“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not important. But it occurred to me that I had never heard a raw Dancer message. Since it’s something I haven’t tried, and everything we have tried hasn’t helped…”
“That makes at least as much sense as anything else about the Dancers,” Charban said. “I will warn you that some of the sounds the Dancers make probably could not be rendered by humans. Here. See this command that says ‘origin’? That means the same as original. And this command will direct the sound to you. That brings up a window with volume controls and that sort of thing.”
“Thank you, General.”
As Jamenson leaned close to the equipment, listening intently, Charban looked back at Geary. “I asked how the Dancers had gotten here. The reply was ‘we traveled.’ How did you travel? ‘By ship.’”
“They have to be messing with us,” Desjani said. “They’re on those ships laughing as they think about us trying to understand those messages.”
“What does it sound like when a Dancer laughs?” Geary wondered, thinking of those wolf-spider faces. “Did you ask them about Unity Alternate?”
“I asked them about the many stars,” Charban said. “They said, ‘are you watching?’ I said yes. They said ‘good.’”
The resulting extended silence was broken by Jamenson. “They sound different,” she said, not like someone who has discovered something but as if she had no idea what she had found.
“What sounds different?” Charban asked her.
“The Dancer messages.” Jamenson turned a puzzled look on the other three. “When I listen to the first message they send us each time, when they start a conversation, it’s sort of long, and it sounds… it sounds sort of musical.”
“The sounds used in the Dancer language—” Charban began.
“No, General. Excuse me. It’s not that. Those opening messages have a sort of bounce to them, a feeling of…” Jamenson struggled for the right word. “Of someone saying a song.”
“Or a poem?” Desjani asked.
“Maybe, Captain. But then after we answer, they answer, and their messages are, um, flat.”
“Flat?” Geary asked.
“Yes, sir. Oh, listen for yourselves. You’ll see.”
Charban, not bothering to hide his skepticism, leaned over and tapped a command. “Go ahead and play them. We’ll all hear now.”
Geary concentrated as the first Dancer message played back, the sounds strange to human throats echoing softly in the room. “You’re right, Lieutenant. There is a sort of bounce to it. Like a…”
“A spoken-word musical instrument?” Desjani said, intrigued.
“And then,” Jamenson said, “here’s their response to our reply.”
The same sort of sounds could be heard, but this time even though they sounded the same, they felt different. “Flat,” Geary said. “I see what you mean, Lieutenant. But what does that mean?”
Charban was frowning in thought. “If they sang to us to start a conversation… there are animals that do that, right?”
“Birds,” Desjani said. “Insects, some mammals, those things on that planet in Kostel Star System. They sing to identify each other, to pass information, for mating—”
“I sincerely hope that’s not why the Dancers would be singing to us,” Charban said.
“Could they be songs?” Jamenson asked. “Songs without music?” She played one of the opening messages again.
Geary listened as the strange tones of Dancer speech once more filled the conference room, the pitch of the words merging, blending, and soaring. “It must mean something. Something that the Dancers’ own translation software isn’t picking up.”
“Why wouldn’t the Dancer software reflect it if it was important?” Desjani asked. “Because it seemed obvious to them?” she answered herself.
“Maybe,” Charban said, his expression shifting rapidly. “We do that all the time, assuming that something very basic doesn’t have to be explained because it is so basic that we believe everyone will just know about it. Are they… ? Could the Dancers be wanting us to sing back to them?”
“Like birds,” Jamenson said. “As the Captain said. One gives a call, and the other responds, so they know who each other is, and then they sing back and forth. But if you don’t respond with a song or a whistle, they don’t respond the same way.”
“That is not a bird,” Desjani said, pointing to the image of a Dancer.
“But what if that’s the problem, Captain? What if we’re looking at them and thinking ‘spider,’ and ‘wolf,’ and ‘yuck,’ because that’s what they look like to us? And we’re still subconsciously basing our assumptions about how they act and talk by how they look to us? But why should they have patterns of behavior that match the images we’re seeing? They’re alien.”
Charban was shaking his head in obvious dismay. “No matter how hard I tried, I kept seeing those images. You are absolutely right, Lieutenant. If the Dancers had looked catlike, I would have assumed they thought and acted and communicated like cats. And if instead they thought like horses, it would have messed everything up.”
“They want us to sing to them?” Desjani asked skeptically. “But there’s no music.”
“We can try,” Lieutenant Jamenson said. “I mean, not really a song maybe, but cast a message with rhythm and scales and—”
“Patterns,” Charban said. “That’s what songs do. They establish patterns of sound, patterns of words. Music. That’s described in terms of mathematics and proportions between scales.”
“Poems do patterns as well, right?” Jamenson added. “Some poems, anyway.”
“And we know how important patterns are to the Dancers! Of course their methods of communication would reflect that! Maybe it’s a sort of verbal handshake! ‘Hi, I’m intelligent and want to talk about intelligent things!’ ‘Hi, I am also intelligent and want to talk about intelligent things, too!’ We have to try this. Do you have any singers in your fleet, Admiral?” Charban asked.
Geary looked at Desjani, who made the universal human gesture of ignorance. “There must be some,” she said. “None of my officers, judging from their efforts during our occasional karaoke nights.”
“I didn’t know you had karaoke nights on Dauntless,” Geary said.
“If you heard my lieutenants and ensigns trying to sing, you’d know why it’s been a while since we held one,” Desjani said. “You can send out a message to all of the ships in the fleet, and I can have my crew checked to see if any claim singing talent—”
“I’d prefer not to spend a long time searching for singers before we can test this idea,” Geary said.
“Please don’t look at me,” Jamenson said. “If you put enough whiskey down me, I sometimes try to sing, but it’s the sort of sounds that would make any self-respecting alien within a hundred light-years run for home. How about poets? Maybe poems would work. Lieutenant Iger does haiku.”
Everyone looked at her.
“Lieutenant Iger does haiku?” Geary finally asked. Somehow, the image of the serious, straightforward intelligence officer didn’t fit such a thing.
“Yes, sir. That’s a kind of poem. They’re good,” Jamenson added. “Lieutenant Iger’s haiku, I mean. He really has a poetic soul. I think.”
“Lieutenant Iger?” Desjani asked in disbelieving tones.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Fine.” Desjani sighed. “Admiral, I recommend we get our intelligence officer up here to see if he can craft lovely poems for the singing spider wolves.”
Summoned on the double, Lieutenant Iger showed up at the conference room slightly out of breath. His eyes first fell upon Lieutenant Jamenson and her bright green hair, producing a reflexive smile that vanished as soon as Iger realized who else was present. Turning his usual sober and studious expression on Geary, Iger saluted. “You sent for me, sir?”