“I have insufficient information about this,” the ISU replies. “Should I search for the unit Marchenko?”
“No, this is not about physical contact. There must be a possibility of establishing a connection between different rooms in this building.”
“I have insufficient information about this.”
“I know, but this was not meant as a question. Can you help me find a communication device?”
“I don’t know. Please define task more specifically.”
“I assume there is a wired connection. We can see that radio contact is impossible through the closed hatch. There are surely more of these hatches around here. Therefore a secure connection through the entire building is only possible by cable.”
“What kind of cable?”
“I don’t know the technology the aliens use. We have to look for something... anything. Fiber-optic cable, electrical wiring, perhaps something more exotic. Back on Earth they used to communicate via vacuum tubes. We need to be open to any technology. But we can assume that the technology should be present in every room here. Can you look for possible devices?”
“My sensor suite is limited, as I was built for mapping rooms.”
“So you cannot see what is hidden behind a wall or in the floor?”
“That is correct.”
This means the ISU is almost useless for this search. Yet she has the ability to see differences in heat. “Perhaps there are visible structures indicating communications channels,” Eve suggests.
“I am going to check the adjoining rooms for this,” ISU 4 says, then wriggles away.
Eve sits down and closes her eyes in order to gather her thoughts. She is in a central room, perhaps even the control room of the building. So everything should lead to this place. It is definitely the wrong place to start a search, because the floor and the walls might contain hundreds of lines leading to all kinds of devices. As this technology is so foreign to her, she can’t tell which of them are used for communication. Therefore she has to go to one of the adjoining rooms.
Eve stands up. She nods at the dead alien who by now seems to be an old friend, and then she turns towards a passage on the right. She walks through an oval arch into an area that looks like a living room. When she looks at the furniture she feels like she’s that uninvited guest who secretly snoops through your bookshelves. In a corner, two sections, each measuring approximately 2.5 by 1.5 meters, are fenced off by wires. Inside each there is a two-meter-long roll that is almost one meter thick.
Eve moves in closer. The cover material is soft. Could those be beds? If she imagines the anatomy of the giant frogs, such a bedroll would be well-suited to rest their legs at night. Next to the two beds are two chairs and a table. They seem to have practical shapes. Apart from their size, these items of furniture could have come from Earth.
There are no wardrobes, though. The aliens didn’t seem to wear clothing, at least not inside the building. Did they have special suits for going out on the ice sheet?
Eve detects something that looks like a trough in another corner of the room. Slightly above it two thick pipes and a thin one emerge from the wall. The thin pipe has a rotary valve and Eve resolves to turn it. She has to use all of her strength. Suddenly a warm liquid flows from the pipe. She tastes it: water, relatively salty but potable. She does not find a faucet on the two thick pipes. Perhaps they provide food?
Eve turns around. She is still too close to the central room. The living room has only one exit. The next room might have been an office or a movie theater. The wide rear wall is covered by a reflective disc. A screen? Two meters in front of it are four chairs with tilted backs. There are pedals placed in front of the chairs, and the armrests contain lots of switches with symbols on them, which she has already seen. Should she see whether the TV programming is any good here?
No. She first ought to finish her task. She leaves the office. The following room is long and narrow. For the first time she sees decorated walls. The entire surface is covered with colors. The patterns remind her of psychedelic graffiti. She touches the surface. These are not simply drawings. She feels bumps, textured areas, and lines that are sometimes parallel to the colors, but often intersect or complement them.
Sensation seems to play a bigger role in the aliens’ perception than they do for humans. Perhaps the thin probe arms with their seven fingers are really well suited for feeling shapes. She imagines the frog creatures standing in this corridor, viewing and touching the works of art on the walls. This would also explain why all switches are covered by symbols.
There are no recognizable technical devices in the corridor where she is currently located. This is ideal for her plan. She tries to concentrate on her infrared sense. This form of perception is still so new to her that she has to consciously engage it.
She slowly looks across the wall. Shortly above the floor she finds three lines, a bright one and two of lesser brightness. Eve makes sure of one thing: They are coming from a room further back. They appear to run at a constant height until they enter the office. She follows the lines. Around the center of the office, two other lines join them. Shortly before reaching the living room, one of the two thin lines moves upward.
The thick line divides itself twice inside the living room. The branches run across the room to the head of the beds and end in a barrel-shaped container. Eve cannot do anything with it, as there are no switches. The thick heat line continues to the control room. There it ends in one of the tall electrical cabinets. Has she found the communication device she was looking for? It cannot be just a power supply, as in that case the other devices would have to be connected to it.
Eve sits down on the floor. If she lowers her face enough, she can see a whole network of lines inside the floor. She crawls through the room. Too bad she isn’t a robot. If she could record what she sees, this might generate a kind of wiring diagram for the entire control center. However, almost all of the cables disappear deeper under the floor. There is almost certainly a technical level, she figures, where all the water pipes and electrical cables are located. She doesn’t have to worry about that.
Eve sits back down in her chair. She looks at the dead alien, who by now does not appear quite so dead to her. She has quickly become used to seeing him like this. “I am Eve. What is your name?” she inquires.
The alien does not reply. She doesn’t mind. He probably doesn’t understand her language.
“I am going to call you George.” She hopes that this doesn’t mean anything offensive in his language. Perhaps these creatures don’t have names, but are associated with particular scents or symbols?
“George, I would like to activate that device over there.” She points at the cabinet. “Can you tell me anything about it?”
Did he just shake his head? No, that is impossible. And of course she does not receive an audible answer.
“I understand, George, you don’t want to help me. I am supposed to help myself. Right you are.”
Eve stands up. She wouldn’t be surprised if George now winked with one of his eyes. However, he remains sitting ramrod straight. Eve smiles at him. Perhaps there is some kind of connection, because she feels as though there is some leftover soul in this desiccated body, laughing at her futile efforts.
“Yes, George, I see you want to test me,” she says. Then she turns around and looks at the cabinet where the thick infrared line ends. Eve sighs. It is probably totally useless to bother with this thing. It was a crazy idea to use infrared to look for a cable. The chances of her coming to the correct conclusion are about as high as the possibility of George’s name really being George. But it’s been fun.
Why hadn’t she ever entered the adjoining room during the last two days? Now she won’t die of thirst, and she is sure to figure out how to coax food from the system. She might be able to survive here for weeks or months. So why is she so obsessed with finding a means of communication?
She needs to know for sure what happened to Marchenko,
that’s why. Otherwise she will go insane. She knows that. Total solitude is worse than death. She could become friends of a sort with George, and share all her secrets with ISU 4. Yet that would not save her from madness. She would rather kill herself by jumping into that dark hole. Where did that sensor unit go? she suddenly wonders. It was supposed to look for traces of communication cables as well. It must not have found anything yet.
Eve kneels next to the slab-like cabinet. It is approximately 1.5 meters high, 1 meter wide, and 30 centimeters deep. The front, which she is looking at, is almost completely covered by symbols. She doesn’t find anything familiar to her. In the center she discovers a circular indentation with a diameter of about 20 centimeters. At the edge of the circle, near the 4 o’clock position, a ball the size of her pinkie finger rises halfway from the surface. One could take it for a simplified diagram of the Proxima system, but the star in the center is missing.
Eve follows the outline of the circle with her fingers. It is warm. Afterward, her fingertips are gray with dust that has collected there. The symbols, which most probably are also buttons, are distributed around the entire circle. Eve tries to find a pattern. Some symbols are repeated. Above the circle they seem to be upside-down, while right and left they are placed sidewise. That is not very practical for reading.
She imagines one of the aliens placing the thumb of its probe hand with the seven long fingers in the center of the circle, moving its fingers like a pair of compasses and reading the symbols with the sensitive fingertip. She tries to do it but her fingers are too short. It was a nice idea, but it isn’t going to work this way. Why are there all these other symbols grouped concentrically around the circle? Even the aliens’ fingers are not that long.
Without suspecting what might happen she presses one of the symbols at the outer edge. Suddenly she hears a short, deep sound. Eve flinches and turns around. The sound came from the ceiling. There must be a loudspeaker hidden in here. Is that a warning—an alarm system—indicating that an intruder is using the device? She stands up and looks around nervously, but nothing happens and nobody appears. Yet she is not entirely sure. The cleaning unit took some time to react to the small explosion. Just to be on the safe side, Eve sits back down in her chair. This way the cleaning unit might not notice anything has changed.
Eve waits for almost an hour and then decides there is no danger. She kneels down at the same spot. This time she presses the key right next to the one she had previously selected. Now a slightly higher-pitched sound can be heard. She is startled again but doesn’t get up.
The next key produces a sound in between the previous two ones. She presses all the keys in reverse order and gets Do – Re – Mi. Eve smiles. Has she discovered a musical instrument? Then the thick red line might transport her input to other rooms. Nonsense. Why would they have installed a music system in the central control room?
The cabinet in front of her probably has a serious purpose. The sounds might just be part of the user interface. This way, everyone can hear whether the navigator pressed the correct keys. Eve tries the next symbol in this sequence. No reaction. She is disappointed and looks up to the ceiling, where the sound should come from. Is the key defective, or perhaps the whole device, because of the small explosion she caused?
Eve memorizes the symbol she just pressed and looks for its double. And she does indeed find one in the second row from the outside. Once again there is no sound. It would be an odd coincidence if two keys so far apart should be defective, while the neighboring ones are working. Perhaps she cannot hear the sound because it is in the ultrasonic or subsonic frequencies, outside her hearing threshold. Once the ISU is back she is going to ask it. Where is that little snake, anyway?
Eve tries out more keys. Each one creates a specific sound. But nothing else happens. Sometimes she cannot hear anything at all. These aliens seem to have a better sense of hearing than humans. She selects the keys she needs for ‘Bajushki Baju,’ the lullaby Marchenko used to sing to them. She remembers the tune quite well and cannot help crying when she plays it herself. Eve wipes the tears from her face and turns toward George.
“That surprised you, didn’t it?” she asks. She imagines him giving her a thumbs-up with all four hands.
Four hands. “Four hands,” she mumbles to herself. Of course. Why should the designers of this device base it on the one-finger search system she employs with it? The intended users have four hands. The keys are too far apart for all 22 fingers to be used. But one finger on each hand, that would be possible. The frog creatures must have knelt in front of the device, just like she has been doing.
Perhaps she can raise it a bit more from the floor to operate it more easily. Eve looks at the four sectors to find similarities. How could she have overlooked this? The four pie shapes on the top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right are identical—in other words, axially symmetric. Turn one of the quarters by 90 degrees, and it is congruent with the next one. Therefore, pressing one key after the other doesn’t appear to be enough, as it seems all four must have to be activated at once. Eve imagines the harmony in several parts this should create. The aliens seemed to have known how to combine work and pleasure. Each meaningful action in this system, whatever it might achieve, also created a tune.
How might this have sounded? Eve’s shoulders sag. She will never find out, because she only has two hands. What about her feet? She changes her sitting posture but cannot find a position in which she can operate the keys with fingers and toes simultaneously. Being a frog would be nice! For a moment she wonders whether she should sever the dead alien’s arms and then... No way, that is out of the question!
“No signs of a communication infrastructure detected,” she hears ISU 4 saying behind her.
Eve is so startled she bumps against another cabinet. “You scared me!” she says.
“I am sorry.”
“But it is good to have you here. I have a new task for you.” Eve looks at the sensor unit. It is not perfectly suited for the task, but she has no choice.
“What is my task?”
“I need your help operating this panel.” Eve points at the device, which so far only serves as a musical instrument.
“I do not have sufficient information about this.”
“I will tell you. I want you to press your front end and your back end against two of the symbols I will point out to you.”
The sensor unit definitely isn’t long enough to reach all the keys. But it should be able to handle the right or left half of the lower quadrants, perhaps up to the sixth symbol row. Eve does not yet know whether this will be a problem. And if it is, she will find a solution. At some point the four other ISUs will arrive here. Where are they, anyway? The building must be much larger than she imagined.
“I understand. Task accepted. Waiting for input.” The ISU crawls into position.
Eve kneels in front of it. Then she wonders which symbol to use. There are many choices, and none of the icons seems familiar. She shrugs her shoulders. It doesn’t matter. One symbol is just as good as any other. “Pick a symbol on the left and another one on the right,” she orders the ISU.
“Based on which system?”
“Randomly generated.”
She herself presses two spontaneously selected keys and holds them down. Two pleasant notes sound from the ceiling. Eve waits until the ISU is in position. She notices it when two new notes are sounded. A beautiful four-note chord! Yet an unpleasant humming noise disturbs the music, and she gets goosebumps. What is that? She turns around, but there is nothing to see. The noise comes from in front of her.
Eve stands up without letting go of the two symbols. Something blue has appeared on the other side of the cabinet. It reminds her somewhat of a hologram, seeming to consist entirely of light rays, and it glitters magnificently. Her experiment has been worthwhile. Unfortunately she cannot see the entire object from her current position.
The aliens are significantly taller and would be able to look ov
er the cabinet. She needs an object to stand on. Eve stretches and straightens her body. In doing so, one of her fingers slips. The three-dimensional image fades away.
“Wow,” she says, “that was something special.”
“Indeed, I do not have an entry for such an object in my database,” the ISU confirms. Even the ISU sounds a bit proud. Its AI probably has a bit of pride-of-discovery programmed into it, in order to give it some motivation.
“I need an object approximately 30 centimeters high that can withstand my weight.”
“I could call ISU 1, 3, 5 and 6. They could change their configuration so they would carry your weight and provide the required height.”
“You are in contact with the other sensor units? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You did not ask, and I assumed you know our abilities.”
“That was an incorrect assumption, but you are correct, I should have asked. No problem, though. So far I haven’t needed the others. Where are they now?”
“Number 1 can be here in five minutes. It was already on its way back. ISUs 3, 5, and 6 will cancel their search mission and return. ISU 6 will take the longest, arriving here in two hours.”
“Search mission?”
“The ISUs have the mission to search for person Eve.”
“But you’ve already found me.”
“It was not my task to inform the other ISUs. Normally I would have reported my success to unit Marchenko and returned to him. The loss of contact led to gaps in our programming.”
Not bad, Eve thinks, the ISUs can even analyze their own mistakes.
“We might as well rest until ISU 6 arrives.”
Eve wonders whether she should walk around the rooms and corridors a bit. Who could guess what else she might discover here? Where and how, for instance, did the inhabitants take care of hygienic needs? Was there a pool for swimming, or a swamp for mud baths? What about facilities for adolescents? She could probably spend months exploring the everyday life of the inhabitants and the inner workings of their technology. Yet during this time the sleeping aliens would be dying in their hibernation chambers.
Proxima Trilogy: Part 1-3: Hard Science Fiction Page 47