There are aquatic intelligent species on Kern’s World. A species of crustacean has long had diplomatic relations with the Portiids, and limited trade and exchange of technology. The spiders do not venture beneath the water much, though, and the ocean-bound culture seems destined to remain there, their technology lagging behind the Portiids, and the horizons of their ambition forever ending at the surface. Aquatic cultures are not good candidates for high technology, and most especially not for spacefaring. That, at least, is Portiid received wisdom on the subject.
Kern agrees with such wisdom in principle. At the same time she has been drawing up calculations about mass, momentum and inertia as applied to the alien ships, and finding neat solutions to her equations only if the huge vessels were filled with water – and completely filled, mind you, with no gaps for air or the sloshing would burst any kind of hull Kern can conceive of. And there was that icy, ruptured wreck they came across on their approach; surely that would have been just such a ship that had encountered some calamity and opened to the freezing void of space, gouting its life’s blood before the remnants froze solid.
There is much debate on the possibilities and Portia keeps a couple of idle legs in the conversation just in case anything particularly edifying is said. With three other feet she asks Helena how an aquatic species might communicate.
We’ve seen how, Helena tells her, deep in the strands of her own work as she fights with the aliens’ communications. Visually, at least in part. Perhaps infrasound. Maybe there are whole extra channels we’ve not picked up, and all this is meaningless. She sounds frustrated, but Portia knows her as well as one of her kind can ever know a Human. Helena has a patience with long, complex tasks that Portia finds quite spiderlike. In her more honest moments Portia would admit it is a facility she herself often lacks. She jumps without a line, as the saying goes, all too often. But then the spiders recognize that to prosper, a colony needs a good balance of temerity and caution.
I see what they have done now, announces Kern, and the screens shift to show new images. Knotlike tangles of legends spring up around the images as Kern explains. The largest waiting ship is now considerably reduced in size, and its mass has contributed to a new globe, that may be either protected by the same flexible membrane, or possibly by something entirely beyond Portiid technology: a field of pure electromagnetic energy. Another ship has docked with this transparent globe, an organic-looking umbilical projecting into it as the two spheres gently orbit one another. The other ships are standing off, some thousands of kilometres away.
I have received some fresh transmissions. Helena is considering them, but they include one clear section that, I think, is unmistakable. It is a docking authorization code that I recognize from my own time. It is, therefore, an invitation. Helena?
I concur, Helena taps out absently, then speaks the sentiment for Meshner and Zaine.
Portia hunches, feeling a frisson of fear at the thought. A strange arena for a first contact: a sphere of water held impossibly in the vacuum of space, an inimical medium for a Human, more so for a Portiid. A challenge, therefore.
I will go, she stamps out emphatically, getting in before some other daredevil can steal her thunder. I will meet with them.
She feels Helena’s hand on her back.
I had better go, too, her Human says. I think I have some first principles of their language worked out.
***
The Lightfoot has been decelerating for some days now, though not for as long as the other alien ships, the ones still far behind them, which are slow to start and just as slow to stop.
The water, of course, Fabian suggests. He waits for a challenge from the females, but right now they are either content to listen or have other things on their minds. They will have hard limits on speed gain and loss, colossal momentum and inertia problems, and the energy required! He finishes his speech with a half-threat gesture to emphasize the martial nature of their opposite numbers.
Someone has taken on a few new Understandings, Portia observes drily, suggesting that Fabian’s newfound authority is very much standing on the backs of (female) giants. Helena absently flicks her a cautionary gesture with one thumb and the spider responds with a little irritated twitch of her palps. Yes, yes, he’s right of course. However he came by it. Portiid genius is in the interpretation and application, not the knowing; she can’t really deny the male his moment.
Viola is unhappy about entering onto ‘enemy’ ground for any kind of meeting. Kern is, too, but everyone else decides in favour of it. Portiids are not good at chains of command. There is no clear successor to Bianca because they tend to think in terms of branches and networks rather than straight lines. Authority amongst them comes down to nebulous levels of influence and Viola is not well-liked enough to carry the argument. Kern herself would be a tyrannical autocrat if anyone let her, Helena suspects, but her long history of negotiation with the Portiids led in different directions, with her reliant on them, less a matriarchal god figure, in the end, than a conjured demon that has grown used to the captivity of its magic circle. Although the Kern instances vary, Helena knows.
‘So tell me.’ Kern’s voice makes her jump with its closeness, for all the computer hybrid can speak from any point around the crew quarters. ‘How are your efforts at communication doing? Because you don’t have time for peer review and editing.’
Helena grimaces. ‘I have a working system, downloaded to my implants and a slate. I can produce signals that are at least superficially similar to their visual data, and I’ve found some . . . tenuous correlations between what we see and the technical data stream paired with it – as well as the simpler emotional content we already had.’
‘Hmmm.’ Kern’s human voice is doubting, and probably she only makes the noise to transmit that doubt. ‘I was not able to find any correlation between the data sets. Show me your working.’
Helena does so, because that sort of snappish demand is just how Kern is – a less than charming personality that every Human and Portiid on Kern’s World has grown quite used to. She flags up the correspondences, which are not any kind of continuous linkages, but points where certain key signifiers in the visual stream – colour-choice, wavelength spread, the physical shapes of objects – always seem to prompt particular responses, as though the visual stream is off on its own for most of the time but comes back down to check in with its sibling channel and . . .
‘Your conclusions, please?’ Kern prompts her, because the data she has provided is intricate but goes nowhere. ‘What is this for?’
‘To give instructions, perhaps. Or take on information,’ Helena explains. ‘But probably the former, because you can see this precedes a lot of the physical response we’ve seen in them, especially the fighting. I’m wondering if we’re dealing with more than one species working closely together, or a species and a machine system, like Viola was saying.’
‘And?’
‘Working out from that, I can see certain visual signals lead to certain types of action. I’ve classified these . . .’ More data flagged up; Kern can search the whole database but this saves her computational power, which Helena knows she appreciates. ‘I can’t exactly chat to them about the weather but I can get as far as We come in peace. And on the technical stream side I have more I can say, but I suspect, without a visual stream, they may not take it on board, or maybe whoever does understand what I’m saying isn’t in a position to call the shots . . .?’