CHAPTER 7
Tiklik had turned off the lights in its quarters. The incessant, unchanging spectral pattern of the diodes had bored the AI. But now the lights came on again, blinking in a frequency at the long end of animal perception. A pulsing change in the air pressure began. Sound, Tiklik thought. An alarm, warning the robot that the air had evacuated on the other side of the door to its quarters.
Tiklik found sound strange. Sound pulsed so slowly, so weakly, that it seemed the sickly shadow of light as it bounced around in the thin skin of planets. Light was the quick voice of stars. Sound was the slow voice of animals.
A tap came at the door to Tiklik’s quarters. The tap sounded in time with the alarm, and by coincidence the metal of the door rang at a frequency in harmony wit
