Starfarers (30 page)

“What do the antennae do?” puzzled Zeyd.

“I’d like to know more about the eyes, too,” Mokoena said. “So far we’ve only guessed the inner pair is chiefly for day vision, the outer for night.”

“And for peripheral.”

She glanced at him before her gaze jumped back to the screen. “Yes, of course, but why do you make it sound so important?”

“This was a dangerous world in the past. Life developed ways to cope with it.”

“Every world is dangerous.”

Zeyd spoke in a rapid monotone. They both kept watching the screen. “Here more than most. Tim and I were talking about it a few days ago. He pointed out that a planet this size must go through bouts of enormous volcanic and seismic activity, with radical effects on climates. The core and spin give it a strong magnetic field, but the field will vary more than Earth’s and in some geological periods the background count goes high. The moon is too small to stabilize the axial tilt, like ours. Chaotic variations must cause still more ecological disasters. I said to Tim that all this must have bred many different biomes. Probably ancestral Tahirians often wandered into territories where, animals and plants were unknown to them. They needed a wide sensory field.”

“And range? I hope you can explain the biochemistry of those eyes to me.”

“What?”

“I’ve been noticing things. Don’t you remember that wall panel in the aircar? An inscription on it, slashes and squiggles and—Red on red. Very hard to read. It has to be easy for them. That implies better color vision than ours. More than three receptors, I would guess. Not incredible. Shrimp on Earth have seven. If ‘receptors’ is the word I want.”

Zeyd chuckled. “Please. This is too much for a single hour.”

“I know. It’s like being a child in a toy shop. What shall we play with first?”

The image became that of a complete Tahirian. It blinked out.

Exhilaration brought levity. “Isn’t sex more interesting than eyes?” Zeyd japed. “Did you get any idea of how they reproduce?”

“No. It’s still as baffling as those dissections of mine.” Mokoena grinned. “Perhaps they’ll show us some explicit scenes.”

“Or enact them?”

She sobered. “Let’s hope for no serious misunderstandings.”

The screen retracted. The scientist emerged, approached, beckoned. He was gray-pelted, though presumably not aged, and wore a pouched belt around the torso. “What comes next, Peter?” Zeyd asked. As they began to tell individuals apart, humans had given them names, because humans need names. Zeyd could as well have put his useless question in Arabic, but Mokoena was listening.

Snaky fingers reached up to pluck at clothes. “Are we supposed to—to undress?” Zeyd exclaimed.

Again Mokoena’s teeth flashed white in the dark face. “They may be thinking about the same subject we were.”

“A demonstration?”

“I trust not!”

They looked at one another. Laughter pealed. They removed their garments. For an instant they could not hide enjoyment of what they saw. Then the four Tahirians crowded around to examine them, peering and sniffing(?),
touching and feeling, gently but with unmistakable fascination, prior to putting them in the tomograph.

“Do they wonder if we’re separate species?” Zeyd speculated.

“As our good captain would say,” Mokoena answered,
“viva la diferencia.”

In a
vast, twilit chamber, shapes bulked, soared, curved, coiled, phantasmagoria reaching beyond sight. Some moved, some whirred. Lights danced and flashed in changeable intricacy, like fireflies or a galaxy of evanescent stars.

“Beautiful,” Dayan said, “but what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Yu replied softly. “I suspect the beauty isn’t by chance, it’s there for its own sake. We may find we have much beauty in common, we and they.”

The two were at the end of a tour. They had walked through twisting kilometers with their guides, and had stood looking and looking without understanding, but their daze came less from an overload of the body than of the mind.

The frustration in Dayan broke through. “We won’t make sense of any of this till they can explain it to us. Can they ever?” She gestured at the nearest Tahirian. “What has Esther, here, really conveyed, today or back at our camp?”

As if to respond, the native took a flat box with a screen out of her(?) pouch belt. Such units were the means of pictorial communication. Fingers danced across control surfaces. Figures appeared. Yu leaned close to see. Minutes passed. The other hosts waited patiently. Dayan quivered.

Yu straightened. “I think I have a hint.” Her voice rejoiced. “The symbols we have developed—I think one of these assemblies, at least, is a cryomagnetic facility for studying quantum resonances.”

“Don’t they already know everything about that?” Dayan objected. “These people were probably starfaring before Solomon built the First Temple.”

“I suspect this whole complex is a teaching laboratory.”

Dayan nodded. “That sounds plausible. It would be the
best for us.” She paused before asking, “Do they do any actual research anymore?”

“What?”

“Would they? They gave up starfaring long ago. We may be the first newness they’ve encountered for thousands of years.”

Yu pondered. “Well, did not the physicists on Earth believe the ultimate equation has been written and everything we discover hereafter will only be solutions of it?”

Scorn replied. “
They
believed. What about those jetless flyers here?”

“That may be an application of principles we know in ways we have not thought of.”

“Or maybe not.” Dayan’s mettle forsook her. “You will doubtless find out,” she said wearily. “Technological tricks. The science underneath them is something else.”

Surprised, Yu said, “No, the basic laws will come first. They are far simpler.”

Dayan shook her head. “Not without a proper vocabulary, verbal and mathematical. We won’t reach that point soon, will we? Newton’s laws, yes—but the Hamiltonian, Riemannian geometry, wave functions? Not to mention Navier-Stokes, turbulence, chaos, complexity, all the subtleties. It’ll be years before we even know whether the Tahirians know something fundamental that we don’t. What shall I do meanwhile?”

Yu touched her hand. “You will help me. If nothing else. No, we shall be partners.”

“Thank you, dear Wenji.”

The warmth was short-lived. Dayan looked off into the dusk. “Technology, your work, interesting, vital, yes,” she said. “But the mysteries—”

Sundaram sat
in his cabin. The interior resembled his own aboard ship, except for the windows. They gave on a wild autumnal rain. Wind yelled. Before him on the floor, legs folded, torso upright, rested the Tahirian whom humans
called Indira, because this happened so often that an Indian name felt appropriate. He was coming to believe that Indira was not known among her/his/its kind by any single symbol, but by configurations of sensory data that changed fluidly according to circumstances while always demarking the unique individual.

Computer screens and a holograph displayed sketches, diagrams, arbitrary figures, pictures. With illumination turned low, reflected light set Indira’s four eyes aglow. Sundaram spoke aloud, not altogether to himself.

“Yes, I am nearly certain now. Yours is primarily a body language, with chemical and vocal elements—characters and compoundings infinitely, subtly variable. It causes your writing to be ideographic, like a kind of super-Chinese hypertext. Is this correct? Then Wenji can make a device for expressing the language we create, the new language our races will share.”

Winter brought
snow, glistery white and blue-shadowed over the ground. Icicles hung like jewelry from bare boughs; many Tahirian trees also shed their leaves. Cold air laved the face and stung the nostrils. Breath smoked.

Kilbirnie, Cleland, Ruszek, and Brent came back from a walk. Taking their turns as caretakers at the settlement, they had grown restless. The outing roused Kilbirnie’s spirits from boredom. She dashed around to look at things, threw snowballs, tried to make her companions join in a song. Only Cleland did, halfheartedly.

Leaving the forest, they saw across the openness that huddle of buildings their crew had dubbed Terralina. Kilbirnie stopped. “Oh!” she gasped.

One of the great, rarely seen creatures they knew as dragons swept overhead. Sunlight streamed through wing membranes and broke into rainbow shards. The long, sinuous body gleamed beryl green. Her gaze followed the arc of flight until it sank below the horizon.

The others had halted, too. “Pretty” Ruszek said. He
sounded reluctant to admit that anything could break the monotony of these days.

“More than bonnie,” she crooned. “Freedom alive.”

Cleland’s glance had stayed on her. “You really do feel caged, don’t you?” he mumbled.

“Don’t we all?” Brent said. His words ran on almost automatically. “Yeah, it was fun at first, the novelty, the jobs, and then traveling around, but what are we now except tourists, once in a while when his high and mightiness Nansen lets us go? The scientific types, sure, they’ve got things to do that matter. Are
we
supposed to spend the next four years yawning?”

“Stop whining,” Ruszek snapped. “You’ve overworked your self-pity.”

Brent glared. “I don’t take orders from you. Not planetside.”

Ruszek snarled and drew back his fist.

“Hold, hold!” Kilbirnie protested. She grabbed his arm. “We dinna need a fight.”

The mate gulped. His hand lowered. The flush left his cheeks. “No,” he yielded. “We’ve been shut in, our nerves frayed. I … didn’t mean offense, … Al.”

“Okay,” Brent replied sullenly. “Me neither.”

“We will get out and rove, every one of us,” Kilbirnie vowed. “We’ve talked of what we want to do. ’Tis but a matter of learning enough that we can make reasonable plans to lay before the skipper. Hanny has a thought—” She broke off. That hope was unripe, confidential. “Wha’ say now we make hot toddies? Big ones.”

Ruszek managed to smile. “The best idea I’ve heard in weeks.”

“She’s full of them.” Cleland’s expression showed what idea he wished she would get.

Ruszek’s and Brent’s eyes went the same way. Briefly, the cold seemed to crackle. Yes, crewfolk were honorable, respectful of their mates; no sane person would dare behave otherwise; there were the soothing medications if desired;
there were the virtuals, and nobody asked what interactive programs anybody else chose; nevertheless—

Kilbirnie broke the tension. “Or shall it be hot buttered rum?” She bounded ahead. The men followed more slowly, none venturing to overtake her.

Year two.

As aboard ship, beds in the cottages were expansible to double width. After half an hour, the cedary odors of love-making had faded from Zeyd’s. He and Dayan had begun to talk, sitting up against the headboard. Their mood was less bright than earlier.

“It’s been far too long,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

He stroked his mustache and attempted a leer. “We must do something about that.”

The hazel eyes challenged him. “Can you?”

He looked the question he neither needed nor wanted to speak.

“You are the one always away,” Dayan said. Her tone regretted but did not accuse, and she did not add that his absences were with Mokoena.

“Research,” he defended. “The environments, the ecologies, the laboratories. All over the planet.”

“Of course. You know how I envy you that.”

“Do you still feel idled? I thought you were happy enough, working with Wenji.” It was not quite true. He was an observant man. He had left some things unsaid in hopes they would improve by themselves; and she was not given to complaining.

She nodded, red locks sliding across pillow. “It is interesting. But—”

He tensed. “Yes?”

She had gathered resolution. “There is real science screaming to be done.”

“What?”

“The pulsar. Some of us have quietly discussed it. We’ll soon be ready to present a plan for an expedition.”

“No!” cried shock.

She smiled a bit sadly and stroked his cheek. “If it happens, I’ll be sorry to leave you forsaken. I’ll look forward to coming back.” She turned implacable. “But go I will.”

The device
that Yu held before Sundaram fitted on her upturned left hand. It had the form of a thin forty-centimeter slab bent at right angles, the vertical part twice the length of the horizontal. A control board, a continuous touch-sensitive surface with a grid of guidelines, covered the top of the lower section. Screens filled both sides of the upper. As the fingers of her right hand gave directions, characters came and went across the screens while a speaker produced melodious sounds.

“I hope we may consider this the finished model,” she said. “The Tahirians who have tried it seem to like it well.”

She gave it to Sundaram. He experimented. Even the randomness he got entranced him. “Magnificent,” he praised. “It will require practice, of course, to master, but—I have been thinking about it. Let me suggest we call it a parleur. A voice across the abyss between two utterly different kinds of communication.”

“You still must create the mutual language.”

“It progresses. I suspect that with this tool progress will rocket. But I will need your help—what you can spare from your technological studies—I will need your help more than ever.”

“How?”

“I imagine that programming your nanocomputer
demands a special talent.” He shrugged, with a rueful smile. “Under the best conditions, I am not a good programmer.”

“You have no reason to be.”

Sundaram blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

Yu regarded him levelly through the muted lighting in his cabin. Rain roared against the windows, a savagery of silver.

“Your own genius is too big,” she said. “It crowds other things out.”

“Oh, come, now, please. I am simply overspecialized.”

“It grows lonely, does it not?”

“Can you collaborate?” he asked in haste. “Have you time?”

She lowered her eyes and bowed above hands laid together. “Certainly. I am honored and delighted.”