That pattern—yes! It had to be. Quickly she compared it with the probe log she’d brought down on her slate. These were the odd cadences and sputters of the very beast whose breakfast snack had been her first evidence of life.
“Listen to this,” she said. Jordin looked startled through his faceplate.
The signal boomed louder, and she turned back the gain. She decided to try the radio direction finder. Jordin did, too, for cross-check. As they stepped apart, moving from some filmy ice onto a brooding brown rock, she felt sparks snapping at her feet. Little jolts managed to get through even the thermal vacuum-layer insulation, prickling her feet.
The vector reading, combined with Jordin’s, startled her. “Why, the thing’s practically on top of us!”
She eyed the landscape. If Pluto’s lords of creation were all swimming in toward this island ridge for lunch, this one might get here first. Fired up by all those vitamins from the lost probe? she wondered.
Suddenly excited, Shanna peered out to sea—and there it was. Only a roiling, frothing ripple, like a ship’s bow wave, but arrowing for shore. And others, farther out.
Then it bucked up into view, and she saw its great, segmented tube of a body, with a sheen somewhere between mother-of-pearl and burnished brass. Why, it was huge. For the first time it hit her that when they all converged on this spot, it was going to be like sitting smack in a middling-size dinosaur convention.
Too late to back out now. She powered up the small lander transmitter and tuned it to the signal she was receiving from seaward.
With her equipment she could not duplicate the creature’s creative chaos of wavelengths. For its personal identification sign the beast seemed to use a simple continuous pulse pattern, like Morse code. Easy enough to simulate. After a couple of dry-run hand exercises to get with the rhythm of it, Shanna sent the creature a roughly approximate duplicate of its own ID.
She had expected a callback, maybe a more complex message. The result was astonishing. Its internal rocket engine fired a bright orange plume against the sky’s black. It shot straight up in the air, paused, and plunged back. Its splash sent waves rolling up the beach. The farthest tongue of fluid broke against the lander’s most seaward leg. The beast thrashed toward shore, rode a wave in—and stopped. The living cylinder lay there, half in, half out, as if exhausted.
Had she terrified it? Made it panic?
Cautiously Shanna tried the signal again, thinking furiously. It would give you quite a turn, she realized, if you’d just gotten as far in your philosophizing as “I think, therefore I am,” and then heard a thin, toneless duplicate of your own voice give back an echo.
She braced herself—and her second signal prompted a long, suspenseful silence. Then, hesitantly—shyly?—the being repeated the call after her.
Shanna let out her breath in a long, shuddering sigh.
She hadn’t realized she was holding it. Then she instructed DIS; the primary computer aboard Proserpina, to run the one powerful program Pluto Mission Control had never expected her to have to use: the translator, Wiseguy.
She waited for the program to come up and kept her eyes on the creature. It washed gently in and out with the lapping waves but seemed to pay her no attention. Jordin was busily snapping digitals. He pointed offshore. “Looks like we put a stop to the rest of them.”
Heads bobbed in the sea. Waiting? For what?
In a few moments they might have an answer to questions that had been tossed around endlessly after the Marsmat discoveries. Could all language be translated into logically rigorous sentences, relating to one another in a linear configuration, structures, a system? If so, one could easily program a computer loaded with one language to search for another language’s equivalent structures. Or, as many linguists and anthropologists insisted—particularly in light of the achingly slow progress with the Marsmat—does a truly unknown language forever resist such transformations?
Shanna stood absolutely still. Those minds offshore might make something of a raised hand, a shifting foot. Not all talk was verbal.
She felt the strangeness. Forbidding, cold, weird chemistry. Alien tongues could be outlandish not merely in vocabulary and grammatical rules but in their semantic swamps. Mute cultural or even biological premises wove into even the simplest of sentences. Blue skies Earthside lifted the spirits; here a blue gas might be poison. What would life-forms get out of this place? Could even the most inspired programmers, just by symbol manipulation and number crunching, have cracked ancient Egyptian with no Rosetta stone?
Not moving, she sent, “Bring Wiseguy online verbal, now.”
“Copy you,” came word from Proserpina’s bridge. Ukizi, from the voice signature.
She heard a delicate pop, and there was the burr of background—Wiseguy waiting for instructions. “Hey, guy,” she said.
“I am not a guy, despite your nicknaming me, but thank you,” the program answered in melodious male tones.
“We’re going to feed you microwave code,” Jordin put in. “Make the usual assumptions, as per training protocol number three. Decode in real time.”
“Now we…wait,” Shanna said, mostly to be saying something. The chill was biting into her feet and hands, and she wanted to move, get blood circulating. “Stay still,” she sent to Jordin.
“Wiseguy,” Jordin said, “can you make anything of those birdcalls?”
“Melodic structures, simple,” the program said.
“Thought so,” Jordin said. “Maybe singing is a universal.”
With the Pluto Project already far over budget, the decision to send along Wiseguy—which took many terabytes of computational space—had been hotly contested. The deciding vote was cast by an eccentric but politically astute old skeptic, who hoped to disprove the “bug-eyed monster Rosetta stone theory,” should life unaccountably turn up on Pluto. Shanna had heard through the gossip tree that the geezer was gambling that his support would make ISA bring along the rest of the DIS metasoftware package. The geezer had devoted decades to it, and he passionately believed in it. This would be a field trial nobody could have foreseen.
Wiseguy had learned Japanese in five hours; Hopi in seven; what smatterings they knew of dolphin in two days. It also mastered some of the fiendishly complex, multilogic artificial grammars generated from an Earth-based mainframe.
The unexpected outcome of $6 billion and a generation of cyberfolk was simply put: a good translator had all the qualities of a true artificial intelligence. As systems got apparently smarter, the philosophers fretted over how to tell an AI from just very fast software. By now the distinction had blurred. Wiseguy was a guy, of sorts. It—or she, or he; nobody had known quite how to ask—had to have cultural savvy and blinding mathematical skills. Shanna had long since given up hope of beating Wiseguy at chess, even with one of its twin processors tied off.
“I am laboring, though I must edit and substitute,” Wiseguy said.
“Okay, just hurry.”
“There are six transactions capable in human languages,” Wiseguy said. “To make assertions, ask questions, issue commands, wish, promise, request. Further, all can be done negatively—”
“So? Hurry!”
“If there are others that aliens use, I will not even recognize it. I suspect that is happening here. I shall place blanks where I suspect this is happening.”
“Great—get on with it.” She waved again, hoping to get the creature’s attention. Jordin leaped high in the 0.1-g gravity and churned both arms and legs in the ten seconds it took him to fall back down. Excited, the flying wings swooped silently over them. The scene was eerie in its hush. No calls now. The auroras danced, filmy. In Shanna’s feed from Proserpina she heard Wiseguy stumbling, muttering…and beginning to talk. Not in English, but in the curious pips and dots of the microwave wave trains.
She noted from the digital readout on her helmet interior display that Wiseguy had been running full bore while eavesdropping on the radio cross talk. Now it was galloping
along. In contrast to the simple radio signals she had first heard, the spoken, acoustic language turned out to be far more sophisticated. Wiseguy, however, dealt not in grammars and vocabularies, but in underlying concepts. And it was fast.
Shanna took a step toward the swarthy cylinder that heaved and rippled. Then another. Careful. Ropy muscles surged in it beneath layers of crusted fat. The cluster of knobs and holes at its front moved. It lifted its “head”—the snubbed-off, blunt forward section of the tube—and a bright, fast chatter of microwaves chimed through her ears. Followed immediately by Wiseguy’s whispery voice. Discourse.
The big body had small cuplike appendages. Ears? But there were smaller openings below, too, with leathery flaps that moved to track the sound of her footsteps. She guessed the cuplike ones were microwave antennas. On a living creature, she thought, and then put aside her sense of awe. If they were like the human-made mechanical antennas, they could both transmit and receive with them—unlike, say, eyes.
Another step. More chimes. Wiseguy kept this up at increasing speed. She was now clearly out of the loop. Data sped by in her ears, as Wiseguy had neatly inserted itself into the conversation, assuming Shanna’s persona, using some electromagnetic dodge. To her ears it was just a noisy, spurting stream. The creature apparently still thought it was speaking to her; its head swiveled to follow her.
The streaming conversation verged now from locked harmonies into brooding, meandering strings of chords. Shanna had played classical guitar as a teenager, imagining herself performing before concert audiences instead of bawling into a mike and hitting two chords in a rock band. So she automatically thought in terms of the musical moves of the data flow. Major keys gave way to dusky harmonies in a minor triad. To her mind this had an effect like a cloud passing across the sun.
Wiseguy reported to her and Jordin in its whisper. It and the alien—Ark—had only briefly had to go through the “me Tarzan, you Jane” stage. For a life-form that had no clearly definable brain she could detect, the alien proved a quick study.
She got its proper name first, as distinguished from its identifying signal; its name, definitely, for the translator established early in the game that these organisms had no gender.
The zand, they called themselves. And this one—call it Ark, because that was all Wiseguy could make of the noise that came before—Ark-zand. Maybe, Wiseguy whispered for Shanna and Jordin alone, Ark was just a “place-note” to show that this thing was the “presently here” of the zand. It seemed that the name was generic, for all of them.
“Like Earth tribes,” Jordin said, “who name themselves the People. Individual distinctions are tacked on?—maybe when necessary or socially pleasant.”
Jordin was like that—surprising erudition popping out when useful, otherwise a straight supernerd tech type. Nobody was going to find an alternative here to Earth’s tiresome clash of selfish individualisms and stifling collectivisms, Shanna thought. The political theorists back home would still make much of this, though, she was sure.
Shanna took another step toward the dark beach where the creature lolled, its head following her progress. It was no-kidding cold, she realized. Her boots were melting the ground under her, just enough to make it squishy. And she could hear the sucking as she lifted her boot, too. So she wasn’t missing these creatures’ calls—they didn’t use the medium.
One more step. Chimes in her ears, and Wiseguy sent them a puzzled “It seems a lot smarter than it should be.”
“Look, they need to talk to each other over distance, out of sight of each other,” Shanna said. “Those waxy all-one-wing birds should flock and probably need calls for mating, right? So do we.” Not that she really thought that was a deep explanation.
“How do we frame an expectation about intelligence?” Jordin put in.
“Yeah, I’m reasoning from Earthly analogies,” Shanna admitted. “Birds and walruses that use microwaves—who woulda thought?”
“I see,” Wiseguy said, and went back to speaking to Ark in its ringing microwave tones.
Shanna listened to the ringing interchange speed up into a blur of blips and jots. Wiseguy could run very fast, of course, but this huge tubular thing seemed able to keep up with it. Microwaves’ higher frequencies had far greater carrying capacity than sound waves and this Ark seemed able to use that. Well, evolution would prefer such a fast-talk capability, she supposed—but why hadn’t it on Earth? Because sound was so easy to use, evolving out of breathing. Even here—Wiseguy told her in a subchannel aside—individual notes didn’t mean anything. Their sequence did, along with rhythm and intonation, just like sound speech. Nearly all human languages used either subject-object-verb order or else subject-verb-object, and the zand did, too. But to Wiseguy’s confusion, they used both, apparently not caring.
Basic values became clear, in the quick scattershot conversation. Something called Rendezvous kept coming up, modified by comments about territory. Self-merge, the ultimate, freely chosen—apparently with all the zand working communally afterward to care for the young, should there luckily occur a Birthing. Respect for age, because the elders had experienced so much more. But respect tempered by skepticism, because the elders embroidered experiences when telling the young the tale of the raiders from Darkside.
“And what’s Darkside?” Jordin asked. He stirred restlessly, watching the sea for signs that others might come ashore. But the big bodies bobbed in the liquid a few hundred meters away.
Wiseguy supplied a guess: “The Outer, they call it also. Perhaps meaning beyond Pluto’s orbit? Far into the darkness? There are other possible interpretations I can display in order of descending probabilities—”
“That’s good enough,” Shanna said. “On with it.”
“Hey, they’re moving in,” Jordin said apprehensively, mouth working.
Shanna would scarcely have noticed the splashing and grinding on the beach as other zand began to arrive—apparently for Rendezvous, and Wiseguy stressed that it deserved the capital letter—save that Ark stopped to count and greet the new arrivals. Her earlier worry about being crunched under a press of huge zand bodies faded. They were social animals, and this barren patch of rock was now Ark’s turf. Arrivals lumbering up onto the dark beach kept a respectful distance, spacing themselves. Like walruses, yes.
Standing motionless for so long, Shanna felt a sharp cold ache in her lower back. The chill had crept in. She was astounded to realize that nearly four hours had passed. She made herself pace, stretch, eat and drink from suit supplies.
Jordin did the same, saying, “We’re 80 percent depleted on air.”
“Damn it, I don’t want to quit now! How ’bout you get extra from the lander?”
Jordin grimaced. He didn’t want to leave, either. They had all dedicated their lives to getting here, to this moment in this place. “Okay, Cap’n, sir,” he said sardonically as he trudged away.
She felt a kind of silent bliss here, just watching. Life, strange and wonderful, went on all around her. Her running digital coverage would be a huge hit Earthside. Unlike Axelrod’s empire, the Pluto Project gave their footage away.
As if answering a signal, the zand hunched up the slope a short way to feed on some brown lichenlike growth that sprawled across the warming stones. She stepped aside. Ark came past her, and another zand slid up alongside. It rubbed against Ark, edged away, rubbed again. A courtship preliminary? Something about their movements made Shanna venture the guess.
The zand stopped and slid flat tongues over the lichen stuff, vacuuming it up with a slurp she could hear through her suit. Tentatively the newcomer laid its body next to Ark. Shanna could hear the pace of microwave discourse Ark was broadcasting, and it took a lurch with the contact, slowing, slowing… Then Ark abruptly—even curtly, it seemed to Shanna—rolled away. Its signal resumed its speed.
She laughed aloud. How many people would pass up a chance at sex to get on with their language lessons? All along the shingle beach, stretching to the horizon,
the zand were pairing off. Except Ark.
“Y’know, sex took a couple billion years to evolve on Earth,” she said.
“Huh?” Jordin’s voice sounded surprised. “Oh yeah. Here…well, how old is this ecology, anyway?”
“Pluto must’ve formed early, from condensation. This could be lots older than us.”
She muted the furious bips and dots of the Wiseguy-zand conversation. Occasionally Wiseguy sent them a quick term for help—“Is this sensible?” the program asked. “Ontological?”
“Hey, is Wiseguy into philosophy already?” Jordin asked. “I dunno what that means.”
“Ummm. The biology saying is ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—meaning, in development of the embryo you see the past stages of the species. Once we had gills, back in our fishy days.”
“Hey, pretty heady stuff,” Jordin said skeptically. “So soon?”
“Well, Wiseguy did train on the SETI messages.”
“Seems like it’s digging at how the zand see their place in this weird world.”
“Maybe canned brains are natural philosophers.”
“Yeah, they don’t have sex to distract ’em.” They both laughed at that, releasing tension.
Here we are, Shanna thought, the Columbuses of a new world, and we’re waiting for a computer to do the introductions.
“Y’know, I gotta move or I’m gonna freeze,” she said.
Jordin grunted assent. “Feels great to move. Hey—the zand are moving inland.”
“Uh-oh. Toward the lander.”
Shanna walked back carefully, feeling the crunch of hard ice as she melted what would have been gases on Earth—nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen itself. Low-g walking was an art. With so little weight, rocks and ices that looked rough were still slick enough to make her slip. She caught herself more than once from a full, facedown splat—but only because she had so much time to recover, in a slow fall. As the zand worked their way across the stony field of lichen, they approached the lander. Jordin wormed his way around them, careful not to get too close.
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