Damon Knight: Orbit 17

They were robots invading an unknown planet, in the service of an unseen master: but stones can be an enemy, and even steel can bleed.

Launce, the guard probe, came out of the shuttle first. He drove his brick-shaped body to the edge of the blast area and looked around. As he paused there, the contact probe, Speed, shot him six sonnets.

“Nonsense again. Stop sending me nonsense and I might have more to say.”

Speed’s glistening vision-dome appeared at the door of the shuttle. “It’s not nonsense. Every word I used is legitimate. If you can’t define one, ask Proteus. He has them all.”

“So do I. But tell me, what is a ‘keg of fluid moonlight flashing fair’?”

A burst came from Proteus, the father-computer in orbit: Continue as outlined.

The probes obeyed, Launce’s perplexed question forgotten. Speed, a fat cone rounded at the bottom, stepped carefully down the ramp on his four spider-legs. When he touched the blackened soil he uttered a cry which Speed had once before called delight; Launce did not pretend to understand. It was all part of the specialized programming which made Speed so special and valuable on this, his first assignment. Launce, bigger than Speed by half, old, experienced, and proven, did not have this special programming. He had been altered by the Combine to handle denotative words and language so that he could act as companion and cater to Speed’s curious needs.

Recent news releases from the Combine (which were available in Proteus) called the new programming an “artificial human soul.” Launce understood the word “soul” to mean the human programming. If Speed had been programmed to act and react as a human being would, Launce expected him to be beyond understanding at least eighty percent of the time.

Proteus set up a map of that area inside them, and outlined their progress across the land on a thin red line as two crawling stars. The two probes began rolling and walking toward the range of glacial moraines which began something less than two miles away. Beyond them lay the settlement which was the object of the contact mission.

Speed began to bubble. “Look at this day. The richness of the color in the grass! The beautiful balance of the vegetable ecology! Look, Launce, an animal!”

Fifty meters distant, a crocodile-headed carrot shape pumped its way through the scaly grass on four muscular jointed legs.

“I’ve been watching it for three minutes. I would say it’s terrified of us.”

“Tsk. ” The inarticulate expression came through to Launce coated with the indigestible sticky stuff which always seemed to rise from the strange new programming. Launce ignored it.

“I’m excited. Aren’t you?”

More sticky words. Launce tried to sort them out. “Haven’t got the programming. Excitement means a heightening of mental activity. Mine is as high as it can go.”

"I only wish you could feel what I’m feeling.”

“Haven’t got the programming.”

“I have some more sonnets. Will you hear them?”

“I’m listening.”

Tractor-treaded Launce trundled ahead, flattening a path in the brittle grass while Speed stalked along behind. All the time he kept bubbling over with words that made no sense to Launce.

Most of Launce’s attention was bent to the problems of the environment and Speed’s protection. The scaly grass, even when flattened out, tended to catch on Speed’s delicate footpads. Twice Launce extended his powerful number four cutting arm and sliced a path through the tangles of scaled bushes. “This vegetation is tougher than Proteus predicted. If consolidating this world takes any length of time, I’m going to lay an epoxy pavement over this path.”

“Proteus says my sonnets are excellent. Don’t you think so?” “I can’t tell one from another.”

“You’re being cruel.”

“Haven’t got the programming.”

The land arose around them, and contorted from a smooth, lake-dotted glacial plain into wind- and water-gouged hills fringed by patches of grass and bush. Launce kept a certain fraction of his attention on the dwindling tower of the shuttle, squatting in the valley they were leaving behind. He was following Proteus’ internal map, and remembering the landscape and its relation to the shuttle as he passed, so that the return trip could be made more quickly and with less concentration. All the while he had grown aware that the feeling of Proteus inside him had been growing fainter by increments. It would be soon . . .

Snap! The relays turned over. Proteus had gone behind the planet. Instantly the big repeater in the shuttle took over, relaying the father-computer’s presence through its superior receiving instruments and amplifiers. The world revolved about its axis very slowly, and a synchronous orbit would place Proteus five light-seconds away from his two probes. That was far beyond the safety factor dictated by the Combine. So Proteus had taken up a closer orbit, and the repeater was activated automatically for fifty minutes out of each orbit.

Speed had stopped his flow of nonsense when the repeater had kicked in. “It’s an odd feeling when Proteus goes into the relays. For that briefest of instants he’s gone. ”

“Only for two microseconds. That’s not enough time to be significant.”

“Yes, but feel the emptiness. The solitude, the isolation ... it’s what the word ‘loneliness’ means.”

“Haven’t got the programming.”

They continued to follow Proteus’ path between the hills. On all sides of them lichen-rotted boulders jutted from the ground, and between the roots of the grass and twisting weeds were round-rubbed pebbles. The great glacier had receded only nine thousand years before, and the glacial character of the land was everywhere evident.

In the direction of their progress a small river tumbled from rock to stone to boulder at the bottom of a gaping rent in the largest moraine. It was the only way which the probes could safely navigate into the higher land of the moraines. Launce was climbing between the hugest boulders, shoving aside the smaller rocks with his forward ram. Speed, for all his fragility, was having an easier time. His four spider-legs could hoist his conical body high over the rocks. Proteus disapproved of such acrobatics on the part of the expensive contact probe, and filled him now and then with strange words distorted almost beyond Launce’s recognition with the stuff of the new programming: Danger. Hardness. Insecurity. Pain. Speed followed Launce’s path and tested each foothold before placing his full weight upon it.

Water rushed and whispered past green-stained stones before them. The early orbiting probes in scouting the planet had noted that the stream was seasonal; it was now at its lowest, barely more than a trickle, at times sinking beneath the jumbled stones and vanishing. Water was no hazard to the probes. Proteus liked the stream bed as a path. Winter freezings had rent the large boulders into flat and tilting shards, most of which had found their own level and were no longer a hazard. Launce entered the roistering water and rolled heedlessly upstream. Speed gingerly settled his pads in the wet and followed.

Only once was the lay of the rocks declared by relay from Proteus to be too hazardous for Speed to pass. Launce spent a half-hour rearranging them until all had settled into a stable

Jeff Duntemann position. His protruding ram and most of his six stubby arms were glistening with water and slick with green scum and grey mud when he received Proteus’ confident word that all was safe. The probes continued upstream, testing, stepping, observing.

The gash in the moraine narrowed as they ascended. At its narrowest the walls were extremely steep, and Launce regarded the boulders comprising the rock pile with great suspicion. All were at rest now and would probably remain so; instabilities among the rocks must have settled themselves out many centuries before. But Proteus was filling Launce with caution as well, although in him it was the quicker, more mathematical caution which measured center of gravity and estimated stability among the rocks. Speed was new, and incredibly expensive to the Combine. They would have risked ten like Launce to protect him. The shuttle, holding only two probes at a time, was the bottleneck, and the cost of larger shuttles went far beyond the budget allotted for the consolidation of a new planet. The Combine was taking a risk in thrusting Speed into an unknown environment, and counted on the experienced caution of Proteus and Launce to protect their investment.