Gavin interrupted. “Explorers! The probes were sent out to explore and acquire knowledge. All right then. If they wanted to learn more about the Earth, they would want to send units formatted to live on its surface!”

Ursula nodded. “Better,” she admitted. “But it still doesn’t wash.”

She knelt in the faint gravity and sketched an outline in the dust. “Here is the habitat, nearly at the center of the asteroid. Now why would the parent probe have placed it here, except because it was the best possible place to protect its contents?

“Meanwhile, the daughter probes the Parent was constructing were out there, vulnerable to cosmic rays and other dangers during the time when their delicate parts were most exposed.

“If the biologicals were just built to poke into a nook of this solar system, our Earth, would the parent probe have given them better protection than it offered its own children?” She gestured upward, toward where the twisted wreckage of the unborn machines lay open to the stars.

“No,” Ursula shook her head. “These ‘biologicals’ weren’t intended to be exploration sub-units, serving the parent probe. “They were colonists!”

Gavin stood impassively for a long time, looking down at her sketch silently. Finally, he turned away and sighed.

7

How much does she realize so far, our little biological wonder?

I can eavesdrop on her conversations with her cybernetic partner. I can tap into the data she sends back to her toy ship. But I cannot probe her mind.

I wonder how much of the picture she sees.

She has only a fraction of the brainpower of Greeter or Awaiter, let alone myself, and a miniscule portion of our knowledge. And yet there is the mystique of the Maker in her. Even I—two thousand generations removed from the touch of organic hands and insulated by my Purpose and my Resolve—even I feel it. It is weird that thought can take place at temperatures that melt water, in such a tiny container of nearly randomly firing cells, within a salty adenelate soup.