Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
They yelled and shouted and got inside with weary last energy. In a few minutes, Cliff looked back and could no longer see the tree line. The wind purred around their sail as it picked up. They were skating across a great sand lake with no idea of what lay ahead. Into the unknown.
So what else is new?
Cliff asked himself, and fell fast asleep.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
—M
ARCEL
P
ROUST
Tananareve stared at the shambling beast looming over her and
made herself not cringe.
Keep your head held high,
her mother’s spirit reminded her. She had to, anyway, because the alien towered over her like a mobile mountain.
This thing smelled, too. Its thick musk made her eyes water and she sneezed.
Memor had brought yet again an odd thing made of plasticlike, squeezable stuff. The vast beast set the thing before her and stepped on it. It squawked, hissed, then got up and walked around on stubby legs. A life-form? Now it ran off in a panicked, lurching gait, as if afraid.
Just the way I feel,
she thought. Each time, Memor brought a little thing that surprised her a bit. But what did they mean? A calling card?
Memor made a resounding speech of woofs, yips, and growls. Plus the seemingly mandatory feather-fluffs, fan displays with suites of multicolored synchronization, and ruffles that sounded like whispery drumrolls. Tananareve got the drift—was she awake?
“Of course I am,” she said back, in words that sounded more like growls. This seemed to please it. Every meeting began this way, and Tananareve still hadn’t figured out why. Or the calling cards.
Haltingly, Tananareve asked Memor for help in finding food they could eat. She felt somewhat comic, mimicking the alien’s huffing, bass word-structures in her high, lilting notes. But her meaning got through somehow.
Memor bowed, a gravid gesture of understanding. The huge thing lumbered around, trumpeting orders to its lessers, trying to find leafy boughs that the human could try. She caught a combination of rough consonants that seemed to mean, “fodder for eaters of meat and grasses.” At least it apparently knew some organic chemistry.
She kept to the ropy vines Beth had settled her into for comfort. Tananareve felt safer here, too, lounging back among this aromatic wealth. Her dark skin blended into the shadows.
Anything was better than the awful rattling box they’d had to endure coming here. She had felt better from the moment they were shooed out of that by Godzilla-like birds.
The forest was oddly comforting. Plants here, adapted to near free fall, looked odd. The usual supporting structures were gone, so huge leaves and blooms hung in the 0.1 g from slender branches. Many had no obvious parallel to Earthly vegetation. They looked like slender spiderwebs with splashes of puffball decoration.
Serf-Ones, as the Astronomers called them, had been busy building an enclosure when the humans were harried into the Greenhouse, as they called it. The Serf-Ones inside the enclosure worked steadily but avoided people. Maybe they were scared of crushing the much smaller humans.
The atmosphere seemed to cling in her lungs, muggy and sweetly fragrant. After the ship’s carefully modulated air, it was pleasant, moist and not chilly. They were still in low gravity, though. The Bowl here had just enough spin that stuff tossed up would eventually settle.
The aliens thought
big.
Their enclosure was far larger than it needed to be. Of course, the entire Bowl exceeded any imaginable idea of limits. Should that tell them anything about the psychology of those who built it?
Tananareve noticed that Lau Pin was getting restless. He paced, climbed some of the thin, layered trees, got into arguments seemingly out of boredom. After several days of this, he announced that he was going to explore. He didn’t want company, either. Beth didn’t like that, but she had no real authority here. She wasn’t going to go herself, not with Tananareve injured and needing looking after.
She was trying to convince Abduss to go with Lau Pin when abruptly he just hiked away, not waiting. Beth shrugged and said with lifted eyebrows to the others, “Guess he just doesn’t like us.” Still, Tananareve knew that Beth worried. That was her nature.
Lau Pin was gone for well over a day. He returned (he admitted) when he started wondering if he could find the way back, even though he used slash marks on the large, barked trees to guide him. He reported finding nothing different, just endless vegetation. No hills taller than fifty meters, just enough to get streams to glide downhill. It was eerie, he said, watching a broad creek easing along over rocks, but not chuckling with the splashes it would have made on Earth. Low g did that, taking the zip out of life in odd little ways. He had never reached the turning back of their enclosure. Even in 0.1 g, the wall was too high to jump and its smooth lattice made climbing impossible. He guessed that the Serfs had dropped the tall, chicken-wire walls from some craft flying above. “It’s enormous, this cage they’ve stuck us in, at least tens of klicks across,” he said.
“Maybe they want us not to get claustrophobic?” Abduss suggested. “Living in the Bowl, maybe they’ve evolved to like room.”
“So we should, too?” Lau Pin rolled his eyes.
“Come on, Astronomers are
huge.
They
need
room,” Mayra said. “Fred, what do you—?” Fred was glowering at one of the skyeyes hovering nearby. “Never mind.”
Fred Ojama wasn’t taking imprisonment well. He was withdrawn, sullen. In some ways, he was worse off than Tananareve.
Beth asked Lau Pin, “Were there more of those head-sized sensors floating around?”
Lau Pin grimaced. “Two followed me the whole way.”
Nobody liked the ever-watching spheres the size of a human head. They seemed to navigate by whispering jets. Lau Pin had studied them and found there was a strong magnetic field near them. Mag lift? Indeed, it was nearly a hundred times Earth’s surface magnetic field, running parallel to the ground here. Abduss guessed it might have to do with running the Bowl, perhaps helping stabilize it with magnetic pressure.
Tananareve listened to all this behind the soft insulation her meds gave her. She was content to lie back and observe through cottony air. There were plenty of vines that in small gravs didn’t bow in graceful catenary curves, but shot straight out. These connected to plants that were crowded layers of great broad leaves. The leaves were as big as Tananareve and firmly attached to barnacled branches. Those long limbs were so large, she could not see where the gradually thickening, dark brown wood ended. Among the green and brown leaves scampered and leaped many small creatures. They capered among odd long, pearly white strands as thick as her arm. These connected like spokes across the open spaces—lanes that cut through the thick green stands of web-trees. She could not figure out what the pale fibers were part of, unless it was some plant of enormous size, its details lost among the distant growths that lay along the big tunnels that brought light and air.
She suddenly saw that her whole mind-set was wrong here. This was not an Earthlike forest.
The landscape is designed. Sculpted. But it looks like Earth’s nature preserves.
Memor sent a small underling into that tangle. It was a ferretlike thing with a big head and darting eyes. It fell from one leaf to another, slid down to a third, and landed on a catlike creature—which squashed like a pillow. With a shudder the prey died, provoking in Tananareve a pang of guilt. The cat-thing had wings and sleek orange fur. Her heart ached at the beauty of it.
Memor gruffed approval. With a few movements of its razor-claws, the ferret hunter skinned the cat and plucked off gobbets of meat and scampered to Tananareve with them. She bit her lip at the reek of the red gobbets, and pointed to the people tending their fire.
Tananareve watched as Memor’s minions snatched at tubular insects and crunched them with relish into a hash. They especially enjoyed ripping big fronds to shreds, picking out packets of ripe red seeds. Tananareve videotaped them at it, watched and learned.
One of the ferret-things brought her crimson bulbs that grew profusely in grapelike bunches. Memor reassured her with feather-fans of certainty that these were humanly digestible. She reached for some, and the bulbs hissed angrily as she plucked one loose. All bluster—the plant did nothing more as she bit in. She liked the rich, grainy taste. Far better than ship food, for sure.
The taste rode atop the bland dryness of the sedative she had taken. Here she was, in the most fascinating and terrifying moment of her life—and she was injured, dulled. Tananareve stopped herself from rubbing at her cracked ribs and her upper right arm, which throbbed from a nasty break. Nothing to be done about broken ribs except not move around, as Beth said, and risk jabbing a rib through a lung. Beth had splinted her arm quite deftly. Their emergency med kit gave her some pain relief, but that didn’t stop her restless mind.
She knew she wouldn’t be much use for a while, even with the quick heal salve Abduss applied to her aching arm. She hung relaxed in a secured bower of vines and plants and wondered how all this profuse life had evolved in near-zero gravity. Time to sit back, watch, and learn—which turned out to be, fathom what the alien called TransLanguage.
At university she had been good at the language game, learning French and Russian. Her secondary expedition job was to be alien translation. So now she had the job of dealing with the giant who identified itself as Memor—the name itself an approximation she had worked out to a sound like a bass humming, deep in its throat. She had imagined that, if they met aliens, there would be some orderly exchange of texts and recordings and, well, a method. Something like SETI messages, maybe, across a proper desk. Not here.
The other people were distracted, finding and choosing edibles, building a shelter, classifying Bird Folk varieties—which kept appearing to do work nearby, openly gawk, and flare their brilliant feather displays, rainbows of vibrant color. Squawking, too, in a language Memor dismissed with a gravelly grunt: unimportant.
Beth came to watch with her and change the dressings on her broken arm. “That bush over there smells like cooked meat,” Beth said. “Strange…”
They watched it uneasily. A ratlike thing as big as a dog but sporting an enlarged head came foraging by. Humans bothered it not at all. Beth pointed out that the animals here had no fear of humans because they had no experience. The rat-thing caught the meaty smell and slowed, tantalized. It lingered—and the bush popped. Spear seeds embedded in the rat. It yelped and scampered away.
“A victory for the plants,” Beth said. “That rat will carry the seed, I’ll bet, until it dies.”
Tananareve said, “So then a fresh bush grows from the rat’s body. Smart.”
Memor approached, huffing and rumbling, and they both tried not to shrink from its size. It spoke and Tananareve translated to, “I, like you, have a meat tooth.”
Beth said, “Uh, charmed, I’m sure.”
“We try for you to find the eatables,” Tananareve translated again. She thanked Memor, and the mountain of flesh and rippling feathers seemed to bow at a sideways angle, lowering its arms and head.
Memor took them for a stroll in the awkward low g, explaining, gesturing with head and hands. It felt good to walk. All this helped improve Tananareve’s translating abilities. They passed by colonies of plants that clearly had a social life, communicating through pollen-sprays their needs and distresses.
Tananareve bit her lip and summoned up the courage to ask, “How do you … manage all this? Your … world-ship?”
Memor stopped and regarded them with big, solemn eyes. She spoke in long, rolling cadences and Tananareve struggled to translate. Her voice came in bursts as she got the meaning. “Fast learns, slow remembers. The quick and small instruct the slow and big by bringing change. The big and slow urges—dammit—call it constraint and constancy. Fast gets attention; slow has power. A robust system needs twice—I mean both. There is one great commandment: Stability is all.”
The sound of her voice was like stones rattling in a jug. Very large stones, boulders, in an immense jug.
Beth asked, “How old is this … world?”
After translations, Tananareve shrugged. “We don’t have the same time measures, but it’s
old.
I get the feeling Memor doesn’t want to say.”
“What’s it—okay, she—doing now?”
Tananareve looked up as Memor tilted her head back and went into the long trancelike state she had seen before. “I don’t know. She says it’s like talking to another part of her mind—that is, if I’m really getting the gist of her meaning.”
Memor wandered away, still in a daze.
Beth smiled and sat back into a conical bower of fleshy plants. “I’m amazed, just like all of us, at how fast you’ve learned.”
She gave Beth a quick, flinty look. Tananareve knew that her honey-toned Mississippi vowels made most crew members discount her.
Talk that way, and people will knock twenty points off your apparent IQ,
her mother had said. But she liked the soft, supple play of her accent, the stretched vowels and rounded consonants. “I’m even more so. Who would’ve thought that an alien language would have sentences at all? Much less, relating in a linear configuration with structures, a system?”
“And they’re not even mammals,” Beth mused. “I think.”
“I suppose, but we don’t really know. Kinda a hard subject to just bring up.” Tananareve frowned. “It was so easy to learn from Memor, just from pointing and acting out. Maybe the underlying chemistry and stuff doesn’t matter so much. I guess there are essentials in language after all. Not just in vocabulary and grammatical rules, but in their semantic swamps. Gad!”
“But you did it,” Beth said simply.
Tananareve shrugged. “Memor says she’s using ‘artful intelligences’ to help her. I suppose that means she’s computer linked.”