‘At least we’re faster,’ Zaine says, doubtless remembering the ponderous manoeuvring of the alien vessels.
We are not, Viola says pedantically. We are merely able to accelerate more rapidly for now. They are signalling us as before, although with a greater proportion on the technical channel. More coordinates.
Everyone exchanges looks: Human heads turn, Portiids cant bodies towards each other.
‘A trap?’ Zaine suggests, but she doesn’t sound convinced.
Potentially a trap if these are simply enemies that want enough of us left to study, Viola puts in. The subtext of her palp-waving means Bad things multiply, implying that just because the alien factions are fighting does not mean they are neatly divided into ‘friend’ and ‘foe’.
‘Can we speak to the Voyager?’ Helena asks.
Kern’s own voice breaks in, transmitting through the air and floor simultaneously. ‘We simply don’t know the capabilities of these ships, now they are paying such close attention to us. At the very least we would be alerting them to the presence of the Voyager if we sent a transmission. We must hope our comrades are watching.’
We can just flee outwards, Fabian suggests. We can change course faster than they can.
And then what? Portia demands. Helena waggles a thumb to get her attention and then signals, Easy, calm, because her colleague tends to become the arch-traditionalist in times of stress, a female’s female. With obvious effort, Portia de-escalates her body language from threat to conversational, saying, If we flee now, even if we escape them, what have we gained? What has Bianca died for? We came all this way riding the line of their signals. There is a mystery here we need new perspectives to understand. Are they enemies that will threaten us back at our home one day? We have seen their technology is as complex as ours, or more so. If we can travel between the stars, so can they. Are they allies? Do they need our help? Why fight each other? Why attack us? If there is any chance of learning more of them, and especially of making peaceful contact, we must take it. Converted to Human terms, she is a passionate speaker, embodying the Portiid virtue of intrepid curiosity.
Zaine has plotted the new coordinates. ‘They’re taking us in-system, past the orbit of the next planet. That gives us around two months, more than enough time to reconfigure the ship and prepare.’
‘I am seeking a meeting of minds on defensive strategy,’ Kern throws out. The odd wording is a best-fit translation of the spider concept: everyone sitting around a web, plucking out ideas as they occur.
Helena feels she would have little to contribute. Instead she has the Lightfoot’s records line up a large sampling of the alien transmissions, especially the visual elements. She is, after all, the doyenne of translation software, even if her efforts have been focused on an entirely different communication system. She has time on her hands, now, if she is happy to burn her own personal allotment of it by staying out of cold sleep. Adapting her goggles and gloves and rejigging her internal software is a long and delicate process, but with Portia’s help she has the opportunity to do it now. And hopefully not screw over my brain like Meshner did.
One of her mentors back on Kern’s World had warned of exactly that – the potential for alien thought and language to cause damage to the Human brain simply through exposure. The woman had been paranoid about some hypothetical ‘true aliens’ whose simple cognition would be anathema for any Humans (or Portiids) who tried to understand it. Helena suspects that mentor was someone whose psychology had problems coping with living on a planet full of spiders. Some of the original Gilgamesh survivors had simply never adjusted, living on a Human reservation where Portiid presence was minimal and covert. Helena’s mentor, when positing that lethal alien race, had been externalizing an internal fear she had lived with all her life, or so Helena came to believe.
And there are Portiids who find Humans impossible to be around, she knows. Sometimes it is the sheer scale, sometimes they simply can’t tune out the crashing of Human footfalls in the way most spiders do. The two species rub along with some rough edges, even after all this time.
Portia strokes her arm gently; a gesture of solidarity evolved independently by two very different species.
Remember what we said about males, Helena tells her, ruffling the tufted brows over Portia’s main eyes.
Fabian is not a typical male, Portia shuffles, doubtless keeping at least one other eye on the subject of her ire. He crouches and dances neatly enough, but he doesn’t mean it. He bears grudges, that one.
And you give him reason to, Helena points out. On her screen, the computer has coded five hundred separate alien signals, visual and informational. This is ant-work, performed by the Lightfoot’s live-in colony rather than Kern’s consciousness or the electronic systems. It is the sort of qualitative analysis at which Portiid ants beat Human computers every time.
Helena frowns, used to finding patterns in signals, in speech; so much of her Portiid language work is finding the correlations between meaning, stance, palp qualifiers, even scent chemicals, all the different facets of communication. Here she sees alien transmissions invariably sent out as two distinct formats, and yet there is no immediate correlation at all. Or if there is, it lies in some part of the data she is not analysing properly. She goes back to the source and taxes Kern about possible other channels, separate elements of the message that haven’t come through to her.
Many days later, and with Kern threatening to throttle her systems access, all she has is absence of evidence for any pattern between visual and numerical signals. Which isn’t evidence of absence, but still . . . ‘What if there are two separate species in their ships, too?’ she wonders. ‘What if the number signals are . . . hidden within the main transmission by some sort of fifth column?’
So instead of giving us a rendezvous, some spy was telling us where they were going? Portia shivers, signalling her discontent with the idea. They were acting on it, though. And we have signals here not meant for us. Every one is split the same way, to a greater or lesser extent. The data-heavy visual information, the more compact Old Empire format numbers. And the proportion changed – look, there’s a pattern.
And she is right. The correlation is not with content but with split. Certain combinations of colour and shape match where the visual information comes close to edging out the numbers altogether. As though they were shouting. And indeed the colours and shapes for those periods seem distinctly less friendly. Black, red, white, spikes and sharp angles. Perhaps universal symbols of threat to anything with an Earth origin. And they are looking at something that came from distant Earth, without a doubt. The technology being used to send these baffling signals is a close cousin to tech the Gilgamesh found in Old Empire facilities, or the tech used to preserve Avrana Kern in orbit about the world that bore her name. Closer to us than whoever’s sending the signals.
Nobody is talking about a machine intelligence now, but Helena strongly feels that there isn’t a human operator on the other end of these transmissions either.
In her mind is Viola’s instinctively angry approach to Fabian, those raised legs, the implicit promise of violence carried over from ancestral, pre-sentient times: I am bigger, I am dangerous, submit to me. Portiid radio transmissions are very urbane: they carry a coded version of the meaning of spider language – the vibrations and visual qualifiers – but without the larger-scale body language to give it broader emotional context. In that sense, Human voices are better radio, because so much of the subtext is carried in tone and pacing, but even then, Humans prefer to communicate by screen where they can read each other’s expressions.