A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge Page B

contact with the less well insulated fabric of their coveralls. When they stopped for long, it was important not to be in deep snow, else they were quickly surrounded by sublimation mist. Every ten meters, they set down a seismo sensor or a thumper. When they got the whole pattern in place, they would have a good picture of any nearby caverns. More important for this landing, they would have a good idea what lay inside these buildings. Their big goal: written materials, pictures. Finding a children's illustrated reader would mean certain promotion for Diem.
    Shades of reddish grays on black. Ezr reveled in the unenhanced imagery. It was beautiful, eerie. This was a place where the Spiders hadlived . On either side of their path, the shadows climbed up the walls of Spider buildings. Most were only two or three stories, but even in the dim red light, even with their outline blurred by the snows and the darkness, they could not have been confused with something built by humans. The smallest doorways were generously wide, yet most were less than 150 centimeters high. The windows (carefully shuttered; this place had been abandoned in the methodical way of owners who intended to return) were similarly wide and low.
    The windows were like hundreds of slitted eyes looking down on the party of five and their come-along walker. Vinh wondered what would happen if a light came on behind those windows, a crack of light showing between the shutters. His imagination ran with the possibility for a moment. What if their feelings of smug superiority were in error? These werealiens. It was very unlikely life could have originated on a world so bizarre as this; once upon a time they must have had interstellar flight. Qeng Ho's trading territory was four hundred light-years across; they had maintained a continuous technological presence for thousands of years. The Qeng Ho had radio traces of nonhuman civilizations that were thousands—in most cases, millions—of light-years away, forever beyond direct contact or even conversation. The Spiders were only the third nonhuman intelligent race ever physically encountered: three in the eight thousand years of human space travel. One of those had been extinct for millions of years; the other had not achieved machine technology, much less spaceflight.
    The five humans, walking between the shadowy buildings with slitted windows, were as close to making human history as Vinh could imagine. Armstrong on Luna, Pham Nuwen at Brisgo Gap—and now Vinh and Wen and Patil and Do and Diem pacing down this street of Spiders.
    There was a pause in the background radio traffic, and for a moment the loudest sounds were the creak of his coveralls and his own breathing. Then the tiny voices resumed, directing them across an open space, toward the far end of the valley. Apparently, the analysts thought that narrow cleft might be the entrance to caves, where the local Spiders were presumedly holed up.
    "That's odd," came an anonymous voice from on high. "Seismo heard something—is hearing something—from the building next on your right."
    Vinh's head snapped up and he peered into the gloom. Maybe not a light, but asound.
    "The walker?"—Diem.
    "Maybe it's just the building settling?"—Benny.
    "No, no. This was impulsive, like a click. Now we're getting a regular beat, some damping. Frequency analysis...sounds like mechanical equipment, moving parts and such....Okay, it's mainly stopped, just some residual ringing. Crewleader Diem, we've got a very good position on this racket. It was on the far corner, four meters up from street level. Here's a guide marker."
    Vinh and the others moved forward thirty meters, following the marker glyph that floated in their head-up displays. It was almost funny, the furtiveness of their movements now, even though they would be in plain sight of anyone in the building.
    The marker took them around the corner.
    "The building doesn't look special," said Diem. Like the others, this