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.

 

the 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."