Eclipse

by K. A. Bedford

  I listened to all this chilly discussion, the subdued ­hostility, the suppressed tension. The sight of people talking into their hands to avoid making eye contact, and veins bulging on necks was all too familiar. I found myself remembering fights and arguments between my parents, when I was little and would hide in my room. I couldn’t see a good reason for my presence here. I didn’t understand most of what the scientists were saying, though I was keen to learn what I could. But mainly I just hated that feeling of being around when parents fight, using words as weapons to avoid looking like wild animals. Blackmore, in particular, reminded me of my mother.

  The captain stepped in, looking pissed off and anxious in his own way. He said, raising a hand, interrupting Grantleigh, “I suppose I’d better have a look at these things. Dr. Blackmore, would you do the honors?”

  Blackmore looked a little surprised by the question, but was prepared for it. She placed a sheet with an ­active black holosurface in the center of the table, and touched the sheet’s corner power point. The image flashed, sparking to life. It wasn’t a real, natural-light rendering; the scientists had collated all the data from other sensor feeds and produced this animated rendering of what the aliens would look like under white light, moving around in a warm liquid environment. The color was acceptable, and the detail available in the rendering was faithful to a fine degree. This display showed one of the creatures arranged in what they were assuming was its normal posture: standing on the three “back” sets of legs, main body horizontal. The rest of the body, which included the end with the whip-like structures was vertical, allowing the creature to use the hand-like grabbers at the end of the other two sets of limbs.

  The three whip structures moved independently of each other, rising from a protrusion on what they thought was the creature’s head. The overall movement of the creature was nimble and quick; studies of their nervous system and muscle tissue suggested the creatures could move and react quickly, with a surprising degree of articulation. Seeing the whips lashing about was disturbing — I was reminded of cockroach antennae.

  They had enough muscle in their upper limbs to handle the mass of the glass spheres, and the patterns of pit ­indentations were compatible with their multi-jointed ­appendages. The suggestion that the spheres were tools was very strong, but we didn’t now what kind of tools, or even what powered them. Ferguson observed, “For all we know they could be bloody bowling balls!”

  I noticed the captain, staring at this image, saying nothing. He looked pale, wide-eyed; he gripped the tabletop with white-knuckled fingers. I saw that Grantleigh had also noticed the captain’s reaction; he stroked his chin, fingering his moustache, watching Rudyard. Ferguson, on the other hand, had seen all he wanted to see of these creatures. He stared at the light bars in the ceiling, or sometimes at the display panels on one wall, showing views of local space. He looked either uninterested or completely oblivious to the captain’s discomfiture.

  Blackmore took Rudyard’s silence as a cue for her to explain what he was seeing. She began with a dry discussion of the potential taxonomy of the creature, its possible environment and home world, the very high capacity of its distributed brain and nervous system, the possible function of the whips as sense instruments. “If neuron density and sheer brain tissue mass was a reliable in­dicator of intelligence, these creatures must be sentient,” she said. This led to a discussion of what her people had seen when they examined the surfaces of those whips though high-powered nanoscopes: a surface covered with millions of microstructures containing tiny membranes that could be scent receptors. As well, she droned on, the science staff had found hundreds of thousands of receptors for sound ranging from extremely low to ultrasonic frequencies, and just as many touch-sensitive receptors. They found none for light, except infrared. Similarly, there were no apparent nervous system structures that seemed capable of pro­cessing visual stimuli. “We think,” Blackmore explained, ­looking at the animated creature before us, “they might communicate through the emission of pheromones in complex patterns and mixtures. There are extensive gland formations in this upper body region.” She pointed to an area coinciding with the topmost pair of limbs.

  Rudyard raised a hand. I saw the moist handprint he left on the table. He said, not taking his eyes from the animation: “Stop it, just stop it. I’ve seen … enough.” His voice was a whispering rasp.

  Blackmore stopped, surprised by Rudyard’s tone, and shut down the animation; the creature vanished into the display paper. She looked like she might be blushing. “Yes, sir, of course.” Her fingers nervously fiddled with the paper.

  Rudyard said, rising from his chair, “Thank you. That will be all.” We hadn’t been here twenty minutes.

  The captain left. As he passed me, I saw how pale he was, how he was perspiring across his high forehead and upper lip. Ferguson shot up, following. “Captain? A word?”

  Which left the two scientists and me sitting there. Blackmore looked angry, perhaps embarrassed, as she stuffed her display sheets into her folder. She was working her jaw, maybe grinding her teeth. Grantleigh sat, hands laced across his belly, watching her. He glanced at me, eyebrow arched. “That’s all, folks!” he said. Of all of us, he looked least surprised.

  Grateful for a chance to speak, I said, “Sir? What just happened?”

  Blackmore got up, slammed her empty chair against the table and stomped out, breathing hard.

  Grantleigh watched her go, shaking his head. “The captain’s a strange kind of man. He doesn’t like surprises.”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir, so I hear.”

  “We sent him all the data we collected over there, but it turns out he didn’t look at any of the image files, just skimmed some of the text. That’s part of what Blackmore’s so upset about — having to deal with a non-scientist.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. “Yes, sir. May I ask why you think the captain just skimmed your data?”

  He got up saying, “Son, there are explorers, and there are people who drive buses, as it were. People of vision, and people who never look up from their maps. Rudyard is a bus-driver at heart, but he’s stuck here, like the rest of us. His main interest is the safety of the ship and her crew. As for anything else, well that’s what he has us for.” He left and, pausing at the door, he added, “He’s always been like this. Don’t let it bother you.”

  With a bit of extra time on my hands, I made for the Mess, deep in thought, trying to imagine a starship captain who didn’t like his job, who didn’t relish exploration and discovery. I remembered Ferguson and Sorcha talking about how Eclipse scientists twelve years ago had found what might be the ruins of an alien civilization on Madrigal. The captain must have been unhappy about that, if what Grantleigh said was true. But how could you not be thrilled to your very marrow about finding such things? I didn’t understand.

  Two nights later, over dinner, Sorcha wanted to hear all the grisly details of my experiences on the alien ship. This was the first chance we’d had to catch up since I returned. She sat across from me in the Mess, flashing her gorgeous smile. “I know you really want to tell me. Go on!” She was one of the few people I had encountered who was interested in the whole alien business. So far I had met people who didn’t want to know anything about it at all, and others who would avoid passing me in the passageways if they saw me coming. It was as if my contact with Grantleigh’s “Great Other” had changed me in the eyes of most of the crew.

  “There’s not that much to tell, really.” I was conscious of the noise around me: the big fab systems in the galley working over the crockery from dinner, crunching it down into component atoms. Across the room some senior ­officers were chatting and laughing about something I couldn’t make out. Closer to us, a small scrubberbot polished the fake granite tiles, and politely asked officers to please move their feet. On the display wall next to our usual table were pane after pane of HSC media that had just ar
rived on a swarm of botships from human space, though there was nothing about us, of course. Nothing about the millions of tons of alien hardware outside that our engineers were trying to bring up to operational capability for the push back home. Sitting there, I tried imagining all those dozens of displays filled with news reports about them. I imagined media multistellars sending remote bots out here as fast as they could get them here for the priceless exclusive rights to the story, if they only knew. It was a frightening prospect.

  Yet there was an even more frightening prospect: what if there was no broad interest in the story? Suppose the ­reactions of the people aboard Eclipse were reflected back home? That seemed absurd. Thinking about it, what was far more likely was that the story would be adapted and changed, misreported, made safe for human consumption rather than the stark challenge to humanity it really was.

  Sorcha laughed. “Not much to tell! The most amazing thing ever to happen to humankind and you say there’s not much to tell?”

  So I tried to tell her things, but the things I wound up telling were about how bored I was a lot of the time, or how cold it was swimming and crawling through the reticula, or how uncomfortable it was in the boat when the others were yelling at each other, and how Ferguson’s farts were so god-awful he could make dogs leave the room.

  Sorcha laughed, politely, but said insistingly, “Yeah, but what was it like?”

  I felt myself wanting to leave, do something else. “What was what like?”

  She rolled her eyes; the whites of her eyes seemed to glow. “What was what like, he asks! What was it really like, discovering another race, making contact, human to alien? You know, that stuff.”

  I checked the time on my internal clock. “Look, I’ve gotta get back to the sims. Janning’s got me rerunning a bunch of sims I missed during the mission.” And with that I got up and left, for some reason feeling an inexplicable sense of panic building in my chest.

  Which was crazy. I enjoyed being with Sorcha, even if we did seem to wind up meeting over meals of space chunder here in the Mess, or swapping mail through ­Ship­Mind. And I was enjoying her trying to teach me self-defense, despite my apparent lack of talent. At first those sessions were incredibly difficult for me in a way the hand-to-hand combat classes at the Academy never were. At the Academy I never had much trouble with the prospect of tackling either cadets or instructors, of either gender. And, much of the time I was so filled with smouldering anger that I got through things more or less okay.

  The sessions with Sorcha were different. I didn’t want to hurt her. She, on the other hand, had no qualms about throwing me about with loud, passionate abandon. “Come on, you big wuss. Look at you, you’re twice my size!” she’d say, grinning, and I’d find myself staring, just for a ­moment, at her smile. Sometimes it was difficult focussing on learning the moves she was trying to teach me, when all I wanted to do was just hold her close and warm.

  But that didn’t explain my hesitation in telling Sorcha about my experiences.

  At the time, I wasn’t yet sure what it was like to have encountered alienness. It was beyond my experience. Perhaps now that I’ve had time to think about it, it was like Captain Cook, discovering the Aborigines of Australia, or Columbus stumbling upon the natives of the Caribbean. But that was human meeting human, and only the cultures were different. Then again, those indigenous people were regarded as savages, and not in any way equivalent to “civilized” human beings. And, in that sense, maybe there was some connection. I wasn’t sure.

  It was hard to think about.

  I didn’t sleep well that night, or the next night, despite burying myself in extra hours of sim work. The mind-grinding weariness and frequent headaches with which I left the sim eggs made me restless, overtired, rolling in my bunk. My headware was no help, despite the equipment’s capacity to alter brainwaves when needed. When I did sleep, it was only light dozing, and I was haunted by hypervivid dreams in which I was at dinner with my parents and sister on one side of the table, and two of the alien creatures on the other side, and my mother trying to explain to our guests how to use a knife and fork. And in the middle of this scene, Captain Rudyard, wearing Colin’s dead purple face, staggered in, as if from a ­terrible storm, yelling, “Not on my ship, you don’t!”

  That woke me. For a while I lay there, staring up at the underside of the bunk above mine, listening to the sleep sounds of my roommates, and the quiet ship-noises: the dull roar of environment processors moving air and heat through the ship; the almost subsonic hum of the ship’s power grid; the distant pulse of the matter pumps shunting streams of raw recycled substance through the fab supply network. Occasional footfalls passing the door; officers looking for their quarters. One of the other guys in here with me, Carroll, an SSO2 in environment, was listening to heavy gash music over his headware; I could hear a tiny amount of non-rhythmic audio bleed from his ear contacts.

  Above all this, I could hear my heart pounding. I sat up and swung my legs over the side. Looking around in the colorless, grainy dark, I remembered fragments from the night those enlisted thugs came to teach me a lesson about rocking the boat. I figured I had probably deserved that. God knows I should have learned that lesson at the Academy.

  I got up and put my uniform on, not fully knowing what I was doing or where I was going. I just felt like wandering around, maybe burn off some of this energy. My internal clock said it was two in the morning; in three and a half hours I’d have to get up anyway.

  Starships are never completely quiet. The night shift has the lights turned down low, and they’re obliged to keep the noise down if they have to pass occupied sleeping quarters, but otherwise business continues as normal. In the course of my meandering, I found myself having to salute about the same number of officers as I would ­encounter during the day, only their faces were unfamiliar. Several told me to go to bed.

  I wound up at the creatures’ observation gallery, as if I was fluid finding my own level. Only when I walked into the red-lit room, with its view down into the gelid darkness of the tank, did I realize this was where I had been heading all along, that I had been drawn here. It was warm, the result of the slow heating of the jelly medium. According to the data coming in on my headware, the scientists ­expected the warming of the jelly to take another two or three days to bring it up to normal human room temperature.

  “Mr. Dunne! What brings you into the dark this night?”

  I knew that voice. Looking up and to my right, I saw Captain Rudyard standing at the far end of the viewing gallery, leaning against the railing, hands clasped together. In this strange light he looked like a man startled awake. I supposed he had just been taking in the same data feeds as I was. He would have seen that the four surviving creatures were responding to the change in temperature and viscosity of the medium with significantly more whip and body movement. Pheromone sensors were detecting some activity too.

  I managed a fumbling, startled kind of salute to the ­captain. “Captain Rudyard, sir. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.” I turned to go.

  “Couldn’t sleep, son?”

  I turned back. “No, sir.”

  Rudyard stared down into the blackness, saying nothing for a while. “I keep seeing these … things. Everywhere I go. Everywhere.”

  What to say? I murmured, “Do you, sir?”

  “Do you think they’re intelligent, Mr. Dunne?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. That’s not for me to say.”

  He glanced up. His eyes looked strange, even accounting for the light. “Don’t give me that bullshit deference nonsense, son. I asked for your considered opinion. You’ve seen all the same data the scientists have.”

  “Sir, I honestly don’t know enough about what constitutes intelligence and sentience in the human mind, let alone in an alien. To speculate in the absence of hard data would be irresponsible, sir.”

 
; Rudyard snorted. “That would be a good answer at the Academy, Dunne. But it’s no use here, in the middle of ­nowhere.”

  I managed a curt, “Sir.” Feeling embarrassed, my face warm.

  “You know what I think? I think these things are more than just intelligent, more than just sentient. I can feel their thoughts, Dunne. Or perhaps their combined mind. They’re as curious about us as we are about them. Can’t you feel it?”

  I thought about this, feeling uneasy. Thought about how I had felt drawn here tonight, and the peculiar dream. The creatures were waking up after their long sleep, and not in the place they expected. Were they curious? Or was that something we were projecting on them? “I’m not sure, sir, to be honest.”

  Rudyard’s hands on the railing were tight, getting tighter. He looked tense, quivering. “Tonight — a short while ago — I received a communiqué from Service HQ.”

  “Sir?”

  He went on, as if I wasn’t there: “They’re sending Queen Helen, son.” His hands on the railing were working the metal. I could hear his breathing.

  “The flagship? Uh…”

  Now he looked at me. “They’re taking all this back home, back to the Community. Their ship too. Everything.”

  This was a surprise. The Service never interfered with a ship out on patrol, not unless something extremely unique was going on. The reality of hypertube transits meant no ship could reach the edge of known space fast enough to deal with an urgent crisis with another Service vessel. A ship exploring beyond known space like Eclipse had to deal with problems herself; the Service would get help out to the scene as fast as possible, but that usually meant days later. Queen Helen must have left her last position almost a week ago, and was now expending godlike energies bending the multi-dimensional tube knots straighter than any ship had bent them before, carving through hyperspace.