The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  “It’s a geodesic sphere,” Rook says.

  Bishop looks down at a display. “A habitat.”

  “Yes.”

  One other thing grabs his attention. From that space station, the Sidewinder is getting a mind-boggling reading. More than three zettajoules of energy are being focused by those octagonal generators, and that energy is being flung in only one direction: into the very heart of the baby star.

  “Jesus. They’re cooking that thing. They’re…”

  “Making a star.”

  He looks at Bishop. “Have you ever seen such tech?”

  The alien stares ahead in silence for a moment. “Negative, friend,” he says at last. “Not even close.”

  “Your people never encountered these…whatever they ares?”

  “No. I have no records of them.”

  “Really? You’re not just messing with me?”

  “I have no records of them,” he repeats.

  For the moment, Rook decides to let it go. If Bishop is still playing at a deception game, it does little good to force the point now, there’s much more to concern him at the moment.

  Closer and closer they come to the geodesic sphere, and as they do, they see a portion of it split open, looking like an amniotic sack being ripped, and they pass through it. The sack closes behind them, and they have to pass through six more layers, each one containing a web of interconnecting lattices miles long, supporting geodesic domes roughly twice the size of the Sidewinder. A network of little habitats. Homes.

  Light comes from everywhere, from the “skin” of the sphere, and even from inside the latticework branches, which have a membranous skin, through which light is emitted from crooked lines that look like giant varicose veins.

  A few minutes of traveling deeper into the sphere brings them to one of those lattices, where they are guided, alighting on one of these membranous branches, just beside a dome. The beings release their hold of the Sidewinder and glide away like jellyfish riding an invisible tide. Ahead of them, though, a dozen more of the creatures are walking directly towards the Sidewinder. “The welcoming party,” Rook says.

  “I suppose so.” The Ianeth looks at him. “The air outside is close to what you can breathe, but not exactly conducive. I recommend putting a new filter and air pack in your environment suit before we step outside.”

  “Yeah. Affirmative, friend.”

  Two minutes later, the cargo bay is opening, and they descend the ramp together. Side by side, they approach the welcoming committee, with Rook limping and holding his injured ribs. Twelve of the aliens are coming, each one well over twice Rook’s height. They move slow and with grace, no jerky insect-like motions such as Bishop exhibits. Their eyes are deep and inquisitive. They approach without any sign of caution. They don’t fear us, he thinks. For some reason that gives him pause.

  Once beyond the Sidewinder, Rook has a moment to test his buoyancy—beyond the ship’s arti-grav field, they now stand on a hard, undulating platform. It’s breathing. Surrounding him are countless platforms extending outward from the latticework shell like spider webs, and though some of them are vertical or diagonal relative to where Rook stands, the creatures walking on them nevertheless remain upright and walk along them without hindrance. Audiences are gathering at the edge of every platform, looking down on them.

  A check to his HUD tells Rook that the gravity here is .7 g. That’s near Earth-level gravity, but this thing isn’t big enough for that. It must have arti-grav generators, but where’s all the power coming from?

  The aliens stop a few feet in front of them, towering over.

  Rook stares up at them, feeling like he’s stepped inside a fever dream.

  Finally, one of them extends one of its many tentacles, which splits into ten others, and at its center there is a small bulb. It starts emitting flashes of light, oscillating rapidly between different colors.

  Over their open channel, Bishop’s voice comes into Rook’s helmet. “I think they’re trying to communicate.”

  “Clearly. What do you figure? They speak through, what, interpretations of light spectrums?”

  “I would say so.”

  Rook looks up at them, opens his arms outward, shakes his head. “We don’t understand.” He realizes his voice is probably muffled inside his helmet, so he turns on the helmet’s microphone. “We don’t understand. Do you, uh, have ears? Can you hear me? Do you understand spoken language?” He feels incompetent at the moment. For all the training he received at ASCA, they never once prepared him for making friendly conversation with a newly-found sentient race.

  More bulbs are extended from the other beings, and suddenly the platform comes alive with lights. It comes from both the aliens and the pulsating membrane they’re standing on.

  “What’s happening?” he says.

  Bishop looks at him. “If I had to guess? I would say they’re conversing amongst themselves.” He points at the ground, which oscillates like a strobe light. “I imagine they’re communicating with some sort of central hub, and this platform is how they relay light and electrical signals.”

  Energy readings are off the charts. The light within the platform intensifies. Then, a transmission comes in over his radio, and it’s coming from the Sidewinder. Music. He forgets the name of this particular band. The song cues up a plethora of different instruments before finally the lyrics begin.

  “Why can’t we be friends?

  Why can’t we be friends?

  Why can’t we be friends?

  Why can’t we be friends?

  I seen you around for a long, long time…”

  Rook taps a few keys on his wrist, lowering the volume. He looks at Bishop, and the Ianeth only stares at him. “That’s why they cut on the music. They’ve been listening to us. They know how I like to play music. Sound. They can hear it, just like we can see all the colors they’re emitting, but they can’t understand the sequences and harmonies anymore than we can grasp the nuances of light.”

  “I would say they have a better understanding of our language than we do of theirs,” Bishop argues. “Or else, they’ve played rather appropriate songs twice now by mere coincidence.”

  Rook nods. “You’re right. They’re not completely oblivious to the words and what they mean, but…but they must’ve also picked up on transmissions between you and me. They’re a little confused about which one is our language, or if the two are related at all.”

  “But they must at least have the gist, or else they couldn’t understand the meaning of each song—”

  Bishop is cut off by his own voice, from a broadcast he sent Rook weeks ago. “—you really love this game, don’t you?”

  Rook hears his own voice played back in response. “Takes me back.”

  Bishop: “It’s more than that, though, isn’t it?”

  Rook: “It’s what opened my eyes to my enemy’s weakness. It’s how I beat them.”

  Bishop: “Why do you think that is? The Cerebrals are the most highly-advanced computers either of our species ever encountered, so how did you beat them? What principle was it that beat them, exactly? It wasn’t just their aversion to sacrifice or the principle of four.”

  The recordings end suddenly, and one of the tall aliens steps forward, pointing at a small split in his face, what looks like a tiny mouth. He closes it, and, performing one of the queerest tricks Rook has ever seen, the lips seal together, completely vanishing. The alien’s face is now flat and featureless around the jaw.

  Presently, Rook and Bishop exchange glances. “So…they’re not communicating vocally…because…because they have no vocal cords? Just recordings of things we’ve said and music that we’ve listened to.”

  “The lights were to test if we could understand them at all. They may not even be able to ‘hear’ the sounds, they may only detect them through the wavelengths themselves, interpreting them the way you might interpret invisible fields of radiation, testing them, and then sorting out one type from another, but you can’
t make a language out of it.”

  “Great, how are we supposed to communicate with them?”

  Bishop has no answers.

  The music is still going. Rook looks back at the aliens, and waves his hands. “Uh…uh, please stop the music. Stop the music!” They look between each other, confused, more lights rapidly oscillating. Rook taps some keys on his wrist, tries to tell the Sidewinder to stop broadcasting. When the music finally stops, he looks up at them. “Look, uh, I guess you guys don’t interpret sound the way we do, but you’ve obviously got the gist of how our lines of communication work, so…” He fumbles for something to say, anything to say, his hands spinning in the air as if he can catch an idea from the ether. “What…uh, what did you guys save us for? I guess that’s as good a place as any to start. Do you understand the question? Why did you decide to intervene when—?”

  Music! Blaring in his ears! It starts off with a continuous rolling snare drum, then a chorus is screaming, and Edwin Starr is calling out:

  “War!

  Huh! Yeah!

  Good God, y’all!

  What is it good for?

  Absolutely nothin’!

  Listen to me!

  War!

  Uh-huh! Yeah!

  What is it good for?

  Absolutely nothin’!

  Say it again!”

  Again, he has to turn down the volume and wave at them to stop. The aliens exchange a fluttering of colors, and their tentacles undulate excitedly. If Rook had to guess, he’d say they’re getting upset. “Okay, okay, hold on, I think we got it. So…so you’re the survivors, too, huh? I mean, you made it when others didn’t? Like us.” He points to himself and Bishop. “And I guess you’re against war on principle?”

  Another fluttering of lights, completely incomprehensible.

  Rook shakes his head. “This is hopeless.”

  “No, it’s not. They’ve locked on to a few principles—war, rescue, friendship—they selected these themes on purpose, even if they can’t quite vocalize them. Perhaps they’ve never needed to, not like this, anyway.” Bishop removes the main CPU of his translator box, which is no bigger than Rook’s pinky finger, and he starts adjusting items from the holo-display being emitted from the translator. “But if they’re trying to synthesize these notions of war and friendship with sounds, then let’s assume for the moment that the lights they’re flashing at us are also trying to do the same.”

  Rook watches those insectile hands moving feverishly. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m working on mapping out a workable syntax. Beings this intelligent must be trying to repeat themselves, to show us a pattern.” A few seconds later, he nods. “There it is. A fluctuation of lights, ranging in luminosity and hue, the same recurring pattern over and over. Let’s assume friendship was imparted in their first burst of lights, and that war was communicated in that second burst, since those were the songs they chose. Now let’s assume all of the elements of friendship—allies, common enemies, bonding, et cetera—are in there somewhere. Now all the commonalities we might associate with war—conflict, disagreements, murder, extinction, and so forth.” Rook watches patiently as the aliens loom over them, appearing as eager as dogs waiting on the tennis ball to be thrown. “Give me your micropad.”

  Rook doesn’t question, he unstraps it from his arm and hands it over, and the Ianeth works hastily. After a few minutes of near silence, Bishop finally turns the micropad around to face the tall creatures, and a series of lights flashes at them. All at once, there is a series of other flashes from their bulbs as they all try to speak at once, but one of them finally seems to quiet the others down, and communicates in a series of slow, simple flashes.

  Bishop watches carefully, records the flashes in the micropad’s small cam, then replays them and analyzes them. Fifteen minutes go by. Then thirty. Finally, he works up another sequence, and the Tall Ones (as Rook comes to think of them) send something back. It goes back and forth like this with Rook standing between them, feeling awkward and completely useless, and trying fruitlessly to massage the pain out of his ribs. Ribs 2 through 4 are certainly cracked, as is one of his vertebral ribs, and some of the costal cartilage has torn. The medical detail is all academic to Rook, all he knows is that he’s suffering tremendous human pain, along with a migraine to accompany all of it, and is now playing guest to a group of aliens with another alien as his liaison.

  Finally, Bishop sends another message back that seems more complicated than all the others, and there is a fluttering of light and some excited movements from the Tall Ones. “It’s a start,” he says.

  “What have you got so far?”

  “Well, it’s a rudimentary set of values I’ve assigned certain patterns, but I believe I have something. It’s the most basic of messages.”

  “What is it?”

  “I believe they’re saying, in a nutshell, that they do not fight. On principle, they don’t fight at all. They don’t understand it, but they seem…excited?...about our performance at Kali. Then there is a piece I can only interpret this way: ‘You war well. We’re not good at it. You teach us.’ ”

  Rook winces. “What the hell…?”

  Bishop spells it out. “They’re pacifists. Highly evolved, highly motivated pacifists who can build you a star and create a geodesic space station made out of organic material and with artificial gravity, but they have absolutely no sense of how to apply it to armed conflicts.”

  Rook stares at the creatures with a newly critical eye. He looks around at all they’ve created, and reminds himself these people are generating a new star all on their own. Then he reminds himself of the Colossus, and the massive incubator or engine or whatever it was that grew the creature in Kali’s belly. It’s almost impossible to wrap his mind around the fact that they aren’t militant, that they’ve never once found martial applications for such power. But then it all sort of fits, doesn’t it? Like tumbler pins in a lock, one falls into place right after the other, and then the key turns, unlocking the door of enlightenment.

  “They’re an organic-technology-based civilization,” he says. “Everything they accomplish is based off of manipulations of organic compounds. Is that what I’m seeing? A bunch o’ tree-huggers?” Rook chuckles, and when he does, the Tall Ones lean forward, as if scrutinizing the laugh. “The tree-huggers of the stars. Star hippies. Jesus.”

  Bishop taps a few keys on the micropad. “The ground beneath us is pumping an extremely powerful electrodynamic fluid. The skin covers a layer of muscle fibers, each one having a tensile strength of 976 MPa. That’s greater than carbon steel, and almost matches compristeel and organisteel. Billions of BTUs of heat are being insulated and channeled beneath us, and in the fibers all around us.” Bishop looks around with renewed appreciation. “This entire shell isn’t just a few super-fragments of organic specimen laced together.”

  “Then it’s not just made of organic compounds, it’s a life form,” Rook says.

  “With a mind, I’ll warrant. Electrical signals are being transmitted through trembling tissues, which I would imagine are nerve endings. They’re coursing from the generators on the outside, and converge somewhere in the center of the sphere.”

  Apparently wanting back in on this conversation, the Tall Ones start emitting more colors from their bulbs rapidly. Rook remains silent for ten minutes while Bishop works out some more values. When he speaks again, he almost sounds frustrated. “There’s an awful lot of problems here with tense, and with major nouns.”

  “Theories?”

  “There’s an odor in here that you cannot detect, probably not even with your helmet off. I believe they’re emitting pheromones on purpose. If that’s true, it would indicate their language is infinitely more complex, as it would mean light is only one half their vocabulary, but certain odors provide context.” He looks at Rook. “The translator box I’m using is partially of Cereb design, I could modify it over time, but this could take months to have a meaningful dialogue with them. Years, p
erhaps.”

  “You’ve communicated well enough so far.”

  “It’s hardly more than children of different cultures pointing at parts of their body and giving them names, hardly enough to conduct a real discussion, but it’s a start.”

  Rook shuffles uncomfortably. “Do we have to do this here? Is there, I dunno, someplace we can go and sit down? Can you at least communicate that much?”

  It takes another hour, but thankfully the Ianeth concocts a way to ask basic questions, and uses a series of gestures, some of which are completely counterintuitive to Rook’s understanding: waving for the Tall Ones to follow causes them to back off, and when Rook decides to sit on the ground, their bodies elongate, becoming almost six feet taller. Without Bishop, he knows he would be totally lost.

  The Ianeth eventually works out a method for asking for a place to go and speak. They step up a flight of stairs that, while wide and deep, are no less human-like or Ianeth-like. Once inside one of these domes, Rook marvels at the fact that no matter where they step, gravity seems to “follow” them, remaining a buoyant but steady .7 g. Entering the dome means passing through a series of membranes, which part for them as they come and shut seamlessly behind them as they pass. The room they come to has black, pulsating walls, with a dim bioluminescent glow coming from a smaller dome at the center. Here, Rook and Bishop are invited to stay, it seems, and are left alone.

  After a few minutes, Rook sees on his HUD that the room’s environment is becoming more agreeable to human conditions. Oxygen, helium, hydrogen and pressure levels are adequate enough that he can remove his helmet. When he does, he winces and begins tearing up at the pungent odor. “Good God, is that the pheromones you were talking about?”

  “No,” Bishop says, going over the developing vocabulary on his micropad. “That’s how it smells everywhere.” He looks at Rook. “I think the Tall Ones, and now we, are all part of a symbiotic relationship with the sphere.” He keeps looking at Rook, perhaps waiting for him to come to the conclusion on his own. Rook just looks at him, waving the odor away. Finally, the alien prompts him. “Like bacteria living the intestines? The living things inside the sphere are part of certain functions.”