Analog Science Fiction and Fact - July-Agust 2014

by Penny Publications

  The screen appeared—military grade holo. After I put the default icons where I like them and peeked at the directory, I opened up the project report with the earliest timestamp, adjusted video and audio, and sat back without popcorn to watch and listen.

  I'd trained on Mars and Venus during my sophomore cadet year, and while I'd never been to another star-system, the difference between interplanetary and interstellar flight is mainly a matter of degree. Both use vector drive, where inertia is channeled in specific directions while maintaining a kind of neutral bubble within the spaceship. And both use a gravity "windshield" to deal with dust, gasses, or asteroids in the way. On interstellar trips, however, the g-shield has to be a nightmare vortex, an obstacle-devouring wormhole that would devour the ship itself if both vortex and ship weren't constantly maintaining the same speed. No one knows where the consumed material winds up, and there's plenty gobbled up at FTL velocities. Maybe unimaginable creatures from some unimaginable dimension will show up someday with one hell of an illegal dumping fine.

  Sorry, I digress. My point is that when the room seemed to tilt slightly, I knew we were on our way. Despite the redirection of forces that acts to insulate passengers from uncomfortable-to-fatal inertial and gravitational effects, a little extra pull from the g-shield always leaks into every spaceship I've flown on. Most people don't feel the effect, but my implanted pilot biomech makes me supersensitive to directional tugs. So I tend to overcompensate by leaning in the opposite direction, which probably makes me look silly. I tried to ignore the annoyance and focused on the earliest report.

  First thing I noticed was the slightly grainy quality of the video despite the gon's best up-scaling. Again, a normal person wouldn't have seen any problem; but with my visual biomech, it was like looking through a window that never lets you forget there's a window between you and the view. Funny how you forget how much technology has advanced until you bump up against what it used to be. The audio sounded state-of-the-art to me. Then again, pilots don't steer by listening, so my hearing hadn't been enhanced.

  If you're wondering why I'm blathering rather than relaying the report, it's because nothing much worth repeating managed to squeeze out between the layers of dry pompousness constituting that initial file. In essence, this waste of terabytes, recorded by some Nordic-looking blip before he actually landed on Abreathon, was a geological, atmospheric, gravitational, electromagnetic, and what-have-you data-spew combined with an irrelevant personal résumé.

  The second file made me sit up and pay real attention.

  I'd never been on an extraterrestrial world with native vegetation or wildlife unless you count people as wildlife. Abreathon had a generous helping of both. Its versions of trees and shrubs displayed a boggling variety of colors and textures, but the most alien aspect was the nearly transparent crystalline structures jutting out from every stalk, dendrite, and bole. These, according to file two's narrator who never exhibited enough ego to selfie, were the local leaves and evergreen needles. They were gorgeous, jewel-like, and often progressed as a spectrum of subtle tints along each stalk. Some were dichroic or contained mineral-like inclusions. Most carried enough of an electrical charge to occasionally spark from leaf to leaf. The cumulative effect of all this arcing in even a small forest generated sufficient thermal noise to make radio transmission very difficult.

  The plants also had a bad habit of releasing a thin mist at night that added up to a more-thanpea-soup fog. That, combined with the constant glow from countless random little discharges kept the forests hidden after sunset from video recorders of all sorts including those set up for infrared and ultraviolet night vision. The result? Almost nothing had been learned about the nightlife of plants or animals.

  Speaking of animals, these were even more interesting than the plants. Again, quite a variety but most had shapes based on a hexagonal frame. Evolution here had come up with an improvement on bones: hollow torsion tubes lighter yet stronger than the terrestrial equivalent. But evolution had failed to invent legs, feet, paws, or hooves. Instead, most critters ambulated on six thin, rippling edges. Some were surprisingly fast considering, but I could've outrun the quickest at a medium jog. Arms of any kind were rare on this world, but the beasts had evolved creative replacements such as living nets of thin tissue that shot out of vertical crevices in the bodies of certain predators. The nets, when well-aimed, trapped smaller animals and then retracted into the crevices, hauling the unlucky prey along. At a guess, the nets were selectively sticky. Nature, I suppose, is the mother of necessity.

  While only a few species used the crevice-net system, the animal population had heavily bought into the crevice idea. I stared, fascinated by the variety of trapping, manipulating, or locomotion-assisting organic devices emerging from those crevices. A trio of animals using needle-coated bubbles on stalks to snag ruby leaves caught my eye, partly because they were unusually bulky, partly because they alone had tentacle-like limbs jutting from torso crevices, but mostly because those particular critters had been highlighted in the video with extra brightness and edited-in indicator arrows. I had more than a hunch why these diners merited special attention.

  The biological tour went on for over an hour, but it sure held my interest. My own dinner arrived, and while chewing on mystery ingredients, I decided that Abreathon's jewel leaves probably tasted better. I left most of whatever it was uneaten and called up the third report. This was the one that counted.

  As I'd expected, it featured those highlighted beasts from the previous file, which somehow suggested hexagonal cows despite any resemblance I could think of. I gestured at the scale icon, and a measuring grid in thin translucent lines covered the picture. My six-sided bovines were big; the largest stood nearly three meters tall at its... apex, the place where boney structures overlapped to create a sort of spiral crown.

  The video zoomed in on one of the hexicows and I wiggled a finger at the transport icon to slow the action. Each of this bovine's four tentacles bifurcated at their ends into something akin to two-fingered hands. All four periodically reached out to snag leaves and then swung around to deposit said leaves into another tentacle's home crevice; apparently they weren't flexible enough to reach their own crevices. An odd arrangement, I thought, since the beasts already had an efficient bubble-with-needles food-grabbing system, but nature does have its Department of Redundancy Department. And not nearly as odd as what adorned every tentacle: metallic bands or bracelets. I expanded the picture enough to bring a band into focus. The tiny knobs and curlicue inscriptions implied one thing: technology at the level of microelectronics.

  Might as well have not bothered fiddling with the video because it did exactly what I'd done when I let it resume at normal speed, even enlarging the same tentacle. It figured. Whatever purpose the metallic objects had been built for, discovering them changed everything for the EE exploration team.

  Intelligent species may be a rare commodity in our galaxy although it's possible we just keep landing on the wrong planets. Still, out of 1,244 explored worlds excluding Abreathon, we'd only found two noticeably inhabited by creatures that made the IQ cut. And neither had advanced enough to have developed microelectronics.

  The next three files followed up on the big discovery. A feeling of celebration and excitement pervaded the reports, even when the recorder wasn't aimed at the bright eyes and grins of EE personnel. The recorder had mostly remained focused on hexicows, which the blips on the scene had named "abreathers," to my disgust. I decided to stick with the far superior "hexicows," at least privately.

  For inventors of microelectronics, these aliens seemed amazingly dull. They ate, pooped, and engaged in what the narrator claimed was reproductive activity without any signs of enthusiasm. I suppose they slept. The reports failed to reveal when they got out their soldering irons or whatever to work their high-tech wonders but the assumption was that this got done in the fog-shrouded night. One video captured a hexicow giving birth, a no-fuss affair where the little one dropp
ed from one of the parents' side-crevices and fell to the ground without generating evident parental interest or concern. The newborn was a miniature of its mother, assuming the father hadn't given birth, except that the tentacles that made this species so distinctive hadn't grown in yet. In an impressive gymnastic feat for a creature without arms or legs, the little fellow wriggled its way upright, moved to the nearest shrub, and used its built-in retrieval system to commence gathering tiny leaves. The wheel of life rolls on.

  I was groggy by now, but couldn't resist playing the next report. It involved attempts to open communications between humans and hexicows. Even approaching our tentacled potential buddies was risky—not due to them. In general, local critters ignored humans and most of the plants were, at worst, passive-aggressive. But small holes riddled the ground everywhere hexicow herds liked to hang out—the narrator suspected that extra soil aeration made the plants in the area healthier. So a human strolling through the neighborhood could break through the surface, and snap an ankle or leg. Even the largest fauna weren't at risk because none were foolish enough to put all their weight on one or two foot-sized spots. The narrator speculated about what had formed the holes, suggesting there might be more animal activity under the ground than on it.

  After a few nasty mishaps, the communications team took to wearing snowshoes when visiting hexicow territory. Perhaps they should've tried clown shoes because the technologically savvy creatures refused to pay their visitors the slightest attention. Quite challenging, I imagine, to trade linguistic information with beings who act unaware that you exist.

  The EE team kept trying new ways of demonstrating they were worthy of interest, at one point showing up on the scene festooned in flashing multicolored lights and equipped with sound-generating gear that emitted noises of all sorts. Another total failure, as was disguising themselves as hexicows. The com-team grew progressively more creative and were richly rewarded by nothing.

  Exploration reports are supposed to be objective, but you couldn't miss the down-shift in mood. Hope flared again when one lucky blip found an abandoned hexacow bracelet, presumably defective. After project technicians made repairs, tests revealed that the bracelet could pick up radio signals over a wide band of frequencies, but only emitted signals on a specific wavelength, one that cut through the general static. Receivers were set to record on that wavelength, and they found plenty to record. These transmissions, project analysts figured, had to contain a language or languages of some kind, but even after consulting Earth's top linguists, no human could guess at how the language was constructed let alone what was being said. The possible single hole in this blanket of ignorance was a distinctive squeal beginning every transmission. The experts proposed that the squeal was a greeting, in essence saying "Hi. Let's talk."

  The com-team on Abreathon, bounce returned to their steps—not so hard with snowshoes—armed themselves with a bulging array of transceivers, detectors, antennas, amplifiers, and all the fixings. Again, they attempted to open at least a nanofilament of communication with the natives. But after a standard week of non-stop effort, they packed up and trudged back to home base with minimal bounce.

  Their discouragement was so palpable I began to feel depressed. So I shut off the recorder, did my last set of required exercises, performed what Priam calls "the nightly ablutions," climbed into the adaptive couch, which registered my horizontal position and became a bed, and fell into dreamland like a human breaking through Abreathon's untrustworthy crust.

  After three days of confinement and with nothing much else to do and a lot of motivation, I'd gone through enough reports in enough detail to get really depressed. Not, I'm sure, as bummed as the EE project team after some three decades of failure, but my personal discouragement meter had reached an all-time high.

  I couldn't imagine how the Boy Genius down the hall could come up with any revelations concerning Abreathon in general and hexicows in particular that the planetary crew hadn't already explored. Perhaps if EE rules permitted less-than-courteous means of approaching unfamiliar intelligent aliens, such as dissection or torture, some progress in communications might've been made. As things stood, the Powers that Be figured it was time to stop wasting money, resources, and lives on trying to pursue a relationship with such a—and here I'm quoting from the official command to vacate—"socially hermetic species." We couldn't even make use of Abreathon's phenomenal natural resources because EE rules forbid any exploitation of worlds inhabited by intelligent species.

  Micah and I chatted daily, but I wouldn't have minded having more of his company than just his voice. He, too, had come up empty on the insight front, but our joint failure didn't faze him. I was so down that I asked him how he managed to stay so damn cheerful.

  "Sometimes I am cheerful, sometimes sad. If I wait a short time, any emotion will change so why take any seriously?"

  I thought about that for a second. "But Micah, you're always smiling."

  "Zen teaches me how to remain content no matter the circumstances, and keeping a little smile sends the right messages both within and without."

  I tried not to sigh too audibly. "You do realize that we're about to be kicked out of EE?"

  He chuckled. "You are upsetting yourself by envisioning something that might happen in the future. On my world, in silence, the clouds thin just enough to reveal the sun's outline; whose good fortune is it to enjoy such a rare sight?"

  "What are you talking about? Sometimes I don't understand you at all."

  "Then may I ask you, what is happening here right now?"

  "Me saying goodbye."

  His only response was a louder chuckle before I closed our private channel.

  On the fourth ship-day, the faint pull from the forward gravity shield vanished; I'd become so accustomed to it that now my cabin seemed tilted the opposite way. A doctor swung by to take blood samples and check on my overall health. A few minutes after she left, Ensign Lincoln pulled me from my metal cocoon with a frown and a brusque gesture. My crewmates awaited me in the corridor along with Ensign Gopal and I wasn't delighted by Micah's blissful smile or Priam's clenched jaw and glittering eyes. The Venusian likely regarded solitary confinement as a heavenly interlude, a chance to dive into his belly-button and pull out cosmic lint, only interrupted by my calls. And if Priam had been successful, I figured, he would've made smug look humble. We followed the ensigns to the ship's bridge and waited until Mentor Michealides, who'd greeted us so warmly to Flightship Skylark, deigned to acknowledge our presence. The first words to pour from his mouth hit my dread button dead center.

  "Ah, the disgraced trio. We are orbiting Abreathon now and I trust the brilliant Cadet Galanis has uncovered some fact that will save the project?"

  "Yes, sir," Priam said quietly. "That I have."

  I felt my eyebrows shoot up in tandem with the mentor's. "And what," he said, "is your great discovery?" He didn't add the words "pray tell" but I'm morally convinced he thought them.

  "I can't reveal that, sir. Not at this time."

  I didn't think Michealides's eyebrows could rise any higher. I was wrong.

  "Perhaps you could bring yourself to divulge the reason for your present silence on the subject?"

  "I suspect you will dismiss my idea if I don't support it with proof." He sounded like a different person, almost sincere.

  "And how do you expect to assemble this proof, Cadet."

  "I can only do so if you will grant us permission to approach an abreather."

  If eyes were drills, Priam would've wound up with two new holes in his head.

  "You expect permission to—words fail me, Cadet. Do you have any concept of the difficulties involved in mounting such expeditions, particularly right now? Or the training required? You do not. There is general training that none of you have undergone, and specific training for this specific environment."

  "We are quick studies, sir."

  "How could you possibly imagine that I would grant this request?"

&nb
sp; I'd never seen Priam's face so utterly intent, radiating earnestness.

  "Because if I'm right, and I am, it will justify all the human time and effort spent here, and there will be no need to dismantle the safe-camp or evacuate the EE team."

  The mentor rubbed his chin. "That might be a strong argument had I any faith in your judgment."

  Priam hesitated, another uncharacteristic behavior. "Sir, I hope you are aware that the Galanis family is among the wealthiest on our mutual home planet and has a tradition of providing each child with a considerable trust fund to smooth their pathway in life."

  "It hadn't escaped my notice. So?"

  I stared at Priam. So the jerk was not only arrogant and obnoxious, he was also filthy rich.

  "I am old enough to access my trust. If you will let me test my idea and it proves wrong, I will donate my entire fund to help defray the cost of evacuating EE personnel."

  I gave Priam another stare, this time in wonder. He'd risk his fortune on what had to be a bluff?

  "Hmm. A remarkable and interesting proposal, Cadet. You would sign binding documents to this effect?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Then, perhaps, I will let your folly find its own merits. Come with me to my office where we will surely locate an assortment of printable legal templates in the ship's memory. Once at the safe-camp you will all need two full days of special training, which normally requires two weeks. I do hope that your claim of being 'quick studies' was no exaggeration. From Cadet Cohen's test scores, which I've recently perused, I fear at least one of you will be ill prepared. We shall land in twenty minutes, so I suggest that we make haste to codify our arrangement."