by Ian Stewart
Conversations with Huff Elder
Say that again?” May thought she must have misheard. The two transpods that had been sent to investigate the pond field had found a mariner survivor, and it was Second-Best Sailor. He was in relatively good health, despite a long trek across the desert in a failing suit. The Tweel had come up with a spare sailor suit—they had stores of just about everything, just in case. Now the polypoid was wearing his new suit, but he was refusing to come out of the pond.
The Neanderthals still didn’t know how Second-Best Sailor had worked his trick with reflected sunlight, and right now they weren’t in any hurry to find out. It could wait until they’d beaten a quick retreat from Aquifer’s sandy surface, just in case whichever force had wiped out the colony was getting ready to mount another attack.
Talitha was keeping a careful watch for any signs of movement on the ground, as well as scanning the space around it for inbound ships that might be belligerent. But its orbit repeatedly took it out of visual contact with the landing party. Half the time it couldn’t even see the North Pole, the most likely source of hostiles.
The operation was taking considerably longer than the Neanderthals had bargained for, and May was starting to feel the strain. Her friend Will was down there, and so was Second-Best Sailor. She presumed Fat Apprentice was dead. She missed him.
The ansible carried the words as if the speakers were face to face, but they made no sense. “Will—did I hear you say he wants to bring the pond with him? The pond? Whatever for?”
“He claims it is intelligent, May.”
“And I thought it was only my late friend Fat Apprentice who could surprise me . . . A pond cannot even be alive, let alone possess intelligence.”
Will bobbed his head in an unconscious gesture of agreement, even though May couldn’t see the movement. She was quite right: The mariner must be insane. “I have argued with him, but he insists that he is right. And he keeps telling me how important it is. He says that the pond is alive. It is an ecosystem, composed of many organisms.”
“Yes, but it is not an organism in its own right,” came the instant rejoinder.
“He says it is. He says it has, or is—I cannot get him to commit himself as to which—a mind. It speaks to him with molecules.”
May had developed a theory to explain the wild delusion. “You say he spent several days in the desert? Wounded?”
“That is what he claims. But the medic has found no sign of any physiological damage.”
“The heat must have dried him out. His electrolytes would have been all over the place. He must have suffered from delusions. Hallucinations.”
Will ran blunt fingers through his shaggy mane. “That was also my theory. But I am half convinced that he knows what he is talking about. How else do you explain those flashing symbols, 2BS, over and over again?”
“Easy. Some kind of flocking behavior of creatures in the ponds,” May instantly replied. She’d been giving that matter considerable thought. “I am not denying that the ponds contain some limited form of intelligence, or that Second-Best Sailor managed to bend it to his will. But I do deny that the ponds themselves are organisms—let alone conscious and intelligent ones!”
“I wish I were as certain as you.”
May sighed. Will was such a pushover. Why did he not use his empathic abilities? Better still, a verifier? Then the tale would fall apart in an instant. “You cannot be serious!”
“The mariner is in his right mind, and he is telling the truth as he sees it. Of that, I have no doubt. I sense it.”
May did a quick rethink. If Will sensed it . . . well, maybe that changed things. Maybe not. Both empathy and verifier could confirm only that the mariner believed what he was saying. Not that it was true.
Will brought her back to reality. “In any case, a walker has emerged from the pond and is . . . drinking it, I guess. Second-Best Sailor is making us wait until it has finished. He insists that it must come with us. He says that the walker is a metamorph of the pond ecology.”
“I was not aware that an ecosystem could metamorphose.”
“Well . . . its dynamic state can bifurcate. It can switch to a new attractor, just as some organisms can. But enough theorizing; that can wait. May, I want a suitable watertight compartment made ready, with a freshwater inlet valve capable of delivering a hundred gallons per minute. Up to a total of fifty thousand gallons.”
May stopped arguing. It was wasting more time than it could save. “I imagine I can persuade Ship to cooperate. It should be easy to build a consensus for something that simple. I will inquire.”
As it turned out, Ship was positively drooling at the prospect. Will’s recommendation alone seemed consensus enough, even before May and Stun backed it up. They didn’t even have to approach the Cyldarians. She had never known the vessel to be so amenable before. Was it keen to extend its ecological diversity? Who knew what went on in the mind of a mile-long spaceship?
Well, it would provide a new beast for the Neanderthals to master, she supposed. “Consider it done, Will. When should we expect you to lift off?”
“Thirty minutes from now.” His confidence belied her intuition. She could almost hear the suppressed “provided all goes as expected.” What he actually said was, “We must collect a supply of food for the pond, and bring that with it to Ship. The—the insects are proving more difficult to capture than I had hoped.”
Insects? Despite the potential dangers that faced them, May could not help a throaty chuckle. A vivid picture had appeared in her head. Very well. All they could do was wait, and watch, and react as best they could to any threat that materialized.
May had always been proud that Ship had no weapons. Now she was beginning to regret being so naive. They could do with some heavy weaponry right now.
As it happened, the rescue went smoothly. Humoring Second-Best Sailor, who still insisted that the pond was a conscious intelligence and the walker was its mobile form, they installed the walker in the chamber that had been prepared for it—basically, an empty tank with a water supply. The mariner wanted a pet, they assumed. But it was a funny way to go about getting one.
The walker seemed confused until Second-Best Sailor poked a tentacle through a weak spot in its translucent skin, up on top where no fluid would leak out, and engaged in what seemed to be a one-sided conversation. The polypoid was obviously insane, and the “discussion” achieved precisely nothing. When Second-Best Sailor asked for the tank’s water valve to be opened, the walker just sat there, immobile, and slowly dissolved. The creatures inside poured out and made themselves at home, so far as that was possible in the artificial environment of a waterproof tank. And that was it.
Yes, Second-Best Sailor did spend a lot of time dangling his tentacles in the water and talking animatedly to himself, but that was merely an extension of his delusion. He also spent a lot of time admiring his collection of fanworm tubes, won with such foolhardy courage from the pitch-dark depths of No-Moon’s ocean. He had left them on board Talitha for safekeeping, until the colony on Aquifer could be properly established. Now he stared at them as if they were the only friends he had. That, too, proved nothing.
There was no doubting his sincerity. All the Neanderthals could feel it. He meant every word he said. But sincerity did not equate with accuracy.
On other matters, he seemed entirely lucid. Sharp Wit Will Cut had spent several hours debriefing the mariner, trying to find out everything he knew about events on Aquifer. Second-Best Sailor described his limited recollections: the nighttime attack on No Bar Bay, his own capture, his interrogation by the hierocrat of Cosmic Unity—
Yes, that was right: Cosmic Unity. It was their installation. At the North Pole? Second-Best Sailor couldn’t confirm that, but yes, it was cold, and the tunnels could well have been carved in ice. Which was good enough to convince Will. He had told the reefmind; the information rounded out their timechunk and added perspective. Now they felt as if they had always known.
Will seemed to believe everything he told him when it came to Cosmic Unity. He broke off from the debriefing several times to issue instructions and talk to No-Moon, based on what Second-Best Sailor had just said. But whenever the polypoid raised the topic of ponds, Will’s eyes seemed to glaze over, and soon he was making a poor job of concealing his anger.
Second-Best Sailor was baffled. Considering what a strange place the Galaxy was, was it so inconceivable that a pond could evolve intelligence? What about the reefwives? he pointed out. They were an intelligent coral reef, flounce it! And the ’Thals traded with them! But no, that was different; that was an organism—well, a superorganism, a social collective.
A pond couldn’t be an organism, though, could it?
So Second-Best Sailor asked what had healed the wound in his flank, if it wasn’t the pond. Will’s answer was particularly hurtful: “What wound in your flank?” Because, of course, there was no trace that he had ever been wounded.
If only they’d brought the damaged suit back with them, then they could have seen the slit where the laser bolt had hit him. But the pond had discarded the suit, leaving it exposed on the beach, and it had disappeared—probably blown away one blustery night.
The polypoid was hurt that no one was willing to believe his story. He offered to act as interpreter, so that they could converse with the pond—but his was the only species among the crew that could send and receive chemical messages, and he was the only polypoid on board. Without independent confirmation, they would simply assume that he was making up the pond’s side of the conversation.
There were ways around that, if they’d been seriously interested. The pond must know things that Second-Best Sailor could not possibly know, and an intelligent line of questioning would be able to home in on a suitable topic. But they all knew that there was no such thing as an intelligent pond, and his near brush with death gave them the perfect excuse not to examine that “knowledge.”
They’re just being reasonable, he thought. To them, I’m sick. What was worse, he’d only gotten the pond on board as a thank-you gesture. Having been told about the Galaxy, the pond was determined to see some of its marvels for itself. The pond had saved his life, after all; he could scarcely tell it to get lost.
He had explained his trick with the fatflies. It was simple enough: get them to swarm in concert, blocking reflections from the ponds and then unblocking them again. The Neanderthals were willing to believe that he had somehow gotten the flies to swarm in patterns, since nothing else explained what they had seen with their own eyes . . . but they had not experienced the pond’s intelligence, so they didn’t believe anything he told them about it. Yet they believed him all right when he told them that there was another polypoid trapped on Aquifer! Not that it had made any difference. He and Will had both agreed that it would be too dangerous to try to rescue him. As yet, they had no accurate assessment of the enemy’s capabilities. But when it came to the pond, no one would listen.
Despite everything, Second-Best Sailor persevered. He made a thoroughgoing pest of himself. He buttonholed people and started explaining some bizarre theory of mind as an emergent phenomenon; he coined new terms like “ecoconsciousness” and laced his conversation with them until he started to sound like the late lamented Fat Apprentice. He had long discussions with Epimenides, who found his ideas interesting but could cite a hundred authorities to dispute every one of his assertions. He spent hours quizzing crew members on what their neural components felt like when they were thinking. Not what it felt like to have those neural components—what the components themselves experienced while their owner’s brain was putting together a thought.
The crew didn’t understand. They wouldn’t listen. A few of the Tweel, less polite than their fellows, displayed amusement. Several told him to shove off.
It depressed him.
The Neanderthals tried to treat Second-Best Sailor’s depression with drugs, but he refused. The more they pressed, the more obstinate he became. Eventually, they stopped trying and pretty much left him to work out the problem on his own. The mariner’s welfare was important, but there were more urgent and more important things to do. And the most urgent of them all was to return to No-Moon. The reefwives’ evacuation strategy had come to pieces; the polypoid race would no longer be safe if No-Moon was lost. The reefmind needed to sort out an alternative before Cosmic Unity’s mission fleet got its forthcoming invasion properly under way. And to do that, it had to find out exactly what the fleet was up to. Only Talitha could provide that information.
So the issue of the pond was put on the back burner, and Will concentrated on developing a consensus for the return to No-Moon. To his surprise, Ship agreed that consensus had been reached on the very first attempt. When it inquired what route he wanted, Will had expressed no preference: “You choose, Ship. Whichever route seems best to you.”
Talitha deftly removed itself from orbit around Aquifer. This was an emergency: Ship was willing to use hydrive. Knowing that even by that means the trip would take several weeks, Will retired to his cabin to rest. But he had been asleep for less than three hours when Ship woke him with an offhand “Will? We’ve arrived.”
This was so utterly improbable that he shot out of bed and rushed to the nearest gallery.
Ship hung stationary in space. Instead of the expected scene of stars pinpointed against a velvet backdrop, the window showed a striking image of a spiral galaxy. It was huge; it dominated the view in that direction.
Ship was right: They had arrived.
The only question was, Where?
When he asked Ship, it refused to answer. “There is no consensus,” the vessel insisted. “But you can stop worrying that we’ve gone off course. This is exactly where I intend us to be at this stage. Now we will wait.”
“Wait? What for?”
“I cannot tell you,” Ship replied. “It is crucial that you should be left to find that out for yourselves.”
Will decided that he had made a mistake when he told Ship to choose its own route. He should have struck a consensus for the quickest and most direct route, not the best. “Best” was too vague a word. Who knew what Ship thought might be best for them?
For the first time in his eventful life, he no longer trusted Ship’s judgment.
“Well, I can tell you where we are,” said Stun. She had been working with their highly experienced Yükü astrogator, and they had an answer to Will’s question. It hadn’t taken long.
He wasn’t going to like it.
She decided to prepare the ground first. “I am sure you have noticed that Ship is behaving much more efficiently than it used to.”
“Effectively,” said Will. “Ship never gave a toss for efficiency, and still does not.”
“More effectively. Much more effectively.”
Will growled, “Get to the point, Eyes That Stun the Unwary.”
She continued to evade it. “But you have noticed this?”
Will flexed his forearms, took a deep breath. He looked like a lion king surveying his domain. “It would be difficult for any ship’s captain not to notice such a dramatic improvement, Stun. I first became aware of it when we started reaching consensus almost before any suggestions were made. Then I noticed that routine tasks were being carried out without any discussion whatsoever.”
“I agree,” May broke in. She had been tending to Will’s crevit while its master was preoccupied with running the ship. “Have you observed that the atmosphere on board has become more contented than we have ever felt before?”
“Yes,” Will agreed. “Despite the difficulties we all face.”
“I noticed those things, too,” said Stun. “Did you also realize that major items of equipment were functioning better?”
“The life-support allocation seemed unusually slick,” May admitted.
“And the gallery window unusually clear,” added Will.
“Mmm. And the hydrive?”
He shook his thick mane and ran his fin
gers through it. “What of the hydrive?”
“It has improved beyond recognition.”
“What makes you think that? Oh, I believe I sense . . .”
Stun ducked her head in affirmation. “Correct. In a few hours, we traveled considerably farther than No-Moon, which on previous experience had to be several weeks distant, even if Ship found a route with less gravitic turbulence than the one we followed to journey to Aquifer.”
Will accepted this, even though it was incredible. He could feel that she was telling the truth. “So where are we?”
She pursed her full, prominent lips, then licked them uncertainly.
“Still hesitant? I will not argue with your conclusions. The Yükü never miscalculates.”
“Thank you, Will, for your confidence. We seem to be . . . No, we most assuredly are somewhere in the Agathyrsi Cluster.”
“Excellent. Uh—where is that?”
“It is a globular cluster located some sixty thousand light-years from the Galactic core in an axial direction.”
“Sixty thousand light-years? That would put us well out towards the rim.”
“Will, I said axial. Not radial.”
The enormity of it struck home. Now he knew which galaxy they were looking at. The Galaxy. Theirs.
Nobody had ever been able to travel out of the Galaxy’s main body of stars, into the spherical halo of globular clusters that extended for a hundred thousand light-years in every direction. Nobody had ever made a really good map of the Galaxy as a whole.
“We are the first people ever to visit this region,” said May.
Knowing which galaxy it was, Will began to see familiar features. Conjectured maps had been pieced together, of course, but he now saw that they were wrong in numerous details.
They were right about the general shape: a spiral galaxy with a distinct bar, from which two thick arms trailed. Between them were two thinner arms, and the four arms were separated by lobes that were too short to count as spirals. The whole thing really did look like a blob of milk that had been dabbed onto the universe and stirred with a spoon. Their familiar Trailing Spiral Arm was just like the maps, including a pronounced fork about forty-five thousand light-years from the hub. Its matching Leading Spiral Arm (the terminology was conventional; actually, both arms trailed) was split by a long rent halfway out, and broken by a dark gap. In between were arcs and isolated patches of brightness, and the three gas clouds of the rim—Ugric, Pome, and Ellops—were clearly visible as dark smears.