Beth noted that Twisty had not said anything about Bemor Prime, who kept a distance from the rest of the team. Twisty showed no signs that it found such a giant spidow intimidating—maybe because there were such creatures somewhere in the Cobweb matrix?—or that it was aware the Bowl Folk knew how to install themselves inside such bodies.
Twisty was engaging Cliff in a discussion about whether an unconscious was a good idea, in the broad sweep of evolution. Cliff kept pressing for details as he swatted away a buzzing bird. There were plenty of the little brown darting ones, more like hummingbirds in their shrill calls and frenetic flailing wings. “We got to you, didn’t we,” Cliff said. “It’s not like you came to us.”
Twisty’s arms danced. “True. We gave that up long ago.”
“Why?”
“Too few prospects in the neighborhood. Your lovely world included.”
“What was wrong with—?”
“No intelligence then, but for the oceans.”
“This is how long ago?” Cliff asked.
“In your years, a bit more than a million.”
“There were pretty smart hominids then.”
“Ah, hominids means ‘pre-human,’ yes?”
“Yeah, primates kinda like us. Tool users. Had fire, tools, flint—”
Twisty paused, arms slack. Cliff glanced at Beth, and gave their wavy hand signal that meant the alien was probably augmenting memory with an inset data feed. Twisty’s voice came out now flatter, almost as though reading as it spoke. “I gather our automatic expedition found them potentially interesting, true. But our craft launched vessels into your seas and spoke with the swimmers there.”
“Dolphins?” Beth asked. “Whales?”
“Without hands, they, like many on other worlds, possess merely the spoken genius of minds thwarted. As in the porpoise, yes.”
Beth kept up her pace through an angular green valley, chuckling. “Some of us think the porpoise proves great genius by doing nothing particular to prove it.”
Twisty’s hands flew with delighted animation. “Their wisdom comes proved in pyramidal silence. Their freedom allows to follow the untrammeled sea winds across your planet.”
Cliff waved off two of the birds that zoomed around his head. Beth saw then that Twisty’s humor had an edge, the creature’s thin mouth slanted and low. “You get this from probes you sent that far back, so you did have an expansionist phase.”
“We learned from such as your sea life. Such minds had not evolved here.”
“Why didn’t you colonize Earth, then?” Beth asked.
“We decided instead to focus on lessons learned in that vast ago time.”
“Lessons from where?”
“Your world, others less clement. Most especially from the Bowl.”
“They taught you what?” Beth persisted.
“The value of vast lands. Yet despite their damaged saga, they venture forth in blazing haughty grandeur and thus risk much.”
Cliff said flatly, “You had a run-in with them, yes?”
“An unfortunate dealing, our history so testifies.”
“Some species exchange?” Cliff bored on.
“True, though of course time’s rub has altered allsuch.”
“There are species like our dolphins here?”
“Some, though not always in seas.”
Beth asked, “Can we meet some?”
“In due time, a phrase I think you know.”
She could tell much from Cliff’s boots, twitching just a bit as he walked on beside a rushing, gurgling stream, his pace picking up with his frustration. Diplomacy was not his strong suit.
Beth said mildly, “Why are we seeing only you, a single representative of what must be myriad species?”
Twitchy stopped dead, facing Beth. “I am sent to fathom you. Others witness, through me. You must know this.”
“We kinda guessed,” Cliff said. “Who else is tuning in?”
The rest of their party, following orders, kept apart. Dealing with Twisty was an executive function. More of the birds were wheeling and cawing in the air above. Sunlight glinted from their feathers. Their wings lifted high, smacking into each other at the top, clacking.
Twisty made smooth, calming gestures with its hands. “We are cautious. I am expendable. We believe in revelation by experience, not the tyranny of talk.”
Cliff stood with hands on hips—an unconscious primate gesture, Beth thought, that she had seen in chimps—and so she knew what he was thinking. “While you’re being careful, your buddies here have killed two of us.”
“Your own history, as unashamedly granted us in great cultural data files—and for that I congratulate you, a mature act indeed—testifies well to your nature. You have extinguished many of your world’s companion species, a classic crime of emerging genera. Yet your losses you see as tragic.”
“We damn well care about each other, don’t you understand?” Cliff was barely holding himself in, she knew. “We’re not just visiting zoo exhibits here for your study!”
Beth held up her hand, fingers tightened into a point, their signal for halt. Cliff nodded. “Suppose you tell us, friend Twisty, how you see the evolution of so simple a young species as we?”
Twisty brushed its hands along its arms, a Glorian gesture she had learned meant a cleansing of the air, and discussion. “I fashion that you emerged from land evolution of what you term apes, a primate specialty. If apes had sacrificed hands for flukes—so the moral might run, given as you are to such—they would still be philosophers, thinking in watery wisdom terms. But a retreat—so you would see it, surely?—into the seas would have taken away your devastating power to wreak your thought upon the body of the world. Instead, you would have lived and wandered, like the porpoise, homeless across currents and wind and oceans. Intelligent, surely. But forever the lonely and curious observer of unknown wreckage, such as our spacecraft sent to your world, miracles falling through the ocean’s blue eternal light.”
Beth said, “Primates never went back into the seas. Porpoises, whales, those came from hooved animals.”
Twisty waved this detail away. “My point is, to use your word, rhetorical. This pathway would perhaps have brought a deserved penitence for you, the eventual human. Perhaps such a transformation would bring that mood of innocence lost as childhood ends. You might have studied other minds, known many things living. All that, but absent power and your notorious urge to harm. It is worth at last a wistful thought for you, that someday the porpoise may talk to us, Glorians. We might well help you fracture the long loneliness that has made humanity a frequent terror and abomination even to himself.”
In the silence following, Beth thought again of a lesson hard-learned from the Bowl: Until you meet an alien intelligence, you will not know what it is to be human.
Cliff shook his head, mouth tight, shoulders tense. “We kill to eat, sure—and so far, your goddamn friends have been killing us for the same reason. Those carniroos are smart, too. Don’t you respect intelligent life here?”
Twisty gave a good imitation of a human shrug, though its shoulders were too liquid, just muscle waves sloshing from neck to shoulder, to make it mean anything.
It stood firm, arms held still, and said slowly, with a curious solemn dignity, “Yes, but intelligence must know and reconcile with the real universe into which logic and mechanism and time have made us all. I know death is coming for me. So do you. Laws of evolution command it. We have no way to pass on survival genetics to the next generation, beyond our age of last reproduction. All longevity beyond that age comes from social forces, keeping us alive for a blissful while. For you humans, that is about fifty years. For us, two hundred—we have made some progress beyond your level, yes. Yet I do not fear death, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.”
Cliff said, “Well, I damn sure fear it.”
Twisty said, “Sadly, so.”
Beth stepped between them. “Look, we’re not dolp
hins. They get eaten by killer whales, nothing they can do about it. But we can! If your buddies, other species, come at us, we’ll kill plenty of them, faster than you can count.”
Twisty made his odd nod again. “You are a farming culture still, though speedily expanding beyond your star as well. This carries historical burdens.”
Cliff shook his head angrily once more. “And you? No farms?”
Twisty’s eyes flicked over the humans, as if judging them with a flinty glare. “We have such, true. But most of us prefer the state nature brought to us, what you would call wild. That does not mean of low intelligence.”
Beth felt uneasy. “So what’s wrong with farming?”
Twisty gestured at the woods and mountains around them. “Some species prefer this. Indeed, on worlds and in what you term the Cobweb, most do. It is somewhat like the terrain we evolved into. As did you.”
“You evolved here, not on Glory?”
“We carry many Glory genes, but of course the Cobweb is all artificial, restored again and again. Glory species went extinct, were revived using guesswork and artwork. We are of long lineage.”
“On Glory?”
“No, mostly—for beyond Glory’s grasp affords us more room and possibility. You should focus outward from it. In ways, we were like you, in ancient eras.”
Beth wondered why Twisty always avoided talking about Glory. She decided to let it go for now; diplomacy was about being polite, or seeming so. “We invented farming when the hunter-gatherer game got too crowded.”
“Much as we did. And passed through our agricultural phase. We learned well that bands associate. Family, bond-groups, clans of ten or more families, fusions of clans. Then, as the number of farmers grows, comes strata formation. Cities. Nations. You and we alike then needed to bind in larger groups. Reunions are essential. Greetings often signaled by eating, mating, even defecating, if that is to your species’ taste. Slumber in pairs is useful, though adding more helps also. Neurological substrates emerge spontaneously in those emergent animals, which share and learn through emotion. The crucial avenue of higher minds, truly. Touch and smell and handshakes, appendage blending, long associations at levels of hormones and chemicals fashioned and selected for just this use—so common! To think and feel are often the same, for all pursue joy. Evolution demands it.”
Beth opened her mouth to hustle along this talkative alien, but then heard high caws and shrieks. Her concentration on Twisty had thrown off her guard.
A flash of pain came at her neck. Wings battered her head as a bird nipped at her neck. She slapped it away, drew her knife—and saw a flock of the darting birds at the necks of her entire team. Shouts, screeching. She stabbed at the bird. Her blade slipped among the feathers, found no target. The bird cawed loudly in her ear, beat at the air—and dived off, catching the wind. She dropped her knife back into its sheath and with her other hand brought her laser up. Her bolt hit the bird in flight. The beam reflected away. It tumbled in the air, squawked. She fired again, missed. It darted away with a flash of speed.
She saw other laser bolts reflecting from the birds. Quick snaps of light, not doing any harm she could see. “Shoot for the head!” she called.
A brown dart zoomed at her, beak yawning wide. She fired straight into its face. That worked. The head exploded. The bird smacked into her chest and fell bloody to the ground. The bird had plainly artificial layers in the head, like computer chips.
Cliff shot three times and hit two of the quick, flapping daggers. She took aim at another and with two shots nailed it.
Twisty, she saw, was lying on the ground. On its back. Not hurt. Just batting the birds away as they came near. It did not even look very bothered by it all.
Twisty’s voice rose to a high pitch, a keening call. Abruptly the birds broke off. They spread out, harder to hit, as they shot away.
“Damn it!” she shouted at Twisty. “Why the hell didn’t you warn us?”
“I would not deprive you of the experience,” it said smoothly.
She felt her neck. It oozed blood, a flesh wound. “Another of your wild, smart things?”
“Their flock mind wished to inquire into you. By flying near, they can interrogate your mind radiations—electromagnetic, though frightfully faint.”
“They could’ve just hovered and asked!” Cliff shot back.
“I decided to let this minor engagement be their only permitted approach.”
“Approach?!” Cliff barked. He pointed his laser at Twisty.
Beth stepped between them. “No. Let’s check the team.”
The birds had nipped and flapped but done no major damage. The team was irritated. Viviane took malicious joy in trampling dead birds under her boots, as they crunched and snapped. Some of the bird bodies had gleaming metallic parts, and the heads carried tiny gear that looked like some kind of comm system.
Twisty watched her check out her team members with an ethereal calm. She picked up a dead bird and studied the feathers. They were more like shiny crystal wafers. “Can reflect knives, even lasers,” she said to Cliff as she showed the body to him.
Twisty waved this languidly away. “The flock wished to taste of you. Apparently you did not appeal. Your thought patterns, which they are sculpted to interrogate, proved difficult to decipher—tangled, they thought. Further, they had not expected such violence, and to lose so many of their members. You proved more impressive in the field than they supposed. Word will spread among the fliers. They will respect you now.”
Cliff glared at the alien and stalked away.
Beth shook her head, bewildered, glanced up into the sky free of the annoying birds—but with a zingo. No, two.
Irked still, she yanked her laser out and fired off three quick bolts. The shots made the intricate structures glimmer. Nothing more. The zingoes rippled and hung in the air. An occasional velvet and ivory shimmer washed over them.
“You need to apply more power,” Twisty said blandly, “to have much impact.”
“Then what’ll they do?”
Cliff called from behind her, “Maybe make sparks. Like when my boyhood cat put his tail in the toaster.”
Twisty shook its head. “These are observers, no more. Do not take them as aggressive.”
“Why not?”
“They will conclude that you are an unpleasant type.”
“Not really. Not yet.” She glowered at Twisty. “You’ll be able to tell the difference.”
“These are of another phylum, if I understand your primate terms.”
“Seems more like something from a kingdom we don’t know, not just a phylum. Ours are animals, plants, fungus, protozoa, and eukaryotes. Those things, zingoes, I call ’em, are—”
“More like a physical class,” Twisty said. “Plasmas, as you say. But they can condense, when irked. Even become hanging liquids.”
“Irked?”
“Do not irritate them.”
“So they’re your bosses?”
“Not precisely.”
“You work together?”
“There is a saying, from one of your older places called England, why bother to buy a dog and then bark yourself?”
TWENTY-THREE
LUMENSTONE
Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Beth watched the gray-green highlands of Honor glide past. This skyfish could sail to higher altitudes with ease, lofting above ivory clouds stacked like ethereal shiny pancakes. Few animals soared here. Some were balloon creatures, pink and fishlike, about a meter in size and drifting in pairs. Broad-winged, leathery birds labored by in languid flocks, avoiding the skyfish.
“How do you get so high?” she asked the Captain, who stood beside her in an observing blister. The blister’s skin bulged out farther at the lesser pressures here. Beth felt as though she were suspended in air herself, a gliding ghost.
The Captain’s head swiveled around at alarming angles, watching the skies as she spoke. When not being used, her arms held close to the body. “Our kindly host kindles forth more lively hydrogen. See”—a flick of an arm—“how its ample belly swells.”
“What’s our ‘host’ called?”
“It wears proudly the deserved title Conqueror of Clouds.” The Captain spoke with a gliding, soft voice that yet struck hard consonants, and her big eyes beamed with pride at the name. Beth had trouble looking at her mouth.
Higher in the atmosphere, the skyfish was more like a balloon now, and Beth wondered how it stretched itself. The pops and rumbles she heard echoing through the warm corridors suggested elasticity in the skeleton, like cartilage protesting as it reshaped.
“We approach a skillful Watcher,” the Captain said, pointing with an angular arm. Beth saw nearby a zingo, more solid seeming than others before.
“What do they watch?”
“Your very alien self, I expect.”
“What are they?”
“Wise portals to the enduring Summation.”
The Captain’s sliding way of saying this meant something, Beth felt. Her speech differed from Twisty’s, always revealing her attitudes with an obligatory adjective before each noun, flowing with melodious diction. Twisty did not give away such information, preferring to be a tad mysterious. She frowned and the Captain explained, “Our distant way of knowing your intriguing kind. Those of Twisty, as you term that attentive being, are more of the determined invasive.”
The Captain’s voice was soft and dry, like worn leather. There were physical differences between her and Twisty, but subtle. Beth supposed that to aliens, human men and women looked much alike in their practical, severe field clothes, too.
Nearby one of the leathery birds glided alone and abruptly dived into a balloon creature. Its wide jaws gulped down the round pink shape, and from the mouth hissed out a jet of air, condensing into fog. The attack had popped the interior bag and the bird let that escape, nothing else. It swallowed visibly, and then lofted away to rejoin its flock.
Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel Page 19
