Is currently in orbit about the planet’s moon. It appears to be willing to take its cue from the vessel accompanying us. For now. As we have seen, these creatures are inconstant.
Viola looms at Fabian’s side, about to shoulder him out of the way, but then reconsidering, her stance indicating a strainedly polite request to take the comms console. Fabian surrenders it with equal professionalism.
What is the cause of their hostility? Viola sends.
Viola? There is precious little difference to the flat transmission, but Portia has doubtless adjusted her body language to speak female to female. There’s an infection agent present on the planet you’ve come down on. The molluscs are terrified of it. Their whole planet is infested with it and they don’t want it getting anywhere else. Which complicates lifting you from the planet and retrieving our hosts’ science records or whatever they are after.
Viola gives a shivery little stamping of feet, a wordless expression of excitement and inspiration. Portia, I— We have been working on the station transmission. We have come to a good understanding of that agent. It is a great deal more than you think. It is . . . a remarkable discovery.
I’ve seen it at work. It scares me too, Portia tells her flatly, she who is most noted for her recklessness.
Portia, you have a communications channel to the molluscs? Viola presses.
Thanks to Helena we do. It is not precise, but we can transmit moderately complex ideas some of the time.
Viola’s legs brace, as though she is about to make a very risky leap. Then we have leverage. We have the Lante account, and we can work through it freely here. If they have an enemy, we can help them understand it. Perhaps we can even start them towards containing it, disrupting it, anything like that. But they need us. They need us off this planet and safe and cooperating willingly with them. Can you tell them that?
I can tell the science faction, Portia replies uncertainly. If we can make them understand, they can tell the war faction, but I don’t know if it will help.
Try, Viola directs her. It’s the only purchase we have on them.
Viola’s technical Understandings make her best suited to the work with the Lightfoot’s systems, which are constantly threatening them with power loss, life-support malfunction, failure of the food fabricators. Mired in this short-term but essential work she has passed the Lante archive to Fabian, telling him to get to grips with the zoological miscellanea transmitted by the station, or by the thing on the station. Having seen what he saw down in the fake city, Fabian would be absolutely in agreement with her even without the threat of spaceborne destruction and is sifting through the material as best he can, trying to build a picture of an alien biosphere using a source that for all he knows is nine-tenths fiction.
Some sections are nonsense, just text arranged like Old Empire words but without meaning, an illiterate’s copy. Some sections seem to mesh neatly with the way Fabian would expect an ancient human scientist to write – theirs was a ritualistic and formal presentation he has always found lacking in effect, and the Portiids are very familiar with it because Avrana Kern was one of that class, and still lapses into the idiom on occasion. And then there are the other sections, the later sections as far as he can tell. In fact, Fabian is forming a pattern in his mind, as Portiids and humans will do, left to their own devices. He has seen the ancient, curated images from the Old Empire mission to this forsaken world. There was a woman named Lante in them, and she was infected, as were they all. Infected and struck down by her commander, but who knows what happened after Baltiel’s viewpoint moved on?
And Fabian orders the entries based on Old Empire dating methods and best guess, and finds the anatomy of a transformation in which human intelligence is overwhelmed, dissolved into frothing chaos and then reconstituted like a metamorphosing insect, until something emerges that takes up the diary and tries to do science without understanding what science is or what words are. But eventually it learned, and the last few entries are almost lost in the noise because Fabian initially nests them within the early documents, so lucid do they seem.
At last, his chronology complete, he scurries up the wall and looks down on the screen where it is all laid out and tries to consider just what the implications are of a woman who died and was made again – and perhaps again and again – but never seemed to acknowledge or realize the fact. He reads of the life of Nod, as Lante called this planet. He reads of radial symmetry, hydrostatic skeletons and all the other ways that Lante translated the alien into biological concepts fit for a human scientist. And the heredity, owing nothing to DNA, information recorded in fine detail in the arrangements of atoms on the inside of membranes, vastly more energy efficient than Earth chromosomes, so that the inheritable material in any cell-analogue of, say, one of those sunbathing starfish takes up less than 0.1 per cent of the space occupied by the genes of an average Portiid or human cell. Except this is where something has gone wrong – either with the record or with evolution – because Lante, in her latter days, is fascinated by a species where that is not true at all, where the inherited instructions passed on to fleeting new generations seem ridiculously abundant.
Fabian thinks this is just an example of Lante no longer being a rational operator, but Viola rebukes him when he says so.
Understandings, she tells him. This is what I wanted in the first place. These are their Understandings. She takes time out from repairs for a few rough calculations on just how much data might be contained in such a trove of genetic code, and essentially runs out of numbers. Every cell a vast archive, but for what, for why?
Days and nights have gone by during all this work, and they remain undestroyed – Helena and Portia staving off the inevitable, resetting the hourglass on the hour. The Lightfoot crew are low on food and the water recycler is showing alarming signs of wear. Zaine sleeps a lot but is plainly suffering when awake. The air composition is slowly shifting, for all Viola can do to fix the scrubbers. And yes, there is a breathable atmosphere out there, but there are other things out there, too. Fabian sent the flying drone high for some longer-range reconnaissance. The land around them is inscribed with fragments of city, repeated over and over. Too high to see any shambling denizens, but something carved out those ready-made ruins.
And now it is night, and although Portiids see better in the dark, they are daytime creatures like humans are, visual first and foremost, and this is an alien night filled with all manner of monsters.
Fabian stares at Lante’s rambling, bizarre account and parts of him are trying to spin conclusions that the rest of him doesn’t like at all. In his head is a shambling figure slowly ascending the altiplano. He dreads a knock at the door.
Fabian makes his final report to Viola. They have the best picture they can of how life works on the planet they are stranded on, and in particular one specific part of that life.
You were right, after all, Fabian concedes. Understandings, here. Not as we have them, but something analogous.
Convergent evolution, Viola decides. Perhaps it is something that any life would attain, eventually.
Fabian is tired enough and unsettled enough to stamp out a sharp answer. Except we did not evolve it, not really. It is a part of the virus the humans used to ‘uplift’ our forebears. Earth life never developed such a facility. This is the motherlode, here. We are . . . artificial pretenders to it.