ked meditatively on the end of one of its ropy
tentacles.
     It finally reached  him,  walked deftly over his legs, and dipped up to
lick enthusiastically at the chemical traces left by  his gripweb. The robot
seemed enchanted by the taste of the glove's elastomer against the rock.  It
hung there on its fourteen plier feet, loudly licking and rasping.
     Pete lashed out with  his pick. The razored  point  slid with  a sullen
crunch right through the thing's corky head.
     It went  limp instantly,  pinned there against the ceiling. Then with a
nasty  rustling  it  deployed  a  whole  unsuspected set  of  waxy and filmy
appurtenances. Complex bug-tongue things, mandible scrapers, delicate little
spatulas, all reeling and trembling out of its slotted underside.
     It was  not going to  die. It couldn't die,  because it had never  been
alive. It was a piece of biotechnical machinery. Dying was simply not on its
agenda anywhere. Pete photographed the device carefully as it struggled with
obscene  mechanical  stupidity  to  come  to  workable terms  with  its  new
environmental parameters. Then Pete levered the pick loose from the ceiling,
shook it loose, and dropped the pierced robot straight down to hell.
     Pete  climbed more quickly  now,  favoring  the  strained shoulder.  He
worked his way methodically  out to the relative ease of the  vertical wall,
where he discovered a large mined-out vein in the constellation Sagittarius.
The vein was a big  snaky recess where some kind of ore had been nibbled and
strained from the rock. By the look of  it, the rock had been chewed away by
a termite host of tiny robots with mouths like toenail clippers.
     He  signaled  on the  spex for Katrinko. The neuter  followed along the
clipped  and anchored line, climbing  like a  fiend while lugging one of the
haulbags. As Katrinko settled in  to their new base camp,  Pete returned  to
the louvers to  fetch  the second bag. When he'd finally heaved and grappled
his  way back, his shoulder was aching  bitterly  and his nerves  were shot.
They were done for the day.
     Katrinko had put up  the emission-free  encystment web at  the mouth of
their crevice. With  Pete returned  to relative safety, she reeled  in their
smart-ropes and fed them a handful of sugar.
     Pete  cracked  open  two capsules  of  instant  fluff, then  sank  back
gratefully into the wool.
     Katrinko took off her mask.  She  was vibrating  with alert enthusiasm.
Youth,  thought Pete—youth, and the  8 percent metabolic advantage that came
from lacking sex organs. "We're in so much trouble now," Katrinko whispered,
with a feverish grin in the faint red glow of a single indicator light.  She
no longer  resembled a  boy  or a young  woman.  Katrinko looked  completely
diabolical. This was a nonsexed creature. Pete  liked to think of  her  as a
"she,"  because this  was somehow easier on  his mind, but Katrinko  was  an
"it." Now it was filled with glee, because finally it had placed itself in a
proper and pleasing  situation.  Stark  and feral confrontation with its own
stark and feral little being.
     "Yeah, this is trouble," Pete said. He placed a fat medicated tick onto
the vein inside of his elbow. "And you're taking first watch."
     Pete  woke four  hours  later,  with a  heart-fluttering rise  from the
stunned depths of chemically assisted delta-sleep. He felt numb, and lightly
dusted with a  brain-clouding amnesia,  as if  he'd slept  for four straight
days. He had been profoundly helpless in the grip of the drug, but the  risk
had been worth it, because  now he was thoroughly rested.  Pete sat  up, and
tried the left shoulder experimentally. It was much improved.
     Pete  rubbed  feeling  back  into  his  stubbled  face  and scalp, then
strapped his spex on. He discovered  Katrinko squatting on her  haunches, in
the radiant  glow  of  her own  body heat,  pondering over  an  ugly mess of
spines, flakes, and goo.
     Pete touched spex knobs and leaned forward. "What you got there?"
     "Dead  robots. They ate our foamchocks, right  out of the ceiling. They
eat anything. I  killed the ones  that  tried to break into  camp." Katrinko
stroked at a midair menu, then handed Pete a fiber lead for his spex. "Check
this footage I took."
     Katrinko  had been keeping  watch with the gelcams, picking out passing
robots in the glow of their engine heat. She'd  documented them on infrared,
saving and editing the clearest live-action footage. "These little ones with
the ball-shaped  feet, I  call  them keets," she  narrated, as  the captured
frames  cascaded  across Pete's spex-clad gaze. "They're small, but  they're
really fast, and all  over  the place—I had to kill three of them. This  one
with the  sharp spiral nose  is a drillet.  Those are a  pair of dubits. The
dubits  always travel  in pairs.  This big  thing  here,  that looks  like a
spilled  dessert  with big  eyes and  a ball on a chain, I call  that  one a
lurchen. Because of the  way  it moves, see? It's  sure a lot faster than it
looks."
     Katrinko stopped the spex replay, switched back to live perception, and
poked  carefully at  the broken litter before her booted feet.  The  biggest
device in the heap  resembled a dissected cat's head stuffed with cables and
bristles. "I also killed this piteen. Piteens don't die easy, man."
     "There's lots of these things?"
     "I figure hundreds, maybe thousands. All different kinds. And every one
of  'em as stupid as dirt.  Or  else we'd be dead and disassembled a hundred
times already."
     Pete stared at the dissected robots, a  cooling  mass of nerve-netting,
batteries, veiny armor plates, and gelatin. "Why do they look so crazy?"
     "'Cause  they  grew  all by  themselves.  Nobody  ever designed  them."
Katrinko glanced up.  "You  remember  those big virtual spaces  for  weapons
design, that they run out in Alamagordo?"
     "Yeah,  sure,  Alamagordo.  Physics  simulations  on  those  super-size
quantum gelbrains.  Huge virtualities,  with ultra-fast,  ultra-fine detail.
You bet I remember  New Mexico! I love to raid a great computer lab. There's
something so traditional about the hack."
     "Yeah.  See, for  us NAFTA types, physics virtualities are  a  military
app.  We  always give  our tech  to the  military whenever it  looks  really
dangerous. But let's say you don't share  our NAFTA values. You don't  wanna
test new weapons systems  inside giant virtualities. Let's  say you want  to
make a can-opener, instead."
     During her sleepless hours huddling on watch, Katrinko had clearly been
giving this matter  a  lot of thought. "Well, you could study other people's
can-openers and  try to improve the design. Or else  you could just set up a
giant high-powered virtuality with a bunch  of virtual cans  inside it. Then
you  make  some can-opener  simulations, that  are basically  blobs  of goo.
They're simulated goo,  but they're also  programs, and those programs trade
data and evolve. Whenever they pierce a can, you reward them by  making more
copies of them. You're running,  like, a  million generations  of a  million
different possible can-openers, all day every day, in a simulated space."
     The  concept  was not entirely  alien to Spider Pete. "Yeah, I've heard
the  rumors. It  was one  of those stunts  like Artificial  Intelligence. It
might look really  good  on paper, but you can't ever get it to work in real
life."
     "Yeah, and  now it's illegal  too.  Kinda  hard to  police, though. But
let's imagine you're into economic  warfare and  you  figure  out  how to do
this. Finally,  you evolve this super weird, super can-opener that no  human
being could  ever have invented.  Something that no human being  could  even
imagine. Because it grew like a mushroom in an entire alternate physics. But
you  have all  the specs  for its shape  and proportions, right there in the
supercomputer. So to make one inside the real world, you just print  it  out
like a  photograph.  And  it works! It  runs! See?  Instant  cheap  consumer
goods."
     Pete thought it over. "So you're saying the Sphere people got that idea
to work, and these robots here were built that way?"
     "Pete,  I  just can't figure any other  way  this  could have happened.
These  machines  are  just too alien.  They had  to come from  some  totally
nonhuman, autonomous process. Even the best Japanese engineers  can't design
a jelly robot made  out of  fuzz and rope that  can move like a caterpillar.
There's  not enough money  in the  world  to  pay human brains to think that
out."
     Pete  prodded at the gooey  ruins with his  pick.  "Well,  you got that
right."
     "Whoever built this place, they broke a  lot of rules and treaties. But
they did it all really cheap. They did it in a way that is so cheap  that it
is  beyond  economics."   Katrinko  thought  this  over.  "It's  way  beyond
economics,  and  that's exactly why it's against  all those  rules  and  the
treaties in the first place."
     "Fast, cheap, and out of control."
     "Exactly, man. If this stuff ever got loose in the real world, it would
mean the end of everything we know."
     Pete liked  this  last statement not  at  all.  He had  always disliked
apocalyptic hype.  He liked  it  even less now because  under these  extreme
circumstances it sounded very plausible. The Sphere had the youngest and the
biggest  population of the three major  trading blocs, and the youngest  and
the biggest ideas. People in Asia knew how to get things done. "Y'know, Lyle
Schweik once told me  that the weirdest  bicycles in the  world come  out of
China these days."
     "Well,  he's right. They  do. And what  about those  Chinese  circuitry
chips they've been dumping in the NAFTA markets lately? Those chips are dirt
cheap and work fine, but they're full of all this crazy leftover wiring that
doubles back  and gets all snarled up. . . . I always thought  that was just
shoddy workmanship. Man, 'workmanship' had nothing to do with those chips."
     Pete  nodded  soberly. "Okay.  Chips  and  bicycles,  that  much I  can
understand. There's a lot of  money in that. But who the heck would take the
trouble to create a giant hole in the ground that's full of robots  and fake
stars? I mean, why?"
     Katrinko  shrugged. "I  guess it's just the Sphere, man.  They still do
stuff just because it's wonderful."
     The bottom of the world  was boiling over. During  the passing century,
the  nuclear test cavity  had  accumulated its own  little desert aquifer, a
pitch-black subterranean  oasis. The bottom of the  bubble  was an unearthly
drowned maze of  shattered cracks  and  chemical  deposition, all turned  to
simmering tidepools of mechanical self-assemblage. Oxygen-fizzing geysers of
black fungus tea.
     Steam rose steadily in the  darkness amid the crags, rising to condense
and run  in chilly rivulets down the spherical star-spangled walls. Down  at
the  bottom,  all  the water was  eagerly collected  by aberrant  devices of
animated sponge and string. Katrinko instantly tagged these  as  "smits" and
"fuzzens."
     The  smits  and fuzzens  were  nightmare  dishrags  and  piston-powered
spaghetti, leaping  and slopping wetly from crag to crag. Katrinko  took  an
unexpected  ease and  pleasure  in  naming and photographing  the  machines.
Speculation boiled  with sinister ease from the sexless  youngster's vulpine
head, a swift off-the-cuff adjustment to this alien toy world. It would seem
that the kid lived rather closer to the future than Pete did.
     They cranked their way from boulder to boulder, crack to liquid  crack.
They documented fresh  robot  larvae,  chewing their way to the  freedom  of
darkness through plugs of goo and muslin. It was a whole miniature creation,
designed in the senseless  gooey cores of a Chinese supercomputing gelbrain,
and transmuted  into reality  in a  hot  broth of undead mechanized protein.
This was by  far the most  amazing  phenomenon that Pete had ever witnessed.
Pete was accordingly  plunged into gloom. Knowledge was power in his  world.
He knew with leaden certainty that he was taking on far too much voltage for
his own good.
     Pete was  a professional. He could imagine stealing classified military
secrets from a superpower, and surviving  that experience. It would be  very
risky, but  in the final analysis  it was just the military. A rocket  base,
for instance—a secret Asian rocket base might have been a lot of fun.
     But this was not military. This  was an entire new  means of industrial
production. Pete knew with  instinctive street-level certainty  that tech of
this level of revolutionary  weirdness was not a spy  thing, a sports thing,
or  a soldier  thing. This was  a  big,  big money  thing.  He might survive
discovering it. He'd never get away with revealing it.
     The thrilling wonder of it all really  bugged him. Thrilling wonder was
at best a passing thing. The sober implications  for the longer term weighed
on  Pete's soul like a damp towel.  He  could imagine escaping this place in
one piece, but he couldn't imagine any plausible aftermath  for handing over
nifty photographs of thrilling wonder to military spooks on the  Potomac. He
couldn't imagine what the  powers-that-were would do with that knowledge. He
rather dreaded what they would do to him for giving it to them.
     Pete wiped a sauna cascade of sweat from his neck.
     "So  I figure it's either geothermal power,  or a fusion generator down
there," said Katrinko.
     "I'd  be betting  thermonuclear, given  the  circumstances."  The rocks
below  their busy cleats were a-skitter with bugs: gippers  and  ghents  and
kebbits,   dismantlers   and   glue-spreaders   and   brain-eating   carrion
disassemblers.  They were  profoundly dumb  little  devices, specialized  as
centipedes. They  didn't  seem  very  aggressive,  but it surely would  be a
lethal mistake to sit down among them.
     A barnacle  thing  with an  iris  mouth and long whipping  eyes  took a
careful taste of Katrinko's boot. She retreated to a crag with a yelp.
     "Wear your  mask,"  Pete  chided.  The damp  heat was bliss  after  the
skin-eating chill of the Taklamakan, but most of the  vents and  cracks were
spewing thick  smells of  hot beef stew and burnt rubber,  all  varieties of
eldritch  mechano-metabolic  byproduct.  His lungs  felt sore  at  the  very
thought of it.
     Pete cast  his foggy spex up  the nearest of the  carbon-fiber columns,
and  the golden,  glowing,  impossibly  tempting lights  of  those  starship
portholes up above.
     Katrinko  led point. She was  pitilessly exposed against  the  lacelike
girders.  They didn't want to risk exposure during  two trips,  so they each
carried a haul bag.
     The climb went well at  first. Then a machine rose up from wet darkness
like a six-winged  dragonfly.  Its stinging tail lashed  through the thready
column  like  the  kick  of  a mule.  It  connected  brutally. Katrinko shot
backwards from the impact, tumbled  ten  meters, and  dangled like a ragdoll
from her last backup chock.
     The flying  creature circled in a figure eight, attempting to  make  up
its nonexistent mind. Then  a slower but much  larger  creature  writhed and
fluttered out of the starry sky, and  attacked Katrinko's  dangling haulbag.
The bag  burst like a Christmas piÓata in a churning array of taloned wings.
A  fabulous  cascade of expensive spy  gear  splashed down to  the hot pools
below.
     Katrinko twitched feebly at the end of her rope. The dragonfly, cruelly
alerted, went for her movement. Pete launched a string of flashbangs.
     The  world  erupted  in  flash,  heat, concussion,  and  flying  chaff.
Impossibly hot and  loud,  a  thunderstorm  in a  closet.  The best kind  of
disappearance magic: total overwhelming  distraction, the only real magic in
the world.
     Pete soared  up to Katrinko like  a  balloon on a  bungee-cord. When he
reached  the bottom of  the starship,  twenty-seven  heart-pounding  seconds
later, he had burned out both the smart-ropes.
     The silvery rain of chaff was driving  the bugs to mania. The bottom of
the  cavern  was suddenly  a-crawl  with leaping  mechanical heat-ghosts, an
instant  menagerie  of  skippers  and humpers and  floppers. At  the  rim of
perception, there were new things rising from the depths of the pools,  vast
and scaly, like golden carp to a rain of fish chow.
     Pete's own  haulbag had been abandoned at the base of  the column. That
bag was clearly not long for this world.
     Katrinko  came to  with a sudden winded gasp.  They began free-climbing
the outside  of the starship.  It  surface  was  stony,  rough  and  uneven,
something like pumice, or wasp spit.
     They  found the underside of a  monster porthole and pressed themselves
flat against the surface.
     There they waited, inert and unmoving, for an hour. Katrinko caught her
breath. Her ribs stopped  bleeding. The two of them waited for another hour,
while  crawling  and flying  heat-ghosts nosed furiously around their little
world, following the tatters of their programming. They waited a third hour.
     Finally  they  were  joined  in  their  haven  by an  oblivious gang of
machines with suckery skirts and wheelbarrows for heads. The robots chose  a
declivity and  began filling  it with  big mandible trowels of stony mortar,
slopping it on and  jaw-chiseling it into place, smoothing  everything over,
tireless and pitiless.
     Pete  seized  this  opportunity  to  attempt  to  salvage  their   lost
equipment. There had been such fabulous federal bounty in there: smart audio
bugs, heavy-duty  gelcams,  sensors  and  detectors, pulleys,  crampons  and
latches, priceless vials of programmed neural goo. .  . . Pete crept back to
the bottom of the spacecraft.
     Everything  was long gone. Even the depleted smartropes had been eaten,
by  a  long  trail  of  foraging  keets.  The  little  machines  were  still
squirreling about in the black lace of the column, sniffing and  scraping at
the last molecular traces, with every appearance of satisfaction.
     Pete  rejoined  Katrinko,  and  woke  her where  she  clung  rigid  and
stupefied to her hiding spot. They inched their way around the curved rim of
the starship hull, hunting for a possible  weakness. They were in very  deep
trouble  now,  for  their  best equipment was gone. It didn't matter.  Their
course was  very obvious now, and the loss  of  alternatives  had  clarified
Pete's mind. He was consumed with a burning desire to break in.
     Pete slithered  into the faint shelter of a large,  deeply pitted hump.
There he discovered a mess of braided  rope. The rope  was woven of dead and
mashed organic fibers, something  like the hair at the bottom of a sink. The
rope had gone all petrified under a stony lacquer of robot spit.
     These were climber's ropes. Someone had broken out here—smashed through
the hull  of  the ship, from  the inside. The robots had come  to repair the
damage,  carefully re-sealing the exit hole, and  leaving this ugly hump  of
stony scar tissue.
     Pete pulled his gelcam drill. He had lost the sugar reserves along with
the haulbags.  Without  sugar to metabolize, the little  enzyme-driven rotor
would  starve and  be  useless soon.  That  fact  could not be helped.  Pete
pressed the device against the hull, waited  as  it punched its way through,
and squirted in a gelcam to follow.
     He  saw a farm.  Pete  could scarcely have been more astonished. It was
certainly  farmland, though. Cute,  toy  farmland,  all  under a stony  blue
ceiling, crisscrossed with hot grids of radiant light, embraced in the stony
arch  of the enclosing hull. There were fishponds with reeds. Ditches, and a
wooden irrigation wheel. A little  bridge of bamboo. There were hairy  melon
vines in rich black soil and neat,  entirely  weedless fields of dwarfed red
grain. Not a soul in sight.
     Katrinko crept up and linked in on cable. "So where is everybody?" Pete
said.
     "They're all at the portholes," said Katrinko, coughing.
     "What?" said Pete, surprised. "Why?"
     "Because of those flashbangs," Katrinko wheezed. Her battered ribs were
still  paining  her.  "They're all  at the portholes, looking  out  into the
darkness. Waiting for something else to happen."
     "But we did that stuff hours ago."
     "It was very big news, man. Nothing ever happens in there."
     Pete nodded, fired with resolve. "Well then. We're breakin' in."
     Katrinko was way game. "Gonna use caps?"
     "Too obvious."
     "Acids and fibrillators?"
     "Lost 'em in the haulbags."
     "Well, that leaves cheesewires," Katrinko concluded. "I got two."
     "I got six."
     Katrinko nodded in  delight. "Six cheesewires! You're  loaded for bear,
man!"
     "I love cheesewires," Pete grunted. He had helped to invent them.
     Eight minutes and twelve  seconds later they  were inside the starship.
They re-set  the cored-out plug behind them,  delicately gluing  it in place
and carefully obscuring the hair-thin cuts.
     Katrinko sidestepped into a grove of bamboo. Her camou bloomed in green
and tan  and yellow, with such instant  and  treacherous ease that Pete lost
her entirely. Then  she waved, and the spex edge-detectors kicked  in on her
silhouette.
     Pete lifted his spex for a human naked-eye take on the situation. There
was simply nothing there at all. Katrinko  was gone, less than a ghost, like
pitchforking mercury with your eyelashes.
     So they were safe now. They could glide through this bottled  farm like
a pair of bad dreams.
     They scanned  the spacecraft  from top to bottom, looking for dangerous
and interesting phenomena. Control rooms  manned by Asian  space technicians
maybe,  or big lethal robots,  or video monitors—something  that might cramp
their style or kill them. In the thirty-seven floors of the spacecraft, they
found no such thing.
     The five  thousand inhabitants spent  their waking  hours farming.  The
crew of the starship were preindustrial, tribal, Asian peasants. Men, women,
old folks, little kids.
     The local peasants rose every  single morning, as their hot networks of
wiring came alive  in the  ceiling. They would  milk their goats. They would
feed their sheep, and some very odd, knee-high,  dwarf Bactrian camels. They
cut  bamboo and  netted their fishponds. They  cut down tamarisks and poplar
trees for firewood. They  tended  melon  vines and grew plums and hemp. They
brewed alcohol,  and ground  grain, and boiled  millet, and squeezed cooking
oil out of rapeseed. They made clothes out of hemp and raw wool and leather,
and baskets out of reeds and straw. They ate a lot of carp.
     And they raised a whole mess of chickens. Somebody not from around here
had   been  fooling  with  the   chickens.   Apparently  these  were   super
space-chickens  of  some  kind,  leftover  lab  products  from some  serious
long-term attempt to  screw around with chicken  DNA. The hens produced five
or  six lumpy  eggs every day. The roosters were enormous, and all different
colors, and very smelly, and distinctly reptilian.
     It  was very  quiet and peaceful  inside the starship. The animals made
their lowing and clucking noises, and the farm workers sang to themselves in
the tiny round-edged fields, and the incessant foot-driven water pumps would
clack rhythmically, but there were  no city noises. No engines  anywhere. No
screens. No media.
     There was no money. There  were a bunch of tribal elders who  sat under
the blossoming plum trees outside the big  stone granaries. They messed with
beads  on wires, and wrote notes on slips of wood. Then the soldiers, or the
cops—they  were  a bunch  of kids in crude leather armor, with  spears—would
tramp in groups, up and down the dozens of stairs, on the dozens of  floors.
Marching like crazy, and requisitioning  stuff, and  carrying stuff on their
backs, and handing  things  out to  people.  Basically spreading  the wealth
around.
     Most of the weird  bearded old guys were palace accountants,  but there
were  some  others,  too. They  sat  cross-legged  on mats in their homemade
robes,  and  straw  sandals,  and  their  little  spangly  hats,  discussing
important matters  at  slow  and extreme length. Sometimes they wrote  stuff
down on palm-leaves.
     Pete and Katrinko spent a special effort to spy on these old men in the
spangled hats, because, after close study, they had concluded that  this was
the local government. They pretty  much had to  be the government. These old
men with the starry hats were  the only  part of the  population who weren't
being worked to a frazzle.
     Pete  and  Katrinko  found themselves  a cozy spot  on the roof of  the
granary, one of the few permanent structures inside the spacecraft. It never
rained inside the starship, so there wasn't much call for roofs. Nobody ever
trespassed up on the roof of the granary. It was clear that the very idea of
doing this was beyond  local  imagination.  So Pete  and Katrinko stole some
bamboo water jugs, and some lovely handmade carpets, and a lean-to tent, and
set up camp there.
     Katrinko  studied an especially elaborate palm-leaf  book  that she had
filched from  the local temple.  There were pages and pages  of dense  alien
script. "Man, what do you suppose these yokels have to write about?"
     "The way I figure it," said Pete, "they're writing down everything they
can remember from the world outside."
     "Yeah?"
     "Yeah.  Kinda  building  up  an intelligence dossier for  their  little
starship  regime,  see?  Because that's  all  they'll ever know, because the
people who put them inside here aren't giving 'em any news. And they're sure
as hell never gonna let 'em out."
     Katrinko leafed carefully  through the stiff  and brittle  pages of the
handmade  book. The people here spoke only one  language. It was no language
Pete or Katrinko could even begin to recognize. "Then this is their history.
Right?"
     "It's  their lives, kid.  Their  past lives, back when they  were still
real  people,  in  the  big  real  world  outside.  Transistor  radios,  and
shoulder-launched rockets.  Barbed-wire,  pacification campaigns,  ID cards.
Camel caravans coming in  over the border, with  mortars and explosives. And
very advanced Sphere mandarin bosses, who just don't have the time to put up
with armed, Asian, tribal fanatics."
     Katrinko looked up. "That kinda sounds like your version of the outside
world, Pete."
     Pete shrugged. "Hey, it's what happens."
     "You suppose these guys really believe they're inside a real starship?"
     "I guess that depends on how much they learned from the  guys who broke
out of here with the picks and the ropes."
     Katrinko thought about it. "You know what's truly  pathetic? The shabby
illusion of  all  this.  Some  spook  mandarin's crazy  notion  that  ethnic
separatists could be squeezed down tight, and spat out like watermelon seeds
into interstellar space. . . . Man, what a come-on, what an enticement, what
an empty promise!"
     "I  could sell that idea," Pete said  thoughtfully. "You  know  how far
away the stars  really are, kid? About  four hundred  years away, that's how
far. You  seriously want  to get human beings to travel to another star, you
gotta put human beings inside of a sealed can  for four hundred solid years.
But what are people supposed to  do in  there, all that time? The only thing
they can do is quietly run a farm. Because that's what a starship is. It's a
desert oasis."
     "So you want to try a dry-run starship experiment," said Katrinko. "And
in the meantime, you happen to  have some handy religious  fanatics  in  the
backwoods of Asia, who  are shooting your ass off. Guys who refuse to change
their age-old lives, even though you are very, very high-tech."
     "Yep. That's about the size of it. Means, motive, and opportunity."
     "I get  it.  But  I can't believe that  somebody went through with that
scheme in  real  life. I  mean, rounding up an ethnic minority, and sticking
them down in some godforsaken hole, just so you'll never have to think about
them again. That's just impossible!"
     "Did I ever tell you that my grandfather was a Seminole?" Pete said.
     Katrinko shook her head. "What's that mean?"
     "They  were  American tribal  guys who ended up  stuck in a  swamp. The
Florida  Seminoles,  they  called  'em. Y'know, maybe  they just  called  my
grandfather a Seminole. He dressed really funny. . . . Maybe it just sounded
good to  call him  a  Seminole.  Otherwise, he just  would  have  been  some
strange, illiterate geezer."
     Katrinko's  brow wrinkled.  "Does it matter that your grandfather was a
Seminole?"
     "I  used to think  it did. That's where  I got my skin color—as if that
matters, nowadays. I reckon it mattered  plenty to my grandfather, though. .
.  . He was always stompin' and carryin' on about a lot of  weird  stuff  we
couldn't  understand. His  English was pretty bad. He was  never around much
when we needed him."
     "Pete. . . ." Katrinko sighed. "I  think it's  time we  got out of this
place."
     "How come?" Pete said, surprised. "We're  safe up here. The locals  are
not gonna hurt us. They can't even see  us. They can't touch  us. Hell, they
can't even  imagine us. With our fantastic  tactical advantages, we're  just
like gods to these people."
     "I  know all that, man. They're like the ultimate dumb straight people.
I don't like them very much. They're not much of a challenge to us. In fact,
they kind of creep me out."
     "No way! They're fascinating.  Those baggy clothes, the acoustic songs,
all  that  menial  labor.  . . .  These people  got something that we modern
people just don't have any more."
     "Huh?" Katrinko said. "Like what, exactly?"
     "I dunno," Pete admitted.
     "Well,  whatever it is,  it  can't be very important." Katrinko sighed.
"We  got  some serious challenges on the agenda,  man. We gotta sidestep our
way past all those angry  robots outside, then head up that shaft, then hoof
it back, four days through  a freezing desert, with no haulbags. All the way
back to the glider."
     "But Trink, there are two  other starships in here that we didn't break
into yet. Don't you want to see those guys?"
     "What I'd like to see  right now is  a hot bath in a four-star  hotel,"
said Katrinko. "And some very big international  headlines, maybe. All about
me. That would be lovely." She grinned.
     "But what about the people?"
     "Look, I'm not  'people,'  " Katrinko said calmly. "Maybe it's  because
I'm a neuter, Pete, but I can tell you're  way off the subject. These people
are none of our business.  Our business now is to return to our glider in an
operational condition,  so that we  can complete  our assigned  mission, and
return to base with our data. Okay?"
     "Well, let's break into just one more starship first."
     "We gotta move, Pete. We've lost our best equipment, and  we're running
low on body fat. This isn't something that we can kid about and live."
     "But we'll never  come back here again. Somebody will,  but it  sure as
heck won't be us. See, it's a Spider thing."
     Katrinko was weakening. "One more starship? Not both of 'em?"
     "Just one more."
     "Okay, good deal."
     The  hole they  had cut through the starship's  hull had  been  rapidly
cemented by  robots. It cost them  two more cheesewires to cut  themselves a
new exit. Then Katrinko led point, up across the stony ceiling, and down the
carbon  column to  the second  ship.  To avoid annoying  the  lurking  robot
guards, they  moved with hypnotic  slowness and excessive stealth. This made
it a grueling trip.
     This  second  ship had seen hard use. The hull was  extensively scarred
with great wads of cement, entombing many lengths of dried and knotted rope.
Pete and Katrinko found a weak spot and cut their way in.
     This  starship was  crowded.  It was loud  inside, and it smelled.  The
floors were crammed with hot and sticky  little  bazaars,  where people sold
handicrafts  and liquor  and  food.  Criminals were being  punished by being
publicly chained to posts and pelted with offal by passers-by. Big crowds of
ragged  men and tattooed women gathered  around brutal cockfights, featuring
spurred mutant chickens half the size of dogs. All the men carried knives.
     The  architecture  here  was more elaborate, all kinds of warrens,  and
courtyards, and damp,  sticky alleys. After exploring  four floors, Katrinko
suddenly  declared that  she recognized  their  surroundings.  According  to
Katrinko,  they were a  physical replica  of  sets  from a  popular Japanese
interactive  samurai  epic. Apparently the starship's designers  had  needed
some pre-industrial Asian village  settings, and they  hadn't wanted to take
the expense and  trouble to design them from scratch. So they had programmed
their construction robots with pirated game designs.
     This  starship had once  been  lavishly  equipped  with  at least three
hundred armed video camera installations. Apparently, the mandarins had come
to the  stunning realization that the  mere  fact that  they were  recording
crime didn't  mean that  they could control it. Their  spy cameras were  all
dead  now. Most had been vandalized. Some had gone down fighting. They  were
all inert and abandoned.
     The  rebellious  locals had  been very  busy. After  defeating the  spy
cameras,  they  had  created  a set of giant hullbreakers. These  were siege
engines, big crossbow torsion machines,  made of  hemp and wood and  bamboo.
The hullbreakers were  starship community  efforts, elaborately painted  and
ribboned, and presided over by tough, aggressive gang bosses with batons and
big leather belts.
     Pete  and  Katrinko  watched a labor gang, hard at work on one  of  the
hullbreakers.  Women braided  rope ladders from  hair and  vegetable  fiber,
while smiths forged pitons over  choking, hazy  charcoal fires. It was clear
from the evidence that these restive locals had broken out of their starship
jail  at least twenty  times. Every time they had been corralled back in  by
the relentless efforts of mindless machines.  Now they were busily preparing
yet another breakout.
     "These guys sure have got initiative," said Pete admiringly.  "Let's do
'em a little favor, okay?"
     "Yeah?"
     "Here they are, taking all this trouble to hammer their way out. But we
still have a bunch of caps.  We got no more use for 'em, after we leave this
place. So the way I  figure it, we blow their wall  out big-time, and let  a
whole bunch of 'em loose at once. Then you and I can escape real easy in the
confusion."
     Katrinko loved this idea, but had to play devil's advocate. "You really
think we ought to interfere like that? That kind of  shows our hand, doesn't
it?"
     "Nobody's watching any more," said Pete. "Some technocrat figured  this
for a big lab experiment. But  they  wrote  these people  off, or maybe they
lost  their  anthropology  grant. These people are totally forgotten.  Let's
give the poor bastards a show."
     Pete and Katrinko planted their explosives,  took cover on the ceiling,
and cheerfully watched the wall blow out.
     A violent gust  of air came through  as pressures equalized, carrying a
hemorrhage  of dust  and  leaves  into interstellar  space. The  locals were
totally astounded by  the explosion,  but when the repair robots  showed up,
they soon recovered their  morale. A terrific  battle  broke  out, a general
vengeful  frenzy of  crab-bashing  and sponge-skewering.  Women and children
tussled  with  the keets and bibbets. Soldiers  in leather  cuirasses fought
with  the  bigger  machines, deploying  pikes, crossbow  quarrels,  and  big
robot-mashing mauls.
     The  robots were profoundly stupid, but  they were indifferent to their
casualties, and entirely relentless.
     The locals made the most of their window  of opportunity. They loaded a
massive harpoon into  a  torsion  catapult,  and fired  it into space. Their
target was the neighboring starship, the third and last of them.
     The barbed spear  bounded off the hull. So they reeled it back in  on a
monster bamboo hand-reel, cursing and shouting like maniacs.
     The starship's entire  population poured into the fight.  The walls and
bulkheads shook with  the tramp of their angry feet. The  outnumbered robots
fell back. Pete and Katrinko seized this golden opportunity to  slip out the
hole. They climbed swiftly up the hull, and out of reach of the combat.
     The  locals fired  their big harpoon again.  This  time  the barbed tip
struck true, and it stuck there quivering.
     Then a little kid was  heaved into place, half-naked, with a hammer and
screws, and a rope  threaded through  his belt. He had  a crown of  dripping
candles set upon his head.
     Katrinko glanced back, and stopped dead.
     Pete urged her on, then stopped as well.
     The child  began reeling  himself  industriously  along  the  trembling
harpoon  line,  trailing a  bigger rope. An airborne machine  came to menace
him. It  fell  back  twitching, pestered by a  nasty  scattering of crossbow
bolts.
     Pete  found himself mesmerized.  He hadn't felt  the desperation of the
circumstances,  until  he saw this  brave little boy ready  to  fall to  his
death. Pete had seen many climbers  who took risks because  they were crazy.
He'd seen professional climbers, such as himself, who played games with risk
as masters of applied technique. He'd never witnessed climbing as  an act of
raw, desperate sacrifice.
     The heroic  child arrived on  the grainy hull  of  the  alien ship, and
began banging  his  pitons in a hammer-swinging frenzy. His crown of candles
shook and flickered with his efforts. The boy could barely see. He had slung
himself out into stygian darkness to fall to his doom.
     Pete climbed up to Katrinko and quickly linked in on  cable.  "We gotta
leave now, kid. It's now or never."
     "Not yet," Katrinko said. "I'm taping all this."
     "It's our big chance."
     "We'll go later."  Katrinko watched a flying vacuum cleaner batting by,
to swat cruelly at the kid's legs. She turned  her  masked head  to Pete and
her whole body stiffened with rage. "You got a cheesewire left?"
     "I got three."
     "Gimme. I gotta go help him."
     Katrinko unplugged,  slicked down  the  starship's  wall  in  a  daring
controlled  slide,   and  hit   the  stretched  rope.  To   Pete's  complete
astonishment, Katrinko lit  there  in  a  crouch,  caught herself  atop  the
vibrating line, and simply ran for it. She ran along the  humming  tightrope
in a thrumming blur, stunning the locals so thoroughly that they were barely
able to fire their crossbows.
     Flying  quarrels  whizzed  past  and around  her, nearly skewering  the
terrified  child at the far end of the rope. Then Katrinko leapt and bounded
into space, her gloves and cleats outspread. She simply vanished.
     It  was a champion's  gambit if Pete  had  ever  seen  one.  It  was  a
legendary move.
     Pete  could  manage  well enough  on  a tightrope. He  had  experience,
excellent balance, and physical acumen.  He was, after  all, a professional.
He could walk a rope if he was put to the job.
     But not in  full  climbing  gear,  with cleats.  And  not  on a  slack,
handbraided, homemade rope.  Not when the rope was very poorly anchored by a
homemade pig-iron harpoon. Not when he outweighed  Katrinko by twenty kilos.
Not in the middle  of a flying circus of airborne robots. And not in a cloud
of arrows.
     Pete was  simply  not that  crazy any more. Instead, he  would  have to
follow Katrinko  the  sensible  way.  He would  have to climb the  starship,
traverse the ceiling,  and climb  down to  the  third starship onto the  far
side. A hard three hours' work at the very best—four hours, with any modicum
of safety.
     Pete weighed the odds, made up his mind, and went after the job.
     Pete turned in time to see Katrinko busily cheesewiring her way through
the  hull of  Starship  Three. A gout of white light poured out as the cored
plug slid aside. For a deadly moment, Katrinko was a silhouetted goblin, her
camou useless as the starship's radiance framed her. Her clothing  fluttered
in a violent gust of escaping air.
     Below her, the climbing child had anchored himself to the wall and tied
off  his second rope.  He  looked  up  at the sudden gout of  light,  and he
screamed so loudly that the whole universe rang.
     The child's many relatives reacted by instinct, with a ragged volley of
crossbow shots. The  arrows  veered and  scattered  in the gusting wind, but
there were a lot of them. Katrinko ducked, and flinched, and rolled headlong
into the starship. She vanished again.
     Had  she been hi