"Trog Base, this is Trog One, do you copy?"
Something stirred in the darkness. Silent for uncountable millions of years, disturbed by trespassers only recently, briefly, then abandoned once again, the endless twisted passages now whispered with the echoes of a kind of movement which their builders had once made.
Within them, somethingperhaps even someonehad ceased to be oblivious to her surroundings.
"We copy you five-by-five, Comrade Agriculturalist Valerian. What can we do y'for?"
Beneath the massive shield of her great body, the hardened ends of more than a hundred small limbslocomotors and specialized manipulatorsrattled and clicked as, pair by pair by pair, they slipped over the edge of the low pedestal on which she had stood sleeping for so long. Her most recent coherent memory was of having been placed there by her creators. It was the last thing she had been fully aware ofif such an expression was applicable under the circumstancesbefore losing her awareness for incalculable ages.
"We are still standing within the air lock, Colonel SebastianoI mean, Trog Base. The outer door is down, as you can plainly see since you are standing almost on top of itand apparently the new gold-foil antenna is working, or you would not be hearing this. The fruits of yesterday's capitalism should never be underrated. We have now swung the inner door aside and for the first time, Comrade Colonel, I myself truly believe that 5023 Eris is of artificial construction."
Her first new awareness had been of a short, broad-band burst of radiation exceeding that which was normally to be expected from cosmic rays and similar incidental energies. It could have been a nova in the near stellar neighborhood, even an unusually powerful solar flare. More to the point, its apparent proximity and magnitude had trembled on a threshold she had been constructed to interpret as potentially threatening to her own existence, and therefore to even more important values that she and she alone had been trusted to preserve.
"I copy you, Andre. Glad to hear you're enjoying the sights. Please keep us advised of what everybody's doing down there, just in case something goes wrong, so the next bunch of victims will have some idea of what they're up against."
With enormous difficulty, she slewed and slithered down into the walkway running past the base of the pedestal, seeking traction, and attempting to point herself in the direction she knew to be correct. She was a superb thing of her kind. It was probable that no other sapient species could have brought anything even remotely as durable and reliable as she was into existence. Nevertheless, she had not moved from her place of waiting for an unimaginably long time, and her internal mechanisms for maintenance, regeneration, self-repair, and buoyancy control were slow responding to her needs.
"I understand, Trog Base, like dismantling a bomb in the moviesand here was I, believing that you simply enjoyed chatting with me. We are about to start into the hemispheric chamber where the many tunnels diverge, and we can see the fluorescent adhesive markings Eichra Oren left behind just before our glorious United World Soviet attempted to steal this place from Mister Thoggosh. Do you copy?"
Soon, in addition to her other difficulties, there was a problem with the medium she'd been propelling herself through. By rights it should have remained a thin, transparent, chemically neutral liquid. Certainly it had been that way when she had surrendered consciousness unthinkable ages ago. Now instead, having forced her way through a semi-hardened plug of the stuff into what appeared to her broad spectrum of sensors to be a near-vacuum filling the corridors all around her, what was left of her original environment seemed to lie congealed in thickened puddles on the floor.
"Copy, Trog One. Lay off the politics if you can, Andre. It isn't that I don't agree with you wholeheartedlymost of us do. But this little world has seen enough trouble recently, without your bringing up the late, lamented invasion by the combined"
"And somewhat pathetic"
"Yeah, and somewhat pathetic battle fleets of Earth. Tell you what: just be satisfied that they all went home in a snit, and stick to the travelogue you signed on for, okay, buddy?"
Perhaps "awareness" was not the proper word for what she felt. Perhaps "felt" was equally inappropriate. The fact was that, in the combined vocabularies of 100,000 sapient species scattered throughout an equal number of alternative probabilities, no entirely accurate expression existed to describe a phenomenon that was the transient manifestation of a highly complex process which could not be called thought, which was not exactly feeling, but which was far too sophisticated to compare with the dull-witted adding-machine workings of electromechanical computing devices. Nor was vocabulary the only barrier to fully comprehending, across a yawning gulf of time, space, and conceptuality, the precise nature of what was going on inside her.
"Okay, you got it, Comrade Colonel, sir. Please to inform Eichra Oren that his fluorescent patches glow very cheerfully in the darkness where he slapped them onto the wallsbut that regrettably they are beginning to peel off. I believe that the surfaces are either too slippery, like Teflon, or that perhaps there is some sort of volatile substance hanging about in the atmosphere, attacking the adhesive."
"That's a big roger, Trog One. And you're telling him yourself, since he's standing right here beside me now, along with Colonel Tai, late of the PRC's Extra-Special Forces. Eichra Oren advises that it's probably a little bit of bothslickness and solvent. The lovely Dr. Rosalind Nguyen, also here I'm glad to say, warns us, solventwise, that you'd better keep your helmets sealed up down there or your offspring just might need two of them per suit."
The recent radiation surge had been detected, not upon her own immediate surface, here within the eternally night-blackened corridors she had somnolently inhabited for inexpressible eons, but on the surface far abovefor which she had also been constructed to "feel" responsible. For herknown to her long-absent creators as well as to herself, as "Model 17"the discrete location of any such disturbance didn't matter, tied in as intimately as she was with the vaster artificial organism of which she was a part. What she "felt," with regard to the disturbance, might have been compared to a tickle or an itch. And her reflexive "instinct" to scratch it was growing stronger and more irresistible by the nanosecond.
"I am rogering the hell out of that, Col . . . wonder what . . . must be doing to our . . ."
"Trog One, this is Trog Base. Andre, you're breaking up down there, do you copy?"
Model 17's second awareness was that something had intruded here again recently. That expression, too, failed adequately to express what was conveyed by the dense cascades of fleeting subatomic particles that served as nerve impulses for an entity accustomed to calculating the passage of time in substantial fractions of the life cycle of an entire universe. The latest trespass had occurred within the last seventy-two hours, vastly less than an eye-blink to Model 17. Whatever the intruder's nature had been, it was not the kind of being she "thought" of as her own kind. Even worse, it had left its untidy, alien traces everywhere.
"Trog One, Trog Base. Do you copy?"
More than anything else, this particular response, bordering on the emotional, was sufficient reason to think of Model 17 as "she." She had been created in the precise image of her makers, each and every one of whom had been a fully functional, if parthenogenetic, female. Her sense of what was proper and fastidious exceeded even theirsexactly as they had intendedand her inclination to nurture and defend that for which she had been constructed to feel responsible was no less pronounced.
"Trog One, this is Trog Base! Andre, do you copy?"
"Very sorry about that, Trog Base. Complications have arisen. Please to give us just one fucking minute."
"Sorry, Doc! Hey, watch it, Trog One, there's a lady present. Will you please tell us what you're doing? Do you copy, Trog One?"
In part, Model 17's creators had bestowed upon her such powerful maternal inclinations because that accurately reflected their own underlying nature, unconscious and virtually uniform throughout the species. In part, the exercise had been deliberate. As they had conceived it, hers was a monumentally maternal task. To her creatorsand now to Model 17it was absolutely without question the most maternal task ever undertaken.
"Copy, Trog Base. This is Roger Betal, the new, improved Trog One, stuck here in the branching-chamber for the duration, according to plan. We all got started down that marked tunnel and lost you, Colonel, so now there's a Trog Two, for whom I'll relay."
In Model 17, the mere awareness of recent trespasses generated nothing resembling alarm. Even "heightened alertness" would probably have put it too strongly. Model 17 simply performed according to her technical specifications, doing exactly what she had been constructed to do under the presently governing circumstances by her farsighted builders, exactly as she had remained dormant under the previously governing circumstances for more than three quarters of a billion revolutions of the planet she "regarded" as her home world, about the star she "thought" of as the Sun.
Now, reoriented and restored to an acceptable percentage of her fullest capacities, she began making her difficult way along the offensively filthy corridor (even in conditions approaching free fall, it seemed unnatural to her to be crawling, centimeter by centimeter, along the bottom of a passageway instead of jet-propelling herself through its center) upward, slowly, toward the surface.
"Roger, Trog OneI mean `copy,' Roger. And will you kindly lean on them a little, down there, to keep us up to date? I know it makes me a boring person, but we'd prefer not to be left with any unsolved mysteries up here. Do you copy?"
"Copy you, Trog Base. I'm sorry to say that we've got a Trog Three now. C.C. Jones has been appointed Trog Two, stationary, and isn't liking it much. He's relaying to me. I sure wish we had some more of that gold foil to string along these corridors as an antenna. These little suit radios are the only good equipment we were issued, but the rest of the party only made it about seventy-five meters before I lost them. Some kinda stuff this place is made of."
"Copy, Trog One. If it stops neutrinos, it'll sure as shit stop radiosorry, Doc. Keep us advised."
Model 17 crawled onward and upward, ignoring all clutter and decay now, having just received indication that two separate parties were descending toward her, following different routes. Whether her makers had intended her to operate in precisely this manner was questionable. Perhaps they had built betteror at least more thoroughlythan even they realized, emphasizing certain aspects of her fundamental programming to the detriment of certain others.
"That's a roger, Trog Base, and so am II always wanted to say that. Trog Three made it to the place we were warned about, where the fluorocarbon's congealed almost solid. Now I don't feel quite so bad about being left out of all the fun. They're making extremely rude remarks down there with reference to Vaseline and Jell-O. Also, we now have a Trog Fourmade it almost three hundred meters that time, believe it or notand it's Remgar d'Nod's turn in the barrel. The suggestion is that the tunnel must be acting as a waveguide. Do you copy?"
"I copy your copy, Trog One, Remgar d'Nod is at Trog Three, saving him the trouble of having to wipe Vaseline and Jell-O off of all eight feet. You can reassure Trog Four that they should be getting into cleaner stuff any time now."
Perhaps it was only that she had been built to reprogram herself on the basis of new data: the noise and heat (which she was ill equipped to recognize for what it was) of a battle raging briefly over the surface of the asteroid; or an awareness that the trespassers were returning. Whatever the case, restoring her environment to original specifications would now be her second priorityimmediately after she attended to these latest alien invaders of her realm.
"With due respect, Colonel, sir, it's getting kind of creepy down there, and I think they've got better things to worry about than my repeating what they heard at this morning's briefing. Hold on, we've got a Trog Five at another five hundred fifty meters. I don't know who's relaying traffic at Trog Four. The whole process is starting to take time and I'm not sure how accurate all these repetitions are. Wasn't there a party game like this, called `Gossip'? You copy?"
In any event, Model 17 understood that it was her duty, crafted into every molecule of her being, streaming through conductors relaying data to her central processor, charging each returning particle which served her in place of willto meet these invaders.
"Well excuse me all to hell, Trog One. We"
"Break, break, break! We got a bulletin, Colonel!"
"Copy, Trog One, go ahead."
"You know that statue they told us to watch out for, the one that looks like a giant trilobite?"
"We copy, Troghey, watch the fingers!"
"Sorry, Juan. I, er, copy you, Trog One. This is Eichra Oren, Roger. What about that statue?"
"Well, you can tell all of its many admirers that it must be off on a museum tour."
"What?"
"Trog Five is at the traffic island where they told us to look for itand it's gone!"