During spare moments in the trip from Cradle, Beled and Bard and Ty had sat down together in private rooms, opened up the equipment cases, and made efforts to get the different ambots accustomed to each other, so that the Blue-programmed ones that most of them were using wouldn’t identify Bard’s more Reddish ammunition as innately hostile, and vice versa. So far it seemed to be working. When the shape of the valley funneled them all together, as when squeezing through a passage between boulders, Bard’s ambots seemed to catch the scent of the ones reposing in Beled’s snaky bandolier, and would crawl around to that side of Bard’s anatomy and aim their sensors in that direction, but it did not seem as though hostilities were about to break out. Since any one communications system was likely to be jammed or hacked by the opposition, your more highly developed ambots communicated with one another in a number of different ways, including sound. Ultrasound was preferred, but all frequencies were used, and so it was occasionally possible to hear Bard’s botmo spewing noise as it tried to evaluate, or possibly just to confuse, the Blue botmo all around it. Sometimes it was a hiss and sometimes it was a mathematical tune played too fast for the human ear to process it. In any case, nothing—at least, nothing audible to humans—came back from Beled’s, Ty’s, or Kath Two’s arsenals. Broadly speaking, Blue armaments makers were biased toward the “lots of dumb ambots” philosophy while Red ones went the other way.
On broken terrain, Doc on his grabb made better time than anyone, with the possible exception of Einstein, who was a gifted scrambler. The two of them would surge ahead and then Beled would put on a loping burst and catch up, obeying some kind of instinct to take point. Langobard seemed more inclined to hang back and act as a rear guard, which meant he spent more time in the company of the slower Ariane. Sometimes he simply picked her up and carried her over rough patches. The valley had been flat higher up, but they had to negotiate a steeper transition down to the altitude where vegetation had been seeded by the ONANs. It then became easier going, though they had to find open trails among the dense low shrubs that had taken root in the ashy soil. Their feet and their noses told them that the ground had been preseeded with some kind of microorganism that had presumably been designed to convert volcanic ash—which tended to have toxic stuff like sulfur in it—to a more wholesome kind of soil.
Einstein had played his cards close to his chest until they had deplaned. Since then, he had been providing Doc, and anyone else close enough to eavesdrop, with his own kind of speculative backstory for the thing they were going to visit.
“You’ll see when we get there,” he said more than once, perhaps betraying some uncertainty as to the correctness of his theory—a word he knew but pronounced to rhyme with “story.”
The phrase “I looked it up” was in frequent use by Einstein. He had no idea who Doc was, and just saw him as a very old man who was willing to answer questions. To answer them, but also to ask them in a way that was challenging without being brusque.
“They had these wheeled vehicles—”
“Cars?”
“No, the big box-shaped ones.”
“Trucks, or lorries,” Doc said.
“My theory is that this ’fact used to be one of those.”
“But a minute ago,” Doc observed, in the mildest possible tone of complaint, “you were saying it got hurled over the mountains by a tsunami.”
“Yeah.”
“That would imply that it had been bobbing around somewhere in the ocean.”
“That’s my theory.”
“Would it not have sunk to the bottom? The boxes were not airtight. Sooner or later it would have filled up with water.”
“The inside of what used to be the box is all coated with black residue,” Einstein offered, also pronouncing that word incorrectly.
“What conclusion do you draw from that?”
“I looked it up, and these trucks were used to carry all kinds of goods. Not just heavy stuff but bags of potato chips, athletic shoes, toys. My theory is that this was one of those. It was near the waterfront when it got hit by one of the earliest tsunamis, a small one that dragged it out into the ocean. And it didn’t sink, see, because—”
“Because it was full of bags of potato chips or something,” Doc said.
“Right, and it didn’t burn, at least not right away, because it was in the water. But then later it got caught up in a really big tsunami, like the one that created Antimer, which heaved it right up over the mountains and slammed it down . . . right over there. We should almost be able to see it.”
“Whereupon its contents burned, leaving the black residue,” Doc said, gently emphasizing the pronunciation.
“Yeah, and the paint burned off and the tires and all of the other stuff that wasn’t steel.”
“Would it not then have rusted away, during five thousand years?”
“I looked it up,” Einstein said. “The place was very dry. And this truck was probably buried. Yeah, it rusted some. But it was preserved until the Cloudy Century.”
Einstein must have looked that up too; the Cloudy Century was roughly 4300–4400, after the oceans had been reinstated but while everything was still quite hot.
“Then, after rivers began flowing again, erosion exposed it. And yeah, the exposed parts are rusted all right. Some parts are of a different metal though.”
“Aluminum,” Doc said.
But Einstein’s discourse was trailing off as he kept looking at the device that was supposed to tell them their latitude and longitude. He was giving every appearance of being lost.
Finally he made a decisive move about fifty meters down-valley, penetrating a bank of tall shrubs. The others followed him. Visibility was poor and so they heard his reaction before seeing the ’fact. “What the—?!”
“What is it?” Ty demanded.