Do you think your people might have developed a distance communications method that translated body language? she asks Portia, whose attention is far more on the defensive tactics huddle, where Zaine, Viola and Fabian confer with Kern. Portia’s palps give a noncommittal shrug.
Helena feels a rising excitement, though. If they relied more on their body language . . . or if we made our physical expressions even more key to getting meaning across. And hadn’t the Old Empire invented a whole extra alphabet of symbols to add emotional qualifiers to written text, to fulfil just that need? So let’s say we’re dealing with a species for whom visual signifiers are a key part of their communication, and they just can’t pass meaning along without them . . . And that is a sticking point, for surely, when developing their culture, such a species would still need to reduce that meaning to some sort of code, something like written characters, that would abbreviate and come to represent the original physical communication. But what if it hadn’t, somehow? She cannot imagine the path such a culture would take. How could they get from barbarism to such a height of technology without ever having to reduce their language to a simpler code? Or perhaps what she sees in that packed visual channel is an abbreviation of something even more complex . . .
Remember to breathe, Portia tells her, and Helena realizes she has frozen up, her mind chasing blind alleys as she holds her breath. It helps to have a friend who knows her that well.
‘I’m going to focus on the visual channel alone,’ she announces. She will take the initial categorization work done by the ants and apply her translation algorithms to it, that are themselves the evolutionary descendants of programs devised by her ancestor, Holsten Mason, when he was still a crewman on the Gilgamesh. The ants will take on her software and bring her crumbs of meaning from the wealth of data that she has.
And it is a wealth that only increases as they fall in-system away from the asteroid belt. The traffic that was so riotous about the silvery habitats or installations or whatever they were is nothing compared to the cacophony they can detect already from the next planet in, a broad-spectrum . . . what? Not babble, but an eyesore of clashing colours, Helena considers. A complex, shifting display from ten thousand separate sources. She wonders if they are at war, whatever they are, but it seems impossible that there could be a whole angry planet with such a level of technology that wouldn’t just destroy itself. Like Earth did. As though there is some millennia-old curse that follows all the children of that lost planet and goads them into annihilation.
3.
Fabian suggests that one faction of the locals owned the asteroid belt and they were in dispute with the faction on the inner planet whose orbit they are now speeding towards. Certainly there are signals triangulating between the world and the alien ships shadowing them. The new rendezvous point – or ambush opportunity, as Portia cannot help thinking of it – will put them within the orbital track of the planet, but a good thirty million kilometres from its position at that time, and she considers the precision of this. Perhaps some alien mind has tried to find a compromise that puts the proposer close enough to home, while not so close as to spook the visitors from the stars. Or perhaps the locals simply have weapons and technology that makes a nothing of thirty million kilometres. If forced to make the call, Portia does not think they do, from what she’s seen, but they definitely have an edge over her own people’s tech. Still, technology is not a linear business. There will be strengths and weaknesses on all sides, even with everyone clinging to the shoulders of antique human giants.
Ever since Portia last came out from the freezers, she has been bothering Kern for updates, regularly asking: Are we nearly there yet? so excited she is skittering all about the crew compartment, floor, walls and ceiling. It is a particularly Portiid state, born from a hunting species that evolved a society where aggressive behaviour has to be kept in check. When the moment for action comes, she will be stillness personified if she needs to be. Right now, her deep ancestral instincts are telling her to Do something! and so she runs about the available space, and stops, and runs, and stops, playing with the level of oxygen and sugars inside her to keep her frustrations in check.
Kern’s long-range scanning shows new alien ships summoned in to wait for them at the rendezvous point, already doing . . . something. The scanners are uncertain at this range, but it is possible that one of them is altering shape or splitting in two, which suggests some interesting convergences with Portiid engineering.
Kern has also taken some better readings on the planet, distant though it is, and come up with a battery of interesting findings. The signal density suggests a very technologically active society, but the good doctor’s analysis is that such a volume of signals does not support the idea of a densely-populated world reliant on radio transmissions. Kern’s comparison with the world named after her, for example, indicates that if Portiid communication was still primarily radio-based, signals would exceed what she is detecting by a factor of ten. Of course, the bulk of modern Portiid chatter is not sent over the airwaves but instead by fibre optics and similar closed systems, meaning Kern’s World is quite a quiet place to any alien listening stations. The crew have formulated a range of mostly unsupported theories to throw evidence at. Is there just a small population? Is radio rationed or restricted to a certain class (as it was through much of Portiid history for religious-social reasons)? Perhaps the world throngs with non-broadcast technology and there is simply a large orbital presence relying on radio transmissions. That is Portia’s suggestion, which she feels best fits the observed facts.
Viola counters with Perhaps they’re just alien, which is not, to Portia’s mind, very helpful. Viola has taken Bianca’s death badly – the two of them had been born to the same peer house, had known each other almost from the moment they hatched. Portiids do not have the close family bond Humans are so dependent on, but kindred minds of long association form a tight-knit sorority – siblinghood, Portia corrects herself, a wave of her palps approximating a rolling of the eyes – where the loss of a colleague leaves a gap in the network, a hole that drags the world out of shape with its absence. And so if Viola’s state of mind is not exactly like Human grief, it is still a mournful acknowledgement that the world of today is at variance with the world of yesterday, and today is not the richer for it.
Still fidgety, Portia pages through the data Kern is accumulating about the planet. Even at this distance, considerable orbital scaffolding is in evidence; not quite the ring about the world that Portia’s home sports, with its geosynchronous web strung out from dozens of elevator cables, but a great clutter of what might be space stations or what might be debris. Sporadic energy signatures suggest either some particular flashy industry or perhaps large-scale weapons discharge. Past all that, the actual planet has a curious signature that Kern can only explain with the idea of an almost entirely liquid surface. At that distance from the sun, this is most likely water, Portia knows.