Michael now stood on a nexus of scaffolds; five radiated away from this spot and ladders and odd spiral poles rose up from the railing. In the nearby air tiny black flecks— insects? — danced distractingly.
"One thing we do know," said Herat. "The autotrophs like a temperature of about a hundred Celsius, at high pressure. Their atmosphere is mostly compressed steam with a bit of nitrogen in it. Look— you can see the air ripple with the heat."
Michael looked about for some sign of the autotrophs. He saw things moving— strange, looping tetrahedrons that rolled to and fro, sometimes stopping to balance on two legs while the other two grabbed some piece of machinery or piping and passed it off to the spidery metal robots that swarmed over the scaffolds. At least he assumed they were robots.
"Are those the autotrophs?" he asked, pointing to the distant tripod shapes.
The guide simply gestured for them to follow. He headed out along one of the narrower catwalks, which passed over the dark pit of the water shaft.
Looking out, Michael could now see a few glassed-in platforms suspended over the shaft. One of them was a broad dome joined to the catwalk by an ordinary looking airlock. There were what looked like beds inside this dome and green forms on many of them. He did a double take and realized he was looking at almost a hundred green men and women, apparently asleep in the blazing light.
"We have provided an interface to the autotroph information net," said the green man. "You will use that to ask your questions." He pointed and Michael, following his gaze, at first could not see what he was pointing at. There was a thing like an inscape terminal, but it was covered with a dense crawling carpet of bugs.
Then he got it. The autotroph AI was a cloud of black metal beads, each about the size of a bee. They had wings and were distributed throughout the vast space of the enclave. Here, though, the green people had built a device to attract them. So were they going to speak to the autotrophs through this device— or only to it?
"Visitors," said a voice in Michael's earphone. It seemed human, male, nondescript. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that this was probably the voice of an AI, not that of an autotroph.
"Hello," continued the voice. "We are with you now."
"Who are you?" asked Herat. "Who speaks? The autotrophs? Or their agent?"
"I am the interface with God," said the voice.
Herat sent Michael one of his patented long-suffering glances.
"Why did you ask us to come here in person?" asked Herat. "We know we could have just transmitted you the text we wish you to translate."
"Our outside interface is untrustworthy," said the voice.
"Outside interface… you mean Arless and his people?"
"Yes. This information is not for them."
"Why not?" asked Herat.
The AI did not answer.
BY THE TIME Herat's investigations took them to Dis, Michael had come to believe he was an old hand when it came to aliens. True, he'd never met a live one, but for years he and the professor had rooted through the debris left by civilizations that had preceded humanity into space. So when he heard they were going to Dis, he was interested— but not apprehensive.
On the morning of their arrival he and Herat had ridden an elevator up from the spin-section of the opulent research ship they had brought and Michael suited up in freefall. He had seen photos of Dis during the trip out, but these were muddy and dark and he really didn't know what to expect. As the airlock opened, he found himself staring at a landscape— complete with hills, forests, and buildings— floodlit by their ship and hanging perpendicular to him like a wall. Everything was magically clear, as if this were a model suspended a meter away. He resisted the urge to reach out; he knew what he was seeing was kilometers away.
They jetted over and as they flew Michael began to feel a presentiment— an inkling that he should have prepared himself better for this place. The ruined landscape— large patches of which had drifted off into space leaving a mesh of girders behind— stretched off into darkness in every direction. He struggled to retain his impression that it was across from him, not down, but failed. In an instant he found himself descending, like some kind of hesitant angel, onto what appeared to be a frozen circle of Hell.
After that experience he was more judicious in his preparations for encountering the alien. He thought he'd done pretty well at Jentry's Envy. But since he had not expected to meet autotrophs here at a human world, he had not prepared himself for coming out here. The autotroph compound was nothing like Dis; it was, if anything, too inhabited. But as they stood next to the buzzing cloud that was the autotroph's artificial intelligence, he found himself struggling to keep his attention focused on the matter at hand.
The green people's AI was silent. They had shown it the Chicxulub writing and now it was querying the autotroph database. Apparently, there were several levels of connotation to Chicxulub writing. It wasn't simply a matter of surface meaning and implication; each word in effect punned off its neighbors and contained multiple allusions. Also, the primary physical metaphors of Chicxulub were inhuman: a metaphor using a galvanic proximity sense as its basis couldn't be simply converted into a visual or tactile equivalent. The AI might be laboriously changing its own mind into something like a Chicxulub/human hybrid. For a few minutes, it would become alien not only to Michael and Herat, but to its own creators.
Michael's attention kept drifting away from it to the chaos all around them. He had no doubt this was the equivalent of a bustling human town and he supposed such a place would look just as incomprehensible to the autotrophs. But he couldn't even tell which things were the aliens and which were machines or helper species.
There were things like big birds here. They circled up near the intense lights, above the flower. Were those the autotrophs? He'd noticed hundreds of odd oval pods, which hung from the inside folds of the red material. Most were still, but one or two thrashed like flies caught in a spider's web. The motion was unsettling; though he knew the autotrophs did not devour one another, or indeed anything living, he had to look away from those twitching bodies.
One of the tripod things wheeled by. It was really just four legs joined at a central pod; each leg was as loose as a tentacle and it tended to roll along on three while holding the fourth up like an attentive head. The tripod that passed stood a good three meters high. It didn't turn its leg/head as it went by and Michael didn't turn to watch it go; he knew it was still moving away because the catwalk bounced slightly with its movements.
"I have several translations," said the AI abruptly. Michael looked at the Herat, who grinned.
"Are they all true, or is one better than the others?" Herat asked the cloud. To one side, their guide had crossed his arms and was looking the other way.
"You must decide," said the bug-covered terminal. "I do not have the context to know.
"These are some translations into terms you may understand. Chicxulub language is self-modifying, so the best translation is one that uses what you call puns to convey the meaning:
"Self-containered: to evert, encome-pass farship's precreative behestination. Your orgasmasher's detournement is presended."
Michael and Herat exchanged glances.
"The Chicxulub were funny guys," said Herat after a moment.
"There is another translation that shows the allusive layer of the message," said the AI. "It could be translated into any number of human mythologies. This one is Greco-Roman:
"Daughter of Saturn, you may escape your devouring father's belly by wielding the bright sword that we have forged for you."