Ted patted Alex’s thick shoulder. “Look, this is a fantastic discovery. You’re just tired.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Alex sighed.
“You’ve got something more, then, Alex?” Nigel said lightly.
Alex brightened. “Uh, yeah, I had to track individual sources of the radio to get a phase fix. I figured, hell, might as well get ’em all. Just a rep-rate problem, following all those emitters on a time-sharing basis.”
“Here.” Ted tapped his own wrist comm and the flat screen stirred to life. The white dots began to move, some winking on and off. “These EMs are also hefty infrared sources. From their body heat, I guess. They’re alive, and apparently each carries a transmitter.”
“Perhaps a nomad culture?” Nikka said softly.
“Well, we’ve thought about that. They don’t have fixed transmitters, that’s for sure, but as for why—”
“Naw” Alex put in. “I got a few that don’t move.”
“Oh?” Ted asked, puzzled. “Is your resolution good enough to be—”
“Yeah, look, see that?” Alex lurched to his feet and walked to the flat. He pointed to a cluster of dots that did not join in the slow snowflake swirl. “These aren’t goin’ anywhere. I can tell for sure ’cause they’ve got little individual signatures in the radio spectrum, if you look close. Li’l shifts in the phase and amplitude, stuff like that.”
Nikka studied the dots as they moved in jagged little jumps. “A few remain still. Perhaps they are old? They no longer take part in the nomadic cycle?”
“Doesn’t look nomadic to me,” Nigel said. “They aren’t moving all together. Look how well spaced they are. They don’t cluster.”
Ted nodded. “Correct. They move through the valley systems, Alex thinks. Sometimes they follow the dust clouds, sometimes not.”
“Any optical fix yet?” Nigel asked.
Ted shook his head. “Dust, clouds, damn dim sunlight in the first place …”
“What is the next step, then? We cannot stand out here in the dark forever,” Nikka declared firmly.
Ted said, “Well, our resolution is—”
“About as good as it’s gonna get,” Alex said.
Nikka said mildly, “Then perhaps it is time for the surface probes?”
The vessels fell, crisp and clean. Winds scorched them; billowy parachutes eased their fall. The slumbering world below was mottled and cloud-shrouded. In some lacing valleys the dryness of the sulfur dust prevailed. There, brackish ponds greeted the first flyback probe.
In the wetter valleys the dust rolled over damper air beneath. Mud fell from the sky. The sluggish rivers were clogged with it. Twisted yellow weeds sprouted on the banks and curious, small creatures scuttled for safety when the second probe popped and murmured and thrust forth a jerking, ratcheting scoop.
Green greeted the third probe, where water had won a permanent victory. The roiling dust blew in nearby mountain passes, but did not eddy and fall here. For this spherical, inquisitive probe the feast of life was more rich. And richer still was the land toward the seas.
The flyback strategy was smash-and-grab. They were instructed to boost at the first sign of anything large. Thus the fifth probe took only one lingering view of the approaching EM creature which had been drawn by its whooshing crash. But the image was clear: a huge thing, leathery, unclothed. Three thin arms rode above the tangle of stiff legs. An awesome head.
It carried nothing. No tools. No radio transmitter.
It had no eyes.
Instead, there was a chunky, rectangular slot in the huge head, a meter across. It turned toward the probe, just as the boosters fired to fling the black cylinder skyward. The probe radio registered a burst of noise, a crisp sputter. Then the landscape dwindled below and the thick pink clouds of Isis consumed the EM creature.
But the spiky rattle in the radio spectrum had come from the creature itself. That much was sure.
Five
Preliminary exploration inched on. Nigel tried to hasten matters, but he had long ago learned the uselessness of trying to put body English on the universe.
Instead, he worked in the fields and tanks, making the fat vegetables swell under ultraviolet phosphors. Rubbery plants stretched tall, driven not by nature’s cruel competition but by well-runed DNA, stepchild of laboratories. Amid these cathedral trees of 99 percent usable, man-centered life, he walked with a slow shuffle, hoarding his energy. The other men and women on the agri team did their work with a quick, efficient energy, but they flagged at the end of the shift, more from boredom than fatigue. Nigel did it slowly because he liked the musk and raw damp of the soil, the click of the hoe, the lofting high into the air of a bundle of rattling dry stalks.
The aliens had given him that. The ability, the oddly tilted sensitivity, had been in him—was in everybody—and the blinding moments in direct contact with the Mare Marginis computer, in the splintered alien ship, had set it loose. In the first years afterward, the stink of enlightenment had followed him everywhere. Before, the dripping of water from a thick-lipped stonework urn had been a restful, pretty sight, nothing more. Then, after the Mare Marginis ship, the same dripping had become a wonderful thing, packed with meaning. Now, at last, it was a dripping into a thick-lipped urn again.
He had talked about that, occasionally, and the words had been distorted and ramified and defined into oblivion. He knew, but others didn’t, that he really could not speak for anyone else, could not penetrate to the experience so that others felt it. Things happened to you and you learned from them, but the pretense of a common interior landscape which one could cart—nonsense. Nothing captured it. He had seen the usual menu of savants, with their crystallized formulas, but they seemed no different. He listened to those Tao and Buddha and Zen phrases, like great blue-white blocks of luminous granite through which pale blades of light seeped, cool and from a distant place, eternally true and forever, immutable and as useful as alabaster statues in a town square.
So he had been grateful when others finally left him alone. He had worked and he did the Slotsleep job, submitting himself to the trial runs with the calm of a domesticated animal. But the alphabet jumble of organizations—ISA, then UNDSA, then ANDP—they were machines, not people. And machines have no need to forget. So to them he was an odd bird with a certain fame and fading glory. He had been in the space program since his early twenties. He had taken part in the series of discoveries that led to the bleak Mare Marginis plain and to the encounter with the alien computer. That made his name useful to the ISA.
It also meant they had to let him go on Lancer. He had put in years of developing Slotsleep, trimming seventeen years from his span. He had done it for the value of research, yes, to bring the stars within range of the extended human life-span. But he had also spent the years floating in the milky rich fluids to keep his own effective age down, so the alphabet agencies could not use age alone as a weapon against him.
The flaw in the logic, he saw, was that after launch, the Lancer crew could do whatever they liked about task assignments. Now he had to maneuver.
He knew what he was and that they should not make a ceramic saint out of him … but still, the illusion had its uses. They gave him more privacy than the usual crew member, let him and Nikka carve a flesh apartment for themselves in Lancer’s rock. And the privacy gave him time to think.
Nigel straightened up from his gardening. He felt a twinge in his back and then a sudden lacing pain. The shock of it made him drop three tomatoes he had plucked. He winced and grimaced and then, before anyone saw the look, made his face go blank. The pain ebbed. He bent carefully to pick up the dusty tomatoes. Traitor muscles along his spine stretched and protested. He let the pain come flooding in, feeling it fully and so disarming it. Enough for today. A legend should not display back problems if he could help it.