The Vigilant Ones

by Alexis Glynn Lather

Illustration by Randy Asplund-Faith

ROBOT SEEKS ICE CUBE ON THE MOON, proclaimed the headline in the local section of the Houston Chronicle.

“Ice cube?!” Jan Kostryzinski exclaimed, incredulous. What the lunar rover had been designed to retrieve was more like a giant straw full of Moon-dirt Slurpee. Headline writers could never resist an inaccurate but catchy turn of phrase. Jan took a savage bite of her burrito and checked her watch. She’d leave the house by 6:45; her office was only fifteen minutes away. The signal from the Moon would arrive at 7:13 P.M.

Jan’s burrito had been in the freezer until she hastily microwaved it. Unpalatable cold spots lurked inside the wrapped tortilla. Twining around Jan’s ankles, Nutmeg meowed.

“Cool it, Nutty, you’ll get your supper. That’s why I came home for mine.” Bracing herself in case the contents turned out to be as inaccurate as the headline, Jan read the article.

The Chron’s science writer had interviewed Jan yesterday in her office at the Planetary Science Institute. Evidently he’d taken good notes. Her name was spelled correctly, with y, i, and i in the right order. The article gave a simplified but adequate background for the project for which Jan was Principal Investigator. It continued, In the current frugal budgetary climate, NASA deems it more important to send humans to Mars to look for life than to the Moon to look for ice. Jan mentally added a footnote: “frugal” meant “dirt cheap or no dice on the ice.” The task of sampling ice on the Moon falls to a robotic rover named Cocytus.

The sidebar sketch made Cocytus look cute, like a bug on six wheels with a bristle extending from its rump. The bristle was its communications antenna. The rover’s name came from Dante’s Inferno where it meant the ninth and coldest circle of hell. That had turned out to be ironically appropriate, because the machine had made life hellish for controllers and scientists as it malfunctioned its way across the lunar surface after exiting the lander. The newspaper article translated the sorry situation into “scientists and engineers have had to overcome a series of mechanical difficulties.”

To Jan’s dismay, the article left out the best part of the project: how confirming ice on the Moon might catalyze the establishment of a lunar base. Jan deplored the priority given to a manned mission to Mars, which absorbed a vast fraction of space exploration money, leaving lunar concerns to dangle on a brittle shoestring of funding. Finding life on Mars or anywhere else in the Universe was a long shot. The surest and best ambition would be to go put life there.

With another meow, Nutmeg leaped into Jan’s lap just as her attention was riveted by a headline under the Cocytus article. CLEAR LAKE BURGLARIES TURN VIOLENT.

In the last few months several homes in the Clear Lake area had been thoroughly burglarized—news to Jan; she’d been preoccupied with Cocytus. Yesterday, a homeowner had been shot from behind when he interrupted one such crime, less than three miles from Jan’s house. Ruffling Nutmeg’s thick fur, she scanned the downcolumn details with morbid interest.

The burglars were experts, not the typical young punks. They hadn’t given the cops much to work with: no fingerprints, no witnesses, no clues except a tentative connection to a dark van, and no tell-tale mayhem, until now. “They’re getting violent because they’ve had so much success that now they feel totally in control,” said a police detective. “They think they know what to expect, that they can handle anything that interferes with carrying out the crime.”

Jan hadn’t been quoted on the Cocytus project. But the paper had given the cop a five-line direct quote. And the burglary article was twice as long as the coverage of Cocytus, which, when she examined the last paragraph, lacked closure. The editors had cut the article.

Sensationalistic journalism! Jan flung the paper down. It was going to be a stressful night for her, and the Chronicle hadn’t helped.

Jan snatched half a tin of Tender Veal Bits out of the refrigerator, dumped the cat food into a saucer, put it in the microwave and keyed in eleven seconds. Nutmeg preferred having the chill taken off. Jan stalked to the back door and gave the knob a sharp turn to make sure it was locked.

The door opened. So it had been unlocked all day. She’d absentmindedly left it that way a few times before—she’d thought her neighborhood was safe. Unnerved, Jan stepped out into a mild but breezy early night.

Jan’s back yard had a high fence and little for an intruder to hide behind just several thin trees and one large shrub near the patio. The yard was empty and quiet. The shrub rippled in the breeze. Its dense wind-stroked greenery reminded Jan of Nutmeg’s ruffled fur—an extraordinary impression that made her take a second look at the shrub.

Jan didn’t know what it was, except not a ligustrum. Everybody had ligustrums, and ligustrums had glossy pointed leaves. Short needles cloaked Jan’s shrub so thickly that it wasn’t possible to see the branches inside of it. Needles probably made it a member of the cedar-pine-whatever family. Jan felt a twig’s tip. It had the bristly-soft texture of a test tube brush. The shrub wasn’t prickly to brush against, but Nutty, who freely sharpened her claws on all other wood in the house and yard, always avoided the shrub, circling wide around it when slinking along the side of the house.

OK, it’s a whatever shrub, Jan thought with a mental shrug. At least it liked it here. It had come up on its own soon after she bought this house, and had grown taller than she in only six years. She fertilized it at erratic intervals. Everything Jan tried harder to cultivate fared much worse. Jan was a soil chemist with a brown thumb. The situation escaped ludicrous irony only because the soils she had chosen to study were the barren grains and dusts on the face of the Moon.

The microwave pinged. Nutmeg instantly let out a shrill feed-me meow. Jan secured the back door, regretting that she’d never gotten around to getting a better dead-bolt lock for it. Leaving Nutmeg purring over her food bowl, Jan started the short drive to work.

Nervous tension tightened Jan’s shoulder muscles and made the burrito sit heavily in her stomach. Tonight was the night for Cocytus to get its sample or die trying. As cranky as the robot had turned out to be, it was doubtful that the mission controllers could keep it going much longer on the frigid floor of Aitken Crater. She was strung-out, Jan admitted to herself, in a state of mind where even ordinary things, such as the shrub in her yard, could strike her with strangeness.

The few stars bright enough to be visible past the street lights twinkled in the night sky, long-traveled light falling through a clear but turbulent layer of air over this part of the Earth. When Jan stopped her car at Bay Area Boulevard to wait for a break in traffic, she noticed clouds massed on the western horizon. Lightning simmered in the clouds. The newspaper had said something about an approaching Pacific cool front that was expected to collide with warm, moist Gulf air tonight. So it had. Tumultuous warfare of weather filled the western end of the sky, just below the crescent Moon.

Storms threatening to engulf the Moon. Primitive people, including Jan’s ancestors in central Europe, would have taken it for some kind of bad omen, maybe a sign of impending natural disaster or war, Jan reflected. But the Moon circled two hundred forty thousand miles beyond the vicissitudes of Earth’s weather, untouched by weather or war. Or crime. A blue van turned off Bay Area. She noticed how dark it looked in sodium-vapor lighting.

Jan hated having to be worried about crime tonight. There was more than enough to make her worry, happening hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Rooted in a mild and fertile soil on its adopted world, the greenling flourished.

Warm and cold airs collided in the sky above. They wrestled with each other, oozing lightning and thunder. The greenling slept through it all.

Racial memory woven through the greenling’s genes made it stay motionless, hiding its active attributes, whenever the human who shared its home-ground came near. On the night of the weather’s tumult, when the human handled its twig, Memory stilled the greenling’s reaction and kept the sensation from intruding on its sleep. Memory deemed the greenling’s sleep—or rather, the dreaming that then unfolded—vital to its development, not to be interrupted by anything less than peril.

Like a taproot, the greenling’s mind was drawn to what lay below the deep dark ground of sleep, a reservoir of lucid dreaming. It dreamed about a once and future war across half a galaxy of stars.

Peter Reiten, the planetologist from the University of Texas, bounced into Jan’s office at the Planetary Science Institute as soon as she had the door open. His shock of dark hair looked even more aroused and uncombable than usual. “Got everybody?”

Jan showed him the screen on her workstation. The blank left half of the screen awaited the reacquired signal from Cocytus. The top right quarter of the screen showed the Main Mission Control Center in Baltimore, while Professors Murray Franklin and Mandeep Singh at the University of Arizona gazed expectantly from the bottom right quarter. “All but the bug.”

Ed Huang, the Program Manager in Baltimore, settled into his chair. “Hiya, Janko. Ready to roll?”

Situated with stack of papers and disks at his side and his laptop computer open, Peter nodded. Jan gave the little CCD camera on top of her workstation a firm, level gaze. “Ready at PSI.”

Peter asked in a whisper, “Why did he call you ‘Janko’?”

“It’s a short cut around a long last name.”

“Cool.”

In a tiny window on the blank side of the screen, the clock ticked toward 7:13. Jan’s office lacked windows. She thought she heard a dim muttering of thunder from outside of the building. Local weather wouldn’t interfere with the signal from Cocytus: relayed through the Deep Space Network, the signal would fly to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and be distributed to Main Control and the Science Sites via the Internet. Thanks to the uninterrupt-able power supply—UPS—not even a local power outage would break the skein of communications. Contact with Cocytus depended only on the orbital alignment of Earth and Moon, which cut off the signal some of the time. Reacquisition hadn’t failed yet. But it always felt iffy.

7:13:03.“Clock accurate?” Peter whispered to Jan.

“I synchronize it with the Naval Observatory when I log on.”

Ed said gravely, “Let’s hope DSN has a signal to relay.”

Murray and Mandeep waited on their corner of the screen with concerned faces.

There’d been difficulty in receiving the transmissions from Sojourner on Mars in 1997, Jan reminded herself. And it hadn’t jeopardized that outstandingly successful mission.

Suddenly the picture from Cocytus wavered in. The M & M’s grinned and Peter let out a sigh of relief.

The picture wobbled and bounced. That meant Cocytus was in motion, receiving the signal from Control and proceeding deeper into Cold Trap Alpha. Jan let out her own breath.

The bobbing image showed ancient alien terrain, rumpled and deeply shadowed. Jan irrationally expected to see a wide white sheen, a frozen lake, in the distance ahead. That was not what they could reasonably expect to find: more like water ice invisibly mixed into dust and grit. Cocytus carried a microsampling instrument and the new Evolved Gas Analyzing Device. The EGAD had not detected water molecules in the tiny samples of lunar soil taken in the traverse so far.

The only good reason to hope for ice was an old radar signal.

Five years ago, the Clementine space probe had found something that reflected radar signals in a way explainable as small ice patches near the south pole of the Moon. Ice might have come from a comet, a cosmic snowball that collided with the Moon, an unknown time ago. The shadowed, frigid environment at the bottom of Aitken Crater might preserve cometary ice in that event. Still, there’d been no incontrovertible proof of it. Confirmation of Clementine’s discovery had had to wait. Until Cocytus. Until tonight. Suspense did a tap dance on Jan’s nerves.

The picture humped up toward the black lunar sky and stars. The picture dropped back toward the Moon surface and a pool of shadow blacker than before.

Mandeep said, “We need the light.”

“Remember, it drains the batteries,” said Ed Huang.

“But tends to keep the bug’s instruments warm,” said Jan. “And that shadow has to be cold as sin.”

Three seconds later, the time it took for a command to reach the Moon, Cocytus’s headlight laid a bright patch of illumination on the terrain, changing inky shadow to ashy dust, grit, and rocks, including, at the edge of the patch, a lumpy but remarkably round rock.

Something clicked in Jan’s mind. “Send it to that round rock,” she told Ed. “I bet there’s paydirt there.”

Cocytus altered its course as directed by Main Control. The calibration scale, yellow lines on the picture, indicated the round rock to be softballsized. Peter, who’d been clicking away on his laptop, paused. “Unless it’s an artifact of the halogen headlight, that’s a funny color for Moon rock. It’s greenish.”

Jan had her own feeling of significance about the rock, even though the soil around it appeared no different from anywhere else in tonight’s traverse. “It’s shallowly embedded,” she said. “We could roll it out of the way and look under it for water.”

“That’s not in the plan,” Ed pointed out. “Can I get a consensus on the suggested activity?”

“I’d like a better looksee,” said Peter.

The M & M’s conferred with each other, then nodded.

Ed’s people had the robot place one wheel against the side of the rock and ambulate forward. The rock rolled away readily in the light gravity. The robot’s microsampler needled the surface beneath.

Jan eagerly waited for the robot’s EGAD to send her results. When the data came, she grabbed it with her interpretive programs.

“I wish the budget cutters hadn’t taken out our rock chipper,” said Peter wistfully. “A piece of that rock might have been a consolation prize if there’s no water ice.”

A few minutes later, Jan slumped in dejection. “No H,0 in this particular ground. Sorry, guys.”

“Earlier, when the robot climbed first up then down, it seems that it entered a secondary or tertiary impact crater,” said Mandeep, who had evidently been making good use of his own time. “That impact would have volatilized any water there.”

“Let’s get a move on,” said Ed. “It hates stopping in the cold.” They’d already had repeated problems with the lubricant in the robot’s joints setting up.

The picture didn’t waver, wobble, or move.

“Uh-oh,” said Peter.

“We’ve seized up,” Ed said, his soft voice unchanged even with bad news. “Either from the cold or the motion involved in moving the rock, putting an asymmetrical stress on the drive train. We’ll try calisthenics to loosen the lubricant. That worked before…”

The picture soon began jerking back and forth.

“Turn off the light to save the battery,” said Murray, his voice harsh with frustration. Three seconds later, the screen went black.

“Now’s a good time for a break,” Jan told Peter and the M & M’s. She stayed calm on the outside. Inside, she asked herself furiously, Any more bright unscientific ideas???

The greenling dreamed of a strange familiar planet with a fiercer star, hotter days, and colder nights than Earth. Green People spread across the world like a blanket, joining roots and branches to lift up living, leafy substance in dense canopies and glorious vaults. Small, soft, mobile creatures took shelter in the safe green spaces.

Into the greenling’s lucid dream, the racial memory encoded in its genes inserted a brief bit of education. Symbiosis is when dissimilar creatures live together for mutual benefit. They help each other.

The greenling heeded impatiently. It knew about symbiosis, and evolution, and many other things that Memory had explained before, both when the greenling was awake and when it dreamed. Memory was something the greenling took for granted. The greenling was eager for the next and more exciting part of the dream. Its whole life long, whenever it dreamed, it always had the same dream until the very end, when the dream always unfolded a little more than last time.

Green Paradise was imperfect, afflicted by insects: bad creatures with hard skins and sharp mouth parts that bored wood, chewed leaves, and sucked the living sap from People. In the end, the Green People left the plaguesome insects behind in the dust of their first, and outgrown, world. The Green People and their symbiotes leaped from the First World to planets across the stars. The greenling cheered the great triumph of the People even though it anticipated the next turn of the story with delicious dread.

The People met a great and unexpected horror.

Insects from far unknown stars attacked the green worlds of People. These Insects were like and unlike the insect kind on the First World. As large as small People or big symbiotes, the hateful creatures had segmented bodies with hard skins, deadly mouth parts, and cunning minds.

Intelligent insects, interjected Memory. The greenling’s genes were designed to unfold new traits in the natural progression of its physical maturity. Its racial memory unfolded in a coordinated manner, attuned to the greenling’s maturing ability to comprehend. They had starflight too. They weren’t content with the worlds they already infested. Insects are always eager to make new infestations.

The greenling unquestioningly agreed.

Ever since Paradise, the Symbiotes had made tools and machines for the Green People. The insect-Enemy made tools with which to attack People. On world after world, the insect-Enemy ravaged the living-grounds of the Green People.

The symbiotes made special new tools—

Weapons—

—With which to fight back. Attack and counterattack, defeat and victory seesawed across worlds and stars.

War.

The greenling knew that this dream was not a made-up fantasy, having been instructed by Memory that the dream was real history. But the greenling did not understand what “real” meant. It only knew a small, safe, familiar universe of which it was the contented center. It experienced sunlight and rain and home-ground shared with friendly mobile things. Those constituted its reality. The dream seemed like a story, and a very entertaining one at that.

The greenling expected, but still found deliciously chilling, the dreamed image of a deserted town, the bleached vegetable corpses of People heaped on the graveyard, too many dead to decently compost. The Symbiotes were all gone, having fled for their lives. The home-structures they abandoned were broken into by Insects wanting living sap and blood to suck.

In time, the Green People devised new weapons of their own to defend themselves. Not like the machines of the symbiotes and insect-Enemy. Green weapons.

As the part of the story that the greenling knew drew to an end, it shivered with anticipation that the story would go on and dread that it would not. What could possibly happen next? The Green People had to win the war—didn’t they?

In the break room down the hall from her office, Jan poured a cup of coffee for Peter. The pot was fresh and full now. It wouldn’t be by 3 in the morning, when the changing alignment of Earth and Moon closed the communications window for this crucial traverse. “I think I know why I fixated on that stupid rock,” Jan told Peter ruefully. “It reminds me of some geodes my ex-husband brought back from a diving trip to Canada. He found them in a crater lake.”

“Crater lake?”

“Yeah. So I guess the rock on the Moon reminded me of water, so I went for it. Mistake.”

Intuition usually served Jan well. But it could give false positives. She expected her confession to elicit more or less polite disapproval, but Peter murmured, “Very interesting. What hap—”

At that point, Charlie Tangley, the network computer technician, invaded the break room. “I detect coffee!” Charlie proceeded to empty a large fraction of the pot into a big commuter cup with bright Astroworld cartoons on it.

“What happened to the geodes?” Peter asked Jan.

“Well, I kept them around for a while for sentimental reasons, then—”

Charlie interrupted. “Sentimental? You?”

Taken aback, Jan wondered what Charlie meant. She knew that she could come off as brusque and cynical at times. In the years since her relationship with Mike died, had she developed a rough shell—like a geode—herself? “Anyway, after I bought a house, I tossed the geodes into the bluebonnet bed in the backyard.”

The erstwhile bluebonnet bed had been located next to the patio outside the back door. Jan involuntarily remembered the recent burglaries. She did not want to return to her house in the middle of the night. If Cocytus did its job, though, the science team would have enough data and jubilation to keep going all night, and she would go home in the safe light of day.

“You grow bluebonnets?” Charlie inquired.

“I attempted once. Unfortunately, I’ve got a brown thumb.”

“I hear if you scrape the seeds they’ll germinate. There’s a technical term for that. Scarification.”

“I tried,” said Jan. “No dice.”

Charlie Tangley was a nice guy, but people called him Charlie Tangent for very good reason. Peter regarded Charlie with the kind of look he might have given a garish invertebrate encountered while collecting rocks in the field.

“Where do we go next?” Jan asked Peter.

Peter had been updating the modeling of Aitken Crater with the data from Cocytus. “The bug’s not in the deepest part of the cold trap yet. I’m convinced that it needs to be, if Ed can get it going again.”

“I read in Av Leak, that is, Aviation Week, that Japan’s working on a new rover. For Mars,” Charlie informed them. “The Japanese thought it would be technically easier than a lunar-polar rover. Moon pole cold is worse than summer on Mars, you know.”

Ignoring Charlie, Peter told Jan, “I want to revise the road map. There’s a path through the part of the crater where the shadow is deepest, then up a steep wall and back into sunlight in less than an hour.”

Jan nodded eagerly. “Great idea. If only Ed can get the bug going again—”

A faint chime reverberated from down the hall. “Your workstation is calling,” said Charlie cheerily. “Maybe Ed did.”

As Jan hurried down the hall with Peter, he asked, “What was inside those geodes?”

Jan felt momentary embarrassment. Mike had been a limnologist, diving to study populations of fish. He’d found the geodes, one broken in half and the other intact, in the debris of an underwater rock slide in the cold blue bottom of the lake. He brought them to Jan as a present because her research had just veered toward space geology. Her background was chemistry, though, and even doing extraterrestrial chemical geology, she’d never been a rock jock. So his geodes had been of only brief interest to her at the time. “Agate, I guess. Green crystalline stuff in spherical layers. If you’re interested,” Jan went in an afterthought, “I’ll dig them out of the flower bed for you.”

Peter flicked her an appreciative look. Jan noticed that he had large, expressive brown eyes with long lashes, and a good physique. That was the moment—unexpected timing, on a difficult night with the Cocytus mission hanging by a thread—when Jan realized that she had gotten over Mike, once and for all. Getting a better job, buying a house, even sorting through and putting away things that reminded her of Mike, hadn’t made that happen. Time had. It had been six years since she wistfully placed Mike’s old geodes on the ground among bluebonnets that never grew.

To the greenling’s delight, its dream did continue. Among the Green People, and among the symbiotes too, there were individuals with special intelligence, skill and understanding of how the Universe worked—scientists. The greenling saw Green scientists and symbiote scientists join in hope and desperation on a project, the aim of which was to save the future.

They took the essence of living substance—genes—from Green People, plus some from symbiotes, and crafted the genes into new kinds of potential Green People carefully written in artificial seeds. Then they cast the seeds out into the universe.

The scientists realized that hardly one out of thousands of seeds would land in a suitable place. But the seeds were durable to the point of immortality until the moment of germination, and in order to germinate, their needs were few: solar radiation, traces of water, and granular rock—sand, dust or soil—in which to take root. Whether a seed germinated in the time it took for a world to go around its sun, or the time it took for a sun to go around its galaxy, did not matter. Memory said: It took a thousand generations and grief untold for Green People to learn how to defeat Insect Enemies. The memory of how that was done must last forever.

Watchfulness must endure. Forever. Because some of the hive-ships of the Enemy flew away from the fields of war—like winged bark-borers flying away from sterilizing fire, seeking fresh treeskin to infest.

Arbor-ships can’t outrace hive-ships. But Green Seeds can.

That wasn’t the kind of interesting information that Memory usually dispensed to its avid student. This time, Memory meant something different and somehow ominous.

The greenling abruptly awoke from its dream with rain tapping on its outer surfaces. Despite the pleasant sensation, the greenling found itself uncomfortable on the inside. Always before, the entertaining dream had left the greenling feeling pleased. This time, the last part of the dream felt hard and unfriendly to the greenling, like a rock that the roots of its soul had to grow around.

Even worse, the greenling immediately discovered something strange in its own self.

For a couple of years, a cluster of growths had swelled on the greenling’s central stem, gradually becoming a familiar part of its intimate world. But now the cluster felt large, odd and awkward, as though something needed to be done with it.

The hard dream had somehow touched the greenling’s inmost parts and changed the greenling. Such an unsettling thing had never happened to it before.

Tinythings scurried on the ground beside the base of the home-structure. These were the largest sort of tinythings in the greenling’s home-ground, with long active legs and busy feelers. The greenling abruptly flicked a sticky string out, snared a tinything, and ate it.

The greenling could survive on light, grains of rock, and water, but it had the means to supplement its diet with lesser organisms which its metabolism efficiently reduced to their component minerals. The enhanced diet made the greenling grow bigger and stronger with rapidity. Also, it liked the crunchiness of the tinythings as it incorporated them. Tonight, though, the greenling wasn’t really in the mood for snacking. It watched the other tinythings intently, registering them as tiny blurs of heat and weak electromagnetic field, wondering why they held more than the usual temporary interest for it.

Then Memory spoke in its intangible whisper. Those are insects.

Sudden understanding shocked the greenling. Of course! The tinythings had hard, crunchy skins. They chewed and sucked juices from the mindless plants in the home-ground. Insects! Enemy?—the greenling wondered wildly.

Memory said, Those are mere insects like the pests on the First World. Insects but not Enemy. Not yet. Not unless evolution makes them much bigger and more dangerous and intelligent.

A gout of torrential rain descended on the greenling, liquidly pummeling its branches like the realization that beat on its soul. It had always been told that its dream was real. Now it understood what real meant. Dead People, vegetable corpses piled high, desiccated forests and burnt green worlds, everything that the dream had shown the greenling, unfolding over its whole young life, the whole story that it enjoyed so much, had really happened, just like the rain was happening.

Sapthirsty, murdering Insects really existed. And real meant they could hurt the greenling too.

With unaccustomed fear, the greenling urgently scanned its familiar surroundings.

The structure that the greenling grew beside housed a hospitable thing. She let the greenling live beside her own home-structure, which shaded the greenling from the sun and sheltered it from the wind. Sometimes the hospitable thing poured mineral-rich water on the ground near the greenling’s roots, which the greenling liked very much, finding it a tasty treat. The hospitable thing lacked a carapace, and she was warm-blooded and soft-skinned, and so could not be an insect. In the same structure there lived a small warm thing which seemed to be a symbiote of the large thing.

At that very moment, the small symbiote was sitting just inside a glass window of the home structure, motionless, perceiving the greenling through the glass. It did that every day.

No Intelligent Insects infested the home-structure.

The smallest and quickest of warm things lived in the air, sometimes coming to briefly stand on the greenling’s branches, which tickled. Memory had long ago informed the greenling that those were birds, and harmless to greenlings. Twelve drowsed in a nearby tree.

Restless and uneasy, not reassured by the normality around it, the greenling opened its senses to receive the whole scope of radiation that bathed its world. Most of the radiation was meaningful—clots of it meant birds and other things, and stipples in the sky were stars. More of the radiation was patterned in a certain way that meant machines.

The insect-Enemy had created terrible war machines. But symbiotes built machines too, for good and useful purposes. Patterned vibrations in the air and ground told the greenling that big machines moved on the ground and high up in the atmosphere, in exactly the way they always had. The familiarity of it all would have lulled the greenling into its usual, comfortable, happy state, except it still felt troubled about how the dream had ended. Or rather, the dream had ended without an ending, and that felt unfair. Or maybe it was even worse, and harder for the greenling to understand, than unfairness.

The greenling brooded. Deep inside, its cluster ached to do something, only the greenling didn’t know what.

The cluster had started out as a bundle of stalks like a bird’s nest. Now it was a complex array of curved, meshing members. Had the greenling’s foliage not been so thick, and had it been possible for the hospitable thing to see the cluster, she would have been struck by the strangeness of it. But she did not know it was there. Her small symbiote did. Two years ago, the small one had mistaken the cluster, which was busy growing, for an invisible and irresistible bird, and leaped at it. The small one never made that mistake again.

The greenling stretched its senses to a refinement it hadn’t known it possessed, sensing details of its world that it had never seen before. Before, it had studied the world with childlike curiosity. It felt different now, driven to learn of its surroundings. So the greenling instantly detected two sizable new things climbing over the fence in a comer of the home-ground.

“Hey Janko, you and I are running neck and neck in the Who Screwed Up the Bug Tally,” Ed greeted Jan when she got to her workstation. Ed could be lighthearted now, because he’d gotten the bug going again.

The image seemed jerkier than before, with slow progress across re-golith rougher than the surface on the first part of the traverse. The patch of light thrown by the bug’s headlight wiggled like an amoeba.

“Come on, baby, come on,” Man-deep cooed at Cocytus.

Without warning, the ragged regolith gleamed in Cocytus’ headlight.

“Look! There!” Jan exclaimed.

“Yes!” Ed said triumphantly.

Shadowed by the impact cone in the center of a deeply shadowed crater, a whitish-gray pocket lay cra-died in the depths of Aitken. It could only be frozen volatiles. Ed directed the bug that way, zigzagging around rocks bigger than itself. Each lurch of the image shot a needle of suspense into Jan; she feared that any zig or zag might be the bug’s last movement. It seemed like ages until it reached the white stuff, which looked so much like old and dirtied snow that hope took Jan’s breath away. “Sample,” Jan whispered. “Quick.”

Ed said, “We better grab the core and go. The bug’s got terminal arthritis.”

“Transition control to me.” Seconds later, Jan was operating the bug’s core drill from her own workstation keyboard. “The drill’s deployed,” she reported tensely. Peter leaned over her shoulder. “Contact.” She keyed in the force control. “Low force. Resistance.” In a window in her workstation, she had EGAD results coming in. Highly probable H_2O! They were in the money. She’d trained for this in simulations. Now she knew exactly what to do. Fatigue and worry vanished in a laserlike intensity of concentration. “Make that mid force. We’ve got penetration of the surface. —Hey!” The drill had stopped responding to Jan’s commands. “I’m not getting response! Maybe I’ve got a glitch on my end—Ed??”

Ed, punching his own backup controls, made a choking sound. “The drill arm locked up.”

“It’s not in deep enough to do any good at all,” Jan said in despair. Nothing Jan did could make the drill penetrate the surface any further. She tried toggling it in and out. The result was that when the drill finally froze up unalterably, it was in the half-retracted position, out of the regolith and extending over the bug’s head. There might be a trace of ice sticking to the tube; no more of a sample than that.

Mandeep cursed each of the robot’s lubricants by trade name. Murray said savagely, “Looks like this’ll be an early night after all!”

Peter shook his head so energetically that his shaggy hair flew from side to side. “Not yet. Look where the bug is. Only fifty yards from the crater rim. It’s a steep fifty yards. But the rim is in sunlight. A little solar heating might warm the bug up well enough—and long enough—to run back in and get the sample.”

“We do it,” Jan decided.

The things vaulting over the fence around the greenling’s home-ground were somewhat larger than the hospitable thing that lived in the home-structure. But that thing was semirooted; she always kept at least one appendage on the ground, and had never once proceeded over a fence. Moreover, rain made the hospitable thing flee into the home-structure, whereas these two seemed busy and energetic even though water poured from the sky and pooled on the ground. These had to be a different kind of thing—possibly a kind that needed wet air moisturizing their breathing organs in order to be active.

The greenling suspiciously perceived the two things dash toward the box affixed to the wall of the home-structure. Because the greenling could sense electromagnetic fields and radiation, it knew that the box admitted electricity into the structure. The hospitable thing liked living in a bath of electromagnetic field, with electricity streaming through the walls of her home; the greenling thought she might need such surroundings in order to live. All organisms had to have the right environment.

The two strange things made themselves briefly active in the proximity of the box. Electricity abruptly ceased flowing into the house-structure.

The greenling stiffened all its needles in alarm. The thing that lived in the structure would not want to have no electricity all around her. The lack might even hurt the hospitable thing.

These new things had to be Enemies. Enemies, right here on the greenling’s own home-ground.

It had never met an Enemy before. But its reflexes had been distilled from a millennium of war. With the deep-rooted patience that only a predatory plant can muster, the greenling waited in the hope that the invaders would stray toward it.

To the greenling’s bloodless, clear joy, the enemy things approached the wall-opening that greenling stood near. Too slowly to catch a mobile organism’s attention, the greenling stretched itself closer, hardly stirring the molecules of the air as it parted them.

The two enemy things touched the wall-opening, which was tightly shut, as always when the hospitable thing wasn’t proceeding through the opening. The greenling now understood what the enemies wanted: to break into the home-structure, which was just as bad as their intruding onto the home-ground, because it was all the greenling’s very own territory.

The invading things paid the greenling no heed. And no wonder its presence didn’t matter to them: they were too far away for it to reach, and too interested in the wall-opening for the greenling to hope that they would blunder into its eager branches. The greenling’s frustration made the cluster in its core throb with strange, painful tension.

One of the things extended a long, sharp part. It touched the edge where the wall-opening met solid wall. Knowing that the edge was a relatively weak part of the home-structure, the greenling watched anxiously.

The enemy thing began boring into the structure.

Primed by a lifetime of instructive dreaming, the greenling recognized boring. The greenling instantly associated what it was perceiving with one, only one possible, galvanizing reality. Insects. Plant-borers. Destroyers.

A new feeling rushed through the greenling as though heated water had entered its roots and instantly traveled to the ends of its twigs. For the first time in its life, the greenling was outraged.

The cluster in its core pulsed with expectancy so intense that it hurt. In the instant before the greenling could not withstand the sensation any longer, it suddenly knew what the cluster existed for.

The greenling did not have to wait at all. The home-boring enemies were close enough already. The greenling had weapons of its very own.

The cold-racked robot slowly, painfully retreated up the crater wall. They had turned off the headlight to save the battery. The image showed nothing but a black bowl of landscape with bright untwinkling stars above it.

Go up and out: it was simple. It was also incredibly tedious to watch. Jan’s neck muscles tied themselves in a painful macrame of tension knots.

“Look at ten o’clock. That’s one of your geodes!” Peter hissed. “I’m marking its location. Why are green geodes scattered around in Aitken crater on the Moon, and in some crater lake in Canada?”

Jan shrugged. Fixated on Cocytus, she found it entirely academic that green geodes should occur in craters both on the Moon and in Canada.

Peter muttered something about organizing a diving trip. “What lake was it?”

“Reindeer Lake. Some geodes lying at the very bottom was what Mike said he found. In the dim cold deep,” Jan replied, probably sounding as distracted as she felt.

“I can’t imagine a meteor impact creating rocks like that.” Peter had decided to worry the geode mystery like a dog with a leather bone. “Tektites yes. Geodes no. If they were embedded in a soft meteor that burned up around them—yeah, maybe—but no known meteorites are like that.”

“We’ve got to get the ice,” Jan said. “That way, there’ll be a base established at Aitken. And then you can have somebody in a space suit hunt rocks for you.”

The bug’s field of view dipped into a chiaroscuro of black and bright spaces. “Ah,” said Mandeep. “We’ve happened into a very fresh crater here in the lip of Aitken. The far side of it is lit by sunlight.”

The camera’s field of view was too narrow for Jan to have guessed that much about the bug’s whereabouts. Annoyed at how little the picture told her, she abruptly summoned a computer-generated sketch of the rover in relation to the Moonscape, displayed in a window of her workstation.

Peter murmured, “If the bug can climb to the main crater rim, it’ll catch some of those rays.”

“It’s in a very fresh secondary crater,” said Mandeep. “And look at the streaking. A good deal of material has been flung about. I’m seeing fractured rocks, too, and other signs of violently ejected debris.”

The real-time animation in the window showed Cocytus in sketchy, car-toonlike form. It emerged from the crater with one last exertion of its drive train, scrabbling and flexing in the middle, like a silverfish crawling out a sink drain.

Sunlit Moonscape flooded the image of the lunar highlands ahead of Cocytus. The stars above the plain vanished, eclipsed by reflected sunlight. Jan tried raising the core drill. Reluctant, it went, higher, intercepting more of the steeply slanting solar radiation. The animated picture made it look like a formidable stinger on an outlandish insect.

Peter said, “Let’s reorient the bug so it catches even more rays, then—”

Without warning, the image flipped. It rotated through at least a full circle, blurred and indecipherable with a brief blaze of sun and a green flash.

“Not like that!” Peter gasped.

“We didn’t do that!’’ Ed retorted, his face aghast.

The screen went blank.

“Loss of signal?” Ed sounded incredulous. Behind him, Main Control became a buzzing hive of activity.

Jan felt a sense of composure wrap itself around her. She always reacted to a crisis this way: with detachment and crystal-clear thinking, emotionality reserved for later. “Did we get hit by a meteorite?” she asked Mandeep. “You said we just traversed a fresh impact crater. Are we in a meteorite shower?”

Mandeep paradoxically nodded but said, “No, the new crater’s not that fresh. It wasn’t made minutes ago, or light-weight debris would still be falling out of the sky.”

They reviewed the final inexplicable imagery, in slow motion. It told them nothing except that the bug had been spun off its feet and landed on its back. At the end came a weird green blur in the field of view, probably an artifact of a damaged, failing camera.

Peter muttered “Almost looked like a bush in that last frame. Can’t be a bush. But darned it if didn’t look like—”

A tap on Jan’s part-opened office door interrupted Peter’s argument with his common sense. Charlie Tangley peered in. “How’s it going?”

“Pretty damn bad,” Jan grated.

“Oh. Sorry to bring more bad news, but we’re getting a lot of rain, and the news radio says there’s street flooding all over the city. If we don’t go home soon, we’ll be stranded here.”

“I’m staying at the Best Western down the street,” Peter said impatiently.

Jan said, “We may not be at this much longer anyway.”

Charlie helped himself to a spare chair and watched the efforts to contact Cocytus. For once, Charlie found nothing irrelevant to remark upon. He had the decorum of an attendee at a funeral.

Half an hour later, the video link showed Ed sitting with his head in his hands, fingers clutching his hair. “I give up. It’s gone. Something nailed us. God threw a rock at us. Something.”

Jan felt sick. If it really had been an incoming meteor, it was cosmically unfair, a one-in-trillions mischance. Charlie shook his head mournfully and slipped out.

Having saved the one unexplored hope until it was the last hope of all, Jan reviewed the EGAD data from the last microsample. And there it was. The signature of water, clear as a bell, standing up to cross-analysis. “Guess what, guys, she said shakily. “All was not lost. It did find water. This we can publish.”

There was moment of surprised silence from her team. Then Murray said, “Thank God the budget cutters didn’t get the EGAD!”

“But I wanted ice stratigraphy,” said Mandeep, forlorn. “It would tell us so much about the history of cometary impacts.”

Jan still had her emergency calm on. Wearing it like an overcoat to hide her emotionality, she said with even-toned assurance, “I think we’ll be back at Aitken Crater before too long, and then we’ll send somebody out for a nice long core sample.”

Peter absurdly added, “We’ll tell ’em to take hedge clippers too.”

An hour later, a few minutes past two A.M., Jan pulled into her driveway, cold, tired, hungry, and wet, especially from the ankles down: the parking lot had been four inches deep in rain water. All the easily-flooded intersections in the area had been inundated, but traffic was nonexistent. She’d been able to take to the middle of the streets and get through.

More than the cold, the memory of the last moments of Cocytus made her shake with turbulent letdown. Time and fatigue had shredded her calm. Fumbling with house keys and key-ring flashlight, she opened the front door and stepped inside before she remembered that she’d left porch and living room lights blazing.

Maybe lightning had knocked her power out.

But Nutmeg normally greeted Jan. Lack of house lights never bothered a cat. More than that was wrong here. Jan’s feeling of habit, of returning home as always, did a sickening reorientation, like that last picture from the Moon, hit by the realization that her house might have been broken into. By somebody who might still be here.

Fear ran down her spine like ice water. Jan stumbled backward to her door and jerked it open. She stood there, undecided whether to retreat through the cold and wet to her car. She had always thought she’d smell sweat, cigarette, something in the air of the room if a criminal was hiding there.

With a cloud-soft touch of fur, Nutmeg materialized to twine around Jan’s legs. Nutmeg took rapid little steps, as if agitated. But she didn’t bolt out the door, and wasn’t cowering under the bed, either. Considering that Nutty was a total coward, there could not possibly be an intruder in the house.

A scratching sound from the direction of the back door made Jan jump. But the noise came from outside. The back door remained firmly shut. Jan crept to the breakfast nook window and parted the blinds to peer out.

Next to the patio, the nameless shrub flailed in the wind. Jan hadn’t realized that the shrub had grown tall enough to scrape the eaves of the house, but it was doing so. The shrub’s greenery still looked like cat fur. In point of fact, it looked like an angry, wet cat’s fur, standing at attention as the shrub twitched in the rainy wind. The plant looked startlingly alive. “Maybe I overdid the fertilizer last time,” Jan muttered.

Released from the trammels of alarm, Jan’s tired brain wheeled and careened back to the blurry last image sent from the Moon. The green flash. She belatedly realized that Peter was right, that the last blurry frame had looked—in a vague, Rorschach-blot way—just like a shrub in the bright sun.

Having a wild notion like that in her brain felt uncomfortable to Jan, like water in her ears after swimming. She dismissed it, then checked around the house with a flashlight, found nothing amiss, and went to bed, too tired to worry about the electricity still being off. That was the power company’s problem.

As Jan stretched out under the covers, aching with the overdue pleasure of lying down, she remembered something. Something good.

The EGAD had found water. So manned missions would soon be sent to the south pole of the Moon to build a base, mine the ice and explore the weirdly beautiful terrain. Maybe she ought to update her application to the Astronaut program and maybe, just maybe, someday leave her own boot prints on the icy dust of Aitken Crater.

And find shrubbery on the sunny north rim—?

Jan smiled at the absurdity of the image. No. No plants existed on the Moon. Not yet. With a permanent base—having dome, and air, and warmth and all—somebody’d do some landscaping with grass and bushes under the dome. Moonscaping, as Peter Reiten might put it. Jan liked Peter. He made her feel interested and relaxed at the same time. And he was single… Jan went to sleep dreaming about the future.

The greenling threshed the rain in excitement and disappointment. It hadn’t known how to use the new ability of its cluster. The attempt hadn’t gone right.

Tension had turned into a thrilling instant of release as the greenling hurled a bolt from its cluster toward the enemy things. But it was young. Its weaponry was rudimentary, just sharp bolts split off its own substance, hardened and sharpened by the secretive processes of the cluster. The first bolt had flown faster than a bird. But it missed the enemy thing and shattered the corner of a brick on the home-structure wall. The other bolt hit one of the enemy things, but merely knocked off the mouthpart with which it was attacking the home-structure. The things themselves then ran away with very rapid mobility.

The greenling sensed when the hospitable thing came home to the home-structure and did not die or flee from the lack of electricity but rather went to its usual night-rooting place inside the structure. The greenling was relieved. At least that much of the world was right again.

But it had failed to kill enemies invading its own home-ground.

The greenling extended a sticky string to retrieve the mouthpart and brooded over it, manipulating the object with its inner, flexible twigs. The object gravitated into the greenling’s cluster.

Not insect part, said Memory of the object clutched and fingered by the cluster. Just a tool. A drilling tool.

The greenling was perplexed. Were the things that had invaded the yard not Insects after all? The greenling thought hard. Other than the mouthpart, which turned out to be a tool, they resembled the thing who lived in the house. Maybe they were its own kind.

If so, it had tried to kill beings who were not true enemies. The greenling’s branches sagged in consternation. Without meaning to, it must have made a terrible mistake.

Memory rectified the greenling’s thoughts. Mistake, but no wrong. It was good to drive them off. They may be enemies of the thing that lives here. Not every thing is a friend to its own kind.

The greenling struggled to grasp the difficult new concept. It was the opposite of symbiosis, where unrelated things depend on each other. Kindred things might prey on each other? But the reason for kindred was help and strength in numbers, as it had learned from its dream. Feeling small and lonely in a large and complicated universe, the greenling suddenly asked, Do I have kindred?

Memory replied. The seeds of vigilance fly far and wide from the war-ground, ahead of the infesting hive-ships of the Enemy. There must be others in this part of time and space who found home-ground. Others, like you, growing and learning.

The good world that had received the greenling turned its face to the sun. All that had happened soaked into the greenling’s consciousness like water into loam. Gradually the greenling realized that its dream hadn’t ended for an important reason. The end of the dream lay in the future.

The greenling’s cluster fondled the boring tool dropped by the enemy things. The cluster could alter the tool and use it to make better weapons, if it had the right kind of materials to work with. The industrious cluster made plans.

Sooner or later, the insect-Enemy would come. The greenling and its kindred, equipped with ancient memory and secret arsenals, waited.

Content

The Vigilant Ones
by Alexis Glynn Lather