Longing for distraction from problems too big for us to solve, we turned back to the holo wall. A strange seascape had filled it: yellow surf foaming on the shore of an endless yellow ocean under a lurid yellow sky. Huge ungainly creatures the color of blood came crawling out of the foam and up a broad beach of orange sand.

  “Huh?”

  I heard Pepe gasp. The wall flickered. The beach and the creatures were gone. Instead, I saw the world around us and Casey running desperately through the prairie dog mounds. His eyes on Lo’s slider pod, he failed to see a dirt-rimmed hole. His foot went in it. He fell on his face, staggered to his feet, limped on till his injured leg collapsed. On all fours, he scrambled on to the pod. The door sprang open. He tumbled in. The door snapped shut. It darted away.

  “¡Caramba!” Pepe muttered. “¡Pobre bombre loco!”

  The sky in the holo turned yellow again. The prairie dogs were gone. Once more the great lizard-things came crawling through the surf. Dragging long crimson tail-fins, they were stumbling clumsily to stand on wide-webbed rear feet. One by one, they bowed their long-jawed heads toward a huge black globe, waddled into a circle, and shuffled slowly around it.

  We sat there a long time, cringing from a dread we didn’t want to face, watching what seemed to be a ceremony of worship. The robot brought Pepe a stack of something like tortillas he had taught them to make, with a bowl of something like frijoles seasoned with something like chili. He waved the robot away.

  “They’re probably still alive. The explorers never settled worlds with any kind of intelligent life, and the creatures had no nanorobs to kill them. If nanorobs can be killers. No matter what becomes of us, evolution still has a chance.”

  He had the robots erase that yellow sky to let us see the rubble and jungle around us and Kilimanjaro towering in the south, cumulus piling up around lower slopes below the snow-crowned double cone. A small brown prairie dog stood guard on a mound where Casey’s pod had been.

  We left the table at last, to search his room for a farewell note or any hint of what had changed him. We found nothing at all. Pepe tried to question the robots. They kept repeating that they were ready to serve us, but they had been programmed for nothing more.

  I told Pepe that I was going outside.

  “Why?” He gave a narrow glance, as if to appraise my sanity. “Casey’s gone. God knows where.”

  But I had to get out of the Crown. It was too big, too empty, haunted with too many riddles, too much death. Pepe must have felt the same way; he came out with me down the ruined avenue, back to the prairie dogs. They barked a greeting and scurried into their dens. We sat down at the jade table, and Pepe kept glancing at the empty pod where Sandor and Lo and Mona had died.

  “I could fly it.” He sighed and shook his head. “But where could we go?”

  We looked for alternatives. With the station asleep, we couldn’t go back. He was not qualified for interstellar flight. Could we get away to some nearer planet? Maybe Mars?

  “Dead as Earth.” Pepe shook his head. “Sandor told us about an early project to terraform it by steering ice asteroids into collision orbits. That was given up when the interstellar sliders opened better worlds. We’re stuck here with the robots, so long as they tolerate us.”

  With nothing else worth doing, we sat there watching the prairie dogs spy on us from their pits, stand upright to baric at us, scurry again about their business. Noon passed. I was feeling a pinch of hunger, hating to go back into the tomblike Crown. A concussion sent the little animals darting back to their dens. A sound like near thunder boomed out of the western sky.

  “Casey.” Pepe made a dismal face. “Pobrecito.”

  We found him a mile or so down an avenue that ran toward Kilimanjaro. The impact had dug a deep pit beside the pavement. In the bottom of it we found twisted fragments of the pod, and red stains of Casey’s blood.

  “The Sagittarian nanorobs.” Standing on the crater rim, Pepe stared at me and shook his head. “He said they were getting into his brain. I guess they did.”

  We went back to the Crown, brought shovels from an exhibit on the history of mining, and spent a long afternoon shoveling dirt back into the crater, finally covering the mound with rocks from the debris. I wanted to find something to mark the grave. Pepe shrugged. “Who’s left to read it?”

  The robot guards let us back into the Crown. Our robot servers set out a meal we barely tasted. The holo wall was alive again, showing a tourist train crawling around Sandor’s memorial as it had been when it was new, chuffing past the Washington Monument. The crouching Sphinx stared across the mall at the Acropolis and the Great Pyramid. I found the gleam of our replicated station dome on the replicated Tycho rim, and felt a pang of longing for its familiar tunnels and all we had lost.

  Pepe shook his head at a robot who was offering glasses of a bright-red wine.

  “I guess we re to spend what’s left of our lives here.” Gloomily, he shrugged. “So long as they want to look after us.”

  I was half asleep and aching from our labor with the spades, but I didn’t want to be alone. Neither did Pepe. When the robots offered wine again, he let me persuade him to take another glass. We sat there half the night, sipping glass after glass, sometimes teary with grief and nostalgia, watching holos of Sandor’s excavations at the lunar site and the whole human story as he had pieced it back together from what he uncovered there.

  “Maybe just the way it happened. Maybe not.” Pepe shrugged. “¿Que importa? Who’s alive to tell the difference?”

  We saw ape-men leaping out of the forest to grassy savanna, learning to walk upright and carry food or weapons in their hands. We saw a naked woman running from a river of red-hot lava, loose hair flying, a smoking stick in her hand, saw her kneeling to pile dry leaves and twigs on the stick and blow on them till she had a fire. We saw shaggy men working in caves by the light of smoky torches, painting the animals they hunted on the limestone walls. We saw men with sharpened reeds pressing marks into soft clay tablets. We saw chains of men and women hauling on long ropes, dragging great rough stones on log rollers to build Stonehenge, and smoother stones to build pyramids in Egypt. We saw Christ on the cross, Mohammed riding a camel toward a mosque, Buddha smiling.

  We saw men with stone axes felling trees and burning the hearts out of dry logs to make dugout canoes. We saw men building sailing ships and locomotives and rocket craft. We saw rockets landing on the Moon, saw old Calvin Defort building Tycho Station and Sandor’s great digging machines plowing it out of the crater slope where the lunar impact had buried it.

  Finally we saw ourselves, as Sandor had restored us. Awkward stiff-faced robots carried sleeping babies out of the maternity lab. We recognized ourselves as toddlers learning to walk, laughing at one another when we made great leaps to the ceiling of the gym and fell sprawling on the floor. We wiped our eyes when we saw Tanya and Dian as small girls, sitting on Sandor’s knee and giggling at the antics of a doll he had given them.

  Finally, when the wall went blank, Pepe embraced me. We clung together, weeping with loneliness and grief, till at last he pulled away and begged the robots for more wine. Instead, they helped us to our rooms. I let them undress me and get me into bed. I woke late from a dream where I was still at the station, at odds with Arne over an illegal move he had made at chess. My head splitting, I stumbled out to the dining room to beg for coffee. The breakfast table was set, the sleek white robots standing behind our chairs, but Pepe’s chair was empty.

  When I went to his room, he was gone.

  7.

  The robots had made Pepe’s bed, but they stood silent, cold eyes blindly staring, when I asked them where he was. In panic, I searched every room and closet in our apartments, finding nothing at all. Still half drunk from too much wine, I stumbled out to see if he taken the remaining slider pod. It lay in the dog town where we had left it, empty when I looked inside.

  A savage anger stunned me. I loved Pepe, my loyal companion since the days back at the station when Arne tried to bully us. Why had he left me abandoned and alone, the last man on Earth, perhaps the only man alive in all the Universe? Betrayed, bitterly bewildered, I sat at the jade table till that irrational anger had faded into sobs of helpless grief. Finally I lay back on the bench and slept off the wine.

  That long afternoon I walked out to the cairn where we had buried Casey and the wreck of his slider, hoping dimly to find Pepe there. He was not, but I knelt by the mound, groping in my memory for The Lord’s Prayer and The Twenty-third Psalm, which my holo father had tried to teach us. I myself have no belief in life after death or anything supernatural, but with no will to leave, I knelt there for hours, droning the words I could recall, my last link with the old Earth.

  A purple dusk was darkening in the east before I stood up and plodded back toward the Crown. Lit by a red sunset, its golden dome towered over me like a fallen Moon, half buried when it fell. I stopped and stood there, shivering in a cold night wind. It was too huge, too long dead, haunted with the ghosts of too many worlds.

  Yet it was now my only home, my prison too, so long as the white robots wanted to feed and house me. Was Pepe somewhere there, lost in its endless warrens, perhaps ill or injured or driven mad? I had to find and help him if I could.

  The robot guards let me in. The dark halls lit my way to our apartments. The robot staff served me a solitary meal and followed me to my lonely room. That night I slept badly, tormented by a bizarre dream that Pepe was calling me back to the dining room.

  He said the robots had dinner waiting for us both. Finally wakened, I knew it was only a dream, yet I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled back to the table. lights came on as I went, but no dinner was set. The room was empty till a silent white robot glided silently to stand behind the single chair.

  I sat there till my eyes ached, staring at the holo wall, where a swarm of monsters never born on Earth were swimming though a jungle of enormous crimson worms grown up around a mushroom of black smoke spewing out of an undersea vent. I sat there till a robot shook my arm and asked how it could serve me. Half awake, I thought I heard Pepe’s urgent voice.

  “Escucha, Dunk. Listen! I’ll reach you if I can.”

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to listen, but all I heard was silence. Stiff and cold from sitting there too long, I stumbled to my feet and let the robot escort me back to bed.

  Next morning I ate alone, facing Pepe’s empty chair and hardly aware of what the robots offered me. With no purpose or hope for anything better, I let them massage me and spent a long time in the shower. At last, searching for a better grip on my own sanity, I went back to the Earth sector.

  Could Pepe be there? As much as I hated its empty stillness and all the riddles of its death, I had nowhere else to look. It had been a city in itself, the main street a great, high-arched hall. Black darkness faced me it as I entered, but hieroglyphic signs flashed to greet me and the ceilings began to glow. Section by section, they lit my way past dark doorways and across darker intersections, until I came out again on that high balcony that looked down into the vast black chamber at the city’s core.

  Vertigo froze me. Waiting for those strange constellations to light the dome above, I had to fight a sudden mad impulse to jump the railing. Had Pepe chosen that escape? I could hardly blame him if he had, but I wasn’t ready to die.

  Shivering from the chill of panic, I swayed against the railing, feeling suddenly so weak that I thought I might topple over it in spite of myself. I gripped it till I got my balance back, pushed myself away, and stumbled off the balcony before there was light enough to let me look for his body on the distant floor.

  Back in the lighted corridor, I leaned against a wall, breathing hard and gulping against a sour nausea, till at last I found the will to move along. With no hope left of finding Pepe or his body, or anything at all, I blundered on though an endless maze that always lit to greet me and fell dark again behind me.

  The lights around me were suddenly red, so dim I felt blinded. Sign were fainter, stranger. Shop windows held nothing I could recognize. The icy air had a strange, bitter bite that troubled my stomach again, and a sudden gust sent a shudder through me.

  I had strayed into a sector whose people had come from some colder star. Lost from anything I knew, with no sense of where I was or how to find myself, I was paralyzed with a senseless terror, left with no interest in who they had been or how they had died. All I wanted was to get out. All sense of direction was gone, I stood there, sick and shivering, till a noiseless robot loomed out of the red shadows.

  It had the shape and grace of the white humanoids in our quarters, but bright black scales covered it, instead of simulated skin. It stood motionless before me, speaking, perhaps, in some electronic language I did not hear. Its blind lenses unnerved me. When I tried to move aside, it glided to block my path again.

  I turned to run. It caught my arm and held me with an iron grip until a more familiar white robot came to at last to guide me back to our apartments. Another stood waiting to serve me dinner. I left the meal untasted, drank all the wine it offered, and finally let it assist me to bed. Lying there, hopelessly mourning all I had lost and feeling that I would never sleep, I heard Pepe calling me.

  I thought it was another dream.

  “Dunk?” His anxious shout came through a rattle of static, as if from somewhere far away. “Dunk, can you hear me now?”

  Groggily, I tried to answer.

  “Dunk!” His voice was suddenly loud, near me in the dark. “Are you okay?”

  I sat up on the side of the bed, fumbling for the light switch. The room lit before I found it, something shining from toward the door. A little cloud of milk-white mist, it glowed with swirling points of many-colored frost. It drifted around the room as if searching and finally paused to hang near my face. I reached out to see if it could be real. A hot spark from it stung my hand.

  “Don’t!” It spoke sharply. “¡Por favor! That hurt. Don’t try to touch me.”

  “Pepe?” Searching for him, I scanned the empty floor, peered into the empty corners of the room, blinked into the empty air around the cloud. “Is this you?”

  “Si Soy tu compadre, Pepe Navarro. “

  “Pepe?” The voice was his own, but I cringed away from the cloud. “I was afraid—” I had to gasp for my breath. “Where have you been?”

  “Everywhere. Or nowhere. If I can make you understand.”

  I sat there on the edge of the bed, shivering and trying to see some shape in the cloud, perhaps Pepe’s face. It was almost the size of his head, but all I found was the dance and swirl of those diamond sparks. They made a faint frying hiss.

  “How?” I whispered. “What is there to understand?”

  “The nanorobs,” he said. “They’ve simply learned to reprogram themselves.”

  I leaned closer, listening. The cloud drew back.

  “¡Cuidado! Not too near. The atmosphere is smothering me. Even your breath gives me a twinge.”

  “I thought—” This was nothing I could understand. “I was afraid you were dead.”

  “Estoy vivo.” The voice had Pepe’s slight Spanish accent, but edged with a faint electronic hum, and now I began to catch something of Sandor’s dry precision. “More alive than ever.”

  The cloud dimmed suddenly and darted away, toward the far corner of the room.

  “Sir?” A white robot was calling from the doorway. Another came behind it. “Have you trouble? May we assist you?”

  “Get them out!” The voice had weakened. “¡Rápido!”

  “No trouble,” I called to the robots. “Please leave the room.”

  “Sir, you should be sleeping. “They glided on to seize my arms and lift me off the bed. “Are you in pain?”

  The cloud had dimmed till I could hardly see it.

  “Now!” Pepe’s voice came faintly. “Their radiation! It’s killing—”

  “I’m okay.” I wrestled free. “I need no help.”

  “Sir, you seem—”

  “Get out!” I waved them away. “Now!”

  They looked at the flickering cloud, swung to face each other, and finally glided out of the room. I sat back on the bed and watched the cloud brighten and drift back to me.

  “Gracias. Their radio spectrum interferes with mine.”

  “Can you—?” I tried to swallow the rasp in my throat. “Can you tell me what happened to you?”

  “I come—come for that.” He spoke in brief phrases, as if each took an effort. “Not easy. Hurts like hell. But had to let you know what I can.”

  “If you’re real.” I had to shake my head. “If you can.”

  “I’ll try. But Earth’s alien now. Hard to push through. I can’t—can’t last—”

  The cloud dimmed and sank toward the floor.

  “Pepe?” I leaned closer, groping for anything I could believe. “Come back! Tell me where you are.”

  “Out in space.” The cloud brightened and the voice came faintly back. “With Casey and Mona and all the others. Sandor tried to explain how we came up. More than I understand.”

  I leaned closer, trying to hear. It darted back.

  “Not too close. I don’t belong here.”

  I drew back and heard Pepe laugh.

  “¡Compadre mio! If you could see your face. Remember all the times you laughed when I crossed myself or spoke offantasmas? Life after death was only superstition, you said, born when primitive people tried to explain the dead loved ones they saw in their dreams? Maybe it was, but now we are alive.”

  I did remember.

  “If Sandor explained—” I shivered and swallowed again. “What did he say?” The diamond flakes spun faster.

  “The nanorobs?”

  “You know their history.” The voice spoke slowly but more clearly. “They were microscopic robots, created to assist our bodies and our brains with everything we did. They were self-replicating, half-mechanical, half-alive. They depended, as we did, on biochemical processes, yet their energies were always electronic. Sandor says they evolved as we carried them out to space, till they could do more for us. Do it better, finally do it all. Our bodies were no longer necessary.”

 

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