Alien Contact

by Marty Halpern

  “So you choose to measure by the only standard that allows your life to be meaningless?”

  Sel laughed. “You are your mother’s son.”

  “Not father’s?”

  “Both, of course. But it’s your mother who won’t put up with any bullshit.”

  “Speaking of which, I can hardly wait to see a bull.”

  By the time they had been a fortnight gone, with almost two hundred kilometers behind them, they had talked about every conceivable subject at least twice, and finally walked along in companionable silence most of the time, except when the exigencies of their journey forced them to speak.

  “Don’t grab that vine, it’s not secure.”

  “I wonder if that bright-colored froglike thing is venomous?”

  “I doubt it, considering that it’s a rock.”

  “Oh. It was so vivid I thought—”

  “A good guess. And you’re not a geologist, so how could you be expected to recognize a rock?”

  At two hundred klicks, though, it was time to stop. They had rationed carefully, but their food was half gone. They pitched a more permanent camp by a clear water source, chose a safe spot and dug a latrine, and pitched the tent with the stakes deeper and the ground more padded under the floor of it. They would be here for a week.

  A week, because that’s about how long they expected to be able to live on the meat of the two dogs they slaughtered that afternoon.

  Sel was sorry that only two of the dogs were smart enough to extrapolate that their human masters were no longer reliable companions. Those two left—they had to drive the other pair away with stones.

  By now, like everyone else in the colony, both Sel and Po knew how to preserve meat by smoking it; they cooked only a little of the meat fresh, but kept the fire going to smoke the rest as it hung from the bending limbs of a fernlike tree…or treelike fern.

  They marked out a rough circle on the satellite map they carried with them and each morning they set out in a different direction to see what they might find. Now they collected samples in earnest, and took photographs that they bounced to the orbiting transport ship for storage on the big computers there. It was nothing but a big satellite now, its electronics running on a tiny amount of the fuel and its databases constantly being transmitted to Earth automatically by ansible. The pictures, the test results, those were secure—they would not be lost, no matter what happened to Sel and Po. The samples, though, were by far the most valuable items. Once they brought them back, they could be studied at great length using far more sophisticated equipment. The new equipment from the colony ship.

  At night, Sel lay awake for long hours, thinking of what they had seen, classifying it in his mind, trying to make sense of the biology of this world.

  But when he woke up, he could not remember having had any great insights the night before, and certainly had none by morning light. No great breakthroughs; just a continuation of the work he had already done.

  I should have gone north, into the jungles.

  But jungles are far more dangerous to explore. I’m an old man. Jungles could kill me. This temperate zone, colder than the colony because it’s a little closer to the poles and higher in elevation, is also safer for an old man who needs open country to hike through and nothing unusually dangerous to snag or snap at him.

  On the fifth day, they crossed a path.

  There was no mistaking it. It was not a road, certainly not, but that was no surprise, the Formics had built few roads. What they made were paths, and those inadvertent, the natural result of thousands of feet treading the same route.

  Those feet had trodden here, though it was forty years before. Trodden so long and often that after all these years, and overgrown as it was, the naked eye could trace the path of it through the pebbly soil of a narrow alluvial valley.

  There was no question now of pursuing any more flora and fauna. The Formics had found something of value here, and archaeology took precedence, at least for a few hours, over xenobiology.

  The path wound upward into the hills, but not terribly far before it led to a number of cave entrances.

  “These aren’t caves,” said Po.

  “Oh?”

  “They’re tunnels. These are too new, and the land hasn’t shaped itself around them the way that it does with real caves. These were dug as doorways. All the same height, do you see?”

  “That damnably inconvenient height that makes it such a pain for humans to go inside.”

  “It’s not our purpose here, sir,” said Po. “We’ve found the spot. Let’s call for others to explore the tunnels. We’re here for the living, not the dead.”

  “I have to know what they were doing here. Certainly not farming—there’s no trace of their crops gone wild here. No orchards. No middens, either—this wasn’t a great settlement. And yet there was so much traffic, along that single path.”

  “Mining?” asked Po.

  “Can you think of any other purpose? There’s something in those tunnels that the Formics thought was worth the trouble of digging out. In large quantities. For a long time.”

  “Not such large quantities,” said Po.

  “No?” said Sel.

  “It’s like steel-making back on Earth. Even though the purpose was smelting iron to make steel, and they mined coal only to fire their smelters and foundries, they didn’t carry the coal to the iron, they carried the iron to the coal—because it took far more coal than iron to make steel.”

  “You must have gotten very good marks in geography.”

  “I never saw Earth,” said Po. “Neither did my parents—all born here. But Earth is still my home.”

  “So you’re saying that whatever they took out of these tunnels, it wasn’t in such large quantities that it was worth building a city here.”

  “They put their cities where the food was, or the fuel. Whatever they got here, they took little enough of it that it was more economical to carry it to their cities, instead of building a city here to process it.”

  “You may grow up to amount to something, Po.”

  “I’m already grown up, sir,” said Po. “And I already amount to something. Just not enough to get any girl to marry me.”

  “And knowing the principles of Earth’s economic history will attract a mate?”

  “As surely as that bunny-toad’s antlers, sir.”

  “Horns,” said Sel.

  “So we’re going in?”

  Sel mounted one of the little oil lamps into the flared top of his walking stick.

  “And here I thought that opening at the top of your stick was decoration,” said Po.

  “It was decorative,” said Sel. “It was also the way the tree grew out of the ground.”

  Sel rolled up his blankets and put half the remaining food into his pack, along with their testing equipment.

  “Are you planning to spend the night down there?”

  “What if we find something wonderful, and then have to climb back out of the tunnels before we get a chance to explore?”

  Dutifully, Po packed up. “I don’t think we’ll need the tent in there.”

  “I doubt there’ll be much rain.”

  “Caves can be drippy.”

  “We’ll pick a dry spot.”

  “What can live in there? It’s not a natural cave, I don’t think we’ll find fish.”

  “There are birds and other creatures that like the dark. Or that find it safer and warmer indoors.”

  At the entrance, Po sighed. “If only the tunnels were higher.”

  “It’s not my fault you grew so tall.” Sel lit the lamp, fueled by the oils of fruit Sel had found in the wild. They grew it in orchards now, and pressed and filtered it in three harvests a year, though except for the oil the fruit was good for nothing except fertilizer. It was good to have clean-burning fuel for light, instead of wiring every building with electricity, especially in the outlying colonies. It was one of Sel’s favorite discoveries—particularly since there was no si
gn the Formics had ever discovered its usefulness. Of course, the Formics were at home in the dark. Sel could imagine them scuttling along in these tunnels, content with smell and hearing to guide them.

  Humans had evolved from creatures that took refuge in trees, not caves, thought Sel, and though humans had used caves many times in the past, they were always suspicious of them. Deep dark places were at once attractive and terrifying. There was no chance the Formics would have allowed any large predators to remain at large on this planet, particularly in caves, since the Formics themselves were tunnel makers and cave dwellers.

  If only the Formic home world had not been obliterated in the war. What we could have learned, tracing an alien evolution that led to intelligence!

  Then again, if Ender Wiggin had not blown the whole thing up, we would have lost the war. Then we wouldn’t have even this world to study. Evolution here did not lead to intelligence—or if it did, the Formics already wiped it out, along with any traces the original sentient natives might have left behind.

  Sel bent over and squat-walked into the tunnel. But it was hard to keep going that way—his back was too old. He couldn’t even lean on his stick, because it was too tall for the space, and he had to drag it along, keeping it as close to vertical as possible so the oil didn’t spill out of the canister that was holding it.

  After a while he simply could not continue in that position. Sel sat down and so did Po.

  “This is not working,” said Sel.

  “My back hurts,” said Po.

  “A little dynamite would be useful.”

  “As if you’d ever use it,” said Po.

  “I didn’t say it would be morally defensible,” said Sel. “Just convenient.”

  Sel handed his stick, with the lamp atop it, to Po. “You’re young. You’ll recover from this. I’ve got to try a new position.”

  Sel tried to crawl but instantly gave up on that—it hurt his knees too much to rest them directly on the rocky floor. He finally settled for sitting, leaning his arms forward, putting weight on them, and then scrabbling his legs and hips after him. It was slow going.

  Po also tried crawling and soon gave up on it. But because he was holding the stick with the light, he was forced to return to walking bent over, knees in a squat. The boy would end up crippled, probably, but Sel would never have to hear his father and mother complain about it, because Sel himself would never get out of this tunnel alive.

  And then, suddenly, the light went dim. For a moment Sel thought it had gone out, but no—Po had stood up and lifted the stick to a vertical position, so that the tunnel where Sel was creeping along was now in shadow.

  It didn’t matter. Sel could see the chamber ahead. It was a natural cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites forming columns that supported the ceiling.

  But they weren’t the normal straight-up-and-down columns that normally formed, when lime-laden water dripped straight down, leaving sediment behind. These columns twisted crazily. Writhed, really.

  “Not natural deposits,” said Po.

  “No. These were made. But the twisting doesn’t seem designed, either.”

  “Fractal randomness?” asked Po.

  “I don’t think so,” said Sel. “Random, yes, but genuinely so, not fractal. Not mathematical.”

  “Like dog turds,” said Po.

  Sel stood looking at the columns. They did indeed have the kind of curling pattern that a long dog turd got as it was laid down from above. Solid yet flexible. Extrusions from above, only still connected to the ceiling. Sel looked up, then took the stick from Po and raised it.

  The chamber seemed to go on forever, supported by the writhing stone pillars. Arches like an ancient temple, but half melted.

  “It’s composite rock,” said Po.

  Sel looked down at the boy and saw him with a self-lighting microscope, examining the rock of a column.

  “Seems like the same mineral composition as the floor,” said Po. “But grainy. As if it had been ground up and then glued back together.”

  “But not glued,” said Sel. “Bonded? Cement?”

  “I think it’s been glued,” said Po. “I think it’s organic.”

  Po took the stick back and held the flame of the lamp under an elbow of one of the twistiest columns. The substance did not catch fire, but it did begin to sweat and drip.

  “Stop,” said Sel. “Let’s not bring the thing down on us!”

  Now that they could walk upright, they moved forward into the cavern. It was Po who thought of marking their path by cutting off bits of his blanket and dropping them. He looked back from time to time to make sure they were following a straight line. Sel looked back, too, and saw how impossible it would be ever to find the entrance they had come through, if the path were not marked.

  “So tell me how this was made,” said Sel. “No toolmarks on the ceiling or floor. These columns, made from ground-up stone with added glue. A kind of paste that can hold up a chamber this size. But no grinding equipment left behind, no buckets to carry the glue.”

  “Giant rock-eating worms,” said Po.

  “That’s what I was thinking, too,” said Sel.

  Po laughed. “I was joking.”

  “I wasn’t,” said Sel.

  “How could worms eat rock?”

  “Very sharp teeth that regrow quickly. Grinding their way through. The fine gravel bonds with some kind of gluey mucus and they extrude these columns, then bind them to the ceiling.”

  “But how could such a creature evolve?” said Po. “There’s no nutrition in the rock. And it would take enormous energy to do all this. Not to mention whatever their teeth were made of.”

  “I don’t think they evolved,” said Sel. “Look—what’s that?”

  There was something shiny ahead. Reflecting the lamplight.

  As they got closer, they saw spotty reflections from various spots on the columns, too. Even the ceiling.

  But nothing else was as bright as the thing lying on the floor. “A glue bucket?” asked Po.

  “No,” said Sel. “It’s a giant bug. Beetle. Ant. Something like—look at this, Po.”

  They were close enough now to see that it was six-legged, though the middle pair of limbs seemed more designed for clinging than walking or grasping. The front ones were for grasping and tearing. The hind ones, for digging and running.

  “What do you think? Bipedal?” asked Sel.

  “Both. Bipedal at need.” Po nudged it with his foot. No response. The thing was definitely dead. He bent over and flexed and rotated the hind limbs. Then the front ones. “It could do both equally well, I think.”

  “Not a likely evolutionary path,” said Sel. “Anatomy tends to commit one way or the other.”

  “Like you said. Not evolved, bred.”

  “For what?”

  “For mining,” said Po. He rolled the thing over onto its belly. It was very heavy; it took several tries. But now they could see much better what it was that caught the light. The thing’s back was a solid sheet of gold. As smooth as a beetle’s carapace, but so thick with gold that the thing must weigh ten kilos at least.

  Twenty-five, maybe thirty centimeters long, thick and stubby. And its entire exoskeleton thinly gilt, with the back heavily armored in gold. “Do you think these things were mining for gold?” asked Po. “Not with that mouth,” said Sel. “Not with those hands.”

  “But the gold got inside it somehow. To be deposited in the shell.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Sel. “But this is the adult. The harvest. I think the Formics carried these things out of the mine and took them off to be purified. Burn off the organics and leave the pure metal behind.”

  “So they ingested the gold as larvae…”

  “Went into a cocoon…”

  “And when they emerged, their bodies were encased in gold.”

  “And there they are,” said Sel, holding up the light again. Only now he went closer to the columns, where they could now see that the glints o
f reflection were from the bodies of half-formed creatures, their backs embedded in the pillars, their foreheads and bellies shiny with a layer of thin gold.

  “The columns are the cocoons,” said Po.

  “Organic mining,” said Sel. “The Formics bred these things specifically to extract gold.”

  “But what for? It’s not like the Formics used money. Gold is just a soft metal to them.”

  “A useful one. What’s to say they didn’t have bugs just like these, only bred to extract iron, platinum, aluminum, copper, whatever they wanted?”

  “So they didn’t need tools to mine.”

  “No, Po—these are the tools. The factories.” Sel knelt down. “Let’s see if we can get any kind of DNA sample from these.

  “Dead all this time?”

  “There’s no way these are native to this planet. The Formics brought them here. So they’re native to the Formic home world. Or bred from something native there.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Po, “or other colonies would have found them long before now.”

  “It took us forty years, didn’t it?”

  “What if this is a hybrid?” asked Po. “So it exists only on this world?”

  By now, Sel was sampling DNA and finding it far easier than he thought. “Po, there’s no way this has been dead for forty years.”

  Then it twitched reflexively under his hand.

  “Or twenty minutes,” said Sel. “It still has reflexes. It isn’t dead.”

  “Then it’s dying,” said Po. “It has no strength.”

  “Starving to death, I bet,” said Sel. “Maybe it just finished its metamorphosis and was trying to get to the tunnel entrance and died here. Or stopped here to die.”

  Po took the samples from him and stowed them in Sel’s pack.

  “So these gold bugs are still alive, forty years after the Formics stopped bringing them food? How long is the metamorphosis?”

  “Not forty years,” said Sel. He stood up, then bent over again to look at the gold bug. “I think these cocooned-up bugs embedded in the columns are young. Fresh.” He stood up and started striding deeper into the cavern.

  There were more gold bugs now, many of them lying on the ground—but unlike the first one they found, these were often destroyed, hollowed out. Nothing but the thick golden shells of their backs, with legs discarded as if they had been…