Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
“Well, we don’t have that,” Beth said. “Maybe that’s necessary, to run a thing like this huge thing.”
“Could even our most inspired programmers, just by symbol manipulation and number-crunching, have cracked ancient Egyptian with no Rosetta stone? I doubt it.”
“Maybe they’ve met other aliens, learned something of how the whole galaxy talks.”
Sobering indeed,
Tananareve thought.
“Still, it means we’re dealing with beings who have unseen resources,” Beth said.
“Hey, just the visible resources are incredible! Yeah, that may explain why Memor can teach me so well. She’s flexible. Nearly all human languages use either subject-object-verb order, or else subject-verb-object. Memor says she uses both, plus object-verb-subject, so she can adapt to us easily.”
Beth sat up quickly. “Something’s happening.”
Animals came fast, yelping, flitting through the nearby foliage. An insectlike thing fluttered by them. It was like a dragonfly whose wing sets moved at right angles to each other. A long-limbed jumping rat streaked by, using Beth’s head as a touchpoint, then gone. She flinched but managed not to cry out.
Then they both heard a long bass note sound through the bowers. Nearby, some of the long, thick white strands trembled. Something was tugging on them, sending low frequency waves ahead.
“Get down, cover up,” Tananareve whispered.
The deep note was louder. Or maybe it just sounded that way since everything else got suddenly quiet.
She looked down the long strands. They laced through the foliage with a clear path around them, almost like a tunnel in the air. Every hundred meters or so, they had an anchor on one of the thick, rough trunks.
A big hairy thing came into view from the distance. Fast. Spherical and ruddy, with six long legs or arms that moved with liquid grace. It flowed as if it were swimming, flicking long, thin legs out to pluck momentum from the white cables. Soundless. Tananareve judged it was ten meters across at least. A flying house.
She and Beth wrapped themselves away, but Tananareve left a slit open to watch the enormous creature pull and fly, pull and fly—zooming on by them with quick, nimble movements of the legs. It swept by, leaving a slight breeze with a prickly, acid aroma.
Then another. It looked the same, maybe slightly smaller, but even faster. Its legs sang with humming as they plucked, all a blur.
It followed the first around a far curve maybe a kilometer away. The sharp odor lingered.
The area around them was dead silent. Nothing moved. Slowly, slowly small rustlings started. The forest went back to business throughout the three-dimensional volume.
Beth whispered, “What was that?”
“A spider designed by an art deco mind.”
“I thought Memor was the top predator of this biosphere.”
“Me, too. But even we have bears and sharks.”
“What’ll we do?”
Tananareve thought to herself,
Send not therefore asking for whom the bells toll. And if it starts ringing, start moving.
“We’d better be getting on.”
Beth nodded, eyes big, face pale, and lips drawn. Tananareve was startled to see that Beth, who had always seemed to have rock-hard confidence, was scared.
The moist heat here felt like it could be cut into cubes and used to
build a wall. Beth was glad to feel it. It wouldn’t be long before their clothes would get worn. At least there was a nearby stream running through so they could bathe and drink. Plus, the Astronomers let them make fire. She had wondered if Memor would intervene when they used the tools they wore around their waists, too, but apparently the immense aliens thought puny humans could do no real damage.
Damage, no. But maybe they could escape.
It had been several days since the huge spiderlike things came zooming through. Beth hadn’t been able to sleep well after that. Others remarked that the huge beasts—Abduss called them spidows—had ignored the humans. Maybe they weren’t predators at all, just large herbivores. But Beth had seen their bristly palps moving in a blur as they clutched the thick strands. It called up a fearful image of spiders that still made her shake.
Tananareve was healing quickly from the speed-heal salve Abduss had in his med store pack. But they were all getting restless, now that they had food and the basics. Mayra deftly climbed to the top of a particularly tall frond tree, lashing herself in with ply ropes when she got above a hundred meters’ height. She found feathered lizards that sported gorgeous fan plumage and could fly among trees, apparently evolved toward a monkey lifestyle. One variety she called mammoth monkeys. Like many things here, they were huge but not gorilla-like. They were shy, with attenuated, long arms and long torso, just built big and limber as a snake. They liked to swing on vines, apparently for amusement.
She could see farther from there, she reported, above most of the tree canopy.
Lau Pin and Mayra spent their time with heads together, inventing one scheme after another to escape. They even got Fred involved. His notions were crazier than theirs, but nothing stood up under examination.
Find if there’s some key to their enclosure, steal it. Only there didn’t seem to be anything obvious the serf breeds used to seal and unseal the boundary.
Find a way to fly away; in low gravity that should be pretty easy. But that wouldn’t get them out of their warm prison. It just meant they would be on their own, without the serf breeds to help them find food.
Surrender. Somehow. Already they were talking, sort of.
Lau Pin hotly objected to this view. “Should we sit here, as prisoners? We can explore a whole huge world out there!”
Tananareve said mildly, “How about those spidows?”
That sobered them all. Beth let their discussion run; it kept them busy and they might find a good idea. She got up to get some water from the daisy-cup cistern Lau Pin had made. Far up among the bowers, orange flashes arced and snapped from treetops into the gray, clouded sky. Only moments before, those clouds had been cheery, popcorn-white puffballs. Now they slid aside to reveal angry purple towers that tapered to infinity. Her hair stood up on her neck, and a warm wind tickled her hair, sure sign of air freighted with electricity. She turned to say something—
—and got knocked off her feet by percussive force. It felt like getting hit with a baseball bat and blinded by a virulent yellow flash. The others were sitting in the giant leaves and nearly got walloped by a felled tree that crashed through nearby. The air reeked of ozone. Small creatures lay around, some twisting and the others clearly dead.
None of Beth’s people was hurt, but they were certainly shaken. There had been no warning except the instant when she felt her neck hairs rising. She had always thought lightning struck golfers out on fairways swinging 4 irons to the sky, or farmers sitting on tractors in flat fields. Earthly lightning descended on anything taller than the rest of the landscape, like a sailboat on open water. But here she had been among trees and massive foliage.
Abduss said, “You were the only one of us standing.”
Beth frowned. “So?”
“Lau Pin measured a strong magnetic field here. We are on a spinning conductor that carries a strong field.”
Lau Pin snapped his fingers. “The same as a generator—a rotating magnetic field drives current. Charges move around on Earth because of that, so it’s the same for the Bowl.”
Abduss grinned. He always seemed happiest, Beth knew, when he was solving a puzzle. “Lightning is the celestial housekeeper, balancing out the overcharged land with the ionized top layer of the atmosphere.”
Beth said. “This came up through the ground, though.”
“Upside-down lightning, yes,” Abduss said thoughtfully. “Somehow opposite from our experience on Earth.”
“Upside down can still kill you,” Tananareve said.
Goes with the territory.
They returned to the discussion. Tananareve repeated her remark about the spidows, and Beth said, “They get into this enclosure anyway. If we escape, we can just stay away from tunnels in the foliage. Back off if we see the spidow strands.”
They all nodded, but she could see they were grudging nods. Abduss made the point that they had now set up “housekeeping” here, had food and water and help from Memor’s servants. “Meanwhile, we know nothing whatever of Cliff’s group and of
SunSeeker
. They could be negotiating with the locals right now. Let’s wait. Give them a chance to make some progress.”
More talk as they ate some of a spongy, spherical fruit, and Abduss’s view emerged as the consensus. Beth had to admit there was some logic to it. “But we can negotiate, too.”
Tananareve said, “I’m getting better at translating. I’ll approach Memor about a deal. But what’s on our want list?”
In the way group decisions often occur, this was the signal to abandon escape plans. More talking to Memor got everyone off the hook. Their faces said they were glad to play for time. Escaping would be scary, and they had been scared plenty already.
The tiny primate learned quickly. Memor had the Serfs bring in a
mindscan. This was an oddly compact version of the ancient devices. At her order, the techserfs had been working on it diligently since Memor summoned forth the customary device used by scholars, but scaled down to these small bipeds.
Here in the Greenhouse Terraces—a privileged verdant garden of vast natural wealth the size of the Old Continents—dwelled many vibrant, quite different creatures. The Astronomers had studied them since ancient long-gone eras of the Voyage. Their mental processes, as viewed in mindscans, told of the slow press of evolution even under the constant condition of the World. But now such crafts could aid in dealing with the Late Invaders—an idea that had come to Memor while letting her Undermind gush up into full view.
Memor persuaded the translator primate to enter the machine. Indeed, it—yes,
she
—seemed to like the prospect of leaving the corral. Serfs had erected the scan tunnel near the corral entrance, and the primate gazed about with quick interest at the technologies assembled.
Memor spoke warmly, using soothing tones and feather-fans of quiet resolve. Serfs attended the cautious Invader, chattering in their simple tongues, and soon all was ready.
The device worked surprisingly well. The Serfs had tested it against the arboreal simians, simple forms that were the nearest approximation to these Late Invader aliens. The primate female submitted to the device after being told that it would help the translations. False, of course. But useful, as so many passing illusions are when dealing with those less adroit. Memor sighed, a long, slow, and satisfying vibration it used to let its mind process data.
The scan revealed a brain startlingly different. Strange, yes—but Memor’s Undermind could see structural connections, similarities (primitive, to be sure) to the Astronomer-class minds honed by more Cycles than time could count.
The female disliked the incisive, magnetic lacing of the scan. Clearly so. She became uneasy, and with the Serfs attending to the process, Memor could see her anxieties forking like dendritic lightning fingers through a mind cloudy, veiled, mysterious. And … divided.
Memor experienced the exquisite tremor of an insight. An idea emerged fresh and flowering from her Undermind.
These awkward, tenuous aliens lived in a sort of middle scale. Their senses had evolved to perceive things on their own puny scale. Of course, they could not see bacteria, but they could sense minor dimensions. The larger scales of a world were beyond them, though—no doubt because they evolved on some gravitational mass, as Memor’s own ancestors had. They had a perceptual horizon limited by the curve of primitive worlds, seen at heights no more than their own stature. They must feel trapped here.
Still more shrunken was their sense of time. Typically they sensed the grind of orbital cycles, seasons, incessant day-night, the brute revolutions of planets. They lived in the mire of cyclic mechanics, sleeping and mating to the tick of some planetary clock. Slaves to time.
Memor had the Serfs interrogate the primate’s innate mind-time scales. They scampered about, using their instruments. The result was desperately plain.
The creature had a summing time of a few of its own eye-blinks, a trifling interval. It used that scale to integrate information. That meant that it could not delegate to its lesser parts the usual boring business of keeping itself alive. It had to keep incessant watch.
This was difficult to believe. The Folk had abandoned the drumming rhythm of short cycles long ago. That was the informing idea behind their pursuit of constancy—of freedom from the ticktock of early origins. Instead, the Folk dwelled on the eternal Quest through the Voyage.
This small, intense being was forced to worry about its housekeeping, such as digestion, excretion, even the intake and outblow of oxygen. Could it be so pointlessly busy? Difficult to know, but depressing to contemplate.
Such a short processing time meant that it could seldom spare computational power on issues beyond its own heart rate. It lived a poor, distracted life. Yet it had built a starship!
Did it even sense the gyre of evolution? Or of the World?
Memor pondered. Her Undermind worked, fretful and persistent as always, yet came forth with nothing. She inspected her Undermind workings, peeled back layers—yes, nothing. The Undermind was justly perplexed. So many questions remained!
Could these hairy bipeds fathom why their slavery to oscillations in dark and day made them primitive? Once even the Folk had submitted to such endless toils. But they had learned otherwise, had in the Deep Times built the World to escape such bondage to primitive cycles. In its way, this small thing represented the ancient past, brought forward by circumstance for Memor’s instruction.
When the alien came out of the scanning, Memor tried to get the female to speak. It was staggering a little, waving its small arms for balance. “I see you find our insightful machines a trial,” Memor said.