“I have been watching it,” said Creno. “What kind of life can that be? You are a sharp sensor, Harta. Focus to it.”
She strained and then relaxed, speaking: “The circuits are closed into themselves. It learns nothing from outside itself except to move and extend its metal feelers for food. Soil is its food. Soil is its energy. Soil is its being.”
“Can it be alive?”
“It is alive.”
All his legs rested now in a row along the ridge. He too was relaxed as one mystery disappeared. “I feel your feelings, but the thing is not alive. It is a machine.”
“I do not understand. A machine in the middle of a dead world?”
“Whether we understand why or not, that is what it is—a machine.”
Harta throbbed with excitement. How could Creno be wrong? He knew everything as soon as the facts were in his mind. Yet here now were living things crawling toward the machine, just like the excrescence at one end but in no way a part of it! The feeling of willed effort as they crawled slowly toward it, white and pink striped, reaching grasping feelers into the turgid product, taking it in, then rising on easing legs as the food spread within them.
“There are living creatures here!” Creno pondered. “I feel your messages. Twenty, thirty—a horde is crawling from that mountain toward it.”
“Four thousand three hundred and ninety-one,” said Harta. She concentrated. “There are three thousand and five more in the mountain caves, waiting to come out as the others return.”