Second Genesis gq-2

by Donald Moffitt

  “I may have. First I want to see if Jorv and the others can pin down a working phylogeny for those creatures. I can tell you one thing, though.” She hesitated.

  “Go on.”

  “They’re not a contact species. But they observe a hierarchy of space.” She saw his puzzled look and added, “You see, it would affect their social organization—and the way they communicate.”

  “You can tell all that by looking at them from a distance?”

  “On average, they maintain a uniform separation between themselves of about one point five limb lengths in close working situations.” She gave a troubled frown. “The limits of fang and claw, you see. In humans, it’s about three feet. But the real clue came from Jorv.”

  “You mean when he got too close to that equipment and was warned off? I suppose it shows that these beings are touchy.”

  “No, not necessarily. They may inhabit a different universe of perception. Communication with them may not be a matter of language, or symbols, or images.”

  She cast a glance at the folded easel of the computer signboard that Jao was removing from the walker.

  “I don’t understand,” Bram said.

  Heln hesitated again. “I don’t believe they’re aware of Jorv.”

  “But they saw him. They rushed him till he backed off.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean they’re not aware of him as an entity. They’re aware of the alteration of hierarchical space that his presence caused.”

  Jao paused in his labors. “Just like physics,” he said. “The shape of space is defined by the presence of matter.”

  Heln pursed her lips. “I know it might not seem to make much sense…”

  “No, no,” Bram said hastily. “In the physical sciences we reason from a single datum sometimes and reach the most astonishing conclusions. You’ve got a new science here. We’ll take your word for it.”

  Ame was anxiously surveying the scene within the floodlit area. “Jorv just got himself chased again,” she said. “We’d better get over there before he gets himself into trouble.”

  “Yes,” Bram said. First he checked the air bubble of Jorv’s walker. It had deflated because the thickened edges of the gasket were misaligned. Shira had been right about Jorv’s carelessness. He must have shouldered his way out of the vehicle frontally, probably spreading the bubble’s lips apart with his hands, then letting them snap back into place. Bram realigned the closure and saw some of the collapsed folds begin to stir and rise; they might need that air on the way back—Jorv hadn’t bothered to set out with a full complement of reserve air bottles, and if he’d had to get back home on his own, he might have made a close thing of it.

  Jao slung his computer over his shoulder, and Bram shouldered the folded easel. Ame, he saw, had a big pad under her arm; she and Shira relieved Heln of some of her excess equipment. Together, they danced lightly across the landscape toward the stick-people’s camp.

  As they approached the lit area, two of the spindly creatures trotted by at close hand, bearing a large, lightweight construction panel between them. Their gait was three-legged, and the long tubular abdomens, with gauntleted pincers on the ends, were curled around for extra support. They were backlighted by the brilliant lamps, and through the cloudy sheaths that covered their bodies, Bram got an impression of stiff, slender, many-jointed legs. The huge boxy helmets, concealing their secrets in the reflected glare, made them look like walking packing crates.

  Jao stepped forward, holding up an outspread hand, but the creatures veered off to join a work crew at the perimeter of illumination.

  “You’d think they’d have stopped,” he said, affronted.

  “Different body language,” Shira suggested. “Holding up a hand doesn’t mean the same thing to them.”

  It sounded reasonable to Bram, but he saw Heln’s pursed lips and frown of concentration.

  They moved into the light. Bram saw Jorv’s space-suited figure ahead, stalking one of the stick-creatures. Jorv approached at a crouch, the lines of his body an exaggerated study in caution. The stick-creature was half turned away, flexing its reedy legs, its sheathed abdomen twitching slightly. It let Jorv get within eight or nine feet, then, abruptly, its legs bunched like springs and it soared over his head and lit down next to a pile of construction materials, where, without preamble, it joined its fellows in putting up one of the polyhedral structures.

  Jorv straightened up, every line of his body showing disappointment, and began stalking another one of the creatures.

  “We’re not even going to get that close to one,” Jao grumbled.

  Every time Bram and his party seemed about to intersect the path of one of the creatures, it veered off and ignored them.

  “Just hold on,” Bram said, “and we’ll be in the thick of them.”

  “I’m insulted,” Jao said. “Am I invisible, or what?”

  Heln said, “They see you … but they don’t see you.”

  “Maybe they’re some kind of hive creatures,” Shira put in. “No real intelligence. The intelligence is in that bubble they landed in.”

  “They’ve got intelligence,” Bram said. “If intelligence means handling tools and machinery.”

  Then, without warning, they were upon one of the creatures. It reared up in their path, the light shining full on it, and for the first time Bram got a good look at what was inside those cagelike helmets.

  Its face was the stuff of nightmares—two bulging domes of jelly on either side of a masklike bulb that was split by a vertical cleft. Each of those jellied eyes—if that’s what they were—was the size of a man’s head.

  The cleft parted in a hideous vertical smile that hinted at something spiny and complicated within. There was a flicker of movement in front of the ghastly face—and in a moment of startled disbelief, Bram saw why the creatures needed so much room in their helmets.

  There was a separate pair of limbs within the helmet!

  They grew out of the creature’s face, or the sides of what passed for a neck. They were smaller manipulating limbs—shorter than a man’s arm—and these peculiar beings kept them folded up on the floor of the helmet, like a person resting his elbows on a table.

  The creature swiveled its complicated head as if looking for a way of escape, and the facial limbs lifted and swung with it.

  A flash of crazy thought went through Bram’s head: It must cramp their style to be deprived of the use of their grasping members whenever they wear space suits! But the creatures’ anatomy gave them no alternative. Limbs projecting through sleeves in a smaller helmet would have immobilized their heads.

  Or maybe they simply needed to have their forelimbs available for grooming or self-care. Maybe they would have felt uncomfortable having the limbs enclosed apart from their faces. Bram could sympathize with that—hadn’t he suffered the agony of being unable to scratch an itchy nose while wearing a space suit?

  Everything had happened in an instant. Through his radio Bram heard a couple of people gasp—he felt like gasping himself—and then the jelly-eyed horror spun around and galloped away.

  “It saw us,” Jao said. “I swear it saw us that time.”

  “No,” Heln said. “It saw the effect we were having on its visual field.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Have you ever heard of an animal called a frog?”

  “Huh?”

  “Wa, in Chin-pin-yin. The children’s story about the mandarin who turned into one.”

  “Oh, yar.”

  “It saw motion, not objects. It ate an animal called a fly, but it didn’t see the fly until it moved. If you tried to feed a captive frog on dead flies, it would starve to death.”

  “Are you saying that these tomato-eyed beasts are frogs?”

  “No,” Heln said patiently. “I’m saying that they have a queer sort of brain wiring that enables them to cooperate as a species but that makes other life forms irrelevant to them—as irrelevant as a fly is to a frog … until
the fly moves. We’re no part of their experience—or their instincts—so we don’t exist for them.”

  Bram looked around at the teeming campsite. “Aren’t you overstating the case? These aren’t primitive animals. They’ve got space travel. They must process information somehow in those heads of theirs. Can you have intelligence without curiosity?”

  Something was bothering him. It was Jao’s description of the creatures as “tomato-eyed.” It was true. The eyes were reminiscent of gigantic green tomatoes. A memory nagged at Bram somewhere below the level of consciousness.

  “Maybe.” Heln stood her ground. “And maybe you can have intelligence without empathy. Maybe we’re going to find that these new neighbors of ours lack basic empathy-that it’s literally impossible for them to relate to any life form but their own.”

  “That would certainly make it hard to communicate with them,” Ame said with a strained smile.

  “To say the least,” Bram said.

  “I hope not,” Heln said, shifting some of her technical accoutrements on their carrying straps. “There has to be a way for us to plug ourselves into their sensory wiring. We’ll just have to find it. Let’s hear what Jorv has to say. Maybe he has some ideas about their phylum by now.”

  Jorv saw them coming and ambled over to greet them. He seemed preoccupied. “They may be descended from terrestrial insects,” he said without preamble. “Did you notice those wraparound eyes? They probably carry the efficiency of the compound type of eye as far as it can go—their visual acuity may surpass our own. And the muscle attachment—I wish I could make out more through those space suits. They don’t move as if the muscles were operating proper skeletons!”

  Bram tried a mild reprimand. “Jorv, you shouldn’t have come out here on your own. We may be running up against a very queer situation.”

  “Queer? I’ll say it’s queer. They won’t stand still long enough for me to get a good look at them. Did anybody bring cameras? Ah, Heln—you’d better start taking some pictures.”

  “Did you try to talk to them?” Bram asked.

  “Talk? They won’t talk. Ame, I think you may have hit on something when you deduced a hookup between sensory input and a visual grid from their radio signals.”

  Ame looked excited. “The compound eye means there’s no overall image—just a very large number of separately perceived patches. The visual information jumps from facet to facet, whether the object is moving or the creature’s head is moving, and the sum of the signals is processed somewhere in the brain—”

  She broke off. Everybody looked at Heln. “Your frogs,” Jao said.

  “What have frogs got to do with it?” Jorv said irritably. “These are insects!”

  “Very big ones if that’s true,” Shira murmured. “Insects shouldn’t be able to grow to that size, with exoskeletons as a limiting factor. And they were lungless, weren’t they? They transported oxygen through tracheae. That would limit their size, too.”

  “We won’t know till we examine one!” Jorv’s eyes were gleaming. “Do you think you could help me get one back to our camp?”

  “Sit on him if you have to,” Bram told the three women. “Jao, let’s get your computer signboard set up.”

  They worked at it for fifteen hours, taking turns going back to the parked walkers to replenish their air supplies and to fetch various items that Heln or Jao had brought along in hopes that they would help.

  Nobody ate a lot during that time—just a few hasty handfuls of travelfood that had been included with their rations—and nobody slept at all, despite the fact that all of them had been awake for more than twenty-four hours.

  They got nowhere.

  Every once in a while one of the stick-beings would dart over and pause for a look at the computer display or at an earnestly semaphoring human being. At least they seemed to be looking. But they always trotted on past without showing any reaction.

  Once an exasperated Jao had stepped squarely into the path of an ambulating beastie and attempted to herd it with blocking movements of his wide torso toward the little communications arena. An observer could not have said that the intercepted individual exactly tried to evade Jao. Simply, it was somehow past him without appearing to have noticed his presence.

  It was a pity, because Jao had knocked himself out to prepare his visual displays. There was a beautiful sequence in simplified diagrams and actual images that showed the human itinerary from the Whirlpool Galaxy to the Milky Way to the vicinity of the enclosed star that was presumed to be Delta Pavonis. Another sequence ingeniously arranged as a query showed the presumed progress of the tomato-eyed strangers from a presumed Sol.

  Jao never got anywhere near to unveiling his masterpieces—a sophisticated scenario that showed the ancient origin of humankind on a planet of Sol, showed bright schematic images of DNA, and showed the diskworld itself with stylized radio waves spreading from it toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies. It went on to show the Whirlpool in the Canis Venatici cloud, halfway to Virgo, being bathed in the radio waves, the reemergence of the colorful DNA schema, then the recreation of human beings and their return to the planet that had given birth to their genes.

  “They don’t take visual information!” Jao said in disgust. “And them with eyes as big as my head!”

  “It’s not visual information, it’s abstractions,” Bram said. “Let’s show them something closer to home.”

  They displayed images relating human figures to Yggdrasil, with much pointing at the green blob that could be seen over the horizon. They showed the fuzzy images of the stick-ship and finally life-size holos of the jelly-eyed creatures themselves, played back from Heln’s camera.

  But when Jao projected one of the fearsome holos in the path of one of the trotting creatures, it passed through it without pausing. “It didn’t see the image as real,” Ame said. “Not polarized for their eyes.”

  “But sometimes they do seem to pause for a second and show body reactions, particularly with the moving images,” Shira said, sounding frustrated. “And certainly when we get too close to their precious equipment.”

  “The same way your feet find stepping-stones when you cross a stream,” Heln said. “Doesn’t mean you’re really aware of the stones.”

  Heln, tree-born, had never seen a stream and certainly never had crossed one on stepping-stones, but Bram appreciated the aptness of the simile.

  “Going to try just one more thing,” Jao grunted.

  He generated an animated image of a Cuddly, and the next time a stick-creature intersected their little communications arena, he sent it scampering toward the being.

  The alien being stopped dead in its tracks and stood stock still for all of two or three seconds. For a moment Bram thought it was going to rear up and change direction, as it did when a human got in its way. The nightmare face seemed to expand as the central cleft widened, and Bram thought he saw a flicker of movement within the cavity.

  Then, apparently, the creature dismissed the holographic Cuddly and darted off on its interrupted errand.

  “We almost had it that time!” Jao exclaimed. “Did you see that?”

  “But why?” Shira asked. “It couldn’t have seen the holo as real.”

  “Something in its neural circuitry reacted,” Heln said. “Something about the image almost tripped a switch.”

  “But what?” Bram wondered. “The Cuddly’s size? Its movement? Its resemblance to something it is primed to react to?”

  “Maybe all of that,” Heln said. “But it shows that the switch is there, ready to be tripped. And maybe after we get back and have time to study our film and data, we’ll be able to figure out how to get them to notice us.”

  They kept at it until their margin of reserve air was almost gone. And then they had trouble prying Jorv away. “They’re insects, all right,” he babbled happily. “Or at least in the insect line of descent. It’s all there in the jointing of the legs—the two short basal joints, femur and tibia meeting at the knees, then the
three short joints and former claws of the tarsus. I’d give my eyeteeth to see them out of their space suits.”

  Bram had Jao drive Jorv back; he didn’t trust the pudgy zoologist not to return to the alien campsite. Before they entered their separate vehicles, Bram exchanged a few words with Jao.

  “Did you notice there were no Cuddlies hanging around? That’s odd … there must be a few burrows in the area, and they’re such curious little beasts.”

  “Huh? They’re probably just being cautious till they figure these insect-people out.”

  “Heln says that maybe we’ll be able to figure out how to trip that switch in their brains after we learn why they reacted to a Cuddly image.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Maybe we won’t want to.”

  It was hard for Bram to keep the curious from sneaking out to the insect-people’s base camp. “Not until we know more,” he insisted. “The specialists are working on it. We don’t want to take the chance of stirring them up till we have some chance of communicating with them.”

  In the meantime, Yggdrasil was drifting inexorably farther away. Smeth called several times a day to display fits of ill temper.

  “We were supposed to leave this system within two Tendays from now. Jun Davd’s got our course worked out for that window, and my black gang’s warming up the fusion drive. We’re halfway through our checklist. We’ve already got a starter ball of deuterium slush in the throat of the scoop, and it’s evaporating with every second that goes by.” His words became a wail. “And where’s Ame? She was supposed to be back here days ago! The twins are acting up, and I don’t have time to handle them by myself.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bram said. “I couldn’t get Ame to leave now if I tried.”

  “Well, it’s not every day you run into a new intelligent life form,” Smeth said grudgingly.

  “I can’t get anyone else to leave, either,” Bram told him. “We may have to change our plans. We can’t leave this system without knowing more about what’s waiting for us at Sol. We may not own it anymore—not if these are the new inheritors.”

  “If we don’t pack up and go soon, Yggdrasil will have to make another circuit. It would use up our whole starter ball. We could be delayed another year.”