, the terror drifted down like winter rain.

“Don’t leave.” The spade fell. He stepped over it, held up his hands, threatened with solitude. “Don’t.”

The radiance went out. Re-formed near him, drifted up to sit on the aged, fallen tree.

“It’s my world. I know it’s different. I never wanted to hurt you with it.”

The greenness spread about him, a darkness in its heart, where two small creatures entwined, their tendrils interweaving, one living, one dead.

“Stop it.”

His own mind came back at him: loneliness, longing for companionship; fear of dying alone. Like Sax. Like that. He held deeply buried the thought that the luminance offered a means of dying, a little better than most; but it came out, and the radiance shivered. The Anne-image took shape in its heart, her icy tendrils invading the image that was himself, growing, insinuating ice into that small fluttering that was his life, winding through him and out again.

“What do you know?” he cried at it. “What do you know at all? You don’t know me. You can’t see me, with no eyes; you don’t know.”

The Anne-image faded, left him alone in the radiance, embryo, tucked and fluttering inside. A greenness crept in there, the least small tendril of green, and touched that quickness.

Emotion exploded like sunrise, with a shiver of delight. A second burst. He tried to object, felt a touching of the hairs at the back of his neck. He shivered, and the light was gone. Every sense seemed stretched to the limit, heightened, but remote, and he wanted to get up and walk a little distance, knowing even while he did so that it was not his own suggestion. He moved, limping a little, and quite suddenly the presence fled, leaving a light sweat over his body.

Pain, it sent. And Peace.

“Hurt, did it?” He massaged his knee and sat down. His own eyes watered. “Serves you right.”

Sorrow. The greenness unfolded again, filling all his mind but for one small corner where he stayed whole and alert.

“No,” he cried in sudden panic, and when it drew back in its own: “I wouldn’t mind-if you were content with touching. But you aren’t. You can’t keep your distance when you get excited. And sometimes you hurt.”

The greenness faded a little. It was dark round about.

Hours. Hours gone. A flickering, a quick feeling of sunlit warmth came to him, but he flung it off.

“Don’t lie to me. What happened to the time? When did it get dark?”

A sun plummeted, and trees bowed in evening breezes.

“How long did you have control? How long was it?”

Sorrow. Peace- settled on him with a great weight. He felt a great desire of sleep, of folding in and biding until warm daylight returned, and he feared nothing any longer, not life, not death. He drifted on the wind, conscious of the forest’s silent growings and stretchings and burrowings about him. Then he became himself again, warm and animal and very comfortable in the simple regularity of heartbeat and breathing.

HE AWOKE in sunlight, stretched lazily and stopped in mid-stretch as green light broke into existence up in the branches. The creature drifted slowly down to the grass beside him and rested there, exuding happiness. Sunrise burst across his vision, the fading of stars, the unfolding of flowers.

He reached for the food kit, trying to remember where he had laid it. Stopped, held in the radiance, and looked into the heart of it. It was an effort to pull his mind away. “Stop that. I have no sense of time when you’re so close. Maybe you can spend an hour watching a flower unfold, but that’s a considerable portion of my life.”

Sorrow. The radiance murmured and bubbled with images he could not make sense of, of far-traveling, the unrolling of land, of other consciousnesses, of a vast and all-driving hunger for others, so strong it left him shaking.

“Stop it. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

The light grew in his vision and pulsed bright and dark, little gold sparks swirling in the heart of it, an explosion of pure excitement reaching out to him.

“What’s wrong with you?” he cried. He trembled.

Quite suddenly the light winked out altogether, and when it reappeared a moment later it was not half so bright or so large, bubbling softly with the sound of waters.

“What’s wrong?”

Need. Sorrow. Again the impression of other consciousnesses, other luminances, a thought quickly snatched away, all of them flowing and flooding into one.

“You mean others of your kind.”

The image came back to him; and flowers, stamens shedding pollen, golden clouds, golden dust adhering to the pistil of a great, green-veined lily.

“Like mating? Like that?”

The backspill became unsettling, for the first time sexual.

“You produce others of your kind.” He felt the excitement flooding through his own veins, a contagion. “Others-are coming here?”

Come. He got the impression strongly, a tugging at all his senses, a flowing over the hills and away. A merging, with things old and wise, and full of experiences, lives upon lives. Welcome. Come.

“I’m human.”

Welcome. Need pulled at him. Distances rolled away, long distances, days and nights.

“What would happen to me?”

Life bursting from the soil. The luminance brightened and enlarged. The man-image came into his vision: The embryo stretched itself and grew new tendrils, into the radiance, and it into the fluttering heart; more and more luminances added themselves, and the tendrils twined, human and otherwise, until they became another greenness, another life, to float on the winds.

Come, it urged.

His heart swelled with tears. He wept and then ceased to be human at all, full of years, deep-rooted and strong. He felt the sun and the rain and the passage of time beyond measure, knew the birth and death of forests and the weaving undulations of rivers across the land. There were mountains and snows and tropics where winter never came, and deep caverns and cascading streams and things that verged on consciousness deep in the darkness. The very stars in the heavens changed their patterns and the world was young. There were many lives, many, and one by one he knew their selves, strength and youth and age beyond reckoning, the joy of new birth, the beginning of new consciousness. Time melted. It was all one experience, and there was vast peace, unity, even in the storms, the cataclysms, the destruction of forests in lightning-bred fires, the endless push of life toward the sun and the rain-cycle on cycle, year on year, eons passing. At last his strength faded and he slept, enfolded in a green and gentle warmth; he thought that he died like the old tree and did not care, because it was a gradual and comfortable thing, a return to elements, ultimate joining. The living creature that crept in among his upturned roots for shelter was nothing less and nothing more than the moss, the dying flowers, the fallen leaves.

He lay on the grass, too weary to move, beyond care. Tears leaked from his eyes. His hands were weak. He had no terror of merging now, none, and the things he had shared with this creature would remain with them, with all its kind, immortal.

It pulled at him, and the pull that worked through his mind was as strong as the tides of the sea, as immutable and unarguable. Peace, it urged on him; and in his mind the sun flicked again through the heavens.

He opened his eyes. A day gone. A second day. Then the weakness in his limbs had its reason. He tried to sit up, panicked even through the urging of peace it laid on him.

Anne. The recollection flashed through his memory with a touch of cold. The luminance recoiled, resisting.

“No. I have to reach her. I have to.” He fought hard for consciousness, gained, and knew by the release that the danger got through. Fear flooded over him like cold water.

The Anne-image appeared, a hollow shell in darkness, tendrils coiling out. Withered. Urgency pulled at him, and the luminance pulsed with agitation.

“Time-how much time is there?”

Several sunsets flashed through his mind.

“I have to get to her. I have to get her to take an instruction. She’s dangerous.”

The radiance was very wan. Urgency. Urgency. The hills rolled away in the mind’s eye, the others called. Urgency.

And it faded, leaving behind an overwhelming flood of distress.

Warren lay still a moment, on his back, on the grass, shivering in the cold daylight. His head throbbed. His limbs ached and had no strength. He reached for the com, got it on, got it to his lips, his eyes closed, shutting out the punishing sun.

“Anne.”

“Warren. Please confirm status.”

“Fine-I’m fine.” He tried to keep his voice steady. His throat was raw. It could not sound natural. “I’m coming home, Anne.”

A pause on the other side. “Yes, Warren. Assistance?”

“Negative, negative, Anne. Please wait. I’ll be there soon.” He gathered himself up to his arm, to his knees, to his feet, with difficulty. There were pains in all his joints. He felt his face, unshaven and rough. His hands and feet were numb with the cold and the damp. His clothes sagged on him, belt gone loose.

“Warren?”

“I’m all right, Anne. I’m starting back now.”

“Accepted,” Anne said after a little delay. “Emergency procedures canceled.”

“What-emergency procedures?”

“What’s your status, Warren?”

“No emergency, do you hear me? No emergency. I’m on my way.” He shut it down, found his canteen, the food packet, drank, forced a bite down his swollen throat and stuffed the rest into his sodden jacket. Walked. His leg hurt, and his eyes blurred, the lids swollen and raw. He found a branch and tore it off and used that as he went-pushed himself, knowing the danger there was in Anne.

Knowing how little time there was. It would go, it would go then, and leave him. And there would be nothing after that. Ever.

II

Anne was waiting for him, at the riverside-amid the stumps of trees, mud, cleared earth. Trees dammed the river, water spilling over them, between them, flooding up over the banks and changing the land into a shallow, sandy lake.

He stopped there, leaned against the last standing tree on that margin and shivered, slow tremors which robbed him of strength and sense. She stood placidly in the ruin; he called her on the com, heard her voice, saw her face, then her body, orient toward him. He began to cross the bridge of tumbled trees, clinging to branches, walking tilted trunks.

“Damn you,” he shouted at her. Tears ran down his face. “Damn you!”

She met him at the other side, silver slimed with mud and soot from the burning she had done. Her sensors blinked. “Assistance?”

He found his self-control, shifted his attack. “You’ve damaged yourself.”

“I’m functioning normally. Assistance?”

He started to push past her, slipped on the unstable log. She reached to save him, her arm rock-solid, stable. He clung to it, his only point of balance. Her facelights blinked at him. Her other hand came up to rest on his shoulder. Contact. She offered contact. He had meant to shove at her. He touched her gently, patted her plastic-sheathed shoulder, fought back the tears. “You’ve killed, Annie. Don’t you understand?”

“Vegetation.”

He shoved past her, limped up the devastated shore, among the stumps of trees. His head throbbed. His stomach felt hollow.

The crawler still waited on the bank. Anne overtook him as he reached it; she offered him her hand as he climbed in. He slid into the seat, slipped the brake, started the motor and threw it full throttle, leaving her behind.

“Warren.” Her voice pursued him.

He kept driving, wildly, swerving this way and that over the jolts, past the brush.

...

“Anne,” he said, standing at the airlock. “Open the lock.”

Silence.

“Anne. Open the lock, please.”

It hissed wide. He walked in, unsteady as he was, onto the cargo platform. “Engage lift, Anne.”

Gears crashed. It started up, huge and ponderous that it was. “Warren,” the disembodied voice said, from the speakers, everywhere, echoing. “What’s your status, Warren?”

“Good, thank you.”

“Your voice indicates stress.”

“Hoarseness. Minor dysfunction in my speaking apparatus. It’s self-repairing.”

A silence. “Recorded.” The lift stopped on nether-deck. He walked out, calmly, to the lower weapons locker, put his card in.

Dead. “I’ve got a lock malfunction here, Anne. Number 13/546. Would you clear it up?”

“Emergency locks are still engaged.”

“Disengage.”

Silence.

“There is no emergency.” He fought the anger from his voice. “Disengage emergency locks and cancel all emergency procedures.”

“This vocal dysfunction is not repaired.”

He leaned against the wall, stared down the corridor.

“Warren, please confirm your status.”

“Normal, I tell you.” He went to the lift. It worked. It brought him up to the level of the laboratories. He walked down to Bio, walked in, tried the cabinets.

“Anne, I need medicines. Disengage the locks. I need medicines for repair.”

The lock clicked. It opened.

He took out the things he needed, washed his torn hands, prepared a stimulant. He was filthy. He saw himself like a specter in a reflecting glass, gaunt, stubbled; looked down and saw his clothes unrecognizable in color. He washed an area of his arm and fired the injection, rummaged through the cabinet for medicines to cure the hoarseness. He found some lozenges, ripped one from the foil and sucked on it, then headed off for the showers, undressing as he went.

A quick wash. He had forgotten clean clothes; he belted on the bathrobe he had left in the showers, on a body gone gaunt. His hands shook. The stim hummed in his veins. He could not afford the shakes. He had visions of the pseudosome walking back toward the ship; she would be here soon. He had to make normal moves. Had to do everything in accustomed order. He went to the galley next, opened the box and downed fruit juice from its container; it hit his stomach in a wave of cold.

He hauled out other things. Dried food. Stacked it there. He took out one frozen dinner and put it in the microwave.

It turned on without his touching it.

“Time, please.”

“Fifteen minutes,” he told it. He walked out. He took the dried food with him to the lift.

He punched buttons. It took him up. He walked out into the corridor; lights came on for him. Lights came on in the living quarters, in his own quarters, as he entered. He dumped the dried stores on the bed, opened the locker and pulled out all his clothing- dressed, short of breath, having to stop and rest in the act of putting his boots on.

The lock crashed and boomed in the bowels of the ship.

She was back. He pulled the second boot on. He could hear the lift working. He folded his remaining clothes. He heard the next lift work. He arranged everything on his bed. He heard footsteps approach.

He looked round. Anne stood there, muddy, streaked with soot.

“Assistance? Please confirm your status, Warren.”

He thought a moment. “Fine. You’re dirty, Anne. Decontaminate.”

Sensors flickered, one and then the others. “You’re packing. This program is preparatory to going to the river. Please reconsider this program.”

“I’m just cleaning up. Why don’t you get me dinner?”

“You fixed dinner, Warren.”

“I didn’t like it. You fix it. I’ll have dinner up here at the table. Fifteen minutes. I need it, Anne. I’m hungry.”

“Yes, Warren.”

“And clean up.”

“Yes, Warren.”

The pseudosome left. He dropped his head into his hands, caught his breath. Best to rest a bit. Have dinner. See what he could do about a program and get her to take it. He went to the desk where he had left the programming microfilm, got it and fed it into the viewer.

He scanned through the emergency programs, the E sequences, hoping to distract her into one of those. There was nothing that offered a way to seize control. Nothing that would lock her up.

It was feeding into her, even now; she had library access. The viewer was part of her systems. The thought made him nervous. He scanned through harmless areas, to confound her.

“Dinner’s ready,” the speaker told him.

He wiped his face, shut down the viewer and walked out, hearing the lift in function.

Anne arrived, carrying a tray. She set things on the table, arranged them.

He sat down. She poured him coffee, walked to her end of the table and sat facing him.

He ate a few bites. The food nauseated him. He shoved the plate away.

Her lights flickered. “Chess?”

“Thank you, no, Anne. I’ve got other things to do.”

“Do. Yes. Activity. What activity do you choose, Warren?”

He stared at her. Observation and question. Subsequent question. “Your assimilation’s really made a lot of progress, hasn’t it? Lateral activity.”

“The lateral patterning is efficient in forecast. Question posed: what activity do you choose, Warren?”

“I’m going down below. You stay here. Clean up the dinner.”

“Yes, Warren.”

He pushed back from the table, walked out and down the corridor to the lift. He decided on routine, on normalcy, on time to think.

He rode the lift back to the lab level, walked out.

She turned the lights on for him, turned them off behind as he walked, always conservative.

He pushed the nearest door button. Botany, it was. The door stayed shut.

“Lab doors locked,” he said casually. “Open it.”

The door shot back. Lights went on.

The room was a shambles. Planting boxes were overthrown, ripped loose, pipes twisted, planting medium scattered everywhere, the floor, the walls. Some of the boxes were partially melted, riddled with laser fire.

He backed out, quietly, quickly. Closed the door. Walked back to the lift, his footsteps echoing faster and faster on the decking. He opened the lift door, stepped in, pushed the button for topside.

It took him up. He left it, walking now as quickly, as normally, as he could, not favoring his leg.

Anne had left the living quarters. He went by the vacant table, to the bridge corridor, to the closed door at the end. He used his cardkey.

It stayed shut.

“Anne,” he said, “you have a malfunction. There’s no longer an emergency. Please clear the emergency lock on the bridge. I have a critical problem involving maintenance. I need to get to controls right now.”

A delay. The speaker near his head came on. “Emergency procedure remains in effect. Access not permitted.”

“Anne. We have a paradox here. The problem involves your mistake.”

“Clarify: mistake.”

“You’ve perceived a false emergency. You’ve initiated wrong procedures. Some of your equipment is damaged. Cancel emergency. This is a code nine. Cancel emergency and open this door.”

A further delay. “Negative. Access denied.”

“Anne.” He pushed the button again. It was dead. He heard a heavy step in the corridor behind him. He jerked about with his back to the door and looked into Anne’s dark faceplate with its dancing stars. “Open it,” he said. “I’m in pain, Anne. The pain won’t stop until you cancel emergency procedure and open this door.”

“Please adjust yourself.”

“I’m not malfunctioning. I need this door opened.” He forced calm into his voice, adopted a reasoning tone. “The ship is in danger, Anne. I have to get in there.”

“Please go back to permitted areas, Warren.”

He caught his breath, stared at her, then edged past her carefully, down the corridor to the living quarters. She was at his back, still, following.

“Is this a permitted area?” he asked.

“Yes, Warren.”

“I want a cup of coffee. Bring it.”

“Yes, Warren.”

She walked out into the main corridor. The door closed behind her. He delayed a moment till he heard the lift, then went and tried it. Dead. “Anne. Now there’s a malfunction with number two access. Will you do something about it?”

“Access not permitted.”

“I need a bath, Anne. I need to go down to the showers.”

A delay. “This is not an emergency procedure. Please wait f6r assistance.”

A scream welled up in him. He swallowed it, smoothed his hand over the metal as if it were skin. “All right. All right, Anne.” He turned, walked back to his own quarters.

The clothes and food were gone from the bed.

The manual. He went to the viewer. The microfilm was gone. He searched the drawer where he kept it. It was not there.

Panic surged up in him. He stifled it, walked out. He walked back to the table, sat down-heard the lift operating finally. Heard her footsteps. The door opened.

“Coffee, Warren.”

“Thank you, Annie.”

She set the cup down, poured his coffee. Hydraulics worked in the ship, massive movement, high on the frame. The turret rotating. Warren looked up. “What’s that, Anne?”

“Armaments, Warren.”

The electronic snap of the cannon jolted the ship. He sprang up from his chair and Anne set down the coffee pot.

“Anne. Anne, cancel weapons. Cancel!”

The firing went on.

“Cancel refused,” Anne said.

“Anne-show me- what you’re shooting at. Put it on the screen.”

The wallscreen lit, the black of night, a thin line of orange: a horizon, ablaze with fires.

“You’re killing it!”

“Vegetation, Warren. Emergency program is proceeding.”

“Anne.” He seized her metal, unflexing arm. “Cancel program.”

“Negative.”

“On what reasoning? Anne-turn on your sensor box. Turn it on. Scan the area.”

“It is operating, Warren. I’m using it to refine target. Possibly the equipment will survive. Possibly I can recover it. Please adjust yourself, Warren. Your voice indicates stress.”

“It’s life you’re killing out there!”

“Vegetation, Warren. This is a priority, but overridden. I’m programmed to make value judgments. I’ve exercised my override reflex. This is a rational function. Please adjust yourself, Warren.”

“The lab. You destroyed the lab. Why?”

“I don’t like vegetation, Warren.”

“Don’t like?

“Yes, Warren. This seems descriptive.”

“Anne, you’re malfunctioning. Listen to me. You’ll have to shut down for a few moments. I won’t damage you or interfere with your standing instructions. I’m your crew, Anne. Shut down.”

“I can’t accept this instruction, Warren. One of my functions is preservation of myself. You’re my highest priority. To preserve you I have to preserve myself. Please adjust yourself, Warren.”

“Anne, let me out. Let me out of here.”

“No, Warren.”

The firing stopped. On the screen the fires continued to burn. He looked at it, leaned on the back of the chair, shaking.

“Assistance?”

“Go to hell.”

“I can’t go to hell, Warren. I have to hold this position.”

“Anne. Anne-listen. I found a being out there. A sapient life form. In the forest. I talked with it. You’re killing a sapient being, you hear me?”

A delay. “My sensors detected nothing. Your activities are erratic and injurious. I record your observation. Please provide data.”

“Your sensor box. Turn it on.”

“It’s still operating, Warren.”

“It was there. The life was there, when I was. I can go back. I can prove it. I talked to it, Anne.”

“There was no other life there.”

“Because your sensor unit couldn’t register it. Because your sensors aren’t sensitive enough. Because you’re not human, Anne.”

“I have recorded sounds. Identify.”

The wallscreen flicked to a view of the grove. The wind sighed in the leaves; something babbled. A human figure lay writhing on the ground, limbs jerking, mouth working with the sounds. Himself. The murmur was his own voice, inebriate and slurred.

He turned his face from it. “Cut it off. Cut it off, Anne.”

The sound stopped. The screen was blank and white when he turned his head again. He leaned there a time. There was a void in him where life had been. Where he had imagined life. He sat down at the table, wiped his eyes.

After a moment he picked up the coffee and drank.

“Are you adjusted, Warren?”

“Yes. Yes, Anne.”

“Emergency program will continue until all surrounds are sterilized.”

He sat staring at his hands, at the cup before him. “And then what will I do?”

Anne walked to the end of the table, sat down, propped her elbows on the table, head on hands, sensor lights blinking in continuous operation.

The chessboard flashed to the wallscreen at her back.

The pawn advanced one square.