Winter brought snow, glistery white and blue-shadowed over the ground. Icicles hung like jewelry from bare boughs; many Tahirian trees also shed their leaves. Cold air laved the face and stung the nostrils. Breath smoked.
Kilbirnie, Cleland, Ruszek, and Brent came back from a walk. Taking their turns as caretakers at the settlement, they had grown restless. The outing roused Kilbirnie’s spirits from boredom. She dashed around to look at things, threw snowballs, tried to make her companions join in a song. Only Cleland did, halfheartedly.
Leaving the forest, they saw across the openness that huddle of buildings their crew had dubbed Terralina. Kilbirnie stopped. “Oh!” she gasped.
One of the great, rarely seen creatures they knew as dragons swept overhead. Sunlight streamed through wing membranes and broke into rainbow shards. The long, sinuous body gleamed beryl green. Her gaze followed the arc of flight until it sank below the horizon.
The others had halted, too. “Pretty” Ruszek said. He sounded reluctant to admit that anything could break the monotony of these days.
“More than bonnie,” she crooned. “Freedom alive.”
Cleland’s glance had stayed on her. “You really do feel caged, don’t you?” he mumbled.
“Don’t we all?” Brent said. His words ran on almost automatically. “Yeah, it was fun at first, the novelty, the jobs, and then traveling around, but what are we now except tourists, once in a while when his high and mightiness Nansen lets us go? The scientific types, sure, they’ve got things to do that matter. Are we supposed to spend the next four years yawning?”
“Stop whining,” Ruszek snapped. “You’ve overworked your self-pity.”
Brent glared. “I don’t take orders from you. Not planetside.”
Ruszek snarled and drew back his fist.
“Hold, hold!” Kilbirnie protested. She grabbed his arm. “We dinna need a fight.”
The mate gulped. His hand lowered. The flush left his cheeks. “No,” he yielded. “We’ve been shut in, our nerves frayed. I … didn’t mean offense, … Al.”
“Okay,” Brent replied sullenly. “Me neither.”
“We will get out and rove, every one of us,” Kilbirnie vowed. “We’ve talked of what we want to do. ’Tis but a matter of learning enough that we can make reasonable plans to lay before the skipper. Hanny has a thought—” She broke off. That hope was unripe, confidential. “Wha’ say now we make hot toddies? Big ones.”
Ruszek managed to smile. “The best idea I’ve heard in weeks.”
“She’s full of them.” Cleland’s expression showed what idea he wished she would get.
Ruszek’s and Brent’s eyes went the same way. Briefly, the cold seemed to crackle. Yes, crewfolk were honorable, respectful of their mates; no sane person would dare behave otherwise; there were the soothing medications if desired; there were the virtuals, and nobody asked what interactive programs anybody else chose; nevertheless—
Kilbirnie broke the tension. “Or shall it be hot buttered rum?” She bounded ahead. The men followed more slowly, none venturing to overtake her.
24.
Year two.
As aboard ship, beds in the cottages were expansible to double width. After half an hour, the cedary odors of love-making had faded from Zeyd’s. He and Dayan had begun to talk, sitting up against the headboard. Their mood was less bright than earlier.
“It’s been far too long,” he said.
She nodded. “Yes.”
He stroked his mustache and attempted a leer. “We must do something about that.”
The hazel eyes challenged him. “Can you?”
He looked the question he neither needed nor wanted to speak.
“You are the one always away,” Dayan said. Her tone regretted but did not accuse, and she did not add that his absences were with Mokoena.
“Research,” he defended. “The environments, the ecologies, the laboratories. All over the planet.”
“Of course. You know how I envy you that.”
“Do you still feel idled? I thought you were happy enough, working with Wenji.” It was not quite true. He was an observant man. He had left some things unsaid in hopes they would improve by themselves; and she was not given to complaining.
She nodded, red locks sliding across pillow. “It is interesting. But—”
He tensed. “Yes?”
She had gathered resolution. “There is real science screaming to be done.”
“What?”
“The pulsar. Some of us have quietly discussed it. We’ll soon be ready to present a plan for an expedition.”
“No!” cried shock.
She smiled a bit sadly and stroked his cheek. “If it happens, I’ll be sorry to leave you forsaken. I’ll look forward to coming back.” She turned implacable. “But go I will.”
The device that Yu held before Sundaram fitted on her upturned left hand. It had the form of a thin forty-centimeter slab bent at right angles, the vertical part twice the length of the horizontal. A control board, a continuous touch-sensitive surface with a grid of guidelines, covered the top of the lower section. Screens filled both sides of the upper. As the fingers of her right hand gave directions, characters came and went across the screens while a speaker produced melodious sounds.
“I hope we may consider this the finished model,” she said. “The Tahirians who have tried it seem to like it well.”
She gave it to Sundaram. He experimented. Even the randomness he got entranced him. “Magnificent,” he praised. “It will require practice, of course, to master, but—I have been thinking about it. Let me suggest we call it a parleur. A voice across the abyss between two utterly different kinds of communication.”
“You still must create the mutual language.”
“It progresses. I suspect that with this tool progress will rocket. But I will need your help—what you can spare from your technological studies—I will need your help more than ever.”
“How?”
“I imagine that programming your nanocomputer demands a special talent.” He shrugged, with a rueful smile. “Under the best conditions, I am not a good programmer.”
“You have no reason to be.”
Sundaram blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
Yu regarded him levelly through the muted lighting in his cabin. Rain roared against the windows, a savagery of silver.
“Your own genius is too big,” she said. “It crowds other things out.”
“Oh, come, now, please. I am simply overspecialized.”
“It grows lonely, does it not?”
“Can you collaborate?” he asked in haste. “Have you time?”
She lowered her eyes and bowed above hands laid together. “Certainly. I am honored and delighted.”
“The honor and delight are mine, Wenji,” he let out.
Nansen took a group of Tahirians on a tour of Envoy. They flitted up in a native spaceboat. Considerable preparation had gone beforehand, while people of both species struggled to explain things and outline procedures; thus far, they had little more than their diagrams and cartoons to talk with. In the course of it, he gathered that nearly all space activity was robotic. Sometimes minerals were brought to Tahir, or finished products whose manufacture on the surface would harm the biosphere. However, this was seldom. The planet’s economy seemed to be as close to equilibrium as the laws of thermodynamics allowed.
Then why does so much material, energy, effort go to the world they’re transforming? he wondered for the thousandth time. What became of the ships that once plied among the stars?
On its drive that he did not understand, the boat glided up toward his vessel. Wheels and hull swelled before him, homelike athwart these constellations. Docking facilities were incompatible. The tube that extended to mate with a personnel lock was an engineering improvisation. Air pressure had equalized en route, and the party passed through to the interior. The Tahirians were less awkward in weightlessness than untrained humans would have been, but evidently app
reciated the help Nansen gave them.
Approaching, they had studied the external fittings of the plasma drive, as they doubtless had done before. Now their first concern was the zero-zero engine. Having led them to that section, he anxiously watched them and their instruments swarm over it. Though they did no damage, it was with relief that he finally decided he could blow the whistle hung around his neck, an agreed-on signal. “We should get you settled in, and all take a rest,” he urged. “You can have as much time here afterward as you like. But aren’t you also curious about how we lived, on our way to you?”
English, he noticed. Out of habit. It might as well have been Spanish or Hebrew or Chinese or anything.
They packed their apparatuses, gathered their other belongings, and accompanied him to the shuttle. It crossed to the forward wheel. Weight mounted as a railcar whisked them to the inner deck. He led them down a passageway. They peered right and left, busily conversing, although he heard few sounds, none of which his throat could make. “I wish you could tell me how you feel about this,” he said aloud, for his own comfort. “Is it splendid, primitive, pathetic, or frightening?”
In a common room gone echoey he did what nobody had managed hitherto. Humans could not yet operate the Tahirian equipment that would have provided a representation of the galaxy. Here he could spread one over a four-meter screen, shining in blackness. Of course, only the most gigantic stars appeared singly, and the display included only what his race had known when Envoy departed—a skeleton galaxy, half empty on the far side of the central clouds. A scale along the bottom was calibrated in units already standardized.
Nansen manipulated the keyboard. A spark sprang to life, an arrow pointing at it: the sun of Tahir, hue precisely correct for the extraordinary Tahirian color vision. He sent the pointer back along a signified five thousand light-years. Where it came to rest, another spark jumped forth, whiter, Sol.
Mostly he watched his guests. He thought he captured a sense of emotions and attitudes. A sound that purred or trilled added overtones of pleasure to a statement; a growling or piping note was less favorable. When the leaves of a mane rose and fell, a smooth wave through them bore a different meaning from the same sequence proceeding jaggedly. The code of odors was as subtle as the movements of a fan in a woman’s hand had anciently been, or more so, and an integral part of the language.
The languages?
Reactions exploded. Two of the beings bounded forward and hugged him, a gesture they had perhaps learned by watching humans. Others kept aside, manes ashiver, as if whispers went between them. Dubious? When Nansen made arrows expand outward from either star, trying to propose future voyages and meetings, he wondered whether what he saw on some was horror. Smells certainly got sharp.
He blanked the screen. “Well,” he said in his most soothing tone, “let’s go to your quarters, and then eat,” in the wardroom, separate foods. He smiled lopsidedly. “May the day come when we can drink a toast.”
A score of buildings, small, curved, delicately tinted, clustered among trees in the middle of a burgeoning hillscape. The tropical sky arched cloudless, the air below lay hot and pungent. Zeyd thought this was less likely a village than a node in a global city.
A large structure stood a hundred meters aside, surrounded by well-tended sward. Waiting nearby, he had ample employment. A score of Tahirians had gathered about him. Three were newly parents, infants clinging to the dorsal ridge with the help of their spurs. All knew more or less what he wanted, and were willing.
One after the next, he held his instrument near a pair of antennae and activated it. A magnetic field extended. The antennae stirred, following its variations with a sensitivity equal to that of the built-in meters, or better. He replaced it with an electrostatic field. The Tahirians cooed. Their manes dithered. Puffs of scent blew from glands in the skin.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said to himself in his mother tongue, “these organs are surely compasses and, I suspect, much else. Manifold are the works of God.”
The building clove. Mokoena came out, accompanied by Peter and a couple of other scientists. Zeyd forgot his experiment. “Ha, at last!” he called. “What did you get in there?”
She drew near him and halted. Her eyes were wide, her voice low. “They showed me their act of love.”
He caught his breath.
“Two adults performed it,” she told him, with a reverence he had seldom heard from her. “A holocinema, and anatomical diagrams on a flat screen, ran concurrently. They’ve finally learned how to do visual presentations that are comprehensible to us.”
“How—”
“A pair meets, mouth to mouth. They embrace, they speak with their manes, they kiss with their scents. Once I understood, I saw it was beautiful. It went on for—eleven minutes by my timer.”
“And the … reproduction?”
Mokoena stood silent, bringing herself back to mere science, before she replied in a more nearly academic voice. “I think both partners have to be in arousal. Pheromones … courtship, love. … Fluids flow between them, both ways, driven by sphincters and the tonguelets, which must be centers of sensation. The gonads release—gametes—that swim down the streams and fuse in the mouths. Then the zygotes swim up the other stream to a—womb? There are many of them, but only a single spot where one can attach and grow. Gestation takes about a Tahirian year. We’ve noticed what we supposed was a … birth outlet … on everybody. It is. At first the parent nourishes the young by regurgitation.”
Mokoena paused again. “I don’t know why they didn’t let you in too, when we’ve generally been together working with them,” she said. “Were they afraid of alarming you? They know nothing about how unlike we may be, inside as well as outside, and—I do have a vagina.”
Zeyd nodded. “It must make for a strange psychology, having the sex organ in the face. Where the newborn feed, too. And hermaphroditic—”
“That’s not the right word. We need a word for their sex.”
“Could this be why we haven’t seen any behaving like married couples?”
“I don’t know. How would a Tahirian married couple behave? It varied over Earth, you remember.” You remember. Mokoena went on quickly: “I can guess at communal or group rearing of the young.”
Zeyd reached for lightness. “Aren’t they curious about our methods?”
Mokoena relaxed and laughed. “Oh, my, yes! I have a feeling our pictures of it leave them puzzled. It’s too weird.”
Scantily clad, she stood with sweat running agleam down a frame that gravity stress had brought back to well-rounded slenderness, panther-dark, joyful. He deepened his voice. “The wondrousness of two sexes—”
“They would doubtless like to know the chemistry as much as we would like to know theirs.”
“We should give them a demonstration.”
“Who will volunteer?”
He grinned. “Well—”
She met his look head-on. “I don’t care to put on a show myself, Selim, not even in the interests of science. Perhaps especially not in the interests of science.”
He kept his composure. “Pardon me. No offense intended. But aren’t you free-spirited?”
“I never did anything that did not mean something more than fun. Good friendship, at the very least. And I never came between two others.” She turned from him to address her guides as best she could.
25.
From high above and afar, after the planetary shell opened a cleft to let the Tahirian spacecraft through and closed again behind, the spectacle was awesome enough. White steam and black smoke roiled in upward-rushing winds where sometimes flame flared. Below sprawled and reared a step pyramid the size of a small mountain, bearing towers, battlements, portals, keeps, roadways, trackways, kilometers-long tubes of mighty bore, forms as alien to human eyes as functions were unknown to human minds. Around it spread a forest of lesser structures, dense near the center, thinning out with distance until empty desert framed the edge of vision. They bore man
y different shapes, but dominant was something like a metal tree with an intricate mesh between the leafless boughs. Lights flashed throughout, a tumbling, bewildering shift from moment to moment, so that the men caught illusory half-glimpses of fireworks, waves, a maelstrom, a thing that danced. Machines scuttled about or clustered to do some task. Here and there moltenness welled up, seethed sullen red, rolled slowly down channels until it congealed into dark masses. There the machines were at their busiest.
“Jesus Christ!” Brent rasped. “What is that? Like the middle of hell!”
“I—I think I can guess,” Cleland said.
“Better wait till we have had a closer look,” Nansen advised. The spacecraft sped onward and the titans’ workshop sank below the horizon.
A number of the third planet’s fifteen-hour days passed before the three visitors saw the sight again. Then they were not sure whether it was the same one; there were several, distributed over the globe. Although they and the Tahirians could now communicate slightly, most things remained obscure, occasionally even the interpretation of a map. This particular uncertainty didn’t matter. They had already encountered more astonishments than they could sort out.
The tour began at an enclosed headquarters where air was breathable, with imagery of the original work. Comets had not contented the builders; to win the stuff that was to become atmosphere and hydrosphere, their machines also dismembered an icy moon of a giant planet and put the pieces on a collision orbit. Centuries later, when things had somewhat quieted down but not much gas had yet escaped back to space, they roofed the world. Thereafter they tapped its own buried reserves of ice, though that was a minor contribution.
“Tremendous!” Brent said. “We’ve got to learn the engineering. What we could do with it—”
“I wonder,” mused Nansen. “Will humans ever start anything that will take millions of years to finish? It’s a rare man who tries to provide for his grandchildren.”
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