Starfarers (31 page)

“The honor and delight are mine, Wenji,” he let out.

Nansen took
a group of Tahirians on a tour of
Envoy
. They flitted up in a native spaceboat. Considerable preparation had gone beforehand, while people of both species struggled to explain things and outline procedures; thus far, they had little more than their diagrams and cartoons to talk with. In the course of it, he gathered that nearly all space activity was robotic. Sometimes minerals were brought to Tahir, or finished products whose manufacture on the surface would harm the biosphere. However, this was seldom. The planet’s economy seemed to be as close to equilibrium as the laws of thermodynamics allowed.

Then why does so much material, energy, effort go to the world they’re transforming?
he wondered for the thousandth time. What became of the ships that once plied among the stars?

On its drive that he did not understand, the boat glided up toward his vessel. Wheels and hull swelled before him, homelike athwart these constellations. Docking facilities were incompatible. The tube that extended to mate with a personnel lock was an engineering improvisation. Air pressure had equalized en route, and the party passed through to
the interior. The Tahirians were less awkward in weightlessness than untrained humans would have been, but evidently appreciated the help Nansen gave them.

Approaching, they had studied the external fittings of the plasma drive, as they doubtless had done before. Now their first concern was the zero-zero engine. Having led them to that section, he anxiously watched them and their instruments swarm over it. Though they did no damage, it was with relief that he finally decided he could blow the whistle hung around his neck, an agreed-on signal. “We should get you settled in, and all take a rest,” he urged. “You can have as much time here afterward as you like. But aren’t you also curious about how we lived, on our way to you?”

English
, he noticed.
Out of habit. It might as well have been Spanish or Hebrew or Chinese or anything.

They packed their apparatuses, gathered their other belongings, and accompanied him to the shuttle. It crossed to the forward wheel. Weight mounted as a railcar whisked them to the inner deck. He led them down a passageway. They peered right and left, busily conversing, although he heard few sounds, none of which his throat could make. “I wish you could tell me how you feel about this,” he said aloud, for his own comfort. “Is it splendid, primitive, pathetic, or frightening?”

In a common room gone echoey he did what nobody had managed hitherto. Humans could not yet operate the Tahirian equipment that would have provided a representation of the galaxy. Here he could spread one over a four-meter screen, shining in blackness. Of course, only the most gigantic stars appeared singly, and the display included only what his race had known when
Envoy
departed—a skeleton galaxy, half empty on the far side of the central clouds. A scale along the bottom was calibrated in units already standardized.

Nansen manipulated the keyboard. A spark sprang to life, an arrow pointing at it: the sun of Tahir, hue precisely correct for the extraordinary Tahirian color vision. He sent the pointer back along a signified five thousand light-years. Where it came to rest, another spark jumped forth, whiter, Sol.

Mostly he watched his guests. He thought he captured a sense of emotions and attitudes. A sound that purred or trilled added overtones of pleasure to a statement; a growling or piping note was less favorable. When the leaves of a mane rose and fell, a smooth wave through them bore a different meaning from the same sequence proceeding jaggedly. The code of odors was as subtle as the movements of a fan in a woman’s hand had anciently been, or more so, and an integral part of the language.

The languages?

Reactions exploded. Two of the beings bounded forward and hugged him, a gesture they had perhaps learned by watching humans. Others kept aside, manes ashiver, as if whispers went between them. Dubious? When Nansen made arrows expand outward from either star, trying to propose future voyages and meetings, he wondered whether what he saw on some was horror. Smells certainly got sharp.

He blanked the screen. “Well,” he said in his most soothing tone, “let’s go to your quarters, and then eat,” in the wardroom, separate foods. He smiled lopsidedly. “May the day come when we can drink a toast.”

A score
of buildings, small, curved, delicately tinted, clustered among trees in the middle of a burgeoning hillscape. The tropical sky arched cloudless, the air below lay hot and pungent. Zeyd thought this was less likely a village than a node in a global city.

A large structure stood a hundred meters aside, surrounded by well-tended sward. Waiting nearby, he had ample employment. A score of Tahirians had gathered about him. Three were newly parents, infants clinging to the dorsal ridge with the help of their spurs. All knew more or less what he wanted, and were willing.

One after the next, he held his instrument near a pair of antennae and activated it. A magnetic field extended. The antennae stirred, following its variations with a sensitivity
equal to that of the built-in meters, or better. He replaced it with an electrostatic field. The Tahirians cooed. Their manes dithered. Puffs of scent blew from glands in the skin.

He nodded. “Yes,” he said to himself in his mother tongue, “these organs are surely compasses and, I suspect, much else. Manifold are the works of God.”

The building clove. Mokoena came out, accompanied by Peter and a couple of other scientists. Zeyd forgot his experiment. “Ha, at last!” he called. “What did you get in there?”

She drew near him and halted. Her eyes were wide, her voice low. “They showed me their act of love.”

He caught his breath.

“Two adults performed it,” she told him, with a reverence he had seldom heard from her. “A holocinema, and anatomical diagrams on a flat screen, ran concurrently. They’ve finally learned how to do visual presentations that are comprehensible to us.”

“How—”

“A pair meets, mouth to mouth. They embrace, they speak with their manes, they kiss with their scents. Once I understood, I saw it was beautiful. It went on for—eleven minutes by my timer.”

“And the … reproduction?”

Mokoena stood silent, bringing herself back to mere science, before she replied in a more nearly academic voice. “I think both partners have to be in arousal. Pheromones … courtship, love. … Fluids flow between them, both ways, driven by sphincters and the tonguelets, which must be centers of sensation. The gonads release—gametes—that swim down the streams and fuse in the mouths. Then the zygotes swim up the other stream to a—womb? There are many of them, but only a single spot where one can attach and grow. Gestation takes about a Tahirian year. We’ve noticed what we supposed was a … birth outlet … on everybody. It is. At first the parent nourishes the young by regurgitation.”

Mokoena paused again. “I don’t know why they didn’t let
you in too, when we’ve generally been together working with them,” she said. “Were they afraid of alarming you? They know nothing about how unlike we may be, inside as well as outside, and—I do have a vagina.”

Zeyd nodded. “It must make for a strange psychology, having the sex organ in the face. Where the newborn feed, too. And hermaphroditic—”

“That’s not the right word. We need a word for
their
sex.”

“Could this be why we haven’t seen any behaving like married couples?”

“I don’t know. How would a Tahirian married couple behave? It varied over Earth, you remember.”
You remember
. Mokoena went on quickly: “I can guess at communal or group rearing of the young.”

Zeyd reached for lightness. “Aren’t they curious about our methods?”

Mokoena relaxed and laughed. “Oh, my, yes! I have a feeling our pictures of it leave them puzzled. It’s too weird.”

Scantily clad, she stood with sweat running agleam down a frame that gravity stress had brought back to well-rounded slenderness, panther-dark, joyful. He deepened his voice. “The wondrousness of two sexes—”

“They would doubtless like to know the chemistry as much as we would like to know theirs.”

“We should give them a demonstration.”

“Who will volunteer?”

He grinned. “Well—”

She met his look head-on. “I don’t care to put on a show myself, Selim, not even in the interests of science. Perhaps especially not in the interests of science.”

He kept his composure. “Pardon me. No offense intended. But aren’t you free-spirited?”

“I never did anything that did not mean something more than fun. Good friendship, at the very least. And I never came between two others.” She turned from him to address her guides as best she could.

From high
above and afar, after the planetary shell opened a cleft to let the Tahirian spacecraft through and closed again behind, the spectacle was awesome enough. White steam and black smoke roiled in upward-rushing winds where sometimes flame flared. Below sprawled and reared a step pyramid the size of a small mountain, bearing towers, battlements, portals, keeps, roadways, trackways, kilometers-long tubes of mighty bore, forms as alien to human eyes as functions were unknown to human minds. Around it spread a forest of lesser structures, dense near the center, thinning out with distance until empty desert framed the edge of vision. They bore many different shapes, but dominant was something like a metal tree with an intricate mesh between the leafless boughs. Lights flashed throughout, a tumbling, bewildering shift from moment to moment, so that the men caught illusory half-glimpses of fireworks, waves, a maelstrom, a thing that danced. Machines scuttled about or clustered to do some task. Here and there moltenness welled up, seethed sullen red, rolled slowly down channels until it congealed into dark masses. There the machines were at their busiest.

“Jesus Christ!” Brent rasped. “What
is
that? Like the middle of hell!”

“I—I think I can guess,” Cleland said.

“Better wait till we have had a closer look,” Nansen advised. The spacecraft sped onward and the titans’ workshop sank below the horizon.

A number of the third planet’s fifteen-hour days passed before the three visitors saw the sight again. Then they were not sure whether it was the same one; there were several,
distributed over the globe. Although they and the Tahirians could now communicate slightly, most things remained obscure, occasionally even the interpretation of a map. This particular uncertainty didn’t matter. They had already encountered more astonishments than they could sort out.

The tour began at an enclosed headquarters where air was breathable, with imagery of the original work. Comets had not contented the builders; to win the stuff that was to become atmosphere and hydrosphere, their machines also dismembered an icy moon of a giant planet and put the pieces on a collision orbit. Centuries later, when things had somewhat quieted down but not much gas had yet escaped back to space, they roofed the world. Thereafter they tapped its own buried reserves of ice, though that was a minor contribution.

“Tremendous!” Brent said. “We’ve
got
to learn the engineering. What we could do with it—”

“I wonder,” mused Nansen. “Will humans ever start anything that will take millions of years to finish? It’s a rare man who tries to provide for his grandchildren.”

“He can’t,” Cleland replied. “Human affairs are too, uh, chaotic. Everything’s bound to change b-beyond recognition in less than a thousand years. Nothing’s predictable. The Tahirians, they’ve achieved a … stable society. And any, uh, profit motive is irrelevant, when self-maintaining, self-reproducing robots do the work.”

“Um, why was the work ever begun? What need for it?”

“Never mind now,” Brent said. “I’m thinking what we could do, we humans, for our purposes, with power like this.”

“We may well find it waiting for us when we return” countered Nansen.

“Or we may not. Or if we do—we won’t arrive helpless.”

A pillar, one of those that upheld the enclosing sky, was in many ways still more numinous. No plain shaft, it rose organismically intricate, responsive, well-nigh alive. Its interplay with strata and height, ground tremors and winds, not only kept it standing but acted on them, was a force in the development of the planet. The ascent and descent of it,
in a bubble that climbed, with stops to go inside for an uncomprehending look, became a voyage in itself.

The waters teemed with microscopic life. Some had begun to aggregate: patches of scum, ragged mats. Crumbling shorelines revealed where germs gnawed rock down to the motes that would go into soil. The life had not arisen naturally, nor was its evolution driven by blind chance and selection. An underlying, interweaving set of mechanisms—biological and nanorobotic together, Cleland speculated—would hold it on the many roads to its destiny, which was to prepare this world for the kind of life that lived on Tahir.

“Everything guided,” he muttered. “Accelerated. Maybe half a billion years will serve. Maybe less. Though if they want what they’ve made to last as long as that—” He stared before him. “Yes, I believe I’m right about what those monster establishments are for.”

And at last their guides, the Tahirians they called Emil and Fernando, brought them to one.

They stood a long while by the aircar, trying to grasp a sight so huge and strange that their eyes did not know how to see it. At their backs reached the barrens, red dunes, black rock, scudding dust. On the right a pillar lifted white over the horizon, made thin by distance, sheering and narrowing until it became a point thrust against the violet heaven.

Ahead lay the forest, metal boles, skeletal limbs, glimmery webs from end to end of vision. Shapes hunched among them, low domes, pentagonal upthrusts, helices, congeries. Robots moved between, some like giant beetles, some like dwarf war machines, some like nothing describable. The forest thickened farther in until it became a shadowy mass. Beyond loomed the central pyramid, its terraces saw-toothed with walls and spires. Smoke and vapors hazed it to blue-gray. Everywhere blinked the light-sparks, over the metal trees, tangled in their meshes, all hues, chaotic in complexity, the lunacy of a million intermingled meanings. A rumbling noise filled the air, a bass that stole into the bones. Now and then the ground boomed and faintly shuddered.