And yet, with all the incredible radio racket the humans are putting out, would not Anti-Makers have homed in by now, to do their harm?
Greeter and Awaiter are are convinced that the Rejectors have lost, that it is safe now to send out a message to the Loyalist community, calling for help.
I cannot allow it of course.
They still have not figured out that even among Loyalists there can be disagreements. The Purpose… my Purpose… must be foremost. Even if it means betraying companions who waited with me through the long, long dark.
10
Ursula had started out thinking of them as somehow unsophisticated. After all, how could people, biological folk, be fully capable if they were born out of tanks and raised by machines? Here they had been decanted, but they had been meant for a planet’s surface. The ancient colonists could not have been anything but helpless pawns so long as they were out in space, dependent on the mammoth starmother probe and its drones for everything from heat to food to air.
But the creatures obviously had been aware of what was going on. The machines, apparently, had been programmed to teach them. And though all magnetic and superconducting records were long decayed, the biologicals had known a way to make sure that their story would someday be read… from a wall of chiseled stone.
“Interpreting the writing will have to wait for the experts,” Gavin told her unnecessarily as he used a gas jet gently to brush dust from uneven rows of angular letters incised in the rock. “With these pictograms to accompany the text, the professor types just may be able to decipher it.”