by John Brunner
“Yes, we did find evidence of that, naturally!” Nadine brushed the point aside impatiently. “But we finally know that they deliberately tailored both plants and animals for use as tools!”
Stunned silence greeted the claim. Eventually Ian said faintly, “How the hell…?”
“It’s very technical, I’m afraid,” Nadine admitted. “I left Lucas trying to figure out how it can be made clear to a nonspecialist because I wanted Igor to be the first to hear about the discovery. Basically, though, what it amounts to is that in several species, both animal and vegetable, we’ve found organs that appear to have little or no evolutionary purpose. You know we have automatic samplers drifting with the ocean currents all the time, studying aquatic life, and we’ve been collecting data on land long enough now to have a very good idea of the evolutionary chain here: sometimes amazingly like ours, sometimes taking an unexpected detour, sometimes seeming to jump a stage which on Earth gave rise to a whole complex of life forms. Well, it occurred to me”—Nadine gave a modest cough—“to check whether these anomalous extra organs, which don’t appear in the more primitive forms even in embryo, as it were, might be sensitive to electrical fields. They are, all right. We have a whole assortment of different plants in the lab right now, and Lucas is playing field patterns at them, derived from those printed on your crystals, Ian, and they’re reacting.”
“Hey!” Ian said. “I’m going there right this minute! You two tell me if you find anything equally important—cancel that! Ten times as important!”
“Yes,” Lucas said in a didactic tone, “Nadine’s right. It looks as though these plants here may be descendants of the earliest counterpart to the bioelectronic system we found on the moon.”
He pointed at the array on the lab bench at the end of the room. The plants, in ordinary plastic pots, were an unremarkable selection of commonplace-enough species, but two automatic electronic devices were sliding along a rail above them, somewhat as though the recording and replay heads of a tape recorder were to be moving while the tape remained still. A computer display on another wall made it clear at a glance what was happening. The first of the devices “played” an electrical field over the plants, in a pattern derived from randomly chosen printed crystals; the second, following about a minute later, detected that the field had been impressed on the plants and was resonating in the mysterious organs unrelated to evolutionary need which Nadine had spoken of.
“Very interesting,” Ian said thoughtfully, and made to take a closer look. Lucas checked him.
“No, keep away, please. You can’t see it from here, but there’s a fine mist of water playing all over the bench—a sort of miniature fog—to improve conduction, and I don’t want a two-metre pillar of water to cause disturbances in the field!”
Ian chuckled. After a pause, he said, “Tell me, have you thought of any use these plants could have been put to?”
“Be reasonable,” Lucas countered. “We only just discovered that the phenomenon exists; it’s far too soon to start guessing why.”
“I was just wondering about the wall niches we keep finding in all the cities here,” Ian murmured. “Every last one, I believe, contains some organic trace. Could these plants have anything to do with that?”
Lucas pursed his lips. “That’s a very sensible suggestion,” he said. “Nadine dear, would you—?”
But she was already punching the nearest computer read-in.
Two minutes, and she reported, “We’d have to let a few sample plants rot, or bake them in an oven or something, to simulate a decay process, but if you asked me to give an advance opinion, I’d say yes. Plants like these could very well have been placed in those niches.”
“Hmm!” Lucas regarded Ian with respect. “I’ve been told over and over that you have amazing insights now and then, but this is the first time you’ve favoured me with the benefit of your talents. I’m impressed. Tell me more. What purpose could they have served?”
Ian spread his hands, blushing vivid red… much against his will, but it seemed to be a reflex he was doomed to endure until the end of his days.
“I can think of myriads of possibilities. As to the interior ones… Well, how about amplification of natural signals? They could well have needed a communication or data processing system, the way we use phones and so forth. As to the outdoor ones, they could be anything from weather detectors to—to route indicators, signposts for people wanting to visit another city! Or they could identify an address, or they could relay news of public importance, or they could—” He broke off, grinning. “You go on!”
Lucas gave an answering chuckle. “Yes, I take the point. Talk about being premature… Still, we now have something really concrete to work on. It would be even better if you were to crack the language for us, though.” He gave Ian a keen glance. “Making any progress in that area?”
“I’m afraid not. I’ve turned most of it over to the machines, you know. Sifting the well-printed crystals for the sort of patterns that might give us a clue because they recur in identical contexts would be difficult enough for a team of a hundred experts; for me, virtually single-handed, it’s ridiculous. But there is one thing that’s becoming alarmingly clear.” He scowled, looking into nowhere.
“What?” Nadine demanded, coming to stand at his side.
“There’s the most amazing degree of resemblance from one crystal to another. I mean, almost to the point where you could believe they were originally identical and have just been altered by the passage of time.”
“But I thought—” Lucas began, and checked, biting his lip.
“You thought they varied tremendously one from another? So did I!” Ian sounded rueful. “Unfortunately it turns out that much of the contrast from one to the next is due—or at any rate ascribable—to the in-built piezo effect, which you know about, I think.”
They both nodded.
“Constant pressure, from varying weights of overlay, has superposed an irrelevant signal on each crystal. Now that I’ve managed to programme the computers to eliminate this chance effect, every approximation brings me closer to an underlying identity. It’s infuriating! But it does prove one thing: We don’t have to do with anything like a book or a recording of music. What we actually do have, though… Any ideas? It would be a fair trade if you gave me an insight, too, hm?”
Lucas and Nadine stared at each other. Eventually Nadine said, “But if they were originally identical, why have so many of them?”
“You tell me!”
Lucas shook his head. “No, I have no ideas at all. All I can think of at the moment is my own problem.”
“I thought you’d just solved one,” Ian said with a smile.
“Which, as usual, has dragged another in by the tail.” Lucas leaned back against the edge of the nearest bench, his plump haunches deforming against the hard square metal.
“Right now the likeliest theory we have about the fate of the aliens is that they were overtaken by a deleterious mutation. Correct?”
“It’s the leader by a mile,” Ian grunted.
“In that case, given what we’ve just demonstrated about their knowledge of genetics—their ability to modify plants and probably animals to use as scientific instruments—how in the whole wide galaxy could they have overlooked and failed to cope with a mutation in their own germ plasm that was obviously apt to exterminate them?”
Lucas shook his head with an expression of pure incredulity.
“It makes absolutely no sense to me. Not a sliver! Not a smidgen!”
XV
The lava of hot new ideas solidified into a grey dull mass just about at the same time as the rainy season arrived, and a huge gloomy inflatable dome had to be erected over the peat site. The drumming of the continual downpour, which would last for at least forty and probably more like fifty days, was no more welcome for being inevitable; it seemed like a ruffle of funeral drums.
Rorschach therefore decreed that it was time to return to main base and hold the mont
hly review conference there, in the hot sunlight which all of them had so often complained about, but which at least did not possess the mind-dulling quality of this steady monotonous downpour.
His judgment, as usual, was accurate. When the first session of the conference assembled, people were already looking a lot happier, thanks to luxuries that were not available at the temporary base on the mainland, such as sonic cleansing machines for their clothes—they had been doing their laundry the ancient way, with water and detergents—beds that were better than sticky inflatable oblong cushions and a far wider choice of diet than the portable food converters could supply.
Heard in this context, so comfortingly redolent of faraway Earth, the summary initial accounts of progress from each successive department seemed more impressive. It was as though, out at the peat site, one felt dominated by the past. Here there was the chance to rediscover a belief in the future.
Ian pondered that until the time came for him to give his own report, and then repeated more or less what he had already told Nadine and Lucas. It did not sound much better than before; still, he could comfort himself with the argument that even negative knowledge was useful.
When everybody had concluded what they had to say, Rorschach took a sip of the beer he had before him in a stein which Karen, on the spur of the moment, had had made for him on discovering that this conference coincided with his fifty-fifth birthday, and said musingly, “One thing strikes me, listening to you all.”
They looked expectant.
“You seem to be talking as though you’ve reached a dead end in every last area. I’m puzzled. To me, it sounds more as though you’re making constant breakthroughs.”
“Valentine?” Igor said, gesturing.
“Yes?”
“You’re nearly right in what you say.” The elderly chief archeologist hunched forward, cupping a glass of wine between his hands. “Naturally, as a result of discovering our very splendid identical buildings—out of deference to Ian, I won’t call them temples!—as a result of that, we have indeed made a hell of a lot of progress. But…!”
He sipped his wine before resuming.
“But,” he said again, more forcefully still, “we’re caught in a vicious-circle process. True, we know far more about the natives than we expected to half a year ago; we’ve been amazingly lucky, which is another way of saying we’ve kept our eyes and minds open and responded when something turned up. On the other hand, though, precisely because we have collected so many new facts, we have many, many more combinations we can make of them. Each of us, in our own way, could be regarded as having the same problem that Ian does: so long as we are simply gathering data, without a tentative framework to hang them on, we’re going to go on being frustrated more than we’re pleased. I therefore wish to move that we revive Ian’s plan to build a simulated Draconian and see if we can develop a strong hypothesis, on the basis of his recommendations, against which to test what we think we know.”
“Seconded!” Cathy said promptly from her place at Ian’s side.
“Before I invite the meeting to discuss the motion,” Rorschach said, “what does Ian think?”
Ian pondered a long moment before replying. He said, “I’m willing, if people don’t think it would take up too much time and distract us from work at Peat.”
Ruggiero raised his hand. “I don’t see how it could,” he said. “Igor’s right: simply making a grand pile of data is ridiculous. By now we ought to have enough to start fitting them together. Ian’s approach to that seems to be the only valid one so far put forward.”
“Does anybody disagree violently?” Rorschach inquired, and when nobody else spoke up continued, “So resolved, then. Achmed, Karen, would you two make yourselves responsible for finding out what’s been worked out by the programme we left running to design a simulated native, and report back tomorrow? We can constitute ourselves a ways and means committee and start estimating how long the project will take. Ian, how long do you reckon on spending—uh—in disguise?”
Ian shrugged. “Certainly a month or two, possibly more. But if any of us has reached a genuine dead end, it has to be me; I literally have no ideas at all of where I can go from here. The more I study the printed crystals, the more certain I become that if they were not absolutely identical, they may have differed in such subtle ways that time has wiped out the crucial information. So I’d better simply say: as long as necessary.”
“Beg to differ,” Lucas said mildly. “You’re not going to cut yourself off from us indefinitely. Sorry. I simply won’t permit it. You’ll be monitored constantly, and medically examined at regular and frequent intervals. Say, at least every month. And you’ll signal daily from wherever you are. By the way, where would you go? Obviously there’s too much happening at Peat.”
“Yes, of course,” Ian said. “I was going to pick Ash. It’s nearly as well preserved, and it’s been a long time since anything unique turned up there, so withdrawing the machines for a while wouldn’t cause any real problems. Yes, I’d say Ash.”
“I think we should consider building two simulacra,” Cathy said. “Ian, wouldn’t it make things easier? I mean, if these people interacted constantly, being alone—”
“With you inside the other one, you mean?” Ian interrupted. He shook his head, smiling. “Sorry, no. If the trick can be worked—which I’m not promising—I’ll have to do it by myself. Having another mock native around who was thinking human would be less than helpful… particularly if you were my partner. It could cause all sorts of—uh—distractions!”
“Pity,” Cathy said, leaning back. “But I take the point.”
When everybody was called to the important new discovery at Peat, a programme had been left on standby status in the base computers, instructed to compile all relevant data including new additions and develop a design for the simulacrum. By now it had incorporated information based on the four statues, and when they tapped into the result, they found the design complete except for a couple of finishing touches. Inevitably it was in the male phase; computer reconstruction of the elderly female found recently had shown what Nadine had long suspected, that when fertilised and gravid the natives became virtually sessile, capable of moving only short distances, if at all, without assistance. Many of the contemporary fauna followed the same pattern, so it was scarcely surprising.
There were all kinds of interesting implications in that which Ian planned to think through when he launched out on his lonely adventure into the mind of another—long extinct—race.
Gradually the simulacrum started to take shape; first they constructed the skeleton with its cleverly articulated joints and then they inserted within it a cradle to support Ian and a miniaturised power pack capable of driving it indefinitely provided it received at least four hours of bright sunlight per day. This was nothing Ian could help with, except to go and “try it on” occasionally like a suit of clothes. He spent most of his time for the next several weeks being repeatedly hypnotised by Lucas, first with the help of a drug, then without. He proved to be an apt subject.
Then came the question of the machine-man interface. It was very difficult to devise means of making Ian feel the motion of six limbs instead of four, but Nadine suggested a solution. Evolutionarily speaking, the manipulating appendages of the natives weren’t legs at all, but more akin to lips, changed in much the same way as an elephant’s nose changed into a trunk. She suggested making the grasping limbs mechanical, but with direct connections to Ian’s face and chin, a proposal that Ian promptly approved.
That left him with the four legs reporting as though he were quadrupedal, but not moving, and that gave Lucas headaches. He was much worried by the risk entailed in having Ian’s real limbs motionless for so long; he talked about cramp, chafing, atrophy. There were cures for all, but fitting them into so narrow a compass was another matter.
It was Ian himself who suggested that into the sensors which were going to be attached to his skin and report heat and cold and o
ther tactile data they should incorporate tiny stimulators based on those used to maintain muscle tone in people temporarily paralysed. Tests showed that that was feasible. Good tone was maintained during a forty-eight-hour test, and circulation remained excellent. He emerged a trifle stiff, but pronounced himself otherwise very satisfied.
Next they solved the problem of making him react to external electrical fields in as nearly as possible the same way as a native animal. Ruggiero spent a long time on that and triumphantly produced a marvel of lightweight engineering: sensors and generators—to bathe Ian in his own field and make him aware of it much as one is aware of a nose, visible but ignored—were combined into tiny flat pads that would rest on his bare skin and signal ambient currents in the form of pressure.
Rorschach’s hasty idea of making use of the magnetic response of the retina was ruled out as potentially very dangerous, but since the discovery of the four statues it had become clear that the natives had had a keen colour sense and no doubt regarded it as important, perhaps in a manner parallel to the way humans regard pitch and timbre: not the most, but the next-most, important means of garnering information about the world around.
Each time Ian put on the simulacrum, he reported to Lucas how well he was responding to the sensory inputs, and Lucas selected what aspects he could reinforce by hypnosis. In an astonishingly short time, less than three months, Ian was beginning to dream in a mode he had never experienced before. On waking, he recalled not visual images, but patterns of swirling warmth, cold, pressure, near pain—not actual pain, just a sensation that was very, very disturbing.
And very exciting, too.
On the night before the simulacrum was due to be put to the ultimate test, a full-scale month-long trial at the Ash site, Cathy said wistfully into the darkness of the room they now shared, “I do wish you could make me understand how it feels, Ian. I’m getting quite envious of you.”