He must approach them. It is the most sensible course.
He rolls up his reel and stows it, then climbs out of the little den he has made among the rocks. Holdhard is sheltered nearby. “Remain here,” he says quietly. “Stay hidden. If you hear fighting, take my reel and flee.”
Broadtail swims toward the creatures’ shelter. He goes slowly and makes no attempt to be quiet. Half a cable away he starts pinging, both to announce himself and to learn as much about the camp as he can in case he must flee a hostile response.
Rob had almost finished getting the heat-exchanger set up when he heard a set of loud, regular sonar clicks. It sounded like a large animal. He flicked on the spotlight and had a look.
Fifty meters away was an Ilmataran, swimming slowly toward him. It was a good-sized adult, festooned with tools and bags of stuff. Its pincers were folded back along its sides. Rob didn’t know if that was a good sign or not.
He controlled his impulse to panic, to flee back to the Coquille—and his second impulse to pull out his utility knife. It didn’t look hostile, and it was alone.
Rob wished someone could tell him how to act. Henri would know what to do. It might be completely wrong, but at least he wouldn’t be standing there like a squirrel in the middle of a driveway watching a car bearing down on it.
Should he call Alicia? If things got ugly he didn’t want her out here. See what the alien wanted, first of all.
Rob took a deep breath, stood up, and turned on his speaker. “Hey!”
The Ilmataran halted in the water about ten meters away.
Well, at least it wasn’t tearing him apart. Yet. Rob took a step toward it. “Hey there, guy,” he said, in the same voice he used to talk to his roommate’s cat back on Earth.
The Ilmataran hovered there a while, then moved forward. Rob and the alien were about six meters apart now. He was closer to an Ilmataran than anyone but Henri had ever been. No stealth suit this time, either. He, Robert Freeman, was making contact with a new intelligent species.
What the hell was he supposed to do? Shake hands? Pat its head? All his training had been about avoiding contact, not how to do it. He turned on his helmet camera so that if he did screw up royally, at least posterity could see what not to do.
The alien made a complex sound, like a green twig snapping. Was it talking to him? According to Dickie Graves they communicated by sending each other sonar images.
Could he maybe use his sonar display to decipher the alien speech? The thought was so exciting that for a moment Rob forgot how nervous he was. It would be pretty damned awesome if Rob Freeman was the one who figured out how to communicate with a whole alien civilization.
He told his sonar software to bypass the signal pro cessor and feed the sound straight into the imaging system. That took a few minutes, during which the alien made some more sounds.
“Okay,” said Rob when he was done. “Try talking to me now.” He knew it couldn’t understand him, but maybe his response would encourage the alien.
It said something else, a long sound pattern like a distant volley of gunfire. Rob looked at his sonar display. Gibberish. A screen full of static. Evidently the Ilmatarans didn’t buy their sonar from the same supplier.
Oh, well. It had been a great scientific advance for about five minutes.
They spent half an hour there, standing a couple of meters apart, trying to talk to each other. Rob couldn’t get his sonar software to make sense of the alien’s sound images, and it was absurd to think it could understand English, no matter how loudly and slowly he spoke.
“I give up,” Rob said at last. “I know you want to talk to me, and I want to talk to you, but we just can’t. I’m sorry.”
Maybe the Ilmataran had reached the same conclusion, for it was silent for a good five minutes. Then it spoke again, but this time it sounded very different. It wasn’t making sonar echo-patterns, it was just making simple clicks. It sounded like a telegraph—click-click-click-click, pause,click-click-click-click-click-click-click, pause, more clicks.
Morse code? Numbers?
Rob took a screwdriver from his tool belt and began tapping it gently against the wrench. Start simple: one tap, pause, one tap, pause, two taps. One plus one equals two. Then he tried two taps, two taps, four taps. Was he getting through?
The alien surged forward until its head was almost touching Rob’s knee. He had to force himself not to flee, and one hand went to the utility knife on his thigh.
It clicked loudly once, then waited. For what? It clicked again. Rob tried tapping his tools together once.
It raised its head then, grabbing for his arm with one of its big praying-mantis pincers, and for a moment Rob thought sure he was going to wind up like Henri. But it put his hand to its head and clicked once.
Rob tapped the wrench once, then patted the Ilmataran’s head. “Okay, so does one click mean you, or your head, or touch me, or what?”
He tried an experiment. He took its pincer and very gently moved it to touch his own chest, then tapped once. But the creature didn’t respond.
Broadtail ponders. What is he to call this creature? There is certainly no number for it in any lexicon. He shall have to give it a name. Something simple. He taps out sixteen: two short scratches, four taps.
This results in silence. Does it not understand? Or is it offended? Broadtail certainly means no insult. The name Builder is appropriate: the creature builds things. Until he knows more about it, that seems the most accurate thing to call it.
Standing this close to the thing, Broadtail learns much about it. He hears a single heart pumping loudly within it. Sometimes it seems to beat more loudly than other times; possibly part of its digestive process? But the creature’s stomach is nearly empty. There is a constant series of clicks and buzzes coming from the back hump, and the creature releases bubbles into the water in a regular cycle that seems to be connected to the noise somehow. He has so many questions! It is extremely frustrating to be limited to simple words.
They are interrupted by a second creature that emerges from the structure. It is similar in size and body plan to Builder, though when Broadtail pings it he can discern some minor variation in its internal organs. Without more of them to study, Broadtail can’t tell which differences are significant and which are simply individual variation. It approaches noisily, then halts about four body-lengths away and calls out to the other one. They exchange calls and the second creature approaches slowly. Its heart is also beating very loudly. The two exchange more calls, then the creature he calls Builder guides Broadtail’s pincer to touch the second being’s body.Broadtail names it Builder 2.
When they finally went back inside the shelter, Rob and Alicia were both exhausted. They’d been up for about twenty hours, and neither had eaten since lunch. They tore into some food bars and each had a bowl of the food-bar soup.
Rob peeled off his damp suit liner and got into the slightly less clammy one he kept for sleeping, then the two of them cuddled up inside one sleeping bag in his hammock.
Neither one could sleep at first. They were both too excited. Alicia had to keep unzipping the bag to get her computer and make notes. “This is magnificent!” she kept saying.“When that guy came up to me I didn’t know what to expect,” Rob told her.
“You handled it very well, Robert. We have established peaceful contact with the species.”