“Oh, yes,” Archie said, and he laughed. “Oh, I say, yes, I understand that. And you still have no idea—listen, chap, I’m doing my best here. Making your case. It’s thick going, but … but …”
And just like that he was gone again. His face slack, his arms dangling at his sides.
Lanoe raised an eyebrow in Valk’s direction. Valk just shrugged.
Archie rubbed his scar again. Then he straightened up and nodded. “There,” he said. “It’s done.”
Without warning, lights flicked on all around the amphitheater. Lights that showed the people in the stands, illuminating their faces, their bodies.
Well. Perhaps people was the wrong word, Lanoe thought.
That would have suggested they were human.
The Choir began to climb off their benches and walk down into the plaza. Lanoe spun around, trying to see them all, see any differences between them, but to his eyes they all looked the same, identical as twins. Hundreds and hundreds of copies of the same body plan, the same clothing.
They weren’t human. Not at all, not when you saw them in the light. His brain couldn’t make sense of them. Not all at once. He could only seem to focus on one detail about them at a time.
They were … tall.
“I was with the Territorials at Tiamat, the big battle there,” Archie said. “You’ll remember it, of course. I heard stories about you, about the pilot they couldn’t burn. Ashes of hell, it got a bit hectic that day!” Lanoe spared Archie a glance and saw he was talking to Valk, his fellow Establishmentarian. Let them babble together, he thought. He was far too busy looking at the Choir.
Tall, he thought again. The Choir stood maybe three meters tall, big enough to make Valk look normal. Tall but impossibly thin, with conical bodies and high, cylindrical heads. It took him a second to realize why that seemed familiar. The sculptures back on the planet—those had been statues. Statues of these—
These aliens. There was no other possibility. The Choir were an alien species. Except there weren’t supposed to be any of those left.
“—got separated from my unit,” Archie went on. “Damned poly bastards cut us down to size, we had just brought our reserves to bear, and oh, things were taking a turn, but they had the guns, the bloody guns on their big damned ships. … They just cut through our formations, like we were made of paper. My squaddies died before my eyes, one after another. I tried to get away, get back to my destroyer, but they chased me down, cut my fighter to pieces, my airfoils gone, no ammo left …”
The Choir all wore the same clothes, a kind of loose dress made of layers of black lacy material with a stiff white collar. When they walked, their skirts swung back and forth in a way that made Lanoe think they must have a lot of legs underneath, but he couldn’t see them—the dresses came all the way down to the ground, their hems sweeping and bunching against the flagstones.
They had four arms.
“—left me no choice. I had to chance a run for the wormhole throat, halfway across the system. Barely made it with six poly bastards right on my tail. I burned out my main thruster trying to outpace them, lost my positioning jets trying to keep out of the way of their fire. I must have maneuvered too hard, pushed myself, because I blacked out. Missing time, the whole thing. Damned inconvenient. Woke up with my helmet obscured by drool and blood. And, to top it all, lost. Lost inside wormspace—”
Four arms, Lanoe thought. Long, jointed arms they kept folded up against their torsos. One in front, one in back, one on either side. They could reach behind themselves, reach in any direction. That was one of the hardest things to grasp. Their body plans were symmetrical, like any animal’s, but radially symmetrical rather than bilaterally symmetrical like a human, like a mammal. They weren’t mammals. They weren’t like any animal he’d seen. Maybe—
Maybe a little insectile. Maybe a lot like insects, or crustaceans. Their heads. Their heads were … not like human heads.
“—panicked, of course I panicked. Who could blame me? I went hunting for any wormhole throat I knew, didn’t find a damned one, of course not—how can you tell one from another in there? And I was terrified, terrified I was going to come out of a throat into the Irkalla system, or Adlivun, some poly stronghold. I couldn’t decide if ’twas nobler to starve to death in a wormhole or risk poking my head out and getting it shot off … I suppose one could say my thoughts were, well, disarranged. I was at the end of my tether and—”
Their heads.
High, cylindrical, hairless. Covered in plates of ivory, plates of interlocking armor. No mouth, Lanoe saw, though he kept looking for one. No nose, no nostrils, no ears, no chins. Just eyes. Dozens of small silver eyes like wet ball bearings embedded in that armor. A ring of eyes that ran all the way around their heads. They could see in all directions. But without mouths, without ears, how did they … Lanoe shook his head. He was making assumptions. That had to stop.
“—finally couldn’t take it anymore. So very, very cold, just frozen stiff. My fighter was running on fumes, and I’d taken enough damage back in the battle I knew I would never get back to space if I set down. But I couldn’t feel my fingers and I was hungry, so very, very hungry, I’d never felt like that before. Like my body was eating itself. I don’t know how I made it but I set down on the planet next door. All I knew was that it was a green planet I didn’t recognize at all. Bloody thing wasn’t to be found in my database. At least it wasn’t poly ground, eh? I set down and crawled out of my cockpit. Fell out, more like. Found some plants and just chewed on them, chewed until I could swallow. Turned out that was the worst thing I could do, of course. They were poison, everything on that planet is poison to humans. Foreign proteins, they told me. The Choir told me, that is. After I woke up and found myself here. They let me in, opened up the door, and brought me inside. They saved my life.”
The Choir swarmed around Lanoe, no, that was a terrible word, gathered around him, all around him, their tall heads blocking out the lights. He felt child-sized before them, was certain that if they wanted to, if he gave them any reason to, they could tear him to pieces. Their hands—their hands were like the claws of lobsters, only more intricate, with four pincers coming together and tapering to a single point. Their eyes watched him, their eyes swiveled around him, studied him from all angles.
“They’re good people,” Archie said. “Really they are. You just need to … well. Get used to them, a bit.”
One of them was closer to Lanoe than the others. It leaned forward, its head looming over him. He tried to crane his neck back to meet its assessing gaze, but he overbalanced and had to take a step back. There was one of them behind him, too. It reached out with one of those claws and … steadied him. That was all. He looked back at the one that was still leaning over him. Saw the plates of its face moving, shifting against each other with a tiny, rasping noise.
“You’ll come to love them, just as I have.”
A dark brown spiderlike thing pushed its way out from between two plates on the alien’s face. Scuttled down into its collar and disappeared.
Lanoe very much wanted to sit down.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I guess,” Lanoe said, “I should begin by saying …”
He turned around, having sensed motion behind him. But that was the problem. There was motion all around him. The Choir were constantly changing position, one of them moving forward while others moved back to make room. They lifted their arms to touch claws. They bobbed their heads forward, or back.
Gestures for which he had no referents. No idea what they might mean.
“On behalf of … humanity,” he said. He turned around again. They were all around him. It made sense, he thought, if they could see in all directions. They wouldn’t understand that he didn’t like having them behind him, behind his back. They wouldn’t understand that he could only think of himself as addressing the ones in front of him. “On behalf of humanity, we’re … we’re pleased to meet a … new species.”
Was that …
offensive?
He turned around again. Tried looking at individual members of the Choir—choristers, he thought, the singular form would be chorister. “We hope this meeting will be … mutually …”
They chirped at him. All of them at once.
It wasn’t the insectile, cicadas-in-a-field sound he might have expected. Much closer to birdsong, the choristers all emitting one single, perfectly clear note that swelled into a kind of symphonically lush trill. It was rather pretty, actually. And simultaneously terrifying, because it was so alien.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“They’re laughing,” Archie told him. The castaway was grinning, himself. “Sorry. They don’t mean any offense. It’s just the way you keep spinning in circles.”
Lanoe took a deep breath. He remembered a piece of advice Zhang had given him once, about speeches. Always start with a joke.
Well, he had them laughing anyway.
“This would be easier,” he said, “if I could talk to their leader. Which of them is in charge here? Maybe I could meet with them alone, even.”
Archie opened his mouth to reply but then his eyes rolled up into his head and he staggered forward a step. Valk reached out to grab his arm, but before the big pilot could get there, Archie was already recovering. Returning to himself.
The Choir chirped again, even louder and longer than before.
Lanoe frowned. “What did I do that time?”
“You asked for their leader,” Archie said, wiping at his eyes. “They haven’t one, that’s the thing. They barely understand the concept—and only because I asked for the same thing, when I arrived here.”
No leader? Lanoe wondered how that would even work.
“Anyway, you can’t talk to a leader, because you can’t talk to any of them,” Valk said. “Not directly.” He turned toward Archie. “Can he?”
“What do you mean?” Lanoe asked.
“Low-power microwaves,” Valk said. “I can see them. Like ripples in the air—around their heads. All of their heads, all the time.” He shook his head back and forth. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“They communicate via telepathy, it’s true,” Archie said.
“No, no,” Valk said, “it’s not like that. There’s nothing psychic about it. I can see it happen, see them trading microwaves back and forth. Their heads—they must act like antennas. Microwave transponders, right? I see the same waveforms going back and forth.” He turned toward Archie, who half-nodded, half-shrugged. “They broadcast their thoughts, and then other brains pick up those thoughts and rebroadcast them, and then—”
“Just call it telepathy,” Lanoe said. Something occurred to him. “They don’t talk.”
“Not out loud,” Archie agreed. “If you could hear their thoughts, though, you might say they never stop talking. Think of your own internal monologue. Is it ever quiet? No, they think all the time, and they constantly share those thoughts between them. They don’t need a leader, you see, because they simply think back and forth until they come to a consensus.”
“Like—like ants, or bees or—something,” Lanoe said, struggling with the idea. “They’re a … hivemind?”
Archie laughed. The Choir did not. “Not at all. You’re thinking they have one brain between them and you’ve got it all wrong. Each of them is every bit as intelligent as you or me, on their own. Each has her own thoughts and feelings and opinions—oh my, they have opinions, and they’re not afraid to offer them up. It’s not a collective consciousness. It’s more like a sharing consciousness.”
Lanoe couldn’t understand. He decided to put that aside. “They don’t talk. They think at each other. But they understand my words. How is that possible? Did you teach them all English?”
“No. They have a written language, but I can’t make any sense of it. No, chaps, no, you aren’t seeing it. The Choir and I, we communicate by pure thought. A language beyond language, a lexicon of symbols and associations and pure signifiers.” He gave Lanoe a knowing grin. “Doesn’t make much sense when I say it aloud, does it? But believe me, it works a treat.”
“Archie can hear them,” Valk said. He gestured at the castaway. “When he has those … I don’t know, little seizures. That’s him talking to them. He’s relaying what we say, and they reply through him.”
Archie nodded. Then he reached up and touched his head, ran his finger along the scar on his temple. “When I first arrived here, they managed to keep me alive, but I’m afraid I was a bit … unstable. Downright barmy, if you don’t mind an indelicacy. Confused, of course, and terrified, painfully aware that I was probably going to spend the rest of my life here. Worst of all, though, was the loneliness. Hundreds of light-years from the nearest human being. Utterly cut off. They did this,” he said, and touched his scar again, “so that I would have someone to converse with. Put an antenna in my head so I wouldn’t be so damned lonely.”
“Aliens performed brain surgery on you,” Lanoe said. “And it would have been without your consent—they couldn’t even let you know what they were doing, or why.”
“They took pity on me. Ah, well,” Archie said, and rolled his shoulders. “All came out right in the wash, didn’t it?” He gave them a warm smile.
Valk watched Archie carefully. His head, specifically. There was a constant flow of microwaves into and out of one lobe of his brain, a sort of carrier wave that was modulated for low-intensity communication. When he blanked out, when his face went slack, the flow increased dramatically and then fell away again, but it never truly stopped. The man must have voices in his head all the time.
If he had been in Archie’s position—alone, stranded among aliens—would he have wanted that? Wanted the surgery that made him one of them?
“They can tell you’re getting overwhelmed,” Archie said. “The Choir didn’t bring you here just to blow your minds.” A little laugh. It sounded wrong. Forced, maybe. Valk could see that Archie’s heart was beating far too fast. Maybe he was the one who was in danger of being overstimulated. “Why don’t we move somewhere less … out in the open, where we can talk more comfortably?”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. “You have some kind of conference room near here?”
That forced laugh again. Why was the man so agitated?
“Something like that. Please, if you’ll follow me …?”
Lanoe ordered the four marines to stand guard around the cutter—their only way out of the city of the Choir, should something go wrong. Then he let Archie lead him and Valk out of the plaza, to what seemed to be a small tram station. They climbed into an open car that ran on a cable snaking through the city’s narrow streets.
Towers and grand, wide buildings of dark stone rose to surround them. The car moved silently, barely rocking, at high velocity. They saw choristers on either side of the street, but none of them ever seemed to need to jump out of the way of the speeding vehicle. No, of course they wouldn’t, Valk thought. They would have sensed Archie coming long before they needed to move.
“I’m so bloody excited to see you here,” Archie said, leaning over the back of his seat. “The Blue Devil! I’ve heard all about your exploits, of course, but I wager you’ve plenty of stories about your adventures since I left Tiamat.”
“Uh,” Valk said. Lanoe was giving him a meaningful look. “Sure. Maybe we can compare notes later.”
“Of course, of course,” Archie said. “You’ve so much to see here, I doubt you want to talk about human things. But promise me we’ll get the chance. It’s been so long—I. Well. I suppose after a while, I gave up hope I would see a friendly human face again. I’ve made a sort of life for myself here.”
“It’s a stroke of good luck for us, you being here,” Valk pointed out. “So we can talk to the Choir.”
“They would have found some way to chat, even without me. They’re very clever,” Archie said.
“Sure,” Lanoe said. “Once we take you away from here, though—”
“Away? Perish the thought! Af
ter so many years, this is my home,” Archie told them. “No, thank you, good sirs, but I’m perfectly happy right here.”
Valk could see the nervous tension in Archie’s muscles. The way neurons in his brain fired like crazy. He was lying. For some reason he had to claim to want to stay here, but it was quite evident he desperately wanted to get away.
Valk couldn’t make any sense of it. It made him uncomfortable. To change the subject, he pointed at the buildings they passed. “What’s this, some kind of shopping district?” Wide spaces open to the street. Inside he could see piles of goods—foodstuffs, maybe, in profuse variety. Black dresses hanging on rows of hooks. Furniture, mostly benches of various size and pattern, high tables and round cabinets with folding doors. A hundred other things, the purpose of which he could hardly imagine—tools, maybe, art objects. One shop was full of cones of burning incense; another sold large jugs of a pinkish liquid.
“In a manner of speaking. Not commerce as you and I would know it, of course,” Archie said. “If they need a thing, they come here and get it, no questions asked. All of it handmade with loving craft, all of it free of charge. The Choir would make old Karl Marx proud.”
“Who?” Lanoe asked.
“Economic philosopher from Earth,” Valk said. “Before even your time.” Marxian theory had been popular among the Establishmentarians, because it had predicted the rise of institutions like the polys—and theoretically, it had provided suggestions on how to fight them. The Crisis had come before any of his theories could be put into practice, and afterward the polys had made sure Marx’s works were banned.
Lanoe shrugged and looked away. Valk had never known him to be much interested in politics.
“What you’re telling me,” Valk said, “is that they don’t use money.”
“Not hardly,” Archie assented.
“But then why would anyone make all of this lovingly crafted stuff, if they’re not getting paid?”
Forgotten Worlds Page 38