“They’re losing speed and altitude fast,” Bram said. “They’re going to come down about two hundred miles farther on, it looks like. We’ll have them for neighbors.”
“The pilot’s braking too fast,” Jao said, squinting at the shaded image. “As if he made up his mind on the spur of the moment. Whoops! He changed his mind. He’s lifting up over that escarpment! Almost grazed it. He must be shaking up his passengers.”
Jao’s commentary may have been unjust. The huge globular object went into a long graceful glide, riding the plume of its jet, and set down with abrupt gentleness in the exact center of a flat circular feature where the plain was smooth.
“A seat-of-the-pants natural,” Bram said. “Like Lydis.”
“If he wears pants,” Jao said. “Or has a seat.”
Ame was looking thoughtful. “What do we do now, great-great-great-grandfather?”
Bram sighed. “I suppose we’d better pay them a visit.”
Everybody wanted to go. Bram fended them off as diplomatically as possible when they came barging into the bay where he was trying to work out a plan with Ame and Jao.
“The first meeting is going to be very important,” he told them over and over. “We’ll have just a few specialists, each with a job to do. We can’t take a crowd along.”
And then, of course, everybody tried to convince Bram that he or she was a specialist.
“As a sociometrician,” Silv Jaks said, getting strident, “my insight into the interrelationships of individuals will be invaluable.”
“We don’t even know if they’re human, Silv,” Bram said. “What we’re really after is a paleobiologlst.”
After she stalked out, Jao said, “That was nothing. One of the archaeologists insisted on being included because, he said, he could tell us a lot about them by studying their pottery.”
Ame wrinkled her nose. “It might not be a bad idea to take along someone from the Theoretical Anthropology group, though. It would give us some kind of benchmark for behaviors.”
“Who do you suggest?” Bram said.
“Heln Dunl-mak,” Ame said promptly. “She’s a sociobiologist. She worked with us to try to analyze longfoot society from physical clues. She’s even been studying the behavior of social insects from the old books and holos.”
“All right,” Bram said.
“And we’d better have Jorv.”
Bram hesitated. “He’s an awfully impulsive fellow. Establishing contact could be a delicate business.”
“He knows more about terrestrial life forms and their development than anybody we’ve got,” Ame said. “There’s his assistant, Harld, but…”
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Jao said, twisting around from his console. He winked. “With a steady hand like me to keep him in line, there won’t be any trouble.”
Bram said, “I thought you’d stay here and—”
“What?” Jao gave a roar of outrage. “Who’s going to operate the equipment? I’ve rigged up a computer signboard. I’ve programmed it with an image library and everything.”
“All right, all right,” Bram said hastily. “I wish we had a linguist.”
“They’ve all gone back to the tree with their tons of books and micromedia in their own pet languages. What do we need a linguist for, anyway? Languages all either have a grammar more or less like Inglex, or they don’t, like Chin-pin-yin. And I remember my childhood Chin-pin-yin as well as anybody. And when it comes to nonhuman speech, all us old-timers have a smattering of the Small Language.” He squinted at Bram. “And one of us, if memory serves, even has a smattering of the Great Language.”
“There won’t be anything like that from any kind of terrestrial stock,” Bram said.
Jao turned back to his console. “Trist’s getting more radio traffic between the stick ship and that camp out yonder. Want to hear it?”
He turned up the volume, and a series of rapid, hard clicks came out of the speaker, like twenty people snapping their fingers as fast as they could.
“When did they switch from modulated polarized light to radio?” Ame asked.
“At about half a million miles. But Trist’s analyzed the signals. He thinks they simply reproduce the patterns of the polarized light version—same positional code on a grid. He still hasn’t figured out how the grid is organized, though. One thing’s for sure—it isn’t any simple up-and-down-and-across raster. Trist thinks it’s irregular.” Jao looked troubled. “But that’s crazy.”
Bram listened to the snapping sounds for a while. “Maybe their receiving equipment is better than my ear,” he said, “but it sounds as if those noises are coming on. top of each other—overlapping. How can they extract an information-beating signal out of that?”
“Trist’s taken the signals apart. He says he thinks they’re organically produced.”
Ame scrunched up her features. “It’s a language, then. A language where sounds have visual coordinates.”
“I don’t understand,” Bram said.
“Bram-tsu, our group’s done a lot of work on sensory impressions and perception,” Ame said. “Back during the years when we were trying to build up the new sciences. Doc Pol helped us with the medical aspects.”
“That old curmudgeon!” Jao exclaimed. “I thought he didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t tap, prod, or take a urine sample from.”
“He says polysenses are very common among human beings—much commoner than is believed. People who hear sounds as smells, for example, or who taste colors.”
“Crossed wires,” Bram said.
“No, it isn’t just that. It’s normal in all of us to some extent.”
Bram thought it over. “Like Edard reading an orchestral score and hearing the music.”
“Something like that.”
“Or Mim swearing that different keys have different textures—G-major being hard and brittle, D-flat soft and velvety. She had an argument with Ang about it. Ang said the only difference between keys is that they’re higher or lower.”
“Colors!” Jao said suddenly. “Numbers have different. colors. That’s how I remember them. Equations transform the colors. I thought everybody saw numbers that way.”
“Drugs will induce that kind of cross talk sometimes,” Ame said. “Your nervous system just happens to work that way naturally.”
Jao grinned. “Hey, Ame, what if you see flashing lights when you bump your elbow?”
“What about it?”
“Me, I get a pain in my elbow when I see flashing lights.”
Bram cut through the clowning. “So our new neighbors have a neural hookup between the sounds of their language and some sort of visual grid?”
“And they see the different planes of polarized light, don’t forget that.”
“What kind of eyes must they have?” he wondered.
“Nothing like ours. Or the longfoots. Or the Cuddlies. Or any other kind of mammalian life we know about.” She hesitated. “They may not have a continuous field of vision. They may see things as a mosaic.”
It was a very strange thought. “What would the world look like to them?” Bram wondered aloud.
“We’ll have to ask them, won’t we?”
Bram turned his attention to Jao’s screen. Jao was fiddling with images. He had made a sort of netlike structure out of green lines. The net kept stretching itself out of shape and changing the relationships between its warp and woof. It also kept trying to bend itself around various abstract three-dimensional shapes.
The snaps and clicks kept pouring from the loudspeaker. Bram could see that each one generated an orange dot within the distorted squares of the net. The showers of dots kept trying to arrange themselves into patterns within the ever-changing net.
“Are we still trying to get their attention on the frequency they use?” Bram asked.
“Yar, I’ve got a loop going on the transmitter. Trist is trying to raise their ship with the same program. Imitating their grid without knowing the coordinates is gobbl
edygook, but they still should extract a pattern.”
Bram shook his head. “I thought they might have tried to contact us by now. The way they set down so abruptly after their flyover of our camp.”
“We’re keeping watch from a little way up the moonrope,” Jao said, “Some volunteers set up a telescope station on top of the stalled moon car. They’ll let us know right away if anything starts moving in our direction.” He adjusted a dial. “But I don’t think they’re coming. It’s going to be up to us.”
Jorv showed up a few minutes later, impatient to start. He wore a vacuum suit with the helmet tucked under his arm. “I’ve been suited up for an hour,” he said. “When do we go?”
“Not for a couple of hours,” Bram said. “They’re getting the walkers wound up and rounding up supplies and equipment. And some of our people need time to get ready.”
That was Heln. She was putting together her material on ants, bees, beavers, wolves, rats, apes, elephants, antelopes-all the vanished animals of Earth that had lived in groups. If intelligence had evolved from any of them, their descendants would resemble them as little as man resembled the tree shrew. Heln wanted to be prepared to spot basic characteristics and extrapolate from them.
“Why delay?” Jorv said pugnaciously. “Pick up a few extra air bottles and get going.”
“Don’t you want time to get organized?” Bram countered. Jorv had nothing with him, not even a camera or a pad to take notes on.
“What for? Get a look at them, I say. Plow through the data afterward.”
Ame came around and put a hand on Jorv’s arm. “It’s not just a case of observing them, Jorv,” she said. “We’ll work from your opinions—but we have to try to communicate with them, too.”
“Why don’t you meet us at the vehicle air lock in, say, two hours,” Bram said.
Jorv walked out, shaking his head and muttering.
Bram helped Jao pack up his computer signboard and image library, while Ame went to give Heln a hand and to collect Shira, her paleobiologist colleague. Heln turned out to be a small, pert redhead, loaded down with a portable reader, cartridges, pad and easel, recorder, and other equipment.
When they arrived at the walker stables, Bram saw that only two walkers were equipped and ready for him, not the three he had arranged for.
“Where’s the other vehicle?” he asked the ostler, a squat, muscular man who was strapping a spare air tank on one of his charges.
“He took it,” the ostler said. “Your friend. Said he was getting a head start, that you’d catch up with him.”
“Jorv?”
“Short chubby fellow, sort of a restless way with him? I told him that I wasn’t finished packing it up, but he said as long as it had enough air and power on the meter to get him there, it was good enough. He almost wouldn’t wait long enough for me to put in a reserve air tank. I said to him, you don’t want to go out there without one—never mind that you’re only one person in a life-support system that’s supposed to handle three.”
“How long ago?”
“About two hours.”
Bram turned to the others. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but we’d better run him down before he gets there.”
“We’ll have to triple up,” Jao said. He looked at the mound of gear they had brought with them, then his eye lit on the red-haired sociobiologist. “Why don’t you and Ame and Shira ride together, and Heln and I can squeeze in with all this equipment.”
The walkers loped side by side across the dim plain, stretching their legs of plastic and synthetic protein. Their yellow headlamps bored into the endless ribbon of rubblescape ahead of them. They had traveled far enough so that the tethered moon was at their backs, showing its shape like a child’s top. To their right was the bloated face of a disk, casting a rusty light. To their left were the deeps of space with a hoarfrost of stars.
“Not a sign of him,” Bram said.
“Don’t forget, he’s running lighter,” Ame pointed out.
She was squeezed against him on the narrow bench. On her other side, Shira’s bony hip dug into her. The lanky paleobiologist said, “He’s had a two-hour head start. But Jorv’s not a good driver. He’ll try to hurry his walker too much, and that’ll mean that its legs will just be churning around in midair a good deal of the time.”
“Could we have passed him somehow?”
“We can see clear to the edge on either side. We’d have noticed his lights.”
“If he remembered to turn them on,” Shira said, and fell silent.
“We’ve been running for three hours,” Bram said. “We’ll be there soon. If we were going to catch up to him, we’d have done it by now.”
“Don’t worry, Bram-tsu.” Ame said. “Jorv is a very intelligent man. He won’t do anything too rash. All he wants to do is study them.”
“They may be studying him by now,” Bram said, and urged the walker on.
An hour later, the great pearly dome of the alien bubble grew out of the dimness ahead. There was no question of it appearing over the horizon—not on the diskworld. It simply became visible as a dot and grew larger.
Bram slowed the walker and approached at a trot. Jao, driving the other walker, fell in beside him.
The aliens were deploying around their bubble, queer sticklike creatures who hurried back and forth, carrying huge cone-shaped containers that they peeled open to reveal equipment and housing materials. Wheeled vehicles, whose barrel-shaped tires seemed to be clustered at one end, leaving a tubular chassis projecting with an upward cant, were being readied. All the activity was taking place under the glare of work lamps set up on tall stands around the perimeter of the camp.
“They like things bright,” Ame said, looking at the pool of light around the tremendous ball.
“Look, there’s Jorv’s walker,” Bram said.
The spindly vehicle, its bubble deflated, stood a short distance from the equipment-littered area of activity. There was no sign of Jorv himself.
“Collapsed bubble,” Bram said. “It should have reinflated itself by now. I hope Jorv’s not—”
Shira tossed her head. “If I know Jorv, he was careless about getting out, that’s all. Walked away and left it unsealed.”
“Bram-tsu,” Ame said. “Do you notice something strange?”
It struck Bram after a moment. “Yes, why aren’t there swarms of those creatures around the walker for a closer look at it? It’s just sitting there. Don’t they have any curiosity?”
“Maybe Jorv’s getting all the attention.”
“No, he isn’t.” Jao’s voice came through the suit radio. “There he is, wandering around in the middle of their camp, and they’re ignoring him.”
Bram spotted the human figure after a moment. Jorv was dawdling about in bemused fashion, pausing here and there to look at things that interested him. He might have been out for a Tenday stroll. The stick creatures hurried past him on their errands without stopping.
It wasn’t quite true that they were ignoring Jorv, though. Jorv got too close to some piece of equipment that a group of them were setting up, and one of them detached itself from the work party long enough to make a number of short, aggressive rushes at the space-suited human. Jorv scrambled back out of the way. Bram couldn’t blame him; even from a distance the rushes looked scary. Jorv kept his distance, and the alien went back to its work, paying no further attention to him.
As the walkers cantered closer, Bram was able to make out more details of the creatures. They were long, tubular beings with pipestem limbs that seemed to grow out in a cluster from just below an oversize head. They walked upright on all fours, like animated plant stands—keeping the trailing portion of their bodies from scraping the ground by curling it upward in balance.
“Our ancestors ran on all fours, too,” Shira said, mostly for Bram’s benefit. “They learned to knuckle-walk, so that they could carry things at the same time. That’s why evolution let us keep forelimbs we could manipulate with.”
Bram studied the distant figures. The beanstalk creatures seemed not at all handicapped by their quadruped stance. The forward pair of legs did double duty as arms, and when the creatures carried things—tottering in the low gravity and intermittently dropping a front limb for temporary balance—Bram was amazed to see the tubelike abdomen curve flexibly around to assist with the grip. There seemed to be a clasping member at its tip.
The creatures wore enormous boxlike helmets that were far too large even for the oversize heads that could be seen shadowily within. A human child could have curled up inside.
“They want lots of room in those helmets,” Bram said aloud. “I wonder why.”
He reined the walker to a halt next to Jorv’s abandoned vehicle. Jao and Heln pulled up behind him.
“We’d better walk from here,” he said.
The five of them climbed to the ground. The pipestem figures in their unwieldy many-faceted helmets made no move in their direction. They went on with their restless scurrying to and fro, never pausing in their chores.
“Do you see what they’re doing?” Jao said, putting a hand on Bram’s sleeve.
Bram looked over to where the floodlights lit the underside of the tremendous cloudy ball that had been first a fuel tank, then an environmental module, then a landing craft.
It was growing all sorts of attachments. An undergrowth of prefabricated polyhedrons. Huge glistening balloons that were blown up and sprayed with hardening foam to become permanent structures. A network of tube-ways and covered platforms that connected with the beginnings of some kind of large excavation.
“That lander will never go anywhere again,” Jao said.
Bram nodded. “They’re here to stay. First spot they touched down on. I get the feeling it could have been anywhere on the rim. They didn’t waste any time unpacking, either.”
Heln came over, festooned with cameras and recorders. “This is all I’ll need,” she said. “I’m leaving the rest of it in the walker. I was able to go through most of the material on the way.”
“Any ideas?” Bram asked.
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