t? Pete  set an anchor, tied off, and tried  the radio.
But without  the  relays in  the haulbag,  the  weak  signal  could not  get
through.
     Pete climbed on doggedly. It was the only option left.
     After  half an hour,  Pete began coughing. The starry cosmic cavity had
filled  with  a  terrible  smell.  The stench  was coming  from the  invaded
starship,  pouring  slowly  from the cored-out hole.  A long-bottled, deadly
stink of burning rot.
     Climbing solo,  Pete gave it  his best. His shoulder was bad and, worse
yet, his spex began to misbehave. He finally reached the  cored-out entrance
that  Katrinko had cut. The locals were  already  there  in force, stringing
themselves  a sturdy  rope bridge,  and  attaching it to massive screws. The
locals brandished torches, spears, and crossbows. They were fighting off the
incessant attacks of the robots. It was clear from their wild expressions of
savage glee that they had been longing for this moment for years.
     Pete slipped past them unnoticed, into Starship Three. He breathed  the
soured air for  a moment, and quickly retreated again. He inserted a new set
of mask filters, and returned.
     He found  Katrinko's  cooling  body,  wedged  against  the ceiling.  An
unlucky crossbow shot had slashed through her  suit and punctured Katrinko's
left arm.  So, with her  usual presence of mind, she  had deftly leapt  up a
nearby wall, tied off on a chock, and hidden herself well out of harm's way.
She'd quickly stopped the bleeding. Despite its awkward location, she'd even
managed to get her wound bandaged.
     Then the foul air had silently and stealthily overcome her.
     With her battered ribs  and a major wound, Katrinko hadn't been able to
tell  her dizziness from shock. Feeling sick, she  had relaxed, and tried to
catch her breath. A  fatal gambit. She was still hanging  there,  unseen and
invisible, dead.
     Pete discovered that Katrinko was far from alone. The crew here had all
died. Died months ago, maybe  years  ago. Some kind of huge fire inside  the
spacecraft. The  electric  lights  were  still on,  the  internal  machinery
worked, but there was no one left here but mummies.
     These dead tribal  people  had the  nicest clothes  Pete had yet  seen.
Clearly they'd  spent a lot of time  knitting and  embroidering, during  the
many weary years of their imprisonment. The corpses had all kinds of layered
sleeves,  and tatted aprons, and braided belt-ties, and lacquered hairclips,
and  excessively nifty  little sandals. They'd all smothered horribly during
the sullen inferno, along with their cats and dogs and enormous chickens, in
a sudden wave of  smoke and combustion that  had filled their spacecraft  in
minutes.
     This was far too complicated to be anything as simple as mere genocide.
Pete figured the mandarins for gentlemen technocrats,  experts with the best
of intentions. The lively possibility remained that it was mass suicide. But
on mature  consideration, Pete had to figure  this for a  very bad, and very
embarrassing, social-engineering accident.
     Though that certainly wasn't what they  would say  about this mess,  in
Washington. There  was no political  mess  nastier than a nasty ethnic mess.
Pete couldn't help but notice that these well-behaved locals hadn't bothered
to  do  any harm  to  their spacecraft's lavish surveillance equipment.  But
their cameras were off and their starship was stone dead anyway.
     The air began to  clear inside  the spacecraft. A pair of soldiers from
Starship Number Two came stamping  down  the hall, industriously looting the
local corpses. They couldn't have been happier about their opportunity. They
were grinning with awestruck delight.
     Pete returned  to his  comrade's  stricken body. He stripped the  camou
suit—he needed the batteries. The neuter's lean and sexless corpse was puffy
with subcutaneous storage pockets,  big encystments of skin  where  Katrinko
stored her last-ditch  escape tools. The battered ribs were puffy and  blue.
Pete could not go on.
     Pete returned to  the break-in hole, where he found an eager crowd. The
invaders  had  run  along  the rope-bridge  and  gathered  there  in  force,
wrinkling their  noses and cheering in wild exaltation. They had  beaten the
robots;  there  simply  weren't  enough of the  machines on duty to resist a
whole enraged population. The robots just weren't clever enough to out-think
armed,  coordinated  human resistance—not  without killing people wholesale,
and they hadn't been designed for that. They had suffered a flat-out defeat.
     Pete frightened the cheering victors away with a string of flash-bangs.
     Then he took careful aim at the lip of the drop, and hoisted Katrinko's
body, and flung her far, far, tumbling down, into the boiling pools.
     Pete  retreated  to the  first  spacecraft. It was  a  very dispiriting
climb, and when he had completed it, his shoulder  had the serious, familiar
ache of chronic  injury.  He  hid  among the unknowing  population  while he
contemplated his options.
     He  could hide here indefinitely. His camou suit was  slowly losing its
charge, but  he felt  confident that he could  manage very well without  the
suit.  The  starship  seemed to  feature most any  number  of  taboo  areas.
Blocked-off no-go  spots,  where there  might  have  been a scandal once, or
bloodshed, or a funny noise, or a strange, bad, panicky smell.
     Unlike  the violent, reckless crowd in  Starship  Two, these locals had
fallen for the cover story. They truly believed that they were in the depths
of space, bound for some  better,  brighter pie in their  starry  stone sky.
Their little  stellar  ghetto  was  full of superstitious kinks. Steeped  in
profound  ignorance, the locals imagined that their  every  sin  caused  the
universe to tremble.
     Pete knew that he should try to take his data back to the glider.  This
was  what Katrinko would have wanted. To die, but leave a legend—a very City
Spider thing.
     But  it  was hard to imagine battling his  way past  resurgent  robots,
climbing  the walls with an injured shoulder,  then making a four-day bitter
trek through a freezing desert,  all  completely  alone. Gliders didn't last
forever, either. Spy gliders weren't built to last. If Pete found the glider
with its batteries flat, or its cute  little brain gone sour, Pete  would be
all over. Even if he'd enjoyed a full set of equipment, with perfect health,
Pete had few illusions about a solo  spring  outing, alone and on foot, over
the Himalayas.
     Why risk all that?  After all,  it wasn't like  this subterranean scene
was breaking  news. It was already  many  years  old. Someone had conceived,
planned and executed  this  business a long time ago. Important people  with
brains and big resources had known all about  this for years. Somebody knew.
Maybe  not the  Lieutenant Colonel, on the  lunatic fringe of NAFTA military
intelligence. But.
     When Pete really thought about the basic implications. . . . This was a
great deal of  effort,  and for not that  big a  payoff. Because there  just
weren't that  many people  cooped up down  here. Maybe  fifteen thousand  of
them,   tops.  The  Asian  Sphere  must  have  had   tens  of  thousands  of
unassimilated tribal people, maybe hundreds of thousands. Possibly millions.
And why stop at that point? This wasn't just an Asian problem. It was a very
general problem.  Ethnic,  breakaway  people, who  just plain  couldn't,  or
wouldn't, play the twenty-first century's games.
     How  many Red Chinese  atom-bomb  tests  had taken  place deep  in  the
Taklamakan? They'd never bothered to brief him  on ancient history. But Pete
had to wonder if, by now, maybe they hadn't gotten this stellar concept down
to a  fine art.  Maybe  the  Sphere had  franchised their plan to Europe and
NAFTA. How many forgotten holes  were there, relic pockets punched below the
hide of the twenty-first  century, in the South Pacific, and  Australia, and
Nevada?  The  deadly  trash  of  a  long-derailed  Armageddon.  The   sullen
trash-heaps where no one would ever want to look.
     Sure,  he could  bend every nerve and muscle to force the world to face
all this. But why? Wouldn't it make better sense to try to think  it through
first?
     Pete never got around to admitting to himself that he had lost the will
to leave.
     As  despair  slowly  loosened  his  grip  on him,  Pete grew  genuinely
interested  in the  locals.  He was intrigued by the  stark limits of  their
lives and their universe,  and in what  he could do with their narrow little
heads. They'd  never  had a supernatural being in  their midst before;  they
just imagined them all the time. Pete started with a few poltergeist stunts,
just to amuse himself. Stealing the  spangled hats of  the local greybeards.
Shuffling the  palm  leaf volumes  in their  sacred libraries. Hijacking  an
abacus or two.
     But that was childish.
     The locals had a little temple, their special holy of holies. Naturally
Pete made it his business to invade the place.
     The locals kept a  girl locked  up  in there.  She was very pretty, and
slightly insane,  so this  made her the perfect  candidate to  become  their
Sacred Temple Girl. She was the Official Temple Priestess of Starship Number
One.  Apparently, their modest  community  could  only  afford one,  single,
awe-inspiring Virgin High Priestess. But  they were practical folks, so they
did the best with what they had available.
     The High Priestess was a pretty young woman  with  a  stiflingly pretty
life.  She  had her own maidservants, a  wardrobe of ritual clothing, and  a
very  time-consuming hairdo.  The  High  Priestess  spent  her  entire  life
carrying  out  highly  complex, totally  useless,  ritual  actions.  Incense
burnings, idol dustings,  washings and  purifications,  forehead  knockings,
endless  chanting,  daubing  special marks on her hands and  feet.  She  was
sacred and clearly demented, so they watched her with enormous interest, all
the  time. She meant everything to them. She  was  doing  all  these  crazy,
painful  things so the rest of them  wouldn't have to.  Everything about her
was completely and utterly foreclosed.
     Pete quite admired the Sacred Temple Girl.  She was very much his type,
and he felt a  genuine  kinship with her. She was the  only  local that Pete
could bear to spend any personal time with.
     So after prolonged study  of the girl  and her  actions, one  day, Pete
manifested himself to her. First, she panicked. Then she tried to kill  him.
Naturally  that effort failed. When she grasped the fact that he  was hugely
powerful, totally magical, and utterly  beyond her ken, she slithered around
the polished temple floor, rending her  garments and keening  aloud, clearly
in the combined hope/fear of being horribly and indescribably defiled.
     Pete understood the  appeal  of her concept. A younger  Pete would have
gone  for the  demonic subjugation option. But Pete was all grown up now. He
hardly saw how  that could help matters any, or, in fact,  make any tangible
difference in their circumstances.
     They never learned each other's languages. They never  connected in any
physical, mental, or  emotional way. But  they  finally  achieved a  kind of
status quo,  where they could sit  together  in the  same room,  and quietly
study one another, and fruitlessly  speculate on the  alien contents of  one
another's heads. Sometimes, they would even get together  and  eat something
tasty.
     That  was every  bit as good as  his connection with  these  impossibly
distant people was ever going to get.
     It had never occurred to Pete that the stars might go out.
     He'd cut himself a sacred, demonic bolt-hole, in a  taboo area  of  the
starship.  Every once in a while, he  would saw his  way through the robots'
repair efforts and nick out for a  good  long look at the artificial cosmos.
This reassured him, somehow. And he had other motives as well. He had a very
well-founded  concern  that  the inhabitants  of Starship Two  might somehow
forge their way over, for an violent racist orgy of looting, slaughter,  and
rapine.
     But Starship Two had their hands  full with the  robots. Any  defeat of
the bubbling  gelbrain and its hallucinatory tools could  only be temporary.
Like  an onrushing  mudslide,  the gizmos  would  route around obstructions,
infiltrate  every  evolutionary  possibility, and  always, always  keep  the
pressure on.
     After  the crushing  defeat, the  bubbling  production  vats  went into
biomechanical overdrive. The old regime had been overthrown. All equilibrium
was gone. The machines had gone back to their cybernetic dreamtime. Anything
was possible now.
     The starry walls  grew thick as fleas with a seething mass of new-model
jailers. Starship  Two  was beaten  back  once  again,  in  another  bitter,
uncounted, historical humiliation. Their persecuted homeland  became  a mass
of grotesque  cement.  Even the portholes  were  gone now, cruelly sealed in
technological spit and ooze. A living grave.
     Pete had assumed that this would pretty much finish the job. After all,
this clearly fit the parameters of the system's original designers.
     But the system could no longer bother with the limits of human intent.
     When Pete gazed through a porthole and  saw that the stars were fading,
he knew  that all bets were off. The stars were being  robbed. Something was
embezzling their energy.
     He  left  the  starship.  Outside,  all  heaven had  broken  loose.  An
unspeakable host  of creatures were migrating  up the rocky walls, bounding,
creeping, lurching,  rappelling  on a web  of gooey  ropes.  Heading for the
stellar zenith.
     Bound for transcendence. Bound for escape.
     Pete  checked  his aging cleats and gloves,  and  joined the  exodus at
once.
     None of the creatures  bothered him. He had become one of them now. His
equipment had fallen among them, been absorbed, and kicked open new doors of
evolution. Anything that could breed a can-opener could  breed  a rock chock
and  a  piton, a  crampon,  and a pulley, and a  carabiner.  His  haul bags,
Katrinko's bags, had been stuffed with generations of focused  human genius,
and it was all about one concept: UP. Going up. Up and out.
     The unearthly landscape  of the Taklamakan was  hosting a robot  war. A
spreading  mechanical  prairie  of  inching,  crawling,  biting,  wrenching,
hopping mutations. And  pillars of  fire:  Sphere satellite  warfare.  Beams
pouring down from the authentic  heavens, invisible torrents of energy  that
threw  up geysers of searing dust. A bio-engineer's final nightmare.  Smart,
autonomous hell. They  couldn't  kill a thing this big  and  keep it secret.
They  couldn't  burn  it up  fast  enough.  No,  not  without  breaking  the
containment domes,  and spilling their own ancient trash  across the face of
the earth.
     A beam crossed  the horizon  like the finger of God, smiting everything
in its path. The sky and earth  were thick  with flying creatures,  buzzing,
tumbling, sculling. The beam caught a big machine, and it fell spinning like
a multi-ton  maple seed.  It  bounded  from the side of  a containment dome,
caromed like a dying  gymnast,  and landed  below  Spider Pete.  He crouched
there in his camou, recording it all.
     It looked  back at  him. This  was no mere robot.  It was a  mechanical
civilian  journalist.  A  brightly  painted,  ultramodern,  European network
drone,  with  as many  cameras  on  board as  a top-flight media  mogul  had
martinis. The machine  had smashed violently against the secret wall, but it
was not dead. Death was not on its  agenda. It was way game. It  had spotted
him with no trouble at all. He was a human interest story. It was looking at
him.
     Glancing into  the cold spring sky, Pete could see that  the journalist
had brought a lot of its friends.
     The robot  rallied  its fried  circuits,  and  centered  him  within  a
spiraling focus. Then it  lifted a multipronged limb, and  ceremonially spat
out every marvel it had witnessed, up into the sky and out into the seething
depths of the global web.
     Pete adjusted  his mask and  his camou suit.  He wouldn't  look  right,
otherwise.
     "Dang," he said.