“Dromids—ouranids—oh.” Being Greek, she caught his meanings at once. “Fuxes and balloons, correct?”
Hugh frowned. “Please. Those are pretty cheap jokes, aren’t they? I know you hear them a lot in town, but I think both races deserve more dignified names from us. They are intelligent, remember.”
“I am sorry.”
He squeezed a trifle. “No harm done, Chris. You’re new. With a century needed for question and answer, between here and Earth—”
“Yes. I have wondered if it is really worth the cost, planting colonies beyond the Solar System just to send back scientific knowledge that slowly.”
“You’ve got more recent information about that than I do.”
“Well . . . the planetology, biology, chemistry, they were still giving new insights when I left, and this was good for everything from medicine to volcano control.” The woman straightened. “Perhaps the next step is in your field, xenology? If we can come to understand a nonhuman mind—no, two, on this world—maybe three, if there really are two quite unlike sorts of ouranid as I have heard theorized—” She drew breath. “Well, then we might have a chance of understanding ourselves.” He thought she was genuinely interested, not merely trying to please him, when she went on: “What is it you and your wife do? They mentioned to me in Enrique it is quite special.”
“Experimental, anyway.” Not to overdo things, he released her. “A complicated story. Wouldn’t you rather take the grand tour of our metropolis?”
“Later I can by myself, if you must go back to work. But I am fascinated by what I have heard of your project. Reading the minds of aliens!”
“Hardly that.” Seeing his opportunity, he indicated a bench outside a machine shed. “If you really would like to hear, sit down.”
As they did, Piet Marais, botanist, emerged from his cabin. To Hugh’s relief, he simply greeted them before hurrying off. Certain Hansonian plants did odd things at this time of day. Everyone else was still indoors, the cook and bull cook making breakfast, the rest washing and dressing for their next wakeful period.
“I suppose you are surprised,” Hugh commenced. “Electronic neuranalysis techniques were in their infancy on Earth when your ship left. They took a spurt soon afterward, and of course the information reached us before you did. The use there had been on lower animals as well as humans, so it wasn’t too hard for us—given a couple of geniuses in the Center—to adapt the equipment for both dromids and ouranids. Both those species have nervous systems too, after all, and the signals are electrical. Actually, it’s been more difficult to develop the software, the programs, than the hardware. Jannika and I are working on that, collecting empirical data for the psychologists and semanticians and computer people to use.
“Uh, don’t misunderstand, please. To us, this is nearly incidental. Mindscan—bad word, but we seem to be stuck with it—mindscan should eventually be a valuable tool in our real job, which is to learn how local natives live, what they think and feel, everything about them. However, at present it’s very new, very limited, and very unpredictable.”
Chrisoula tugged her chin. “Let me tell you what I imagine I know,” she suggested, “then you tell me how wrong I am.”
“Sure.”
She grew downright pedantic: “Synapse patterns can be identified and recorded which correspond to motor impulses, sensory inputs, their processing—and at last, theoretically, to thoughts themselves. But the study is a matter of painfully accumulating data, interpreting them, and correlating the interpretations with verbal responses. Whatever results one gets, they can be stored in a computer program as an n-dimensional map off which readings can be made. More readings can be gotten by interpolation.”
“Whe-ew!” the man exclaimed. “Go on.”
“I am right this far? I did not expect to be.”
“Well, naturally, you’re trying to sketch in a few words what needs volumes of math and symbolic logic to describe halfway properly. Still, you’re doing better than I could myself.”
“I continue. Now recently there are systems which can make correspondences between different maps. They can transform the patterns that constitute thought in one mind into the thought-patterns of another. Also, direct transmission between nervous systems is possible. A pattern can be detected, passed through a computer for translation, and electromagnetically induced in a receiving brain. Does this not amount to telepathy?”
Hugh started to shake his head, but settled for: “M-m-m, of an extremely crude sort. Even two humans who think in the same language and know each other inside out, even they get only partial information—simple messages, burdened with distortion, low signal-to-noise ratio, and slow transmission. How much worse when you try with a different life form! The variations in speech alone, not to mention neurological structure, chemistry—”
“Yet you are attempting it, with some success, I hear.”
“Well, we made a certain amount of progress on the mainland with both dromids and ouranids. But believe me, ‘certain amount’ is a gross overstatement.”
“Next you are trying it on Hansonia, where the cultures must be entirely strange to you. In fact, the species of ouranid—Why? Do you not add needlessly to your difficulties?”
“Yes—that is, we do add countless problems, but it is not needless. You see, most cooperating natives have spent their whole lives around humans. Many of them are professional subjects of study: dromids for material pay, ouranids for psychological satisfaction, amusement, I suppose you could say. They’re deracinated; they themselves often don’t have any idea why their ‘wild’ kinfolk do something. We wanted to find out if mindscan can be developed into a tool for learning about more than neurology. For that, we needed beings who’re relatively, uh, uncontaminated. Lord knows Nearside is full of virgin areas. But here Port Kato already was, set up for intensive study of a region that’s both isolated and sharply defined. Jan and I decided we might as well include mindscan in our research program.”
Hugh’s glance drifted to the immensity of Argo and lingered. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said low, “it’s incidental—one more way for us to try and find out why the dromids and ouranids here are at war.”
“They kill each other elsewhere too, do they not?”
“Yes, in a variety of ways, for a larger variety of reasons, as nearly as we can determine. Let me remark for the record, I myself don’t hold with the theory that information on this planet can be acquired by eating its possessor. For one thing, I can show you more areas than not where dromids and ouranids seem to coexist perfectly peacefully.” Hugh shrugged. “Nations on Earth never were identical. Why should we expect Medea to be the same everywhere?”
“On Hansonia, however—you say war?”
“Best word I can think of. Oh, neither group has a government to issue a formal declaration. But the fact is that more and more, for the past couple of decades—as long as humans have been observing, if not longer—dromids on this island have been hellbent to kill ouranids. Wipe them out! The ouranids are pacifistic, but they do defend themselves, sometimes with active measures like ambushes.” Hugh grimaced. “I’ve glimpsed several fights, and examined the results of a lot more. Not pleasant. If we in Port Kato could mediate—bring peace—well, I’d think that alone might justify man’s presence on Medea.”
While he sought to impress her with his kindliness, he was not hypocritical. A pragmatist, he had nevertheless wondered occasionally if humans had a right to be here. Long-range scientific study was impossible without a self-supporting colony, which in turn implied a minimum population, most of whose members were not scientists. He, for example, was the son of a miner and had spent his boyhood in the outback. True, settlement was not supposed to increase beyond its present level, and most of this huge moon was hostile enough to his breed that further growth did seem unlikely. But—if nothing else, simply by their presence, Earthlings had already done irreversible things to both native races.
“You cannot a
sk them why they fight?” Chrisoula wondered.
Hugh smiled wryly. “Oh, sure, we can ask. By now we’ve mastered local languages for everyday purposes. Except, how deep does our understanding go?
“Look, I’m the dromid specialist, she’s the ouranid specialist, and we’ve both worked hard trying to win the friendship of specific individuals. It’s worse for me, because dromids won’t come into Port Kato as long as ouranids might show up anytime. They admit they’d be duty bound to try and kill the ouranids—and eat them, too, by the way; that’s a major symbolic act. The dromids agree this would be a violation of our hospitality. Therefore I have to go meet them in their camps and dens. In spite of this handicap, she doesn’t feel she’s progressed any further than me. We’re equally baffled.”
“What do the autochthons say?”
“Well, either species admits they used to live together amicably . . . little or no direct contact, but with considerable interest in each other. Then, twenty or thirty years back, more and more dromids started failing to reproduce. Oftener and oftener, castoff segments don’t come to term, they die. The leaders have decided the ouranids are at fault and must be exterminated.”
“Why?”
“An article of faith. No rationale that I can untangle, though I’ve guessed at motivations, like the wish for a scapegoat. We’ve got pathologists hunting for the real cause, but imagine how long that might take. Meanwhile, the attacks and killings go on.”
Chrisoula regarded the dusty ground. “Have the ouranids changed in any way? The dromids might then jump to a conclusion of post hoc, propter hoc.”
“Huh?” When she had explained, Hugh laughed. “I’m not a cultivated type, I’m afraid,” he said. “The rock rats and bush rangers I grew up amongst do respect learning—we wouldn’t survive on Medea without learning—but they don’t claim to have a lot of it themselves. I got interested in xenology because as a kid I acquired a dromid friend and followed her-him through the whole cycle, female to male to postsexual. It grabbed hold of my imagination—a life that exotic.”
His attempt to turn the conversation into personal channels did not succeed. “What have the ouranids done?” she persisted.
“Oh . . . they’ve acquired a new—no, not a new religion. That implies a special compartment of life, doesn’t it? And ouranids don’t compartmentalize their lives. Call it a new Way, a new Tao. It involves eventually riding an east wind off across the ocean, to die in the Farside cold. Somehow, that’s transcendental. Please don’t ask me how, or why. Nor can I understand—or Jan—why the dromids consider this is such a terrible thing for the ouranids to do. I have some guesses, but they’re only guesses. She jokes that they’re born fanatics.”
Chrisoula nodded. “Cultural abysses. Suppose a modern materialist with little empathy had a time machine, and went back to the Middle Ages on Earth, and tried to find out what drove a Crusade or Jihad. It would appear senseless to him. Doubtless he would conclude everybody concerned was crazy, and the sole possible way to peace was total victory of one side or the other. Which was not true, we know today.”
The man realized that this woman thought a good deal like his wife. She continued: “Could it be that human influences have brought about these changes, perhaps indirectly?”
“It could,” he admitted. “Ouranids travel widely, of course, so those on Hansonia may well have picked up, at second or third hand, stories about Paradise which originated with humans. I suppose it’d be natural to think Paradise lies in the direction of sunset. Not that anybody has ever tried to convert a native. But natives have occasionally inquired what our ideas are. And ouranids are compulsive mythmakers, who might seize on any concept. They’re ecstatics, too. Even about death.”
“While dromids are prone to develop militant new religions overnight, I have heard. On this island, then, a new one happens to have turned against the ouranids, no? Tragic—though not unlike persecutions on Earth, I expect.”
“Anyhow, we can’t help till we have a lot more knowledge. Jan and I are trying for that. Mostly, we follow the usual procedures, field studies, observations, interviews, et cetera. We’re experimenting with mindscan as well. Tonight it gets our most thorough test yet.”
Chrisoula sat upright, gripped. “What will you do?”
“We’ll draw a blank, probably. You’re a scientist yourself, you know how rare the real breakthroughs are. We’re only slogging along.”
When she remained silent, Hugh filled his lungs for talk. “To be exact,” he proceeded, “Jan’s been cultivating a ‘wild’ ouranid, I a ‘wild’ dromid. We’ve persuaded them to wear miniaturized mindscan transmitters, and have been working with them to develop our own capability. What we can receive and interpret isn’t much. Our eyes and ears give us a lot more information. Still, this is special information. Supplementary.
“The actual layout? Oh, our native wears a button-sized unit glued onto the head, if you can talk about the head of an ouranid. A mercury cell gives power. The unit broadcasts a recognition signal on the radio band—microwatts, but ample to lock onto. Data transmission naturally requires plenty of bandwidth, so that’s on an ultraviolet beam.”
“What?” Chrisoula was startled. “Isn’t that dangerous to the dromids? I was taught they, most animals, have to take shelter when a sun flares.”
“This is safely weak, also because of energy limitations,” Hugh replied. “Obviously, it’s limited to line-of-sight and a few kilometers through air. At that, natives of either kind tell us they can spot the fluorescence of gas along the path. Not that they describe it in such terms!
“So Jan and I go out in our separate aircraft. We hover too high to be seen, activate the transmitters by a signal, and ‘tune in’ on our individual subjects through our amplifiers and computers. As I said, to date we’ve gotten extremely limited results; it’s a mighty poor kind of telepathy. This night we’re planning an intensive effort, because an important thing will be happening.”
She didn’t inquire immediately what that was, but asked instead: “Have you ever tried sending to a native, rather than receiving?”
“What? No, nobody has. For one thing, we don’t want them to know they’re being scanned. That would likely affect their behavior. For another thing, no Medeans have anything like a scientific culture. I doubt they could comprehend the idea.”
“Really? With their high metabolic rate, I should guess they think faster than us.”
“They seem to, though we can’t measure that till we’ve improved mindscan to the point of decoding verbal thought. All we’ve identified thus far is sensory impressions. Come back in a hundred years and maybe someone can tell you.”
The talk had gotten so academic that Hugh positively welcomed the diversion when an ouranid appeared. He recognized the individual in spite of her being larger than usual, her globe distended with hydrogen to a full four meters of diameter. This made her fur sparse across the skin, taking away its mother-of-pearl sheen. Just the same, she was a handsome sight as she passed the treetops, crosswind and then downward. Prehensile tendrils streaming below in variable configurations, to help pilot a jet-propelled swim through the air, she hardly deserved the name “flying jellyfish”—though he had seen pictures of Earth-side Portuguese men-of-war and thought them beautiful. He could sympathize with Jannika’s attraction to this race.
He rose. “Meet a local character,” he invited Chrisoula. “She has a little English. However, don’t expect to understand her pronunciation at once. Probably she’s come to make a quick swap before she rejoins her group for the big affair tonight.”
The woman got up. “Swap? Exchange?”
“Yeah. Niallah answers questions, tells legends, sings songs, demonstrates maneuvers, whatever we request. Afterward we have to play human music for her. Schönberg, usually; she dotes on Schönberg.”
—Loping along a clifftop, Erakoum spied Sarhouth clearly against Mardudek. The moon was waxing toward solar fullness as it crossed that coal-glow. Its di
sc was dwarfed by the enormous body behind, was actually smaller to the eye than the spot which also passed in view, and its cold luminance had well-nigh been drowned earlier when it moved over one of the belts which changeably girded Mardudek. They grew bright after dark, those belts; thinkers like Yasari believed they cast back the light of the suns.
For an instant, Erakoum was captured by the image, spheres traveling through unbounded spaces in circles within circles. She hoped to become a thinker herself. But it could not be soon. She still had her second breeding to go through, her second segment to shed and guard, the young that it presently brought forth to help rear; and then she would be male, with begetting of her own to do—before that need faded out likewise and there was time for serenity.
She remembered in a stab of pain how her first birthing had been for naught. The segment staggered about weakly for a short while, until it lay down and died as so many were doing, so many. The Flyers had brought that curse. It had to be them, as the Prophet Illdamen preached. Their new way of faring west when they grew old, never to return, instead of sinking down and rotting back into the soil as Mardudek intended, surely angered the Red Watcher. Upon the People had been laid the task of avenging this sin against the natural order of things. Proof lay in the fact that females who slew and ate a Flyer shortly before mating always shed healthy segments which brought forth live offspring.
Erakoum swore that tonight she was going to be such a female.
She stopped for breath and to search the landscape. These precipices rimmed a fjord whose waters lay more placid than the sea beyond, brilliant under the radiance from the east. A dark patch bespoke a mass of floating weed. Might it be plants of the kind from which the Flyers budded in their abominable infancy? Erakoum could not tell at her distance. Sometimes valiant members of her race had ventured out on logs, trying to reach those beds and destroy them; but they had failed, and often drowned, in treacherous great waves.
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