by James Gunn
“As to that,” Adithya said, “details are unnecessary. But surely, if something like that might have happened—an unlikely circumstance, as Asha has said—there would be no possibility of biological consequences.”
“Cross-species fertilization?” Asha said.
“I am not saying that,” Adithya said.
“Certainly not,” Tordor said. “Unless the Lemnians need only stimulation for self-fertilizing processes.”
“You’re joking,” Adithya said.
“On the contrary,” Tordor said, “there are thousands, if not millions, of different species in the galaxy, and every one has a different evolutionary path with different evolutionary strategies for survival. In fact—”
“Anyway, she told me the ‘revelation’ that led to the massacre of the males,” Adithya said. “Perhaps to impress me. Or to intimidate me. Of course I couldn’t understand it. But the Pedia could.”
“Well, what was it?” Riley asked.
“It seems to have been received electronically,” the Pedia said, “although it may not have been transmitted—if that is the correct word—that way. The message that the Lemnian revealed to Adithya had many strange words and grammatical constructions, and it was in a language that is not only unfamiliar but of unique structure, not unlike the language of Earth’s birds, rudimentary though that is.”
“Enough of your excuses,” Tordor said. “What was the message?”
“What I have is merely a jumble of what may be words,” the Pedia said, “and it may take many cycles, perhaps long-cycles, to correlate these with previous discoveries from Nepenthe and Centaur—”
“Yes,” Asha said. “We understand that conclusions are not possible, that all information is partial.”
“Given all that,” the Pedia said, “this is an approximation, in Galactic Standard, of what the Lemnian told Adithya.”
A line of words appeared on the wall of the dining space that the red sphere had carved out for them:
Seeking US are not ♐❒□❍ our the it SERVE we gulf us ♋●● vast separates THE from internal purpose ♌♦◆ here suns AND searching purpose
The four of them stared at the line of words and symbols as if continued study could produce comprehension out of chaos.
“What do the symbols mean?” Riley asked.
“A place where the translation fails,” the Pedia said. “Where more information is necessary.”
“And the different sizes of letters and emphasis of words?” Asha asked.
“You are asking more than the medium can provide,” the Pedia said. “This is, after all, a transcription of a verbal message in an alien language.”
“There are no such symbols and emphases in Galactic Standard,” Tordor said.
“Galactic Standard is limited in many ways,” the Pedia said.
“And so is Earth’s Pedia,” Tordor said.
“And yet it is all we have,” Asha said, “and I have confidence that, given time and further data, the Pedia can help us come up with an answer.”
But she was not as confident as she sounded, and neither was Riley.
* * *
During the long journey to the nexus point, they had time to go over the cryptic message many times without getting any closer to its meaning. The Pedia was silent for long stretches, possibly devoting all of its resources to correlating the data from their explorations. It was capable of millions of calculations per second, but even the fastest calculations are no better than the information available.
At one point Riley said, “There’s nothing in the message that would drive a Federation crew into maniacal homicide.”
“Nor a civilized species into mindless prey,” Tordor said.
“Or destroy an entire species,” Riley added.
“And it doesn’t contain any instructions to kill the males,” Asha said.
“At least that we can understand,” Adithya said.
“It is possible,” Riley said, “that the Lemnian female didn’t know the message. Never knew it. This kind of directive may go only to the top administrators, and the rest only follow orders.”
“Why would she lie?” Adithya asked.
“People often pretend to be more important than they really are,” Riley said. “And she knew you didn’t understand her language. She could have made up anything, and you would have been just as impressed.”
“And yet—” Asha began.
“And yet?” Riley said.
“And yet a message like this might well be shared as broadly as possible. If it really was received as a ‘revelation’ from ancient gods, it may have been distributed around the Lemnian world. Moreover, all the females had forgotten their recent history. Only the male somehow escaped, perhaps because he was considered too insignificant to be included, perhaps because he was hiding, perhaps because he was male.”
“Which means,” Tordor said, “that we have to assume that the absurd message is real.”
“We can also make some other assumptions,” Asha said. From the evidence so far, she pointed out, the response to the alien invasion, if that was what it was, was different in each situation they had investigated. Mass insanity, mass dying, mass virtual lobotomies, mass murder. Each seemed like an attack tailored for the vulnerability of each species. Or perhaps they were the same attack interpreted differently by each species, according to its own evolutionary history and culture.
“Either way,” Riley said, “we are left with the question: What do the invaders want?”
“What all invaders want,” Tordor said. “Destruction. Or conquest. Or both.”
“But they conquer nothing,” Adithya said. “They only destroy.”
“Destruction is one kind of conquest,” Tordor said. “Aliens are as difficult to categorize as people. Some kill just for the killing. Some kill to destroy the competition. Some have long lives and think in terms of hundreds or even thousands of long-cycles. They may be waiting to return after the worlds are depopulated.”
“Some of our fiction writers have speculated that world wars or the poisoning of the environment or the climate are the work of aliens,” Asha said.
“Nepenthe is already depopulated,” Riley said. “But it is not a great place to live. Or breathe. Unless you were a Nepenthean.”
“Centaur will be depopulated soon,” Tordor said, “leaving only the tigers. And without centaurs to hunt, they too will die.”
“And the Lemnians won’t last longer than the life span of the youngest,” Asha said, “unless my message convinces them that the gods have changed their minds, and they treat their lone male as their potential savior.”
But even these discussions, circular as they were, could not survive the long, dull voyage between nexus points, the terrifying exhilaration of the passage through no-space, and then the seemingly endless journey from nexus point to the solar system toward which Tordor had directed them. It was a red dwarf sun, only one-third the size of Earth’s sun and one-tenth as bright.
“Three-fourths of the galaxy’s suns are red dwarfs,” Tordor said, “and because they lose their energy resources so slowly, they will be around when all the larger, brighter suns have left the sequence and collapsed. Or exploded. They are the immortals of the galaxy, and their planets will still be thriving when the rest of the universe has gone dark.”
The planets of the red dwarf had orbits close to their primary, like children huddled near a feeble fire on a cold night. Closest was a onetime gas giant whose deep atmosphere had been blown away, even by the weak solar winds, leaving a barren, rocky core that raced around the red dwarf in a few cycles. But the next farther out was a blue world that, though swift, took twenty-two cycles to orbit its sun. It was in the Goldilocks zone where water was liquid, which for the red dwarf primary was only a few million kilometers from its muted glow. And that meant the planet’s oceans were liquid. Or ocean, to be accurate, because the world was known in the Terran equivalent of Galactic Standard as “Oceanus,” Tordor told them.
It was a water world, one ocean covering the entire planet to a depth of hundreds of kilometers.
Aquatic life thrived in this environment. Although there were no continents or islands, seaweed floated to the surface and matted together to form floating habitats, some lasting only a few cycles, others more permanent, and on some of these creatures with gills crawled up, evolved lungs, and sometimes returned to the ocean. Ocean life was layered, with microscopic organisms at the top, converting sunlight and air into carbon-based food and oxygen, feeding plankton and krill-like creatures, who in turn fed fish and fishlike mammals; predators fed upon them, and so on down to the depths, where armored and gelatinous life-forms were nourished by the warmth and nutrients from hot springs.
Gradually the mammal-like creatures, who had evolved from creatures who climbed onto the floating islands and then, over the long, long cycles, returned to the ocean, grew huge, and some developed the ability to dive deep for sustenance rather than straining the plankton and krill from the top ocean layers. Inevitably they came into contact with the denizens of the deep, particularly the great tentacled, large-brained creatures who ruled the ocean floor. They would have great battles there. Sometimes the mammal-like creatures would win and carry back to the surface the tentacles of their prey and sometimes the tentacled creatures would win, clutching their enemies in a death grip until they drowned. And sometimes the mammal-like creatures would return, wounded and scarred, to survive on the dead bodies that floated to the surface or to return once more to the undersea struggle.
And so it went, generation after generation, with who knows what epic narratives passed along in the sonorous messages the mammal-like creatures transmitted across the upper regions of the ocean world. But after hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of long-cycles the great-brained mammal-like creatures shared a great thought. Throughout the ocean’s circumference and down to its deepest reaches, the song traveled until all the mammal-like creatures had heard it and participated, and even the fishes and tentacled creatures understood that something was happening that might change their watery world. One mammal-like creature with better eyesight or greater curiosity than the others had seen the sky and told his fellows about the sun that warmed them, the clouds that covered the world, and the storms that troubled the ocean. And another joined in the song to say that the creatures who lived in the ocean need not be at the mercy of the sun or the clouds or the storm, that minds could understand and shape a better environment for everybody.
“In fact,” Tordor said, “the mammal-like creatures discovered science.”
“In Earth language,” the Pedia said, “the word ‘science’ means ‘knowledge.’”
And so they grew knowledgeable and passed along their knowledge from generation to generation through the songs they sang, because they had no means of recording their knowledge in any other way. They became philosophers, thinking great thoughts but unable to translate them into anything tangible. And so it went for more thousands of cycles, while the songs got longer and more complicated, until a new note emerged. It suggested that something might be done to capture the energy in the soft glow of the sun, to harness the storms, to tame the waves, to make the minds of the ocean creatures the master of their environment rather than the uncaring acts of nature. But, the thought continued, the mammal-like creatures had no hands, no way to interact with their environment except through swimming and thought.
A response came: What about the tentacled creatures of the deep? They had a way to manipulate objects. For some tens of long-cycles the song continued until a new voice added a note: Let us find a way to talk to the tentacled creatures. And the effort continued until finally a message was sent and received, and in a remarkable feat of reconciliation the mammal-like creatures and the tentacled creatures formed a team to shape their environments and understand their universe. Together they built a civilization on Oceanus.
“They could not construct a spaceship,” Tordor said, “and it was only by cosmic accident that a Federation scientist discovered electronic signals from a place where no member of the Federation was known to exist, where, indeed, no star was visible, as most red dwarfs are not. A ship happened upon this dim system, discovered Oceanus, and reported to Federation Central. This was, of course, many thousands of long-cycles ago, but it has become legend. The philosophical musings of the mammal-like creatures have enriched the Federation’s intellectual life, and the cleverness of the tentacled creatures has revolutionized many Federation practices. Only a few of the smaller tentacled creatures were ever taken into Federation space and returned, but the people of Oceanus became vital, though distant, contributors to Federation civilization.
“And now they too have gone silent.”
“A remarkable story,” Asha said. “I wonder how much of it is legend and how much is true.”
“That is the problem with legends,” Tordor said. “They always contain a kernel of truth, but it is not always possible to determine what kernel.”
“But with a world like Oceanus and creatures like these,” Riley said, “how are we ever going to find out what’s happened?”
“We will have to be very ingenious,” Tordor said, “and very brave. And perhaps a little reckless.”
“We?” Riley said.
“It will take both of us,” Tordor said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The red sphere deposited Riley and Tordor on the largest of the floating islands. They wore protective red garments prepared for them by their ship out of its own substance through a process that they still did not understand. They argued about it in the long periods of travel, Tordor suspicious of the ship’s mysterious and protean nature, Riley willing to trust the symbiotic relationship he had established since the discovery of the ship in the temple raised to house and contain it on the planet of the dinosaurs, Asha and the Pedia continuing to probe the nature of what Riley called “intelligent matter.”
They would not be able to maintain the protection of their garments for the length of time it would take them to investigate the silence of Oceanus. The red film that enveloped them contained a reservoir of air in a bulge at the back, and it had a limited ability to process exhalations for breathable ingredients of oxygen and nitrogen, but this would not suffice for more than a cycle, particularly through moments of strenuous activity. The first thing Tordor did then, when he set hoof upon the matted surface of the island, was to push his trunk through the protective red surface of the suit and take a cautious breath.
After a few moments of suspense, he said, “The air is breathable. Humid and scented with the odors of the sea and the decay of vegetation, but not toxic. And the bacteria and viruses seem to be tolerable, or, at least, not above the level that our improved immune-responses cannot handle.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Riley said, although he thought that Tordor had experienced far more alien environments in his long Federation service, as well as far more immunizations against alien microbial threats. He stripped back the part of the red suit that covered his head. “We had better keep our suits on, however. They may be necessary if we have to explore the ocean itself. Or get exposed to it by accident.”
The island was only a few kilometers across. Soil deposited by creatures and storms had bound the matted fibers together in what seemed like a solid surface, but it felt spongy under their feet. Insects swarmed up and small creatures scurried. It was, Riley thought as he swatted away some insects, an unpromising beginning.
“What now?” he said.
“Now we explore,” Tordor said.
They tramped around the island and crossed its interior before they ended where they had begun, near the island’s edge where it met the vast ocean that covered the entire planet. They had observed small animals looking something like fish out of water or crustaceans or habitat-building creatures that had fashioned small structures out of seaweed and mud who scurried into them when startled by such alien life-forms. But mostly what they encountered were insec
ts that seemed to welcome them as new sources of food.
Riley swatted ineffectively at them. “Go away,” he said. “You’ll be sorry if you sample either of us.” He turned to Tordor. “Okay. What next?”
“Now,” Tordor said, “we wait for a great-brained mammal to contact us.”
Riley looked out over the blue ocean, hoping to see the bulk of a huge sea creature breaking the surface; there was nothing but the ceaseless motion of wave and current and the barely perceptible rise and fall of the island under their feet. So it was for an entire Oceanus day, which was only half a dozen hours long and complicated by the swift rotation of the planet around its red dwarf primary, and an equally short night, which was brightened by the reflected light from planets much closer than in most solar systems so that they appeared as small round objects rather than pinpricks in the night sky.
“We can’t just sit here fighting the bugs,” Riley said.
“You are right, as always,” Tordor said.
He knelt by the edge of the island, with the blue waves rolling gently toward his hoofs. He lowered himself to the surface, pushed his medallion through the yielding surface of his suit with his short trunk, and immersed it in the ocean. “What do you hear?” he asked.
From the ocean came garbled words. Tordor lifted the medallion. “We didn’t understand that.”
“Only the movement of the water,” the Pedia said.
“Try again,” Tordor said. “And this time listen to the sounds of the ocean. There are many sounds if you only listen for them. Sounds of life talking to life.” He pushed the medallion back into the ocean and left it there for several minutes before he withdrew it once more.
“Well?” he asked.
“There are sounds there, muffled by the waves, but sounds that are more than the movement of water,” the Pedia said. “I cannot discern anything that sounds like intelligence at work.”
“We are too close to the island,” Tordor said.
“And what does that mean?” Riley asked.