by Jack Dann
Ten feet behind the robot—and attached securely enough to make it practically an extension—is an enclosed dray so wound with organic polymer conduit sheathed in steel that it looks like the wormy heart of a metal idol, pulled from the god after long decades of infestation. But the heart's sinuation quivers and throbs. The rock from the robot's incision is conveyed to the dray and funnels into it through a side hopper. The rock funnels in and, from three squat valves, the heart streams three channels of viscous liquid—glassine—that coat the ceiling and walls of the tunnel the robot has formed with a seamless patina. The walls glow with a lustrous, adamantine purity, absolute, and take on the clear, plain color of the spray channels, which depend upon the composition of the slag.
Behind the dray, the robot directs its mobile unit—a new thing given by Andrew—which manipulates a hose with a pith of liquid hydrogen. The liquid hydrogen cools and ripens the walls. The hose also emanates from the dray. The dray itself is a fusion pile, and by girding the walls to a near diamond hardness, the tremendous pressure of the earth suspended above will not blow the tunnel out behind the robot, leaving it trapped and alone, miles into the crust.
Behind the robot, farther back in the tunnel, in an air-conditioned transport, the service wagon, humans follow. The service wagon is attached to the robot by a power and service hitch, and there is constant radio contact as well. Sometimes the humans speak to the robot over the radio. But the robot knows what it is supposed to do. The idle chatter of the humans puzzles the robot, and while it listens to conversations in the transport, the robot seldom speaks. At night the robot backs out of the hole, detached from the service wagon, and spends its night above ground. At first, the robot does not understand why it should do so, but Andrew has said that to do this is important, that a geologist must comprehend sky and weather, must understand the texture of surface as well as depth.
Besides you are so fast it only takes fifteen minutes to get you out when there is no rock for you to chew through, Andrew says. Even at sixty miles, even at the true mantle, your trip up will be quick.
Andrew lives inside the robot. He brings a cot, a small table, and two folding chairs into the small control room where years before the engineers had entered and the robot had seen for the first time. There is a small, separate cavern, the robot has carved out not far from the worksite. Andrew uses the area for storage, and at night the robot rolls down into this, the living area. Also at night, Andrew and the robot talk.
How was your day, Andrew might say. The robot did not know how to answer the first time he had asked, but Andrew had waited and now the robot can say ... something. Not right, but something.
Smelly.
Smelly?
It was like summer in the field after a rain when there are so many odors.
Well, there was a hydrocarbon mass today. Very unexpected at such a depth. I'm sure it isn't organic, but it'll make a paper for somebody.
Yes, I swam through it and the tunnel is bigger there. Gurney and the techs took over internal functions and drained it manually, so you didn't have to deal with it. Hell of a time directing it into the pile. Tremendous pressure.
The rock was very hard after that. It sang with the blades.
Sympathetic vibrations, maybe.
Maybe.
Andrew laughs. His voice is dry as powder, and his laughter crackles with a sharp report, very like the scrape of the robot's blades against dense, taut rock. The robot likes this laughter.
Every night when there is not rain, before sleep, Andrew goes outside for some minutes to name the stars. At these times, the robot's awareness is in the mu, the mobile unit, and the mu follows along behind Andrew, listening. Andrew points out the constellations. The robot can never remember their names, and only fleetingly sees the shapes that they are supposed to form. The robot does know the visible planets, though, which surprises Andrew. But the robot has watched them carefully for many years. They are the stars that change. Andrew laughs at the robot's poor recall of the other stars, and names them again.
There'll be meteors soon, he says one night. The Perseids start next week.
Do the stars really fall?
No. No, they never fall. Meteors are just ... rock. Debris.
And there is no gravity up there? What is that like?
I don't know. I've never been into space. I would like to. As you get deeper, there will be less gravity pulling you down. The pressure will be greater and the rock will want to explode inward, so the cutting will be easier.
Andrew?
Hmm.
What will happen when I get to the bottom?
The bottom of what?
The mohole.
Andrew does not answer for a long while.
The earth is round, he finally says. There isn't any bottom.
On weekends, the robot does not dig, but wanders the land. With the mobile unit, the robot can range the nearby forest and mountains. The mu scrambles over deadfall that would daunt a man. Sometimes, the robot deliberately gets lost. The robot feels the fade of signal from the main housing back in the living area, where the robot's noetics physically remain, until there is a flurry of white noise and the fading of awareness and a click and the world snaps back to its grid as the robot's transmission togglgs from line-ofsight microwave to modulated laser satellite relay. Or so Andrew had said when the robot asked about it.
The robot scrambles up hanging valleys into cems and cirques with chilled, clear water where only cold things live. Or climbs up skree slopes, using the mu's sure footing, onto ridges and to highland plateaus above the tree line. At this elevation, snow remains all year and the mu spreads a wide base with its spidery legs and takes small steps when crossing.
The robot hears the low whistle of marmots, and sees an occasional mountain goat munching, although these goats are neutered, and the last of their clan. They had been brought by humans in the 1800s, until they filled the Olympics with goat mass and threatened to eat the upper tundra to nub. Now helicopters dart them with birth control and they die without progeny. And the robot sees the wolves that have begun to return after their species' far northern retreat.
The robot is descending from a high pass near Saw-tooth Ridge when a pack of five wolves flow over a rise. They are changing valleys, perhaps to find denser spreads of the small, black deer of the rain forest or even a sickly Roosevelt elk. Their leader is an old, graying dog with spit-matted hair and a torn ear. He looks up at the mu, starts, and the other wolves come up short too. The robot ceases moving. The wolves sniff the air, but there is nothing—nothing living—to smell. But, with its chemical sensors, the robot smells them. They have the stink of mice to them, but tinged with a rangy fetor of meat and blood.
The other wolves do not appear as bedraggled as the leader. One, smaller, perhaps younger, whines, and the leader yips at this one and it is silent.
Then a cloud shadow moves up and over the pass, and courses darkly down into the adjacent valley. In that instant, the wolves course with the shadow, running with it down the coloir of the pass and disappearing from sight into the green of fir and hemlock a thousand feet below. The robot follows them in the infrared until their separate heats flux into the valley's general sink.
Still the robot stands and remembers that this is not a new sight, that the man, Victor Wu, has seen wolves in the passes before. But the man has never smelled wolves, and smelling them now pleases the part of the robot that is becoming the man, that the man is becoming.
And the robot digs, and is glad to dig. The deep rock begins to take on a new smell. This bedrock has never seen the surface. It is the layered outgush of an ocean floor rift dating from the Triassic. The smell is like the scent of high passes and summits, although the robot cannot say how. And the rock chimes and hums when the robot cuts it; it does not break away uniformly, but there is an order to its dismantle that the robot feels. And so the robot knows when to expect a mass to break away, and can predict when the going will be harder.
As the robot digs deeper, the rock grows faulty and unstable. The tunnel behind the robot is at risk of blowing out, and the robot takes time to excavate down fault lines, shore up weaknesses with double or triple diamond glass. If the tunnel did collapse, the robot would have to dig a slow circle trying to find an egress farther back. But the people in the service wagon would die, and this concerns the robot. Andrew would die.
The robot seldom speaks, but has come to know the voices of the technicians and graduate students in the transport. There is Gurney, the chief tech, who is a Mattie. The robot is surprised to learn that Gurney was in the field when the woman spoke, that Gurney remembers the robot.
Don't it give you the willies, a tech asks Gurney.
It's a machine, Gurney says. Depends on who's driving. Right now, I am. Anyway, the good Mother wants us to eat.
Many of the techs are not Matties, but descendants of the logging families that used to rule the Peninsula and still permeate it. The Matties outnumber them in the cities, but up the dirt roads that spoke into the mountains, in dark, overhung coves and in the gashes of hidden valleys, the families that remain from that boom time eke out makework and garden a soil scraped clean of top humus by the last ice age and thinly mulched with the acid remains of evergreens.
Nothing grows goddamn much or goddamn right out here, says a tech.
The Matties and the loggers heatedly discuss politics and appear close to fighting at times, but the robot cannot understand any of this. It thinks of the man who was killed on the stone steps, and the man who killed him. The robot does not understand at all.
The grad students and the Matties are more comfortable around one another. The robot feels a warmth toward the graduate students that is certainly from the man. Yet their speech patterns are different from the techs, and the robot has difficulty understanding them at times. The meanings of their words shine like the moon behind a cloud, but the robot cannot think to the way around to them. Always they recede, and the robot is impatient. Victor Wu's instincts are stronger in the robot than is his knowledge. Andrew has said that this is to be expected and that any computer of sufficient size can learn words, but you can learn intuition. Still the robot should know what the students are discussing, and finds the incomprehension irritating.
But always the rock to return to, and the certainty that rock was what the robot was made for, and what the robot was born and bred for, and, in the end, that is enough.
One day in the following spring, at a critical juncture down in the mohole, Gurney does not show up for work and the digging is halted.
The referendum passed, one of the grad students says, and there's fighting in Forks and a Mattie got killed in Port Angeles, it looks like.
Andrew gives the robot the day off, and to the robot's delight, the man and the mu go for a long walk along the Quinault. Andrew seems sad, and the robot says nothing for a long while. The robot wants to speak, but doesn't know what to say to Andrew.
It's not the politics, Andrew finally says. The damn Matties got their Protectorate fair and square with the referendum. But you get the feeling they'd take it if they hadn't.
Hadn't what?
Won the vote. There's something about Gurney and them, the ones that I've met. I care about the same things they claim to. I don't know. Something else again.
Andrew, I don't understand.
They spend a lot of time worrying about whether everybody else believes the same way they do.
The river rushes against cliff and turns through a stand of white birch. The robot stops the mu. The robot is captivated by the play of the light on the water, the silver reflection of the sun, turning the clear water to opaque and viscous lead, then just as suddenly, when a cloud passes, back to happy water once again.
It doesn't really change, does it?
What?
The water. The way the light's there, and isn't, then is. Andrew rubs his eyès. He gazes out over the water. You are doing very well with your contractions, he says.
You were right that I should stop thinking about them and they would flow more easily. Do you think it is Victor Wu's knowledge surfacing, or my own practice?
I don't know. Both.
Yes, both.
The trail leads through a marsh, and Andrew struggles to find a dry path. The robot extends the mu's footpads; each folds out as if it were an umbrella, and the mu seems to hover over the mud, the weight is distributed so well.
Thank you for the mobile unit, the robot tells Andrew. I really like using it.
It was necessary for the dig. That's where most of the first grant money went. Robot, I have to tell you something. Andrew stops, balancing on a clump of rotten log.
You have to tell me something, Andrew?
Yes. Someone is coming. She phoned yesterday. All this brouhaha over the Protectorate Referendum is attracting attention all around the world. She's going to shoot a documentary. She's coming in a week. She's bringing a crew and she'll be staying in Port Townsend at first. I just thought you might. Want.
Laramie. Laramie is coming.
That's right, robot. Laramie is coming home for a while. She doesn't know how long.
For the first time ever, the robot feels the man, the man Victor Wu, as a movement, a distinct movement of joy inside him. Little Bulge. Coming home. The robot tries to remember Laram.ie's face, but cannot. Just a blur of darkness and bright flush. Always rushing and doing. And the camera. The robot can remember Laramie's camera far better than her face.
Andrew begins to walk again. I didn't tell her about you, robot. I didn't tell her about her father being part of you.
Laramie does not know?
No. She knows about the noetics, of course, but not how I've used them. I didn't strictly need her permission to do it.
Do you think she will hate me?
No. Of course not. I don't know. I don't know her anymore.
Should we tell her about me? At this thought the robot feels fearful and sad. But what matters is what is best for Little Bulge.
Of course we should. It's only right. Damn it, robot, I don't know how I feel about this. I don't know how much you knew about it or how much you realized, the Victor Wu part of you, I mean. Laramie and I—we didn't part on the best of terms.
I don't remember. I remember the bridge at the Lillian once. You didn't like her?
Of course I liked her. I love her. That was the problem. She was impetuous. She's opportunistic, damn it. Look at her pouncing on this thing. She called me a stick in the mud. I guess she was right. She called me a sour cynic who was fifty years old the day he turned twenty-five. We haven't spoken in some time.
I don't understand.
Robot. Victor. You never had a clue, I don't think.
I am not Victor.
I know that. I know that. Still, I always thought he suspected. It was so obvious, and he was so brilliant in other ways.
Andrew and the robot arrive back at the river. The robot thinks about it and realizes that they'd been traversing an oxbow swamp, made from spring overflows at the melting of the snow. At the river, they pick up a trail, once solid and well-traveled, now overgrown and ill-kept for two seasons. The Forest Service has been officially withdrawn at the Matties' request, Andrew tells the robot. Booth, who is the president of the United States, responded to political pressure from the Mother Agatha and the Matties.
The goddamn world is going back to tribes. The country's going to hell. And taking my funding with it. And now there's a skeleton crew for the Park Service, even, over at
the Ho. I had a lot of friends who got fired or reassigned to the Statue of Liberty or some shit. Something else too. I think some of them haven't left.
What do you mean haven't left?
Haven't left.
Tlie trail diverges from the river, winds over a rise, then back down to the water again. A side trail leads to a peninsula and a wooden trail shelter, enclosed on three sides. Andrew takes a lunch from his daypack and eats a sandwich, while the robot looks for quartzite along the riverbank. The robot has become an expert in spotting a crystal's sparkle and extracting it from the mud or silt of skree with which it has been chipped away and washed downstream from pressurized veins in the heart of the mountains. This day, the robot finds three crystals, one as cylindrical and as long as a fingernail. The robot brings them to Andrew, back at the trail shelter.
Nice. Trace of something here. Blue? Manganese maybe, I don't know. I like the ones with impurities better.
I do too.
Andrew puts the crystals in an empty film canister and stows them in his daypack.
I was here at the turn of the century, he says. It was June and there was a terrible storm. All night long I heard crashing and booming like the world was coming to an end. Next morning, the whole forest looked like a war zone.
The robot does not know what a war zone looks like, but says nothing.
And all that morning, trees kept falling. If I hadn't camped out here on the end of the peninsula, one of those trees would have fallen on me, smashed me flat. Killed by old growth. God, that'd probably thrill a Mattie to death just thinking about it.