his left and Alita on his right. They ate with their fingers, saying nothing for a long time. In the east, the looming bulk of Delamar, the larger, inner moon, was slowly crawling into the sky, almost half full, the lighted portion bowed away from the horizon. Delamar was big and it was close, less than fifty thousand kilometers out, and its crater-pocked horns spanned a full ten degrees of sky, the dark side blotting out the shining star-glory beyond. Here and there, diamond pinpoints of light glowed on Delamar's night side. Once those had been human cities; now, presumably, the Masters ruled there as they ruled Cloud. One story that continued to filter through the camp held fervently that Delamar had not been taken, that those cities were still free, that the remnants of the CDF flew ships from Delamar each night to scoop up a few lucky slaves and carry them off to freedom in the sky.
Most of the former CDF personnel knew better, of course. The clackers would have been foolish to leave human garrisons so close to the newly conquered world. The stories, though, like hope itself, simply would not die.
"There's got to be a weakness there," he said, speaking very quietly. No one yet knew just how sensitive the hearing ofclacker spies was, or how thickly strewn their listening devices might be.
"What weakness?" Alita asked. "Who?"
"The clackers," Wal replied. "He's been going on about it all day."
"The cluckers have weaknesses, I'm sure," Dieter said, "Don't see what we can do about it, though."
"We can learn."
A solitary floater eye drifted past, paused, then turned its disturbing, solitary orb on the four of them for a moment. Then it drifted away again, randomly checking other groups of slaves, maintaining that
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William H. Keith, Jr.
constant, fear-stirring knowledge that the Masters' eyes and ears and thoughts were everywhere, inescapable, unbeatable.
When her bowl was scraped clean, Alita set it carefully aside. "What weakness?" she asked again.
"Why do they have us sifting through the mud for every last scrap of refined metal? Every shard of broken glass, every piece of plastic? Jewelry stripped from skeletons. Bric-a-brac and smashed kitchen appliances and eating utensils and the plumbing pulled from the bones of burned-out buildings. They cleaned up most of the easy-to-reach stuff, all the big pieces, right after the invasion. Hell, they must have gotten ninety-five percent of everything within a few weeks after they moved in. Why so much effort for that last five percent?"
"They are machines," Dieter reminded him. "They are efficient."
"Efficient? Using half-starved slaves isn't efficient." "I told you," Wal reminded him. "We can't attribute human concepts of need or efficiency to the clackers." "But it doesn't make sense. Look, they want every scrap of glass we can find , . . but all they need to do is scoop up sand from Cloud's beaches, and they could make all the glass they could ever need. Aluminum? Delamar's regolith is rich in aluminum silicates, easily extracted, easily processed with a simple solar furnace. Ceramics?" He brushed absently at the crust of dried mud on his right forearm. "All they need to do is gather clay, shape it, and bake it. I think the weirdest thing, though, is their craving for iron and steel. Any spacefaring civilization has access to all of the iron ore it coula possibly use simply by collecting and processing asteroids."
"Cloud's suns have three separate planetoid belts," Dieter said, nodding. "You're right. The cluckers could
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get all the nickel-iron they wanted by mining the belts. Other stuff, too. Gold. Uranium. Platinum. Just about anything they need, and enough of it to last for centuries. Compared to what they could get cheaply and easily out there, this scavenger hunt in the ruins is nothing."
"Right," Jaime said. "So where are their orbital smelters, their asteroid mining ships, their deep space ore processors?"
"Maybe they're there," Wal pointed out. "We're hardly in a position to see their belt activities, are we?"
"No, wait," Alita said. "Dieter put his finger on it. If they had access to belt resources, there'd be absolutely no point to collecting broken glass or gold rings. Why bother with steel clasps from rotted clothing, when one small nickel-iron asteroid will provide you with all the steel you need for the next thousand years or so? It's stupid."
"If we knew why they act this way," Jaime told the others, "it might give us a weapon."
"Don't see how," Dieter said.
"Knowledge is always a weapon," Jaime told him. "You just have to learn how to apply it."
