The Last Hour of Gann (63 page)

“Nice dismount,” said Crandall, and a few people laughed.

“You okay?” asked Nicci.

“Yeah.” Amber swiped away the pain-tears that
stung at her eyes and rolled off the worst of the debris. Mr. Yao was there to help her up and he kept his hands on her until her eyes adjusted to the considerable dark of the ruined building.

What she saw struck her briefly speechless.

This wasn’t a warehouse. She didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a warehouse. Dominating the first floor of the cube they had invaded was some sort of inner chamber with perfectly round, perfectly seamless, transparent walls. It reached all the way up to the ceiling and through it, up through the next floor and however many floors were between them and the top of this building, where it let in plenty of grey stormlight, enough that she could clearly see the spiders and the web.

They weren’t really spiders
, only three wiry legs around a shiny, metallic ball, but that was all she could think to call them. There didn’t seem to be many of them, but since they were all exactly alike and moved so fast, it was impossible to say just how many there were. They swarmed back and forth, effortlessly leaping, climbing and sliding along the thousands of filaments that filled their chamber. When Amber reached the inner wall (she had not been aware of walking toward it) and craned her neck to see up past the dark ceiling, she could see the entire web, with something like a spider’s egg sac the size of a man suspended in the very center. On this side of the spider-chamber, a bank of perfectly recognizable, if alien, computer stations formed a tight ring right up against the glass. Evenly-spaced between monitors were clear tubes that made Amber think of hamster cages. Now and then, a spider would slip through one of these tubes and extrude a proboscis of some sort from its stomach into the back of a computer, insert whatever it thought it was inserting into the entirely dead system, and then scuttle back out and onto the web.

“What is it?” Amber asked, dimly aware of what a stupid question that was. No one here could possibly know the answer.

“Besides creepy?” asked Maria.

Beside her,
Eric turned back to give the spiders a speculative looking over. “If I had to guess, I’d say either some sort of power generator or maybe a data storage and retrieval system. But yeah, all it is now is creepy.”

Scott
brought out his flashlight and clicked it on, painting the glass with a sudden pool of white radiance. The spiders scuttled on, oblivious. Scott watched them for a second or two, his face flexing uncertainly between wonder and revulsion, before a sudden gust of howling wind reminded him he was supposed to be saving the day. He swung the light around and almost immediately illuminated a door.

Everyone looked at it, at each other, at the door.
Scott took a tentative step forward, then abruptly changed his mind and went to examine one of the computer panels instead.

There were
chairs, Amber saw. Most of them were still neatly tucked in under their matching desks, as if the workers monitoring this station had only just stepped away for lunch and turned out all the lights behind them. There was a coffee cup at one of the desks, or whatever kind of cup they called it when they didn’t drink coffee. It had writing on the side, almost aged entirely away but still just perceptible in the fading light. ‘Gann’s Best Dad,’ maybe, or ‘Techies Do It With Tools’.

“Where’s the lizard?” asked
Scott suddenly.

“He wanted a look around,” said Amber, still staring sickly at the cup.

“But he’s coming?”

“That’s what he told me.”

Somewhere, Crandall snickered, whispered, and got a few more people to laugh.

“Why is it so clean in here?”
Nicci asked suddenly.

Amber, once more blushing, looked back at her baby sister and then around at the room. It was clean, she realized. The glass she’d been staring through for who knew how long now was damned near spotless. There was no stain of long-emptied drink on th
e inside of the coffee cup. The dead eyes of the many monitors were dust-free. The rain had brought in a spreading slick of water, but there was no sign of previous flooding. Amber had fallen on a good-sized heap of debris caused by the tree crashing through the wall…but ‘heap’ was definitely the operative word, and it was a clean, well-managed little heap at that.

“Someone’s living here,” said Dag.
“Someone’s living here
right now
.”

And the door opened.

Amber jumped along with everyone else. A few people screamed. She didn’t, but only because Nicci slammed up against her and knocked the scream out of her throat.

Scott
’s flashlight beam came swinging wildly around, shining a spotlight over the open door, the blank wall, the ceiling, and then finally at the floor where the little robot came whirring in.

The second
group-scream was almost as loud as the first, but the thing reacted to the sound no more than the spiders reacted to light. Short, squat, and rounded—a metallic blister with many panels and a black scanning plate that ran around its middle, it looked so completely like one of the cleanerbot models that you sometimes saw advertised in tech catalogues or (if you didn’t mind a plastine model) on TV late at night that no one screamed again even when it came at them.

It rolled inside, sending a thin bead of light ahead of it, indifferent to the rapid retreat of the many humans before it. When it reached the glass wall, it hesitated, then opened a small panel and sent out a thin, metallic tendril, like the questing arm of a squid, to tap and test at the surface it found. It clicked at itself under the anxious weight of fifty alien stares, then withdrew its tendril and opened a second panel. It sprayed out two careful bursts of some kind of greyish foam, paused as if undecided,
then added a third. It turned away, leaving the ‘soap’ to bubble and gradually start to slide
up
the glass, picking up speed as it climbed.

“It’s a cleanerbot,” said
Scott. He sounded utterly astonished. “The lizards have
cleanerbots
! Just like ours!”

Amber leaned a little closer to the glass in spite of
Nicci’s tugging hands and saw a thin, spreading mass of tiny beads. Metallic, like the spiders, and like the spiders, lifeless as they went about their work. “Not quite like ours.”

The bot had moved on, rolling slowly through the shuffling feet that surrounded it until it reached the first puddle of rainwater. There it stopped, testing, tapping. It began to roll from side to side, trying to map out its dimensions, and, finding that
it reached from wall to wall, retreated a short distance to think.

“Is it okay?”
Nicci asked nervously.

Amber shook her head.

The bot sat immobile, ‘arms’ retracted, ‘face’ dark. Every so often, that bead of light would dart out and flicker off the water. Twice it opened a panel, half-extended some unidentifiable tool, hesitated, and retracted it again. It hummed now and then, audibly and for no reason that Amber could determine, as if it were talking to itself.

“Oh my God, I have got to get out of here,” Maria whispered.

“It’s okay, baby,” said Eric, watching the bot with a queasy expression.

“It’s not okay, it’s a fucking zombie!”

The bot slid out its tendril again. It felt at the water, then opened a third panel, reached in decisively and brought out a small triangular flag. It planted this firmly in the puddle and turned around. It moved on.

“We’re not really staying here, are we?” Maria asked. She was trying to laugh, but it was the kind of gape-faced laughter that sounded more like someone working herself up to a scream and no one joined in. “Come on, people! We’re not…We’re not
really going to
sleep
here?”

Outside, a crash of thunder answered in unequivocal terms.

The bot came to the pile of broken concrete and bark. It felt at it, paused, and felt at it some more. It made another soft, electronic sound—a sound that struck Amber as one that was almost distressed.
Someone’s been sleeping in my bed
, she thought, a nonsensical accusation gleaned from some forgotten fairytale back in those bygone days of state-care.
Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, oh dear, oh dear. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed and she’s…still…HERE
!

It ran out a second tendril to join the first and slowly, methodically, began to stack the debris back into a neat heap, talking to itself in its worried way.

“No,” said Maria, backing rapidly away as it went about its fussy work. “Seriously. I will sleep in the rain. I don’t care. Get me away from this place.”

The bo
t retracted one of its tendrils and ran out a brush, cleaning the concrete chunks. It began to hum.

Without warning,
Eric picked up a basketball-sized chunk of concrete and brought it smashing down on the bot’s head. The bot caved in on itself without resistance, smooth sides bursting to spew out guts of wire and jelly. One fat, blue spark spat out from its core, leaving a plume of greenish smoke and some ungodly, hot stink in the air behind it. There was no last metallic cry, no dying grope of its tendrils, no planting of a final caution flag to warn people not to slip in its spilled oils. It was dead.

“Thank you, baby,” said Maria.

Eric checked the mess under the chunk of concrete and then brought it down again, giving it a little twist and shove this time. He wiped his hands unnecessarily on his shirtfront; the concrete had been quite clean.

“
I don’t see why we have to wait around in here,” announced Scott, striding forward to stand in front of Eric. “It’s out of the wind, but it’s just as cold and not a lot drier.”

“And it’s creepy,” muttered Maria,
eyeing the bot’s leaking, smoking corpse. Eric put an arm around her, watching the spiders instead. Amber found herself watching the ‘soap’ as it made its way doggedly across the glass wall. And when it reached the end, she wondered, what would it do? Would it just cluster up and wait to be collected? Or would it come trickling across the floor to crawl back inside the broken husk of the bot and sit there forever?

“I’m going in
.” Scott waited, either for protests or applause, but there was nothing and his awkward hesitation looked so much like the bot’s that Amber actually shuddered.

He noticed. He blushed. He gripped the flashlight like a weapon and marched over to the door, which slid itself open as obediently as any automated door back on Earth.
Scott walked through. The door slid shut.

Dag followed. Then
Eric and Maria. Crandall. Mr. Yao. And then all of them, shuffling along in a subdued line past the spiders and out of the rain.

It was cold out here. And wet. “Come on,
Nicci,” Amber said, following.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Meoraq?”

Amber spared the (murdered) bot a final glance, unsure just why it bothered her so much. It had been a creepy little thing and a part of her was very glad to know it would not be rolling up next to her in the middle of the night to clean her while she slept. “He’ll know we were here.”

They went through the door.

And like some magic door in a fairytale, they came out in Earth. Or so it seemed to Amber, as she found herself confronted with an ancient alien civilization that was none of it ancient or alien
enough
. Whoever the lizardmen of yore were, they kept keepsakes on their desks. The decorative pot for some sort of plant still stood in the corner of one office, its occupant long turned to dust and swept away. There were pictures on the walls, but after so many years exposed to light, their images had faded entirely out to white. There were trophies in a glass case in the hallway, monuments to the office Lizardball league. There were no aliens here; there were only people, and they were all gone.

She
knew that she was being left behind as she lingered in the halls, but
someone
had to look at it, someone had to
witness
. She drifted from room to room in silence, until she came to a door, just another door. Recessed lights in the ceiling came on with a drill-bit whine when she opened it. On the other side, she found a bathroom.

And that was the end for her. That was where it all swelled up and shut down. Seeing the sinks and the stalls and the corroded mirrors, recognizing them in spite of the little differences because no matter the minutiae of design, the function was still the same. Aliens gotta pee, after all. Lizardmen were going to want to wash their hands before they put them back on their keyboards. Lizardladies were going to want to touch up their cosmetics and adjust the lie of their lizardish clothes.

Skyscrapers and bridges, offices and bathrooms, desks and chairs and coffee cups—none of it was the product of uniquely human invention. They weren’t special. Forget the vastness of the universe and the infinite potential of its diversity, they weren’t even significant right here in this room. The lizards had built all this—plumbed their pipes and wired the lights and programmed the cleanerbots and even fired off the bomb that had ended it—without any human help at all. If there was some great cosmic entity floating out in space, puking up planets and scraping people together out of mud, He was doing just fine without them.