by Nancy Kress
“Because,” Tmafekitch finally said, “it was not before in me.”
“That’s crazy!” Rilla burst out angrily.
“Yes,” Tmafekitch agreed. “The Masters are sometimes crazy. They did not put the word in the Ihrdizu. Not before. Only now.”
All over Genji, Ihrdizu on their mating journeys stopped, turned around, and walked back to their villages. Researchers raced to question them. Each little-she responded courteously.
“It is ****.”
Fishing boats stopped fishing, stowed the catch they already had, and sailed back to their fishing ports. Two scientists, one Japanese and one Anglo, took flyers to two different ports, made ritual greetings, and asked why the boats had returned.
“It is ****,” the Ihrdizu said.
A three-day festival in the Southland central valley, a gathering of two thousand Ihrdizu, came to a sudden halt. The festival-goers packed up their young and their provisions and started back to their own food ponds and birthing pools. The itinerant talkers who had come for the festival, who had much local fame but no food ponds or birthing pools of their own, each went with a different group of Ihrdizu. Bruce Johnson flew to Southland to question as many talkers as he could. Why did the festival stop? Why were the talkers each boarding with an Ihrdizu household instead of continuing on their accustomed circuit?
“It is ****,” the talkers said.
“How the hell did a Chujoan word get into their vocabulary?” Don Serranian cried. “A word that apparently none of them knew before the same identical moment all over the fucking planet?”
Bruce Johnson said, “Hard-wired. Into the genetic structure. Had to be. All set for conscious access at some signal, some timing system.” Johnson hardly slept, Dane thought. As tightly wrapped as Serranian, Johnson nonetheless was responding differently to this latest development. He was completely absorbed, forgetting even to eat, to bathe. Serranian, like many of the others, was frustrated and scared by events that made no sense. Johnson loved it.
Serranian said tightly, “What sort of signal?”
“How should I know?” Johnson said. He walked in tight circles in front of the QED. “Maybe astronomical, like the minute variations in light that trigger some bird migrations on Earth. Maybe internal. If knowledge was stored in the Ihrdizu brain, passed on generation after generation, until some chemical inhibitor was removed in the synapses . . . Yes! Yes!” He began punching keys furiously.
“Removed how?” Serranian yelled. “You can’t just have spontaneous genetic combustion!”
“We can’t,” Johnson said gleefully. “Can the Ihrdizu?”
“No!”
“How the hell do you know? Could they have an outside trigger?”
“Like what?” Serranian was furious; Dane actually thought he might strike Johnson. Dane moved swiftly between them. A First Conciliator was not supposed to be a bodyguard, but to keep fanatics conciliated . . .
But Johnson seemed to calm down a little, even if Serranian did not. His next words were very soft, almost inaudible. His face shone. “An outside trigger. Yes. Tell me, Serranian—how do the carpet whales communicate with each other across huge expanses of ocean?”
“We don’t know!”
“Carpet whales,” Johnson said musingly, his face still radiant. “Carpet whales.” He started typing rapidly in QED mode, inputting to the fuzzy-logic program he had set up to coordinate event-data. After a while he leaned back and watched the screen.
“Will you look at that,” he said softly. “Just look at that.”
Every mature carpet whale on Genji had arrived at the Southland-Nighland strait, south of the sub-Chujo node.
They blanketed the sea for kilometers with their sinuous black flatness billowing on the waves, their dozens and dozens of pairs of thin waving tentacles. The largest of the whales stretched a hundred meters long, twenty-five meters wide. There was not enough food in the sea for all the stomatalike mouths to graze on, so the himatids seemed to have simply stopped eating. They did not move much. However alien they were, it seemed obvious what the carpet whales were doing.
They were waiting.
All over Genji, the Ihrdizu returned to their villages, and waited.
On Chujo, the mats of snug grew and writhed, and, circled around the mats, the Chupchups waited.
The humans looked at each other. The fascinated ones, Dane thought, the ones like Bruce Johnson, ran data program after program, straining even the QED’s powers. The others, the ones used to the orderly accumulation of knowledge that grew rather than decreased in logical connections, sat around tight-lipped—and cursed the waiting.
“I want her out of here!” Jane Johnson said to her husband. “I want Rilla on the orbital ship, away from all this! It’s just too weird, and nobody knows what will happen!”
“I won’t go!” Rilla said. “I want to stay here on Genji!”
Jordan Dane doubted that Bruce Johnson actually heard either of them.
“In my grandmother’s sand garden,” Suzy Tatsumi said reflectively to Dane, “were quiet empty spaces, bare sand or bare polished rock, as much a part of the design as the living bonsai.”
For days there were storms. Powerful winds blew Genji’s thick air masses. Rain whipped across the seas. In the low-lying villages, the waters rose dangerously above flood tide.
But then the winds blew themselves out, the clouds dissipated, and one of Genji’s rare clear skies shone above noontime Southland. And the carpet whales, the massed and tightly packed carpet whales in the Nighland-Southland strait below Chujo, all rolled over to their ventral sides.
Signals began to flash into the sky.
Grains of metal from the seas, grains gathered over millennia and apparently stored in precisely measured amounts in precisely measured locations on the ventral surface, reflected the light of Murasaki. Clouds of gases released from millions of stomata refracted the light. Focused it. Sent it toward Chujo, which was not in eclipse with Genji and therefore was experiencing midnight, a moonside midnight clear and cloudless at the sub-Genji point.
“The light signals are of course very faint. Far too faint to activate any phototropisms in the snug mat,” Kenzo Ohkubo transmitted from Chujo, He said it as if he did not expect this information to make the slightest bit of difference, as indeed he did not. They had all, or nearly all, given up expectations. What expectations should E. coli have about the next food to come down the human gullet? Ohkubo, thought Jordan Dane, sounded almost jaunty. He was not among the scared ones.
The electromagnetic signals—clearly more than just light—went on striking the great snug mat on Chujo. The mat stirred. “A hive mind, perhaps,” Bruce Johnson said. “Or something.”
All around the moonside of Genji, the Ihrdizu sat still, remembering things they had never before known.
Nearly every scientist flew, after wild negotiations for flyer space, to the Southland-Nighland strait, and agreed-upon research spheres be damned. Okuma Base was effectively deserted. Technicians remained, along with Jordan Dane, Suzy Tatsumi, and—to Dane’s surprise—the Johnsons. At first Dane thought that Bruce Johnson was staying for Jane’s sake. Later he realized that Johnson wanted to be near the QED, preferring to analyze data than to gather it.
Jane Johnson, tight-lipped, disappeared into the dorm dome, taking Rilla with her.
Bruce, Dane, and Tatsumi were gathered at the screen in the main dome when Miyuki Kaneko appeared on the all-channel transmission from Chujo. Unlike Kenzo Ohkubo, Miyuki’s voice was not jaunty. It was perfectly steady, without shading but not empty, as white light is without color because it contains all colors.
Miyuki said formally, “To all human scientists: The Chujo team has succeeded in opening the Chujoan ‘book’ voluntarily given to us by the Chujoan spokesman. The artifact is a container of opaque and very hard glass. It has taken the team so long to open both because they did not wish to break it and because the method of closing, locking, and opening is unlike anything humans
use. Dr. Ohkubo, who is at the snug-mat site, has asked me to describe to all of you exactly what we have found.”
She drew a careful breath. “To call the artifact a ‘book’ is incorrect, although to call the cairns a ‘library’ is not incorrect. The glass box contained a pile of etchings on thin plates of glass. These are unmistakably numbered by dots in the left-hand corner of each: one dot for the etching on the top, two dots on the next we encountered. We will transmit the etchings’ now, with commentary on what we have learned thus far.”
“Listen to her. Prerecorded, all of it. As good as already written the journal paper,” Bruce Johnson said. He could not sit still. He danced in front of the screen, his eyes burning with excitement and fatigue.
Tatsumi, pouring tea for Jordan Dane, said, “Formality can be such a protection against disbelief.”
The huge mat of snug, covering the entire floor of the valley, wrinkled, stretched, slid. The Chupchups scrambled across its surface, heading for a crevasse that billowed steam. Streamers of sulfurous yellow billowed across the mat. Suddenly, one edge of the mat reared, jerked, and leapt into the sky. The edge struck the far side of the crevasse, to join with a second leaping edge. The two waves stuck, clung, forming a seamless whole. The bioloon started to billow along the crevasse.
“Not again,” Miyuki said, in the same formal voice in which a few hours ago she had recorded the contents of the Chujoan glass box. “They should not die again.”
No one heard her. The rest of the team recorded, scanned for samples left behind, controlled the movements of the robot probe that would fly as close alongside the rising bioloons as Kenzo Ohkubo dared. They observed. They were scientists.
“The first etching,” said the prerecorded Miyuki, “as you can see, shows two Chujoans standing with an Ihrdizu on what clearly seems to be the surface of Genji. Please look carefully at the Ihrdizu, who is a mature female. Around her snorkel is a . . . a ‘necklace.’ It is an actual necklace, in miniature, made separate from the etching and then embedded in the glass.”
The picture of the etching held, then magnified the Ihrdizu’s snorkel. Dane leaned as close as possible to the screen. He realized he was breathing heavily. Like Bruce Johnson, he thought ruefully, and glanced at Tatsumi. She went on drinking her tea, her dark eyes large.
The screen transmitted an image of a corroded lump of metal. Miyuki’s voice said formally, “We all have known, of course, that the Ihrdizu once had metallurgy. This coin or medallion was found by the expedition’s first ecospecialist, Dr. Katsuyoshi Minoru, twenty-five years ago. Core samples taken under choice Ihrdizu seaside villages have shown that, just as they have shown that the Ihrdizu culture flourished in waves, dying off and then being rebuilt at least six separate times. Each time, many other flora and fauna have died with them and never been replaced.
“A great question has always been: What caused the die-offs on Genji? What upset the ecological balance so much that the Ihrdizu had to fight for prime space, by the sea but on very high ground, just to survive? What ecological disaster raced through Genji, changing everything eighty generations ago in a breathtakingly short space of time?”
The snug mat was lifting itself. Alive with purpose, rippling, its center axis bulged, pulling the rest of it along the ground with a hiss like a wave sliding up a beach. It shed pebbles, making itself lighter, letting go of its birthplace.
Beneath, in the vat, hydrogen by-products of the snug combined with other gases. The mat rose, shaping itself into a teardrop. A teardrop with pockets. From the other valleys of the volcanic ridge, other bioloons rose, each bearing a load of Chujoans clinging to the sides, scrambling into the pockets.
“They will all die again,” Miyuki said. “All die! Like the successive generations on Genji, like the carpet whales slaughtered by the Ihrdizu . . . death. All death!”
Kenzo Ohkubo looked away from his recording instruments long enough to glance at her. He said quietly, “You forget yourself, Kaneko-san.”
The rebuke, gentle as it was, sobered her. She watched the bioloons rise to the sky, paced by the robot probe.
“The second etching,” said the formal Miyuki two hours earlier, “shows the same two Chujoans—computer analysis shows all four figures to have been etched from the same plate—standing still on Genji. This time the necklace-bearing Ihrdizu is dead at their feet. The plants around them are dead. The village behind them is in flames. The small birthing pool in the lower left corner is overgrown with what seems to be—this is just supposition—some sort of snug. It is not possible, given our current uncertainty about Chupchup culture, to read the identical expressions on the two Chujoan faces.”
“Grief,” said Jordan Dane at once. He glanced at Tatsumi. She put her teacup on the table; it rattled in her fingers.
“They caused it,” Bruce Johnson said. “Dane—the Chujoans fucking caused the die-offs. Or that die-off, anyway. Look at that birthing pool. Snug. It was like the wineskin plague, only this version attacked Genji life-forms. The Chujoans were the bioengineers, and they fucked up, and they caused an ecological disaster!”
Dane said shakily, “You don’t know that.”
Johnson said, “I’m going to set a QED fuzzy-logic program right now to correlate the data and deduce the probabilities.”
Tatsumi said, “He said—” She stopped.
Dane turned toward her. Her face, ordinarily the clear pale gold of good brandy, had gone white. He put a hand on her shoulder, gently, the first time he had ever touched her. “Who said what, Suzy?”
“Kammer. He said to me, after the Chujoans had covered him with that snug, twisted and deformed him . . .”
“What, Suzy? What did Kammer say?”
“ ‘Learned much myself on Chujo about understanding and standing between. Masters and slaves. Everybody’s right, everybody’s wrong.’ ”
“Masters,” Dane said. “Masters of bioengineering.” They watched the screen, waiting for the next etching.
The bioloons soared into the blue-black sky of Chujo. On the ground, the long lines of Chupchups who had not climbed onto the snug watched the others go.
Miyuki strained her eyes until the bioloons were small dots. Still they kept rising, high into the atmosphere. She put her hand over her mouth, realized what she was doing, and took her hand away. This time she would not be sick.
She would not.
Ohkubo’s team had already erected the dome of double-thick shielding material. Last time, they had had no protection. Last time, when the Chujoan bodies had started to hurl back toward the planet, still trailing streamers of snug, it had been only chance that none of the splattering corpses had struck any of the human researchers. Only the body fluids had.
She would not be sick.
Inside the dome, the researchers crowded around the screen receiving transmissions from the robot cameras pacing the bioloons. Ohkubo focused on one large bioloon, adjusted the telescopic lens, and split the screen to show transmissions both from a distance large enough to see the bioloon whole, and from a few meters away from one pocket. On the second screen, a golden-brown Chupchup face with large-pupiled green eyes stared at Miyuki. If the researchers had known enough to name Chupchup expressions, she told herself with rare sarcasm, she would have said the face was exalted.
She turned away from the screen, not wanting to see him die.
“The third etching, which you see here, is . . . is . . .” The prerecorded voice faltered.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bruce Johnson said, not prayerfully.
“—is perhaps stylized rather than literal. We know from the carvings in the abandoned cities of Chujo that the Chujoans are capable of stylized representation. Or perhaps the etching is literal.”
A line divided the top of the drawing from the bottom. The line might have been a sea cliff, or a shoreline, or nothing at all. Above the line, the same two Chujoans—Dane did not need a computer analysis to know they were the same ones as in the first two etchings—knelt, their hea
ds bowed, staring below the line. Below the line, a carpet whale swam, its dozens of “eyes,” those sensory organs located between each pair of tentaclelike “arms,” all turned toward the Chujoans. The orientation of the eyes was painstakingly drawn. The himatid regarded the penitent Chupchups, who regarded them back.
Johnson laughed, a slightly sour note. “It’s a story. Just another myth, another talking.”
“It’s not a myth,” Dane said. He wondered how he knew. “The carpet whales somehow judged the Chujoans for the mess they had made of the Genji ecology. Well, maybe not ‘judged’—but got told about it anyway. Or something.”
Johnson started frantically feeding data into his fuzzy-logic program.
Tatsumi said quietly, “The carpet whales made the illusions of Kammer. Of Kammer in his tatters of snug. Of Kammer dead, just as Philby saw him on the beach after the massacre.”
“The himatids are very old,” Dane said. “Not even Holden knows how old.”
“Master and slave,” Tatsumi said. “Did I ever tell you what Edward Philby said to me about time, art, and justice?”
Dane didn’t answer.
“He said our great failing was that we could not recognize that they were the same things.”
High in the atmosphere above Chujo, the bioloons began to change.
The robot cameras recorded it all, from several angles, at several different depths, with several different levels of magnification. There was no mistake. The Chujoans in the pockets of the bioloons, all at exactly the same moment, extended their hands straight above them, their humanoid legs straight below. They went stiff, long rigid axes of stiffness. The pockets around them grew as the snug shifted violently, then sealed itself. Each rigid human was sealed in a pocket of snug: giving warmth, conserving air. Around these rigid axes the bioloon shifted with incredible swiftness, changing shape too precisely for anyone to think it was by chance.