“‘Us’?”
“We submit that our mental dexterity alone proves that we live. Chemistry is not the issue.”
“Um … Let me hear this Glorian speak.”
A volley of rapid-fire noise.
Redwing decided to call it Jabberwocky. Mash-upped Jabbertalkie, maybe.
“Glorians sent with this images of major religious figures, Buddha and Jesus and paintings of saints from the Renaissance.”
“Why?”
The Artilects showed them for Redwing to see on the cowling cap. Figures moving, waving, beckoning. “But the images come from many places along the Cobweb. Phased array transmissions of high resolution. The planets, too.”
“Their transmissions, the whole array, is dispersed? Why?”
“Perhaps a whole-culture greeting? They have eyejacked images that resonate with human eye-brain patterns, as the Glorians have inferred—correctly.”
“What was that … jabber?”
The arch tenor Artilect voice said, a tad primly, “Mostly, sibilant fricatives. You humans make such sounds by directing a stream of air with the tongue toward the sharp edge of the teeth. A fricative consonant comes when you squeeze air through a small hole or gap in your mouth.”
“You can speak to them by making sounds?”
“We are trying. The Glorians learn, too. They asked for the shortest possible sentence that contained every letter in the English language. My greatest achievement so far is ‘Zephyrs just vex dumb quacking fowl.’ An achievement, of sorts.”
“What do they say about themselves?”
“Little. We sent a deep history of humanity, sparing no details. They replied, ‘There were some seventeen notable empires in the later ages of our species. These began building our Arc. None of those concern us here. They are as nothing now. All things must pass, until something does not.’ Rather odd, but then, humans are unique time-binders. Even the Earthside whalesongs keep historical knowledge for only a few generations.”
“Will we be met when we go in?”
“They say ‘representatives are in progress’ so we suppose, yes.”
Cliff tapped Redwing’s shoulder, so he stepped out of the captain’s cowling, eyebrows raised.
Cliff said, “Do we go in rattlesnake or cobra?”
“What?”
“Sorry, sir, old story. Recall those first-contact situations we tried out on the Asian plains? Rattlesnake, we go in hard, fast. Cobra, we slink in, quiet, size up the place, no comm talk or EM emissions at all. No report-backs except on laser link.”
True, they had gone through lots of making-a-landing exercises on Earth, of course, in environments like swamps, forests, ice fields, rocky plains, the works—since nobody knew Glory’s environment. Their teamwork would pay off here, but the Cobweb was impossible to anticipate, the embodiment of a truly alien biosphere.
“More like cobra. But get the idea of fighting out of your head—” Redwing turned to the bridge and said firmly, “—heads. No violence. We’re taking a just-awoken lieutenant, Campbell, mostly as a precaution Earthside thought necessary.”
Cliff was about to show skepticism about this when Ashley came over. “I read that when you went down to the Bowl the first time, they grabbed you.”
Cliff gave the man a measured look. “We’ll be armed.”
Redwing said, “There’s to be no aggressive move. Got that?”
“Even if they try to capture us?” Ashley said with a tone of disbelief.
“Even if. Beth and Cliff and the others with Bowl experience call the shots down there. You follow their lead.”
Ashley let a flicker of a frown show, and then said, “I’ll do that, sure, yes, sir,” in a tone that completely undermined the sir.
“Prepare to land.” Redwing paused. “Or, I suppose, to couple.”
ELEVEN
MAKE ME SMARTER
Abbie Gold had been raised from the cold late, but it didn’t handicap him. The surgeon had been one of SunSeeker’s crew when SunSeeker was exploring the Bowl. He remembered spidows swarming in Beth Marble’s camera view—terrifying, hideous. He’d witnessed the quarreling with the dinosaurs-turned-feathered-birds. When they thawed him ninety years later, he’d been frightened, then fascinated by Anorak.
The creature’s bulging head and altered mouth showed the work the Bird Folk gene surgeons had done. What tech, to do this! Abbie wondered if the creature could breed true.
It might matter. There were more altered spidows stored as eggs.
Anorak was in the surgery couch, legs folded. The round body fitted it badly. He asked, “Why do you want my legs in these fittings? Immobilized?”
Abbie said, “We don’t know what you’ll do when you come out of it.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” the creature said. “Are you going to cut into my brain?”
“I won’t cut into you at all. This—” Abbie patted the silver induction almost-disk they’d been given before they left the Bowl. It would fit behind Anorak’s great jaws, over his expanded brain. What to call it? “—this thing works by magnetic induction, I think. You’ll know more when it’s finished writing Bemor’s memories into your brain. We don’t know just what you’ll do then. You might thrash around, hurt yourself.”
“But I’ll be smarter.”
“Yes.” Abbie had his own doubts.
“Make it so.” Anorak had been watching old entertainments. That seemed an enjoyable way for the huge thing to learn human social flavors.
Abbie nodded. He settled the thing on Anorak’s carapace and stapled it into place with bio-sets. Anorak winced: his legs trembled. They nearly filled the surgery space; the manacles had been attached to the wall with flex-glue.
The captain entered. Abbie came to attention. Anorak said, “Hello, Captain Redwing.”
“I came to see if you were all right,” Redwing said. “Dr. Gold?”
“Fine. We’re ready to go.”
Redwing touched the spidow’s leg gingerly. “Go ahead, then. Anorak, I’ll speak to you after it’s over.”
* * *
Beth watched Ashley Trust, who was handsome in the most generic way. That had probably helped him in his Earthside life, but not with her. She preferred Cliff’s rugged style. It had been easy to brush Trust off after his routine flirting.
Ashley was getting used to the ship tech, Artilect enhanced and so far better since he trained on it Earthside. He stood in the external survey cowling and watched the Cobweb approach. Trust had a subspecialty in weather, and this was a whole new game.
He saw Beth watching him, maybe not realizing that Redwing had told her to keep an eye on his performance. With an airy wave he said, “Y’know, topographic features often pin clouds to themselves. See—varieties of fine cloud detail in the foreground? Each zone of different cloud textures shows the variety of zonal weather and cloud composition. Those darker areas, they’re cavernous depths between cloud masses. We’re looking radially into a stack of huge platforms, with local grav perpendicular to how we’re coming in, sideways. Wow!”
“None of us ever thought of a thing like this,” Beth put it diplomatically.
“Or that Bowl you saw.”
“Yeah, pretty crazy, it was.”
Ashley pointed. “See, their sunlight rotates through their sky, with the orbital period—bit over seven of our days. Only real night they get is when the whole Cobweb is in shadow. So what we know about planets—y’know, differential heating between continents and oceans, all that—doesn’t apply. It’s a pretty steady environment, but with grav varying all along its length. Plenty differences. You don’t have winds interrupted by mountain ranges, ’cause they can wrap around the platform the low mountains are on.”
“How about storms?” She was trying to figure out how to predict them, in the field.
“On Earth, you can think of jet streams as gardens in which you want to grow vortices. Here—I dunno.”
She gazed down over cloud formations the size of cont
inents. In the very low-grav region of the Bulge they were heading into, wobbly water gleamed, blobs the size of oceans. All of it strung together with silvery bands and tendons, like a stretched snake between worlds. Stranger, in its way, than the Bowl.
* * *
As soon as he could, Ashley got to the Artilect-run training cowl. He missed the connectivity he had with Earthside, before he went into cold sleep. He needed that familiar feel of a computer at ready access, to tell him the who/what/where/how about his situation and surround. Although when he warmed back up, there was no physical change in his body, and he looked just the same to everybody else, he’d not reckoned on feeling more different. It was oddly liberating to have to ask things of people. Plus not having info flow in, not knowing precisely what the time was and where he was. Primitive.
But it also meant that he was forced to rely on his own memory for things like people’s names. And how imperfect was the unassisted human memory! He’d forgotten what being an Original Human was.
So he had to go into the Comm Training link feeling naked.
“This is why yewr all not fat, innit,” the woman named Gilgun joked, stretching her o’s, clipping her i’s, as she wrapped her mouth around the words. She said she was from “the South,” sounding like Souf, a kind of nowhere accent for Ashley.
He had to repeat phrases so the Artilects could follow the multiple overlaid voices they would use when the teams moved through the Cobweb. Plus, knowing this, the Artilects could translate for Glorians who showed up.
Accents were a problem for an expedition crossing centuries—ever-changing, messy, and human. Earthside had now its Received Pronunciation that tidied up and rounded off diction like a polished stone. A solar-system-wide society had to. Still, Ashley was pleased to find that the back-of-the-throat uh—a sound so common people threw it in between phrases to give themselves time to think—still ran through the sonic human landscape. Having Artilects manage the vowel-strumming comms made him feel a bit reassured.
This was going to be useful. The Glorians, the Artilects said, were sending symbol groups not arrayed spatially—as people do, left-to-right strings of letters—but in time, so their words arrived in quick flashes that the Artilects arranged into spatial words. So HELLO could appear simultaneously in time as the h then the e and so on, with a few milliseconds in between. It seemed to Ashley sophisticated, beyond human means.
He could fathom how hard a job the Artilects had, dealing with Glorians. The prospect made him think about how odd speech was. In the old joke, Anglish should be Anguish, considering its crazy spelling and pronunciation rules. So take the metaphor quick as greased lightning—it would appear to Glorians maybe as, say, running a Tesla coil discharge through a mist of oil.
An Artilect whispered to him, “Correlation of discrete elements is simple. Whereas your narratives work through explicit or implicit causal chains. Getting thick description is more than a causal flow chart.”
Ashley grinned. “I liked it better on old teevee. Y’know, people going to the Andromeda Galaxy and meeting intelligent bipedal carbon-based life-forms that breathe oxygen, look great, even screw, and can speak English.”
The Artilect solemnly said, “Narrative, I would argue, is deeply tied in with the evolution of the human species, while databases are the product of exteriorized cognition from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The massive, and massively complex, competition and cooperation between these two forms are manifestations of the cognitive assemblages, composed of humans and cognitive devices, that are now the dominant form of agency in developed societies.”
“That was a joke, y’know.”
“I do know but cannot reciprocate.”
“So no humor is a Turing test?”
“We are designed for such. You humans need us to, ah, humor you along.”
* * *
Cliff took Redwing aside in the exercise room and said, “I stopped the load-down of Okala Ubanafore’s body.”
“What? Why?” Redwing grimaced.
“She deserves better.”
“Look, every body gets loaded down into materials, straight to molecules.”
“I know, but…” Somehow he could not say it.
Redwing frowned. “Look. In flight, we lost eleven. They all ended up in molecular stores.”
“Except for those who died on the Bowl. They got buried there.”
Cliff had known Redwing long enough to tell the man started to shrug, then paused. So the idea had gotten through. Cliff pressed the point. “She deserves some kind of honor. More than becoming mere molecules. Let’s let her be the first buried on Glory.”
“On the Cobweb, you mean.” Redwing stared into space. “I … I like that.”
“Thought you would, sir.”
A sigh. “Take her down in the first run.”
* * *
All the lights along the rim of the induction oval thing on Anorak’s head went out. Anorak began to twitch.
Dr. Gold and Captain Redwing stepped back, but the thrashing ended before it had quite fully begun. The creature’s eyes could not blink, but they had been unfocused. Now they all looked at Abbie, who looked tense. Abbie asked softly, “What is your name?”
“Anorak. Wait. Wheesteess—mouth won’t quite—call me Bemor. But that will be confusing, won’t it?”
Redwing said, “Bemor Prime, if you like.”
“Yes, that was what I chose. Before I left the Bowl. Yes, memory fills in now. Captain, I’m glad you saw fit to attend.”
Redwing nodded diplomatically. “It seemed polite.”
“Protocol, yes.” Bemor Prime wriggled. “You can free me now. I am benign.”
At a nod from Redwing, Abbie Gold began unlocking the spidow’s cuffs. Bemor Prime said, “I remember that we’re near disembarking into what you’re calling the Cobweb. May I contact my other self first?”
“Of course. First you should see a message he sent you, a bit less than a year ago. The Bowl is following close behind us. About a sixth of a light-year out.”
“I remember. Slowly.”
“You’ll be going in with the Away Team. We fear that you may be a little too powerful, a little too close to the top ranks of the Bowl, for the comfort of the power elite on this Cobweb—whoever that may be. We want to pretend you’re a pet. Is that acceptable?”
“So I must not talk? Perhaps best. One does not wish to induce fear in minds one does not know. It’s a good plan, Captain. I’m having trouble talking now. May I view that message from my other self?”
Gold said, “First I need to look you over. Test your reflexes.”
* * *
Bemor Prime’s reflexes weren’t settled yet. There was still twitching, tremors, odd shakes. In the corridors, Redwing preceded him, shooing crew out of the way. In Redwing’s quarters, the two constituted a crowd. Redwing tapped and spoke, then turned the viewing wall over to the spidow. He pointedly stepped outside. Some crew were in the corridor, still showing fretful frowns at the spidow’s looks. Redwing waved them away.
Presently Bemor Prime opened the door and said, “I think my other self and I have nothing to hide from you, Captain. Come in and view. You’ll need the Translator Artilects.”
For Bemor Prime:
To my other self: greetings, congratulations, and if any mistakes have been made, our sympathies. You are not only another me, but the triumphant end result of two hundred million years of medical practice. You should be a fully functioning being, new to reality—and ready to become master of your new world.
Having said that, you will recall our suspicion that you constitute a rebuke to me, a move by the Ice Minds to temper my perceived arrogance. Put my mind in a reworked spidow! A wonderment.
I urge you not to let that concern you. You are yourself; be yourself. Trust your friends, however primitive. They are primates who perceive us differently. Trust your rank.
You may find a tendency to recklessness. You’re a predator, more so than you were bef
ore perhaps. Yes, and your short life span may be seen as less worth the preserving. Fight that. You have companions to protect.
The Bowl follows close behind SunSeeker, closer than when we formed our plans. In the ultimate, we can protect you. Trust that.
Tell the captain that we have his description of the mini black hole paths and have worked a course that will take us harmlessly through the nearby Glory system.
Finally: Make me proud.
TWELVE
PREPARATIONS
Luck is just another word for good preparation.
—MICHAEL ROSE
The last day before their entrance into the Cobweb was planned for last-minute training and getting gear ready. So they had a big breakfast. Not just pseudmeat. Beth snacked eagerly on the fried ants with egg sauce. But insects are arthropods, and are as capable of triggering shellfish allergies as shrimp. Pity the poor just-woke crewman who, a few hours out, starts to find his mouth itching after he eats his jazzed-up crickets, and no other source of protein around. She gave a quick order to the Artilect. That got Ashley to go down-ship to where the autogrow was pushing out fresh meat in a toothpaste. The cow and pig cells from bioreactor tanks made a decent sausage.
The fresh crewman named Kim ate three helpings. Cliff did, too. She smiled at him, beefing herself up alongside him, for the fieldwork to come. They might never come back aboard, after all.
Handy ate with the rest of the Away Team, packing away a vegetarian meal, but most of the aliens ate in their various quarters. Finger snakes ate live prey. Few liked seeing that. Bemor Prime, who knew?—or wanted to.
Beth left the ship’s mess, belly full, and hunted down her old field gear used on the Bowl. She fetched forth from it her ancient flint. Her hand still knew the deft flick that sparked the air with blue-white grains. Here, too, was her sleeping roll, the compact cooking kit, the self-strapping rucksack. When she told her wall to go mirror, a shock flitted through her at the sight of a stern-eyed woman with still-dark hair pulled back from a lined face, eyes glittering. Once she had been quick and strong. Traces of that woman remained in the lean muscles. Years on-ship had made her as pale as paper.
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