by R. Lee Smith
“I’m soaked,” said Nicci, shivering. “And my feet are killing me. Can you carry my bag?”
Amber took it wordlessly. In the next instant, a scaly hand snatched it out of her grip. Meoraq slung the pack onto his shoulder, not looking at either of them. His spines were still flat.
“Yeah, but admit it. You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” said Amber.
He gave her a scathing sidelong glance and did not reply.
“This is perfect, Meoraq!” Scott called.
Meoraq opened his mouth and hissed quietly through his teeth. Scott, busy climbing the fallen tree that had bashed through the wall of the warehouse or whatever this place was, did not notice. He checked whatever lay inside, made some gestures to Eric and then climbed down and came running back to them.
“Perfect!” he said again, giving Meoraq a clap to the shoulder.
Meoraq stiffened and looked at his shoulder. Yellow flared on his throat and began to fade again almost immediately. “Don’t do that again,” he said in a distracted, indifferent way that Amber felt sure hid a deep desire to snap someone’s fingers off.
Oblivious to danger, perhaps thinking that he was showing his faithful Indian guide some appreciation in the hopes that respect would soon be reciprocated, Scott moved off and started herding people across the park.
Amber followed, holding Nicci’s hand but looking sideways at Meoraq. “Are you all right?”
“You keep asking that.”
“You keep scaring me.”
He grunted—one of his sarcastic grunts—and said, “You’re not scared enough, human, or you would not be here.”
“Oh come on, look at that!” Amber waved her hand toward the approaching storm, which threw out a strobing flare of lightning that lasted several seconds without stopping, almost as if it were waving back.
Meoraq gave it an incurious glance. “So?”
“So we can’t walk in that!”
His flat spines shifted against the top of his head, trying to flatten even more. “A man can walk anywhere in God’s favor.”
“Yeah, well, maybe God wants us to sleep here tonight, did you ever think of that? If he can put trees and people in your path, why not this place?”
“Do not be blasphemous,” Meoraq said curtly. “His Word commands His children to let the ruins and all the trappings of the Ancients fall to dust. This is not shelter. It is nothing but a grave.”
Ahead of them, Scott was busy directing people into a queue. Dag boosted them up onto the sloping trunk of the tree, while Crandall waited on the wall to help them over. Eric was nowhere to be seen; presumably he was inside, helping people down. Amber watched people climb, crawl, and drop in this orderly procession, with the black wall of the storm howling ever closer in the background. She could understand Meoraq’s hesitance, given his beliefs (his stupid beliefs, if he really thought strolling through a thunderstorm was somehow more righteous than sleeping in an empty building), but she didn’t see any alternatives.
“For what it’s worth,” she said finally, “I’m sorry we didn’t listen to you earlier. But we’re here now. I don’t know how bad this storm is going to get—”
She stopped there, frowning at the tree. Then she looked at the ground, turning in a slow circle so that she could see the whole park stretching out behind them.
“What’s the matter?” Nicci asked, watching the line move on without them.
“The tree,” said Amber, beginning to be alarmed. She turned around again, this time looking beyond the park and in all directions, her hands cupped against the weather. At one side, Nicci fidgeted, hugging herself and casting longing looks at the promise of shelter. At the other side stood Meoraq, unmoved by the wind or rain, watching only her. And on the tree itself, waiting impatiently for Nicci to notice him and need the hand he kept holding out to help her up, was Scott.
“For Christ’s sake, Bierce!” he shouted finally. He had to shout, and even that was scarcely perceptible over the howl of the storm. “What are you looking for?”
“Trees!” she shouted back. Amber pointed at the massive thing under his feet. “Where did that come from?”
Scott raised himself up cautiously against the wind and looked around, then dropped down again to clutch at the trunk of the broken tree. “Who cares?” He twisted around to say something to someone on the inside, then came back around to shout, “Right! Maybe they grew it here! You never heard of landscaping? Get in here!”
“There’s no hole!”
“What?”
“Amber, come on!” Nicci moaned. “It’s raining!”
“There’s no hole!” Amber pointed at the root ball of the broken tree, where huge clods of disturbingly fresh dirt still clung, then at the unbroken ground.
“So it fell a long time ago!” Scott shouted. “I repeat, Bierce, who gives a damn?”
“No, it didn’t!” Amber insisted. “The wood is too fresh!”
“Oh for…What, you think it fell out of the sky?”
Amber looked around again, past Nicci and her imploring, wind-burned face, past Meoraq and his thoughtful stare, past the empty waste of the ghost-city, to the distant clumps of prairie trees, which were all of the small, whippy-limbed variety. She looked back at Scott. “Yes!”
He glared at her, then shook his head again and started to work his way down the tree and into the building. “Fine! Stay out here and freeze!”
“Wait!” cried Nicci. She took a step, looked back at Amber.
She waved her sister on ahead, but moved closer to Meoraq. “Where did it come from?”
He glanced at the tree without much interest, then pointed out into the nothing.
She looked, but could still see no large trees. “How can you tell?”
“By the angle of impact,” he told her.
“But how did it get here?”
He cocked his head at her, then bent over and plucked a blade of brown grass. He held it up for her inspection, then opened his fingers and let the wind rip it away.
Amber looked at the tree—thicker than she stood tall, a broken stub still fifteen meters long at least—and tried to picture the storm that could uproot it, much less bring it hurtling through the air from who knew how far away to land here.
Meoraq’s hand closed around her upper arm. He propelled her forward a few steps, then released her and looked away, frowning, back at the city.
“Are you sure you want us in there?” Amber asked uncertainly.
“I am sure I don’t, but I want you together. If it has to be together in that building, so be it. Go.”
She let him push her toward the tree, but didn’t start climbing. “Aren’t you coming with us?”
“Soon. I need to make a patrol.”
“I’ll come with—”
“No. Stay here and keep your people together.” He walked away into the storm.
Amber struggled up into the tree, which was not as easy as even Nicci made it look. Her hands, numbed by freezing rain, couldn’t seem to hold their grip; her technique consisted of lunging and sliding until she could climb onto the broken wall itself. There was a large heap of debris directly beneath her, so she wiggled over as far as she safely could before dropping down. Her boots hit the ground with a painful shock that went straight to her knees, which buckled and pitched her directly into the pile of concrete chunks and tree bark she’d been so careful to avoid falling on. It wasn’t a bad fall; she scraped her palms, thumped her elbow, bunched up her shirt and scratched her side, but that was all. She was fine.
“Nice dismount,” said Crandall, and a few people laughed.
“You okay?” asked Nicci.
“Yeah.” Amber swiped away the pain-tears that stung at her eyes and rolled off the worst of the debris. Mr. Yao was there to help her up and he kept his hands on her until her eyes adjusted to the considerable dark of the ruined building.
What she saw struck her briefly speechless.
This wasn’t a warehouse. She didn�
��t know what it was, but it wasn’t a warehouse. Dominating the first floor of the cube they had invaded was some sort of inner chamber with perfectly round, perfectly seamless, transparent walls. It reached all the way up to the ceiling and through it, up through the next floor and however many floors were between them and the top of this building, where it let in plenty of grey stormlight, enough that she could clearly see the spiders and the web.
They weren’t really spiders, only three wiry legs around a shiny, metallic ball, but that was all she could think to call them. There didn’t seem to be many of them, but since they were all exactly alike and moved so fast, it was impossible to say just how many there were. They swarmed back and forth, effortlessly leaping, climbing and sliding along the thousands of filaments that filled their chamber. When Amber reached the inner wall (she had not been aware of walking toward it) and craned her neck to see up past the dark ceiling, she could see the entire web, with something like a spider’s egg sac the size of a man suspended in the very center. On this side of the spider-chamber, a bank of perfectly recognizable, if alien, computer stations formed a tight ring right up against the glass. Evenly-spaced between monitors were clear tubes that made Amber think of hamster cages. Now and then, a spider would slip through one of these tubes and extrude a proboscis of some sort from its stomach into the back of a computer, insert whatever it thought it was inserting into the entirely dead system, and then scuttle back out and onto the web.
“What is it?” Amber asked, dimly aware of what a stupid question that was. No one here could possibly know the answer.
“Besides creepy?” asked Maria.
Beside her, Eric turned back to give the spiders a speculative looking over. “If I had to guess, I’d say either some sort of power generator or maybe a data storage and retrieval system. But yeah, all it is now is creepy.”
Scott brought out his flashlight and clicked it on, painting the glass with a sudden pool of white radiance. The spiders scuttled on, oblivious. Scott watched them for a second or two, his face flexing uncertainly between wonder and revulsion, before a sudden gust of howling wind reminded him he was supposed to be saving the day. He swung the light around and almost immediately illuminated a door.
Everyone looked at it, at each other, at the door. Scott took a tentative step forward, then abruptly changed his mind and went to examine one of the computer panels instead.
There were chairs, Amber saw. Most of them were still neatly tucked in under their matching desks, as if the workers monitoring this station had only just stepped away for lunch and turned out all the lights behind them. There was a coffee cup at one of the desks, or whatever kind of cup they called it when they didn’t drink coffee. It had writing on the side, almost aged entirely away but still just perceptible in the fading light. ‘Gann’s Best Dad,’ maybe, or ‘Techies Do It With Tools’.
“Where’s the lizard?” asked Scott suddenly.
“He wanted a look around,” said Amber, still staring sickly at the cup.
“But he’s coming?”
“That’s what he told me.”
Somewhere, Crandall snickered, whispered, and got a few more people to laugh.
“Why is it so clean in here?” Nicci asked suddenly.
Amber, once more blushing, looked back at her baby sister and then around at the room. It was clean, she realized. The glass she’d been staring through for who knew how long now was damned near spotless. There was no stain of long-emptied drink on the inside of the coffee cup. The dead eyes of the many monitors were dust-free. The rain had brought in a spreading slick of water, but there was no sign of previous flooding. Amber had fallen on a good-sized heap of debris caused by the tree crashing through the wall…but ‘heap’ was definitely the operative word, and it was a clean, well-managed little heap at that.
“Someone’s living here,” said Dag. “Someone’s living here right now.”
And the door opened.
Amber jumped along with everyone else. A few people screamed. She didn’t, but only because Nicci slammed up against her and knocked the scream out of her throat.
Scott’s flashlight beam came swinging wildly around, shining a spotlight over the open door, the blank wall, the ceiling, and then finally at the floor where the little robot came whirring in.
The second group-scream was almost as loud as the first, but the thing reacted to the sound no more than the spiders reacted to light. Short, squat, and rounded—a metallic blister with many panels and a black scanning plate that ran around its middle, it looked so completely like one of the cleanerbot models that you sometimes saw advertised in tech catalogues or (if you didn’t mind a plastine model) on TV late at night that no one screamed again even when it came at them.
It rolled inside, sending a thin bead of light ahead of it, indifferent to the rapid retreat of the many humans before it. When it reached the glass wall, it hesitated, then opened a small panel and sent out a thin, metallic tendril, like the questing arm of a squid, to tap and test at the surface it found. It clicked at itself under the anxious weight of fifty alien stares, then withdrew its tendril and opened a second panel. It sprayed out two careful bursts of some kind of greyish foam, paused as if undecided, then added a third. It turned away, leaving the ‘soap’ to bubble and gradually start to slide up the glass, picking up speed as it climbed.
“It’s a cleanerbot,” said Scott. He sounded utterly astonished. “The lizards have cleanerbots! Just like ours!”
Amber leaned a little closer to the glass in spite of Nicci’s tugging hands and saw a thin, spreading mass of tiny beads. Metallic, like the spiders, and like the spiders, lifeless as they went about their work. “Not quite like ours.”
The bot had moved on, rolling slowly through the shuffling feet that surrounded it until it reached the first puddle of rainwater. There it stopped, testing, tapping. It began to roll from side to side, trying to map out its dimensions, and, finding that it reached from wall to wall, retreated a short distance to think.
“Is it okay?” Nicci asked nervously.
Amber shook her head.
The bot sat immobile, ‘arms’ retracted, ‘face’ dark. Every so often, that bead of light would dart out and flicker off the water. Twice it opened a panel, half-extended some unidentifiable tool, hesitated, and retracted it again. It hummed now and then, audibly and for no reason that Amber could determine, as if it were talking to itself.
“Oh my God, I have got to get out of here,” Maria whispered.
“It’s okay, baby,” said Eric, watching the bot with a queasy expression.
“It’s not okay, it’s a fucking zombie!”
The bot slid out its tendril again. It felt at the water, then opened a third panel, reached in decisively and brought out a small triangular flag. It planted this firmly in the puddle and turned around. It moved on.
“We’re not really staying here, are we?” Maria asked. She was trying to laugh, but it was the kind of gape-faced laughter that sounded more like someone working herself up to a scream and no one joined in. “Come on, people! We’re not…We’re not really going to sleep here?”
Outside, a crash of thunder answered in unequivocal terms.
The bot came to the pile of broken concrete and bark. It felt at it, paused, and felt at it some more. It made another soft, electronic sound—a sound that struck Amber as one that was almost distressed. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, she thought, a nonsensical accusation gleaned from some forgotten fairytale back in those bygone days of state-care. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, oh dear, oh dear. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed and she’s…still…HERE!
It ran out a second tendril to join the first and slowly, methodically, began to stack the debris back into a neat heap, talking to itself in its worried way.
“No,” said Maria, backing rapidly away as it went about its fussy work. “Seriously. I will sleep in the rain. I don’t care. Get me away from this place.”
The bot retracted one of it
s tendrils and ran out a brush, cleaning the concrete chunks. It began to hum.
Without warning, Eric picked up a basketball-sized chunk of concrete and brought it smashing down on the bot’s head. The bot caved in on itself without resistance, smooth sides bursting to spew out guts of wire and jelly. One fat, blue spark spat out from its core, leaving a plume of greenish smoke and some ungodly, hot stink in the air behind it. There was no last metallic cry, no dying grope of its tendrils, no planting of a final caution flag to warn people not to slip in its spilled oils. It was dead.
“Thank you, baby,” said Maria.
Eric checked the mess under the chunk of concrete and then brought it down again, giving it a little twist and shove this time. He wiped his hands unnecessarily on his shirtfront; the concrete had been quite clean.
“I don’t see why we have to wait around in here,” announced Scott, striding forward to stand in front of Eric. “It’s out of the wind, but it’s just as cold and not a lot drier.”
“And it’s creepy,” muttered Maria, eyeing the bot’s leaking, smoking corpse. Eric put an arm around her, watching the spiders instead. Amber found herself watching the ‘soap’ as it made its way doggedly across the glass wall. And when it reached the end, she wondered, what would it do? Would it just cluster up and wait to be collected? Or would it come trickling across the floor to crawl back inside the broken husk of the bot and sit there forever?
“I’m going in.” Scott waited, either for protests or applause, but there was nothing and his awkward hesitation looked so much like the bot’s that Amber actually shuddered.
He noticed. He blushed. He gripped the flashlight like a weapon and marched over to the door, which slid itself open as obediently as any automated door back on Earth. Scott walked through. The door slid shut.
Dag followed. Then Eric and Maria. Crandall. Mr. Yao. And then all of them, shuffling along in a subdued line past the spiders and out of the rain.
It was cold out here. And wet. “Come on, Nicci,” Amber said, following.
“Shouldn’t we wait for Meoraq?”
Amber spared the (murdered) bot a final glance, unsure just why it bothered her so much. It had been a creepy little thing and a part of her was very glad to know it would not be rolling up next to her in the middle of the night to clean her while she slept. “He’ll know we were here.”