Bram broke it to him gently. “I think that’s what it may take. We’re going to have to put it to a vote.”
“Don’t say that! Jun Davd spends all his time looking at the pictures and data you sent up. I’ve been trying to get some revised escape orbits out of him, but his computer’s all tied up with an analysis of the radio traffic that—that colony sent.”
“Sent?”
“Yes, it’s stopped. They don’t seem to have anything more to say to one another. Jun Davd says the colony’s on its own.”
“Is he getting anywhere with his analysis?”
“No.”
Jun Davd was interested in Heln’s theories. “A life form that lacks basic empathy on a neurological level. It’s a chilling thought for us humans. Very frustrating. Our only other relationship with intelligent beings was with the Nar—probably the most empathetic life form in the universe.”
“I’ve forbidden our people here to go visit. But I know they sneak over there anyway, make a party of it. Walkers are checked out and are gone for twelve or fifteen hours. I can only hope they’re watching from a distance. The insect-folk themselves are sending out pickets. Those wheeled vehicles of theirs are spreading outward in reconnaissance patterns. They’re probably looking for expansion sites. I hope there are no encounters.”
“And if there are?”
“According to Heln, they’ll see the human beings as a detail of their environment. An unimportant detail. Irrelevant.”
It was an audio-only circuit, but Bram could almost see Jun Davd shake his head in bemusement. “What if some impatient idiot grabbed hold of one of these creatures?”
“Then he’d be a relevant fact of the environment. That’s the kind of encounter I don’t want.”
“I hope your terrestrial life specialists come up with some answers soon. People here in the tree are agog at your pictures. We can’t keep them penned up much longer. You’re liable to have tourists.”
Bram groaned. “That’s all we need.”
“Heln believes that there may be a switch in the neurological makeup of these insect folk—a switch that would make us a part of their perceptions—and that this switch can be tripped if we find the key?”
“Correct.”
“And that once tripped, it will stay tripped for them as a species?”
“Yes.”
“Extraordinary!”
“Heln’s delved into volumes of biological lore from the buried libraries and says there are all sorts of examples of these neurological switches—they’re called ‘releaser’ mechanisms—in terrestroid life. If the animal’s nervous system is complex enough and there’s a degree of social organization, the perception of the triggered individual becomes the perception of the species.”
“What if the perception is something we won’t like?”
“All we want to do is get them to notice us.”
“Be careful.”
“I’m on my way to see Jorv now, to see if he’s made any progress in tracing their species.”
“The claspers at the tip of the abdomen were characteristic of many insects,” Jorv said happily. “Like paired forceps. Insects developed an opposing grip before our own ancestors did. Only they had it in a different place.”
He looked up at Bram, pleased with his little joke. Jorv had gotten an artist to prepare diagrams from Heln’s pictures, and these were spread out on easels around him.
“Odd place for a hand,” Bram said.
“Not when you consider the purpose.”
“Which was?”
“To assist in copulation.” Jorv licked his lips. “A useful accessory, particularly for species that mated in flight.”
“These creatures don’t have wings.”
“No, but I’ll wager an autopsy would show vestigial wing muscles, just as human beings have vestigial tails. They lost the wings somewhere along the way, as ants did.”
Jorv pointed at a picture tacked on the wall, showing a spiny, many-legged creature with fearsome jaws—a blowup from one of the old texts he and Heln had been delving into.
“Are they ants?”
“No. I haven’t been able to find a form they correspond to—not yet. There’s something puzzling about them.”
Bram looked again at the diagram of the abdominal claspers. They were heavily gauntleted, but their form was plain enough, as a gloved hand is.
Jorv continued happily babbling. “The female claspers for gripping the male would have been in a different abdominal segment, but that doesn’t mean anything. The structures would have been there embryonically, and if evolution decided they would make a useful hand, a similar appendage could have developed from the ovipositor.”
“Ovipositor?”
“For laying eggs. It was generally equipped to puncture holes in mud, vegetation, or some other hatching medium. Living flesh, I’m afraid, in the case of some of the nastier species.”
“Insects seem to have been a remarkably single-minded life form.”
“In the sense of a will to survive? So were our own ancestors, no doubt. But those creatures building their city out there have developed intelligence. They’ve learned how to survive and propagate through technology. Don’t worry. Once we get a key to their developmental patterns, we’ll find a way to communicate with them.”
“I hope so.”
Jorv frowned. “I still haven’t decided whether their ancestors were plant eaters or meat eaters. The mouth parts are hidden inside that odd facial structure. There were over a hundred million species of insects, and so far I haven’t been able to find anything like it.”
Ame came over with a new sheaf of blowups. “Hunters or browsers?” she mused. “It would be nice to know before we meet them again.”
* * *
As it happened, it was the insect-folk who made the first move. Bram was having a meal with Ame when he got a call from one of the watchers he had posted on the plain.
“Bram-captain, one of those tube machines is rolling in your direction. It zigzags a lot, but there’s no doubt about where it’s headed. It should reach the digs in about an hour.”
“Thanks. Stay where you are. Keep an eye out for any more of them.”
He stood up. Ame said, “I’ll get the others.”
“Tell them to keep their distance till we see what they’re up to. Let’s see what they have in mind, for a change.”
He deputized a dozen people for crowd control. “Tell everybody to stay out of their way. Don’t interfere with them. If any approach is made, it will be done by one of the specialists.”
An hour later, the excavated streets were full of waiting people. Word had gotten around fast. They sat on ledges, hung over the low rooftops that had thrust themselves out of the rubble, and loitered in the stone arches. Bram had a vantage point from the top of one of the buildings facing the moon plaza. If the insect surveying party kept to the avenues of rubble leading into town, this would be the major route.
“There it comes,” Jao said beside him.
A tiny shape appeared in the distance and soon resolved itself into one of the tube vehicles, bumping along on its fat tires at about twenty-five miles an hour. The four barrel-shaped rollers were all grouped close together under a cab that seemed to carry most of the weight; the long, slender cylindrical body tilted upward at a thirty-degree angle behind it, doing a lot of vibrating. Bram supposed it made as much sense as any other design for rough country; if the cab had to crawl over an obstacle, the projecting section had plenty of leeway to tilt downward without dragging.
The bizarre vehicle rolled by the crystalline shafts of the moonropes without slowing down and came to a quivering stop at the edge of the wide plaza. Bram could see human figures peeking at it from around corners.
He waited for a door to open, but none did. After a few minutes a boxy helmet emerged from the end of the tube, about twelve feet above the ground. The rest of the insect-person extruded itself, hung rigidly horizontal from the lip of the tube
by the claspers at the tip of its elongated abdomen, and let itself drop lightly on all fours to the ground. Seven more of the creatures followed.
They stood around, conferring with twitching movements of their long sterns. Bram saw little, discreet flashes of lights from their helmets and assumed it was the polarized light version of radio communication. After getting everything settled to their apparent satisfaction, they slung equipment over their humped shoulders—or hips, if that’s what they were—and began skittering down the long boulevard with lots of nervous, darting side trips, staying in a loose group.
People began to drift down from rooftops and emerge from side streets to trail after the insect-people at a respectful distance.
“We’d better get down there,” Bram said.
He vaulted over the rooftop and floated to the ground, with Jao close behind him. He strode in thirty-foot bounds across the plaza and caught up with the little parade going down the avenue.
Trouble started almost immediately. A skylarking fool who had been leaping up and down in great swoops shot fifty feet into the air and came down squarely in front of one of the insect-people. Apparently he got a good look at the jelly-eyed face within the helmet, because he backed away with a jerk and stumbled.
The insect-being showed no signs of-stopping, and the skylarker showed no signs of getting out of its way. Jao reached the spot in one long soaring arc and snatched the offending person out of the way with a hand hooked into the webbing of the life-support backpack.
He bore his kicking prize to Bram. He did not set the fellow down on ground, but held him out to Bram at arm’s length.
The face within the helmet was that of a junior archivist named—Bram rummaged in his memory—Alb something-or-other. Alb was less than thirty years old, having been born in the heart of the Milky Way, and hadn’t lived long enough to develop good sense.
“Put him down,” Bram said.
Instead of letting go, Jao rammed the errant archivist into the ground with some emphasis. Alb stood there with a silly grin on his face.
“Alb, I thought I told everybody—” Bram began.
“He can’t hear you,” Jao said. “He isn’t tuned in to your frequency.” He made twisting motions to get the idea across to Alb, but the young man just stood there stupidly, no doubt listening to the gibes of his own circle of friends.
“Oh, chaos take it!” Jao exclaimed. He dialed through his own frequencies till he hit Alb’s. He must have turned the power full up, to judge by the way Alb flinched. Somewhere out there a number of other people must have acquired an earache too. Jao proceeded to give the unfortunate fellow a dressing down. Bram tuned in for the tail end of it: “…brains of a three-legged baggage walker!”
Alb gave Bram a sheepish apology and promised to behave. Bram heard group laughter on the frequency, and Alb turned pink.
They caught up with the insect patrol some distance down the avenue of rubble. Jao’s lecture seemed to have had good effect; the trailing crowd of people was hanging back farther. One of those who wasn’t lagging behind was Heln Dunl-mak. She skipped ahead of the alien party, just beyond what she had described to Bram as the insect-people’s “avoidance zone.”
Heln’s slight figure was top-heavy with improvised equipment—a bulky pack that Jao had put together for her. It was flashing modulated polarized light, some of it drawn from frequently appearing patterns in the stick-ship’s early radio transmissions, some of it repeating and stringing together “phrases” that the darting aliens were blinking at each other.
“Best program I could cobble together at short notice,” Jao said apologetically as he waved at Heln’s dancing form. “Heln doesn’t really know what she’s saying to them, but she can punch in a few crude menus based on their physical behavior, and the computer can try to correlate it with what they’re flashing to each other at the time. Then it runs through all the combinations. With luck, we’ll get a ‘turn right,’ or ‘follow me,’ or ‘look at this.’ It’s up to Heln to recognize a response.”
But there was no sign of recognition from the insect-folk that Bram could see. By stretching his imagination to the limit, he might at best have concluded that they showed a sort of irritation or brief annoyance—analogous to what a human might display if a light were flashing in his eyes or if he were trying to talk with a radio on in the background. But such distractions, really, were below the level of awareness.
“The computer’s learning all the time,” Jao said defensively. “Sooner or later it might hit on something.”
“What you’ve done is amazing,” Bram assured him.
Jao brightened. “Want to know what the hardest part was? It wasn’t the program. It was inventing the gizmo to recognize the polarization through different planes of orientation, then to transmit the same way. That’s what takes up so much room in the backpack. I had to scavenge the faceplates of a whole bunch of helmets to build it.”
Heln, arms spread low, purposely penetrated the avoidance zone and dropped to one knee, then danced back as the creatures showed restlessness. Her equipment blazed a signal that looked sustained to human eyes but that to the aliens, of course, would have flickered. Bram saw the shadowy facial limbs lift as if to ward off something, but the creatures never stopped their prowling movements.
“They still don’t see it as speech,” Jao said. “Something missing.”
“Very frustrating,” Bram said.
One of the insect-people was using an odd camera—a sizable box with one curved face studded with thousands of pinhole lenses. It took its pictures by sweeping areas of the ruins in short arcs.
“Multiple fixed-focus lenses,” Jao said. “Motion shifts the pattern. They must have some way of reading the result. Like Heln said, it’s the way they see.”
“They’re not much interested in the people,” Bram said. “Or individual objects. They seem to want fields of view.”
“Looking for another place to light,” Jao said. “The digs here are ready-made of them—honeycombed with chambers connected by a tunnel system.”
“No,” Bram said. “We can’t allow that. We’ll be coming back here someday. We’ve got to talk them out of it.”
“First we’ve got to find a way to talk to them.”
The insect-people spent the next few hours exploring, completely ignoring the holiday crowd that tagged along. After a while, Bram became aware that their seemingly random forays added up to an extremely efficient search grid.
Besides the camera, whose purpose was obvious, they used a number of other instruments. One was a long stinger that came out of a cylinder on legs and penetrated the ground to a depth of—Bram estimated by counting the telescoping sections—thirty feet, at least. The tripod gave a little jump when it hit bottom. “Their version of a thumper,” Jao said. “They’re searching for cavities.” Other instruments, with a little thought, were soon recognized as a surveyor’s transit and a range finder, adapted to the peculiar insect vision.
The creatures seemed to get restive after a while, and after they had darted at one another in a series of little mock attacks, they all filed back to their vehicle, launched themselves up into the end of the angled tubular chassis, and disappeared inside. Bram waited, but the barrel-wheeled vehicle showed no signs of starting up.
Heln sauntered over. “Lunch break for them,” she observed. “Or some kind of break. Whatever it is, they’ve got to take off those helmets to do it.”
After twenty minutes passed, the creatures popped out of the end of the tube again and resumed their mysterious activities. Several of them could be observed preening their nightmare faces. Jorv appeared with an assistant, who took more pictures.
At the end of another couple of hours, the creatures found the ramp to the parking garage under the sports arena. This seemed to excite them. There was another head-to-head conference, with eight long tail sections sticking out and wobbling, the gauntleted claspers working convulsively.
They knew about air locks. Afra
id that they might damage the locks leading to the stadium interior, Bram had been about to order that the creatures be let through while someone held the door, but one of them figured out the human machinery at a jelly-eyed glance, and they swarmed inside. They even closed it behind them.
They seemed to be awfully good with machinery.
“They can notice inanimate objects,” Bram puzzled, “but not a crowd of people.”
“You don’t understand,” Heln said. “We are inanimate objects.”
“Yar,” Jao said, as if he were an expert. “We haven’t impinged on them.”
A thought struck Bram. “They must have seen the shuttles parked in the field on their way through. If not man, then man’s works! Why didn’t they take an interest in those?”
“Held no meaning for them,” Heln supplied. “Wasn’t important. Not like the air lock here. They wanted to get inside.”
Bram spoke to his traffic control-deputies. “Keep the mob outside. I won’t evict anyone who’s already in there, but I think we’d better keep the numbers down.”
Without their space suits, the creatures from Sol were an unnerving sight—spiny legs, globular green eyes, and hard shiny integument bristling with stiff hairs. The four-fingered claspers at their projecting rears were pincers of horn, and the forward manipulating limbs, now revealed, were all tweezers and hooks.
They prowled the floor and balconies of the chamber, taking no more notice of the gawking humans than humans would have taken of moss on a rock. With the boxy helmets off, the clicking noises they made to each other could be heard like a high-speed rattle of broken sticks.
Their insect ancestry was fully apparent. “You see,” Jorv said ecstatically, “how evolution modified the exoskeleton in a way that permitted them to grow to size. It became a partially embedded, hinged, mostly external skeleton that operates as a system of levers. The extensor and flexor muscles operate separately, bridging the hinges on opposite sides.”
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