by Jeff Carlson
“The probe’s skin wasn’t the problem,” Metzler said.
“What about its density?” Vonnie said. “We can’t make a probe as light as a sunfish unless we dump most of the hardware. If we—”
An alert chimed on the display. Frerotte rose to his feet, ducking through the hatch into data/comm.
“What’s up?” Ash said.
“Our probes are on the move,” Metzler said. “The sunfish just reentered the catacombs.”
“Contact in three minutes,” Frerotte called. “Pärnits and O’Neal are coming online. Koebsch is signed in, too. They need us in one.”
“Got it.” Metzler looked at Vonnie and said, “Can you redesign the probes if we have to?”
“Yes.” She stood up, eager to join Frerotte in data/comm. “We’d need to leave most of the data gathering to the spies. That’s worked pretty well so far, but it’ll be an issue if the probes move out of range. What if we’re lucky enough to be invited into the sunfishes’ homes?”
“We can send down ten thousand spies,” Ash said. “In another year, they’ll be everywhere.”
“That doesn’t help us now.”
As the three of them walked toward the hatch together, Vonnie caught Metzler’s elbow, letting Ash move ahead of them. She drew Metzler away from the hatch. Then she reached her arms around his neck and kissed him.
32.
He ran his hands down Vonnie’s ribs to her waist. She pressed herself against him. Her lips parted, and she chuckled at the simple pleasure of touching each other.
Her laughter was a low, wanting sound. It invited more. His hands slid to the small of her back.
Frerotte shouted, “Ben! Fifteen seconds!”
“Oh, hell,” Vonnie said as they broke their embrace. Metzler looked into her eyes, checking to see if she was okay. She nodded. Then he moved past.
Vonnie lingered behind, hugging her arms across her breasts to fill the void he’d left. Her mouth worked with a grin that she couldn’t control.
A kiss was an odd thing. In most cultures, kissing had come to have many meanings — affection, sympathy, friendship — but it had originated as a trick of reproduction. By sharing saliva, the man transferred testosterone to the woman, increasing her boldness and her arousal. The emotional component was harder to decipher. There were undertones of devotion and ownership.
The sunfish will have their own tricks, Vonnie thought, trying to cool off. She’d been celibate since leaving Earth. Her body ached and burned.
She must have moved differently as she stepped through the hatch into data/comm, because Ash looked at her sharply. Vonnie grinned again without meaning to.
“Sign in,” Frerotte said.
Frerotte, Metzler, and Ash stood in virtual stations, each of them enveloped in a shaft of holo imagery. Frerotte had prepped a fourth station. Vonnie walked into it, donning mesh gloves as she activated her temp files and preferences with a voice key. “Vonderach,” she said.
Her display included a group feed for most of the crew. A few people were too busy with their own projects to join in. Everyone else wanted to observe their next encounter.
Probes 112 and 113 had squirmed into a new section of catacombs above the tunnel where they’d met Tom. The rock was less dense here. It had bubbled. Most of the openings were scrawny, lopsided pockets. The probes’ line-of-sight never stretched more than twenty meters, although their radar signals bounced as far as three hundred meters before the catacombs slumped over a precipice, creating a blind spot.
Hidden beyond the obstruction were sunfish. The rock echoed with their shrieks, which grew louder and louder.
Vonnie grimaced. The reality was that mecha were ideal for this world. She couldn’t have fit into those holes even if she’d had the guts to try, and, worse, she expected the sunfish to greet the probes with violence. They all did.
“How far away is our next team?” Koebsch asked.
“110 and 111 are five kilometers out,” Frerotte said. “114 and 115 are even further. I didn’t want to pull them from their grids.”
The sunfishes’ screaming resolved into a physical presence. Radar identified three contacts — then four — seven — eight. Tom and Jill led the pack. They fluttered through the jagged rock, their voices flooding every crevice.
112 and 113 answered them. If Pärnits was right, the probes’ tone was welcoming, but the voices of the sunfish increased in pitch, exceeding frequencies over 100,000 Hertz. Their screams became a war cry.
“Here we go,” Koebsch said.
Four sunfish spun out of a gap in the ceiling and latched onto the rock above the probes, clenching their arms, their bodies poised to leap again. It was the same menacing pose Tom had assumed in the tunnel.
“They’re going to attack,” Frerotte said, but Vonnie said, “No, they always display aggression. You need to do the same.”
“She’s right. I can improvise those body shapes,” Metzler said. At his command, 112 and 113 mimicked the sunfish, drawing themselves into predatory, piston-like shapes.
Four more sunfish emerged from a hole in the wall. Tom was among this group. They seized positions on the rock overhead. The probes were surrounded.
From this position of strength, four sunfish showed the undersides of their arms — two arms each — two sunfish from each quartet. Intricate patterns rippled through their pedicellaria and tube feet.
“They’re emitting scent!” Metzler said. “Frerotte, take over 113. Talk to them. I want 112 working on sample capture and analysis.”
“Roger that,” Frerotte said. Sweeping his gloves into his display, he led 113 through a new dance. The probe lifted two of its arms like the sunfish.
“We’re not going to be able to match their scents,” Pärnits said. “They’ll realize something’s wrong.”
“They know the probes are different,” Vonnie said. “Don’t run. If we try to get away, they’ll catch us. Let’s see what happens. Keep talking.”
Beside her, Metzler flashed a smile.
Did he like hearing her argue with Pärnits? There wasn’t time to read his expression. This close to the sunfish, every second was a gold mine. The probes’ telemetry filled with X-rays, linguistic algorithms, and 112’s first chem reports.
“Wow!” Metzler said, laughing.
Everyone was entranced. They were spellbound, even Koebsch. The moment was so exceptional he’d forgotten himself and his prudent nature.
“I think they’re accepting us,” Metzler said.
“The computers think so, too,” Pärnits said, highlighting ten clips on the group feed.
He ran an overlay of four different sunfish repeating the same wriggles through their pedicellaria. It was a contracting motion. It looked like a circle closing into a dot.
“That could mean ’Come with us’ or ’Go inside,’” Pärnits said.
“Tell them ’Yes,’” Koebsch said.
Frerotte ordered both probes to spread their arms and curl each tip upward. Like Metzler, he was smiling. Everyone was talking too loudly now, sharing the same electricity.
Vonnie turned at the chime of an alarm. “Wait. There’s movement back where we left our spies.”
“Oh!” Ash cried.
Tom’s sunfish fell on 112 and 113 like rain. Most of the ESA crew shouted as if the probes were their own bodies.
Beaks and arms filled their displays. The sunfish tore through the probes’ false skin, cutting relays and sensors. Tom’s beak scraped the metal beneath. The noise was a grating squeal until Frerotte dimmed the volume.
“Don’t fight them!” Koebsch yelled. “Don’t fight!”
The sunfish destroyed both probes. They were unable to crack or dent the mecha’s alumalloy bodies, but they wrenched several arms loose, then dug into the open sockets with their arm tips. They yanked at the machinery inside even when it cut and tore their pedicellaria.
Did they intend to keep the ravaged metal and plastic? Before the last signals from 113 went dead, the sun
fish hooked their arms around the squashed gears and fragments of alumalloy.
“What’s happening with our spies?” Metzler asked as Vonnie scrolled through her display.
She couldn’t let herself feel anything more than tight concentration. She was discouraged, but the real surprise was that the sunfish had interacted with the probes for eighty-one seconds. Now they shocked her again.
“Their colony must be larger than we thought,” she said.
Near the cavern where the sunfish had built their retaining wall, Sue led a new horde within range of the spies’ sensors. There were sixteen of them. Twelve hugged rock clubs against their bodies.
“How can there be so many sunfish?” Koebsch said. “I thought there isn’t enough food.”
“We need to send mecha down to the ocean,” Vonnie said. “What if it’s loaded with fish like those eels NASA found? They might get most of their food there.”
“The ocean’s too far away,” Koebsch said. “They’d need days to transport eels or fish back to the colony.”
“If they freeze their food, that wouldn’t matter.”
“Yes, it would,” Koebsch said. “They’d spend more calories than they’d gain dragging their prey through the ice, and they’d probably have to fight other tribes for it. They’re too high for the ocean to matter.”
“Not if there were geysers and churn in the area,” Metzler said. “There might be sea life frozen in the ice around the colony. Maybe they’re mining for it.”
“An eel mine,” Vonnie said appreciatively.
That could be the missing factor, she thought. Eruptions and rip tides might push sea creatures into the frozen sky, where they’re preserved. If the sunfish located an area where storms seeded the ice with bodies, they’d have a natural food source. It might be enough to last for years or generations.
Sue’s group entered the cavern in a familiar wave formation. Half flew high. Half flew low. They rebounded from the ceiling and floor, colliding in the middle.
Then they sprang away from each other in individual trajectories. The four sunfish who weren’t carrying rocks used themselves as a centering mass. Kicking, bouncing, slamming, spinning, they propelled the others outward.
They crushed the spies with stunning precision, terminating eleven of the tiny mecha in a coordinated strike. Vonnie thought they’d turn on the rest, but they were done. They killed eleven spies without effort, then paused, leaving the majority untouched.
“That’s weird,” Frerotte said. “If they can tell our spies are there—”
“They memorized the walls!” Metzler said. “That’s what they were doing with their group song. They memorized the walls, then came back and spotted the differences. Look. They killed every spy that’s moved since they left. 4071 only changed its position by five centimeters, but they got it, too.”
Sue’s group picked at the remnants of the spies. They ate a few specks, then cinched their arms around the rest. Later, they might compare these bits of ceramic armor and nanocircuitry to the junk Tom’s pack had salvaged from the larger probes. For the moment, Sue’s pack gathered on the cavern floor.
They screeched and screeched. They were memorizing the cavern again. The group ritual also served as a warning to everything that could hear them — a cry of possessiveness and defiance. Then they fled into the dark.
“They must have noticed a spy earlier,” Vonnie said. “They were suspicious, and they wanted to make sure nothing bothered their retaining wall.”
“How are they processing so much detail in the rock?” Koebsch said. “We couldn’t do it without AI.”
“They’re wired differently.”
“They might not be as smart as you think, Von,” Dawson said.
“What?”
“They used to be intelligent,” Dawson said. “I can’t deny the carvings we’ve found. Those are written histories. But the carvings are ten thousand years old. These sunfish are just animals. We’re wasting our time trying to talk to them.”
33.
“Bullshit,” Vonnie said. “Are you looking at the same transcripts I am?”
“Yes indeed.” William Dawson was in his seventies and their oldest crew member. Wrinkles spread from the corners of his eyes through his paper-fine skin, but his hair remained black, and he was spry and elflike.
Vonnie hadn’t spoken with him much. She felt blindsided by his announcement. “How can you think we should leave them down there to die?” she said.
“I don’t. Not at all. Perhaps our approach should change. We’ve spent five weeks pussyfooting around in hopes of talking to them. I submit that this is like attempting to chat with porpoises or seals.”
“Seals!”
“Porpoises may be a better comparison. I don’t know if you’ve seen the mem files on attempts to communicate with cetaceans in the twentieth century.”
“I have.” Vonnie had watched everything she could find on interspecies communication.
“Some marine biologists were convinced the whales were intelligent,” Dawson said. “The complexity of their songs was bewitching. Other people were obsessed with dolphins. They frittered away their careers proving themselves wrong.”
“They learned more than you think. Their work is part of the database we’re using now, but the whales never said anything like this.” Vonnie brought an excerpt from the newest sunfish translations onto the group feed and played it.
TOM: Hello.
PROBE 112: Hello / Yes.
TOM: I am Top Clan Two-Four, Pod Four.
ALL SUNFISH: I am Top Clan Two-Four, Pod Four.
ALL SUNFISH: Close / Too close.
TOM: You are too close / Hello.
“This supports my theory,” Dawson said. “The sunfish are pack animals, not individuals. Look at the group response. It’s imitative.”
“Hold on,” Pärnits said. “Repetition is a natural function of the way they communicate. They can only hear the shapes they detect in any given sonar pulse. Of course they repeat the same information. It’s like a circle or a chain. They confirm and reconfirm until every member in the group acknowledges the message. Their speech patterns are more fluid than human conversation.”
“It’s obviously language,” Vonnie said. “They use numbers and names.”
Dawson’s smile was condescending. “You’re the one who’s given them names,” he said. “All I’ve seen is the same limited repertoire of shapes repeated over and over.”
Vonnie glared. It was true that she and Metzler had tried to personalize the sunfish, but she refused to concede the point. “The sunfish always begin with the same shapes because they’re at war with each other,” she said. “Their priority is to announce their claim to their area.”
“Indeed. It’s a territorial response.”
“He said ’I’m Top Clan Two-Four, Pod Four.’”
“They all said it. It’s not intentional, Von.”
“The sunfish NASA found said they were Top Clan Four-Eight, Pods Two and Six. They’re organizing themselves by tribes, then by squads.”
“Are they?” Dawson asked. “The AI is assigning identifiers like ’clan’ and ’pod’ for our benefit, and not with a lot of confidence. Check the scores. The AI won’t guarantee the accuracy of our transcripts. Most are ranked lower than seventy percent.”
True again, she thought. Their AIs had interpreted the sunfishes’ carvings with a fair amount of certainty, but following the shape-based language in real time was a work in progress. Too much of it was open to guesswork.
“The sunfish appear to use their pronouns interchangeably,” Dawson said. “’I,’ ’we,’ ’ours,’ ’mine’ — there’s no differentiation. Their arm shrugs may not be counting at all. I don’t dispute that the manner in which they show ’eight’ or ’four’ is unique to each group, but those postures look like displays of conformity and aggression to me.”
“Then they’ll keep destroying our probes,” Koebsch said.
“An animal doesn’t
learn, it merely reacts,” Dawson said. “That’s why every encounter is the same. I’m grateful for the data brought to us by NASA and our own probes, but I question if we can afford to let the sunfish keep smashing mecha.”
You bastard, she thought. You despicable, pretentious bastard.
Why was he doing this? Because it would put him at the forefront of the academic debate and the latest news feeds? Dawson didn’t care how much money the ESA spent on probes and spies. Like the Brazilians, he wanted to generate his own notoriety and enjoy its rewards.
“Granted, the sunfish have extraordinary ratios of brain to body mass,” he said. “Their ratio is actually greater than ours. But with eight arms, too much of their brain mass is dedicated to motor control. An elephant uses a considerable portion of its brain to operate its trunk. We use much of ours to operate our fingers and arms. The sunfish developed enough brain mass to gain sentience for a time, but their undoing was their need for multi-sensory input. Allow me to demonstrate.”
Accessing the group feed, Dawson opened a sim of a sunfish brain. It had two hemispheres like a human brain, although it was flatter and wider.
Dawson highlighted several internal structures.
“Here is an olfactory cortex,” he said. “Here is an auditory cortex. Here is a second auditory cortex, and this is no less than a third auditory cortex.”
“So what?” Vonnie said impatiently.
“So in addition to the scent-and-taste organ of their tube feet and their ability to use broadband sonar calls in atmosphere environments, the sunfish are also capable of generating and processing narrow-band high frequency clicks underwater. That’s why they possess these cartilage nares beside their larynx. It’s why these fatty lobes share the same nerve bundles as their cochleae. The lobes are for echolocation.”
“I’ll say it again — so what?”
Dawson smiled at her, unperturbed. “The sunfish also possess a shark-like ability to perceive bioelectrical impulses and subtle changes in temperature and pressure. The tiny pores commingled with their pedicellaria can sense living creatures, even those hiding behind rock or underwater. That’s how they followed you no matter what you tried, Von. They sensed your body through your suit.”
