In Alien Flesh

by Gregory Benford

“Mist looks pretty heavy,” he agreed. He glanced back at the log cabins that were the communal living quarters. They blended into the matted grasses.

  “Tell me,” she said insistently.

  “Well, I..."

  “You keep waking me up with nightmares about it. I deserve to know. It's changed our lives together. I—"

  He sighed. This was going to be difficult. “All right."

  IV.

  Vanleo gave Reginri a clap on the shoulder and the three men set to work. Each took a spool of cable and walked backward, carrying it, into the surf. Reginri carefully watched the others and followed, letting the cable play out smoothly. He was so intent upon the work that he hardly noticed the enveloping wet that swirled about him. His oxygen pellet carrier was a dead, awkward weight at his back, but once up to his waist in the lapping water, maneuvering was easier, and he could concentrate on something other than keeping his balance.

  The sea bottom was smooth and clear, laced with metallic filaments of dull silver. Not metal, though; this was a planet with strangely few heavy elements. Maybe that was why land life had never taken hold here, and the island continents sprinkled amid the ocean were bleak, dusty deserts. More probably, the fact that this chilled world was small and farther from the sun made it too hostile a place for land life. Persenuae, nearer in toward Zeta, thrived with both native and imported species, but this world had only sea creatures. A curious planet, this; a theoretical meeting point somewhere between the classic patterns of Earth and Mars. Large enough for percolating volcanoes, and thus oceans, but with an unbreathable air curiously high in carbon dioxide and low in oxygen. Maybe the wheel of evolution had simply not turned far enough here, and someday the small fish—or even the Drongheda itself—would evolve upward, onto the land.

  But maybe the Drongheda was evolving, in intelligence, Reginri thought. The things seemed content to swim in the great oceans, spinning crystalline-mathematical puzzles for their own amusement. And for some reason they had responded when Vanleo first jabbed a probing electronic feeler into a neural nexus. The creatures spilled out realms of mathematical art that, Earthward, kept thousands working to decipher it—to rummage among a tapestry of cold theorems, tangled referents, seeking the quick axioms that lead to new corridors, silent pools of geometry and the intricate pyramiding of lines and angles, encasing a jungle of numbers.

  “Watch it!” Sasuke sang out.

  Reginri braced himself and a wave broke over him, splashing green foam against his faceplate.

  “Riptide running here,” Vanleo called. “Should taper off soon."

  Reginri stood firm against the flow, keeping his knees loose and flexible for balance. Through his boots he felt the gritty slide of sand against smoothed rock. The cable spool was almost played out.

  He turned to maneuver, and suddenly to the side he saw an immense brown wall. It loomed high, far above the gray waves breaking at its base. Reginri's chest tightened as he turned to study the Drongheda.

  Its hide wall was delicately speckled in gold and green. The dorsal vents were black slashes that curved up the side, forming deep oily valleys.

  Reginri cradled the cable spool under one arm and gingerly reached out to touch it. He pushed at it several times experimentally. It gave slightly with a soft, rubbery resistance.

  “Watch the flukes!” Vanleo called. Reginri turned and saw a long black flipper break water fifty meters away. It languidly brushed the surface with a booming whack audible through his helmet and then submerged.

  “He's just settling down, I expect,” Vanleo called reassuringly. “They sometimes do that."

  Reginri frowned at the water where the fluke had emerged. Deep currents welled up and rippled the surface.

  “Let's have your cable,” Sasuke said. “Reel it over here. I've got the mooring shaft sunk in."

  Reginri spun out the rest of his spool and had some left when he reached Sasuke. Vanleo was holding a long tube pointed straight down into the water. He pulled a trigger and there was a muffled clap Reginri could hear over suit radio. He realized Vanleo was firing bolts into the ocean rock to secure their cable and connectors. Sasuke held out his hands and Reginri gave him the cable spool.

  It was easier to stand here; the Drongheda screened them from most of the waves, and the undercurrents had ebbed. For a while Reginri stood uselessly by, watching the two men secure connections and mount the tapper lines. Sasuke at last waved him over, and as Reginri turned his back, they fitted the lines into his backpack.

  Nervously, Reginri watched the Drongheda for signs of motion, but there were none. The ventral grooves formed an intricate ribbed pattern along the creature's side, and it was some moments before he thought to look upward and find the pithole. It was a red-rimmed socket, darker than the dappled brown around it. The ventral grooves formed an elaborate helix around the pithole, then arced away and down the body toward a curious mottled patch, about the same size as the pithole.

  “What's that?” Reginri said, pointing at the patch.

  “Don't know,” Vanleo said. “Seems softer than the rest of the hide, but it's not a hole. All the Drongheda have ‘em."

  “Looks like a welt or something."

  “Ummm,” Vanleo murmured, distracted. “We'd better boost you up in a minute. I'm going to go around to the other side. There's another pithole exposed there, a little farther up from the water line. I'll go in that way."

  “How do I get up?"

  “Spikes,” Sasuke murmured. “It's shallow enough here."

  It took several minutes to attach the climbing spikes to Reginri's boots. He leaned against the Drongheda for support and tried to mentally compose himself for what was to come. The sea welled around him, lapping warmly against his skinsuit. He felt a jittery sense of anticipation.

  “Up you go,” Sasuke said. “Kneel on my shoulders and get the spikes in solid before you put any weight on them. Do what we said, once you're inside, and you'll be all right."

  V.

  Vanleo steadied him as he climbed onto Sasuke's back. It took some moments before Reginri could punch the climbing spikes into the thick, crinkled hide.

  He was thankful for the low gravity. He pulled himself up easily, once he got the knack of it, and it took only a few moments to climb the ten meters to the edge of the pithole. Once there, he paused to rest.

  “Not so hard as I thought,” he said lightly.

  “Good boy.” Vanleo waved up at him. “Just keep steady and you'll be perfectly all right. We'll give you a signal on the com-line when you're to come out. This one won't be more than an hour, probably."

  Reginri balanced himself on the lip of the pithole and took several deep breaths, tasting the oily air. In the distance gray waves broke into surf. The Drongheda rose like a bubble from the wrinkled sea. A bank of fog was rolling down the coastline. In it a shadowy shape floated. Reginri slitted his eyes to see better, but the fog wreathed the object and blurred its outline. Another Drongheda? He looked again but the form melted away in the white mist.

  “Hurry it up,” Sasuke called from below. “We won't move until you're in."

  Reginri turned on the fleshy ledge beneath him and pulled at the dark blubbery folds that rimmed the pithole. He noticed that there were fine, gleaming threads all round the entrance. A mouth? An anus? Vanleo said not; the scientists who came to study the Drongheda had traced its digestive tract in crude fashion. But they had no idea what the pithole was for. It was precisely to find that out that Vanleo first went into one. Now it was Vanleo's theory that the pithole was the Drongheda's method of communication, since why else would the neural connections be so close to the surface inside? Perhaps, deep in the murky ocean, the Drongheda spoke to each other through these pitholes, rather than singing, like whales. Men had found no bioacoustic signature in the schools of Drongheda they had observed, but that meant very little.

  Reginri pushed inward, through the iris of spongy flesh, and was at once immersed in darkness. His suit light clicked on.
He lay in a sheath of meat with perhaps two hand spans of clearance on each side. The tunnel yawned ahead, absorbing the weak light. He gathered his knees and pushed upward against the slight grade.

  “Electronics crew reports good contact with your tapper lines. This com okay?” Sasuke's voice came thin and high in Reginri's ear.

  “Seems to be. Goddamned close in here."

  “Sometimes it's smaller near the opening,” Vanleo put in. “You shouldn't have too much climbing to do—most pitholes run pretty horizontal, when the Drongheda is holding steady like this."

  “It's so tight. Going to be tough, crawling uphill,” Reginri said, an uncertain waver in his voice.

  “Don't worry about that. Just keep moving and look for the neural points.” Vanleo paused. “Fish out the contacts for your tappers, will you? I just got a call from the technicians, they want to check the connection."

  “Sure.” Reginri felt at his belly. “I don't seem to find..."

  “They're right there, just like in training,” Sasuke said sharply. “Pull ‘em out of their clips."

  “Oh, yeah.” Reginri fumbled for a moment and found the two metallic cylinders. They popped free of the suit and he nosed them together. “There."

  “All right, all right, they're getting the trace,” Vanleo said. “Looks like you're all set."

  “Right, about time,” Sasuke said. “Let's get moving."

  “We're going around to the other side. So let us know if you see anything.” Reginri could hear Vanleo's breath coming faster. “Quite a pull in this tide. Ah, there's the other pithole."

  The two men continued to talk, getting Vanleo's equipment ready. Reginri turned his attention to his surroundings and wriggled upward, grunting. He worked steadily, pulling against the pulpy stuff. Here and there scaly folds wrinkled the walls, overlapping and making handholds. The waxen membranes reflected back none of his suit light. He dug in his heels and pushed, slipping on patches of filmy pink liquid that collected in the trough of the tunnel.

  At first the passageway flared out slightly, giving him better purchase. He made good progress and settled down into a rhythm of pushing and turning. He worked his way around a vast bluish muscle that was laced by orange lines.

  Even through his skinsuit he could feel a pulsing warmth come from it. The Drongheda had an internal temperature fifteen degrees Centigrade below the human's, but still an oppressive dull heat seeped through to him.

  Something black lay ahead. He reached out and touched something rubbery that seemed to block the pithole. His suit light showed a milky pink barrier. He wormed around and felt at the edges of the stuff. Off to the left there was a smaller opening. He turned, flexed his legs and twisted his way into the new passage. Vanleo had told him the pithole might change direction and that when it did he was probably getting close to a nexus. Reginri hoped so.

  VI.

  “Everything going well?” Vanleo's voice came distantly.

  “Think so,” Reginri wheezed.

  “I'm at the lip. Going inside now.” There came the muffled sounds of a man working, and Reginri mentally blocked them out, concentrating on where he was.

  The walls here gleamed like glazed, aging meat. His fingers could not dig into it. He wriggled with his hips and worked forward a few centimeters. He made his body flex, thrust, flex, thrust—he set up the rhythm and relaxed into it, moving forward slightly. The texture of the walls coarsened and he made better progress. Every few moments he stopped and checked the threads for the com-line and the tappers that trailed behind him, reeling out on spools at his side.

  He could hear Sasuke muttering to himself, but he was unable to concentrate on anything but the waxen walls around him. The passage narrowed again, and ahead he could see more scaly folds. But these were different, dusted with a shimmering pale powder.

  Reginri felt his heart beat faster. He kicked forward and reached out a hand to one of the encrusted folds. The delicate frosting glistened in his suit lamp. Here the meat was glassy, and deep within it he could see a complex interweaving network of veins and arteries, shot through with silvery threads.

  It had to be a nexus; the pictures they had shown him were very much like this. It was not in a small pocket the way Vanleo said it would be, but that didn't matter. Vanleo himself had remarked that there seemed no systematic way the nodes were distributed. Indeed, they appeared to migrate to different positions inside the pithole, so that a team returning a few days later could not find the nodules they had tapped before.

  Reginri felt a swelling excitement. He carefully thumbed on the electronic components set into his waist. Their low hum reassured him that everything was in order. He barked a short description of his find into his suit mike, and Vanleo responded in monosyllables. The other man seemed to be busy with something else, but Reginri was too occupied to wonder what it might be. He unplugged his tapper cylinders and worked them upward from his waist, his elbows poking into the pulpy membranes around him. Their needle points gleamed softly in the light as he turned them over, inspecting. Everything seemed all right.

  He inched along and found the spot where the frosting seemed most dense. Carefully, bracing his hands against each other, he jabbed first one and then the other needle into the waxen flesh. It puckered around the needles.

  He spoke quickly into his suit mike asking if the signals were coming through. There came an answering yes, some chatter from the technician back in the sand dunes, and then the line fell silent again.

  Along the tapper lines were flowing the signals they had come to get. Long years of experiment had—as far as men could tell—established the recognition codes the technicians used to tell the Drongheda they had returned. Now, if the Drongheda responded, some convoluted electrical pulses would course through the lines and into the recording instruments ashore.

  Reginri relaxed. He had done as much as he could. The rest depended on the technicians, the electronics, the lightning microsecond blur of information transfer between the machines and the Drongheda. Somewhere above or below him were flukes, ventral fins, slitted recesses, a baleen filter mouth through which a billion small fish lives had passed, all a part of this vast thing. Somewhere, layered in fat and wedged amid huge organs, there was a mind.

  Reginri wondered how this had come about. Swimming through deep murky currents, somehow nature had evolved this thing that knew algebra, calculus, Reimannian metrics, Tchevychef subtleties—all as part of itself, as a fine-grained piece of the same language it shared with men.

  Reginri felt a sudden impulse. There was an emergency piece clipped near his waist, for use when the tapper lines snarled or developed intermittent shorts. He wriggled around until his back was flush with the floor of the pithole and then reached down for it. With one hand he kept the needles impacted into the flesh above his head; with the other he extracted the thin, flat wedge of plastic and metal that he needed. From it sprouted tiny wires. He braced himself against the tunnel walls and flipped the wires into the emergency recesses in the tapper cylinders. Everything seemed secure; he rolled onto his back and fumbled at the rear of his helmet for the emergency wiring. By attaching the cabling, he could hook directly into a small fraction of the Drongheda's output. It wouldn't interfere with the direct tapping process. Maybe the men back in the sand dunes wouldn't even know he had done it.

  He made the connection. Just before he flipped his suit com-line over to the emergency cable, he thought he felt a slight sway beneath him. The movement passed. He flipped the switch. And felt— —Bursting light that lanced through him, drummed a staccato rhythm of speckled green—

  —Twisting lines that meshed and wove into perspectives, triangles warped into strange saddle-pointed envelopes, coiling into new soundless shapes— —A latticework of shrill sound, ringing at edges of geometrical flatness—

  —Thick, rich foam that lapped against weathered stone towers, precisely turning under an ellipsoid orange sun— —Miniatured light that groaned and spun softly, curling into
moisture that beaded on a coppery matrix of wire—

  —A webbing of sticky strands, lifting him— —A welling current—

  —Upward, toward the watery light—

  Reginri snatched at the cable, yanking it out of the socket. His hand jerked up to cover his face and struck his helmet. He panted, gasping.

  He closed his eyes and for a long moment thought of nothing, let his mind drift, let himself recoil from the experience.

  There had been mathematics there, and much else. Rhomboids, acute intersections in veiled dimensions, many-sided twisted sculptures, warped perspectives, poly-hedrons of glowing fire.

  But so much more—he would have drowned in it.

  There was no interruption of chatter through his earphone. Apparently the electronics men had never noticed the interception. He breathed deeply and renewed his grip on the tapper needles. He closed his eyes and rested for long moments. The experience had turned him inside out for a brief flicker of time. But now he could breathe easily again. His heart had stopped thumping wildly in his chest. The torrent of images began to recede. His mind had been filled, overloaded with more than he could fathom.

  He wondered how much the electronics really caught. Perhaps, transferring all this to cold ferrite memory, the emotional thrust was lost. It was not surprising that the only element men could decipher was the mathematics. Counting, lines and curves, the smooth sheen of geometry—they were abstractions, things that could be common to any reasoning mind. No wonder the Drongheda sent mostly mathematics through this neural passage; it was all that men could follow.

  After a time it occurred to Reginri that perhaps Vanleo wanted it this way. Maybe he eavesdropped on the lines. The other man might seek this experience; it certainly had an intensity unmatched by drugs or the pallid electronic core-tapping in the sensoriums. Was Vanleo addicted? Why else risk failure? Why reject automated tapping and crawl in here—particularly since the right conditions came so seldom?

  But it made no sense. If Vanleo had Drongheda tapes, he could play them back at leisure. So ... maybe the man was fascinated by the creatures themselves, not only the mathematics. Perhaps the challenge of going inside, the feel of it, was what Vanleo liked.