Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

The teleoperator with Larry’s voice turned to him, raised its mechanical arms, touched one of them to its chest, and asked, “Which am I?”

“Get serious,” Lucian asked. There was something about Larry’s tone of voice that unnerved him.

“I am serious. Think about it.”

Lucian considered the question. “Both, I guess. You’re a living thing that’s controlling a machine.”

“Exactly. And that’s what these are. Except the data from Mars sounded like it was machines controlling the living things sometimes. Maybe they don’t make the distinction between life and machine that we make.”

That was an unsettling thought. Lucian was about to reply when he spotted another of the shuffling creatures coming through the debris. The two things sensed each other and moved together. Their tentacles touched, and then each started reaching into the slot on the back of the other, removing small objects and transferring them to its own carry-slot. The tentacles flitted over the two bodies faster than the eye could see, doing things Lucian could not quite follow. But when the two creatures moved away, one seemed to have traded a pair of its legs for the other’s left tentacle. “Jesus,” Lucian said. “Modular animals? Mix and match parts? Come on, let’s get busy with the gee-wave sensors before something that wants to trade parts with us comes along.”

The T.O. picked up the equipment bag and hooked it onto the front of its body. It rummaged through the bag until it found the gravity-wave sensor, the same device Larry had used to find the Rabbit Hole in the first place. Now it was adjusted to point them toward areas where the induction tap could find a strong enough signal to work on. “My God,” Larry’s voice said. “We could just dump the taps on the surface, Lucian. The gee-wave fields are strong as hell.”

“Can we do that?” Lucian asked. “Wouldn’t those little digger things mess them up?”

“We could probably get away with it. They’re pretty well sealed and armored. And the tapping team just told me they’re already getting signals from the things. Still, we really ought to—”

“Behind you!” Lucian said.

The T.O. whirled about to see.

“Oh my God,” Lucian said. There were two of them, and for once they looked indisputably like robots. Animals did not have wheels. Each of the things had a low cylindrical body held horizontal to the ground by two pairs of wheels. Each had four manipulator arms; long, hard-looking, fierce-gleaming metal, the end clamps cruel and sharp. The two of them paused for a moment about fifty meters from Larry and Lucian.

Time stopped for a long moment. “They know we’re here,” Larry said at last. There could be no doubt of that. There was something watchful, aggressive, in their posture.

And then they moved. Faster than Larry could make the T.O. react, they were on top of Lucian. One of them reached out with those cruel claws and grabbed for his armored suit, lifting him high off the ground.

For a terrible moment, Larry could see into Lucian’s helmet, see the shock on his face, his stunned horror. Lucian reached out an arm to him, seemed about to cry out—

But then the robot spun about, and vanished down the tunnel shaft with him.

He was gone.

“Lucian!” Larry screamed, and the T.O. set off after him, dropping the forgotten induction taps. But the other roller robot grabbed for the teleoperator. Larry, staring through the eyes of the T.O.‘s remote cameras, dodged the first grab and kicked out hard at the manipulator arm. The arm swung back, rebounded against the robot’s body—and then plunged deep into the T.O.’s carapace, seeking not to grasp, but to tear, to rip.

Larry screamed as the control rig shot pain-reflex shocks through his body. The electric charge was not enough to hurt, but Larry was not just in his own body anymore. He was in the T.O., and his chest had just been ripped open. The pain was real, in the place where all pain was real, in the mind, in the soul. He imagined his heart sagging out of his chest wall, shattered ribs hanging at obscene angles. His left leg buckled as a control circuit shorted. He swung out with his right arm, desperately trying to defend himself—but that razor-sharp claw sliced his arm off at the elbow.

Larry screamed again at the pain shock as his arm spun away. Real and imagined, seen through the soul and the TV cameras, he saw his arm shorting and sparking, spewing imaginary bright red blood from hydraulic lines. He saw hallucinated, bleeding flesh visible under the shattered metallic skin. And then another cruel slash, and Larry screamed in a voice that choked off as his head was hacked away from the teleoperator’s body. The T.O.‘s vision switched automatically to the chest cameras. Dead eyes that still could see watched in mindless terror as the T.O.’s head smashed to the littered, filthy ground and the little scavengers began to pick over the teleoperator’s corpse.

They pulled Larry, screaming, from the control rig and put him under with the heaviest anesthetic they could find. While he slept, the technicians discovered that the induction taps, abandoned on the ground, were working, pulling in massive amounts of data. The analysts understood none of it at first, but they rushed to beam it all toward the Saint Anthony , and to Earth.

Time passed, and the rover-laborer brought its prize inside the Caller, to a place where it might be examined more thoroughly. Even in the first moments of study, the Caller was startled, indeed astounded by what its rovers had found. This airless satellite was not a world where organic life should have been found. It was baffled by the crude artificial carapace that this creature lived in. Clearly, the carapace could not keep the creature alive for very long at all.

But the Caller could not invest time or energy in examining its find. Not until it had pulled this chaotic star system into some sort of order.

Still, the Caller’s kind were adept at analyzing new life-forms and then preserving them. They needed such skills, for in each biological component of the Charonian life cycles were bits and pieces from a hundred genetic heritages.

This new creature might well provide more such useful data. The Caller put a small subset of its consciousness to work on the problem of placing this animal in suspended animation until such time as it could deal with the problem. A day, a year, a generation or a millennium from now, it could return to this puzzle at its leisure.

Marcia MacDougal tossed the datacube to the floor of her room and stared through the window at the Martian night. A debacle. An absolute, bloody debacle. Lucian Dreyfuss dead—or maybe worse, if her private fears were true. No one had seen him die—and she had just gotten through dissecting one of the Charonians. What might they do to Lucian?

And Larry Chao, heavily sedated, had been packed aboard the Nenya for transport back to Pluto, trucked off like a sack of potatoes. There was not time to wait for his recovery on the Moon. He would have to pull himself together on the flight home.

A bloody disaster, completely needless. The induction taps were functioning perfectly just lying on the floor of the shaft, beaming their signals straight up, in ideal line-of-sight conditions. They could have simply dropped the probes down the shaft and accomplished every bit as much.

But there was something worthwhile that could be gleaned from the disaster. Her intuition told her that. Somewhere in the transcripts, in the videotapes, the data-tap recordings, there was an answer, an answer worth all the struggle and fear and confusion.