Where the desert met the mountains, the winds were strong; they’d had the run of the place, after all, and now these rising shelves of rock came to thwart them. The remote recorded gusting clouds of brown-red grit, dust devils, a great complex of thermals whirling upwards and carrying all sorts of fine debris into the higher atmosphere.
The camera had lost sight of the plastic bag; now it veered back into view, far closer. The remote was rising, above the peaks now, looking down. The thing – the indisputably living thing – lazily undulated its way along the line of the mountains.
‘We think it’s more than ten metres across,’ Baltiel’s voice broke in, because the remote gave little indication of scale.
It was like a jellyfish, a thing of absurdly thin layers, radial in layout, riding the winds and trailing filaments barely visible save where they shimmered in the sunlight. Following it for a long time, Baltiel pointed out that it was not simply airborne flotsam at the mercy of the elements. Some structure within it constantly trimmed its shape and dimensions as though a crew of sailors was taking in and letting out sails. The mood in the audience was that perhaps Baltiel was seeing what he wanted to see, but everyone was seeing a gigantic airborne cnidarian. Everyone saw the alien. Whatever they thought of Baltiel’s individual conclusions, the mood of the audience was forever changed, as were they.
They were the first humans to set eyes on something that had evolved on another world and owed nothing to Earth.
‘This is nothing,’ Baltiel told them, and switched to the next item in his extraterrestrial playlist.
This was one of his favourites, for pure artistry. The remote drifted through a night sky, and below the land seemed barren, rugged yet flat; this was more of the desert, but temperate uplands, a plateau approximately the size (and, by pure chance, shape) of Texas. The planet’s moon was a crescent sliver in the sky. The remote’s cameras did their best to amplify the light. The ground below had a curious texture to it, whorled with knotted clusters like closed fists, each sitting in a span of empty space away from its neighbours.
The timing was utter serendipity; the remote (under Baltiel’s guidance) was still trying to work out what it was looking at when dawn crested the edge of the world and threw out its red light. As day brightened over the plateau, the fists unclenched spirally, throwing out five branching arms whose inner surfaces were dark like pools – not the green of chlorophyll nor any other colour, they seemed more like solar cells than plants, and yet surely they were drinking in the sunlight in some exchange analogous to photosynthesis. And to do what? Their world was bounded by the plateau-top that they carpeted. Or perhaps this sessile form was merely the adult and their larvae rode the winds to be captured and consumed by vast jellyfish . . . Perhaps, perhaps, and here the best guesses of Baltiel or any of them were just spitting into the hurricane of the unknown.
Now the remote drifted over the sea, but that was a medium it was unsuited for and the water was almost completely opaque. There was something wallowing just below the surface, though – some huge round thing like a pale shadow glimmering within the inky ocean. Unable to make out more of it, the remote coasted on. Now they saw little nodules bobbing on the waves – ‘little’ meaning larger than human size, but the dark ocean was so vast that anything was dwarfed in comparison. They were translucent, veined. Baltiel thought they were immature sky-jellyfish. Perhaps, perhaps.
He showed them the poles, too – there was no land, no ice, but instead a weird sargassum of tendrils and coils and flowers, extending for hundreds of square kilometres. Everything was organized in hubs and spokes, a bizarre tessellating pattern when seen from above. The tangle seemed living but inanimate, and yet there was a constant sense of motion from beneath.
By now nobody queried the computer or tried to get round the embargo. He had them, and who can blame them? And yet he had saved the best until last.
This last sequence was where the sea met the land, shielded from the baked interior by mountains that broke the moist air and shook it down for all the rain it had to offer. Here they were on the high latitudes, still hot by Earth standards but a breath of cool air compared to the murderous tropics. The remote’s eye-view soared over a flat landscape of pools and creeks and mud, a salt marsh as far as its view could take it.
Everywhere there was life opening petals or leaves or some other alien organs to the sun, digging down roots to drag the sea-borne minerals from the salt-saturated ground. Or perhaps doing something else, some alien process without an Earth equivalent. Everything was low and stunted; the biology of this world had not produced anything that could keep a tall tree standing. Everything was blackish, with iridescent hints of blue-green or rust-red. The remote drifted lower, lenses hunting movement. Something flitted past between it and the ground, something winged and definitely not a jellyfish, pale and swift, moving quite unlike a bird, a series of staccato lunges through the air. In its wake, movement began on the ground again, the narrative of prey and aerial predator impossible to resist. There were things like spiny stones rocking into motion, making slow progress as they grazed the edge of the pools.
Baltiel ended his presentation there. They’d seen enough to know how much more there must be to see. Oh, perhaps one or two were harbouring some sneaking disappointment, brought up on a certain kind of story. Because when you went to an alien world and met the aliens, the aliens were supposed to be able to greet you. Advance science as far as you like, the human mind continued to place itself at the centre of the universe. If not to create intelligence, what was it all for? Where were the cities, the spaceports, even the abandoned ruins of an elder civilization? And yet this was all the alien life ever discovered that the human eye could make out unaided. A miracle that it had broken out of bacteria-analogues in the first place; a miracle that the result was something they could even recognize as ‘life’.
Then Baltiel called up their mission statement which was, of course (and entirely incidentally), to destroy all this and replace it with something more like home.
Senkovi watched the reactions of the crew with interest. There was no guarantee that they would see things from Baltiel’s perspective. After all, like the old films say, we came thirty-one light years from Earth to terraform planets and chew gum, and we’re all out of gum. Actually, there was gum, or at least the means to manufacture it, but that wasn’t the point.
What, after all, was the ‘type’ for a terraformer? They were hardy frontiers-people, surely, tough engineers come out to carve a home for themselves in the far reaches of humanity’s sphere of influence, like the railroad builders of old. Except that was bunk, of course. Nobody here was eking out a desperate, dangerous living to send back pennies for their families. Nor were they the colonists, destined to tough it out under an alien sky until either they or the planet surrendered to the other. When the accelerated terraforming procedures took, the terraformers themselves would be on the first ship out, leaving the planet virgin for someone else to live on. Unless they grew so in love with their handiwork that they decided to stay, against all policy and orders. And, speaking of that . . .
‘This has given me something of a quandary,’ Baltiel was saying, showing his working even though he’d already found his answer to the sum. ‘This is an unprecedented situation. Our mission briefing doesn’t cover it.’ A grimace, more calling up of records on their mind’s-eye displays or the ship’s screens for them to peruse. ‘The very first terraforming expeditions did – the in-solar ones, and the first ever out-system mission. Everyone was hopped up about extraterrestrial life. And they didn’t find even a microbe, and they were spending a whole lot of money and resources. And so it fell by the wayside for later missions. Nobody puts it in the manual any more. And it’s not as if we can call Earth for clarification and then wait sixty-two years for their thoughts on the matter. The decision’s ours.’ By which, of course, he meant ‘mine’.