So ended my first night on the saurian Earth.
12
The Planetary Assembly met in a circular room in the centre of the Assembly building. There was no furniture, just a spiral ramp winding down to a space in the centre. The saurians ambled in, apparently in a random order, filling up the ramp from the bottom. There was no obvious focal point, no “chair” for the Convenor. I realised that with the communication being essentially mental, physical location was unimportant to them. The Convenor had explained that the layout in the surprisingly small room was due to the fact that they still liked to see each other when communicating, since body patterns were often used to emphasise points in debate. I had a good view of all of them, since they had placed me in a swivel chair, right in the centre of the open space in the middle of the room.
When they were all ready (and mostly trying not to stare at me too obviously), the Convenor sent out a calling-to-order signal and the mental and visual hubbub died down. I was formally greeted as the first visitor from a human Earth, a sentiment mentally echoed by the Assembly; I made some suitable response which was translated by the Convenor. She then kicked off the debate by raising the issue of how to make best use of the opportunities presented by the slider machine.
What followed was frankly bewildering. The subtle and ever-shifting pattern of mind-links formed a metal weave throughout the room, with the flickering kaleidoscope of their skins forming a further level of complexity. They were not thinking in English, of course, so I was limited to picking up moods plus those thoughts which were visual or conceptual. Rather like the pictograms, they often used images for certain concepts – sometimes the meaning was clear, sometimes not; they had obviously developed a kind of mental shorthand of their own which was almost impossible for me to follow. A quick flash of a human figure superimposed against a mushroom cloud was clear enough, and not very promising, but what was I to make of an image of a number of saurians swimming together in formation? It was presumably a reference to some event in their collective memory which had meaning for them. So while I understood a few odd snatches I was generally lost in the roar of communication between these powerful, alien minds. I had thought them slow and deliberate, but when a hundred of the best minds of the planet – who had known each other very well for a long time – bent their attention to debate a subject, the speed of the interchanges left me floundering. I realised that in all of communications with saurians they must have slowed down and clarified their meanings for me, as if I were a very young child.
After a while they stopped for refreshment and I went outside to collapse on the turf, my head aching. One of the grazers wandered over and stared at me curiously, then retreated when the Convenor appeared.
‘I’m sorry for that, I realise it can have meant little to you, but it was important for them to see you. Why don’t you sit out the rest of the session and I’ll brief you this evening. Tertia has something she wants to show you.’
She went back into the Assembly building and Tertia appeared on cue. Who needs mobile phones, I thought.
‘Tough going, was it?’ She radiated sympathy. ‘I have an inkling of what you feel. I observed a session once, and I had trouble following it. Never mind, I have a trip I think you’ll enjoy.’
The wildlife park was only a short hop away, but I enjoyed the jog alongside Tertia. There was no entrance as such, or even any visible enclosures; Tertia explained that the animals were kept in defined areas by an electrical field which reacted with tags implanted under the skin and wired into their nervous systems. This sent a warning signal to them as they approached the boundary, which grew in intensity until they were rendered unconscious if they tried to cross it. Visitors wore headnets to tell them when they were approaching the boundary and to provide information about the animals in that enclosure. I therefore had the strange experience of walking among wild animals – some of them quite dangerous – with no physical boundary between us.
‘I hope the power doesn’t go down!’
‘You should know us better than that by now – we have triple-redundancy on all of our power systems.’
‘What if lightning knocked out the system?’
‘We don’t allow lightning to strike at random – we drain off the electrical charge before a storm can reach any sensitive areas.’
‘Ah… I should have guessed.’
The animals were indeed fascinating. No giant dinosaurs, sadly – it appeared that gigantism had ceased to provide any evolutionary advantage millions of years before, so there was nothing bigger than the size of a rhino. None of them bore any close resemblance to the fossil dinosaurs that I knew from the human Earth. Then we approached the mammalian areas. Most were small and furry, vaguely similar to the rodents I was familiar with. Some were larger, clearly members of the horse or antelope families, but still much smaller than the ones I knew. A copse provided a home for a family of monkeys; then, on the far side, what I first though was a large monkey got up and walked slowly towards me.
I stopped in shock, my pulse accelerating. It was little more than a metre tall, of slender build, and covered with fine hair. Its arms were long in proportion, with strong hands which looked suited to climbing. But it stood and walked on two legs as easily as a human, and it came close and stared at me curiously. The face was a little flatter than a monkey’s, and its mental signature was noticeably more complex. This was no monkey or ape, I realised with a sense of dizziness – it was a hominin, similar to the precursors of mankind. The names slipped through my mind, labels tentatively attached by a humanity struggling to make sense of its origins from fragmentary and ambiguous remains; australopithecus, or an early member of the homo genus such as habilis or erectus; my knowledge was not specialised enough to determine the closest match. I looked down into its dark eyes, and as it looked back I felt a deep but unformed sadness, an aching gulf stretching across aeons of lost opportunity. I turned and walked away, my vision blurring. There but for fortune, I thought, a minute aberration in an asteroid’s orbit.
Tertia sensed my mood, of course, and left me in peace as we went back to Laketown.
That evening the Convenor came to dinner again and summarised what had happened in the Assembly. ‘I have to say that over the last couple of years humanity has provided us with the most intense and interesting debates we have enjoyed for many millennia, since we decided to modify ourselves to achieve universal mind-linking. However, to the facts first of all. It is now clear that we cannot manufacture slider machines capable of generating holes significantly larger than the one you used. The power requirements increase as the cube of the area of the hole; or to put it another way, to increase the diameter from two to four metres would require three hundred and sixty times the power. And while we could provide that easily enough, the machinery is subtle and delicate and could not withstand any more power than we are currently pouring into it – it would be destroyed. So we cannot send through large items of machinery or other items which might speed up the process of reducing your carbon emissions and other pollutants. However, we will build many more machines which will be able to help in transporting food to famine-stricken areas.’
‘That should certainly help. Although it would only be a short-term expedient, of course. The long-term priority has to be to make communities self-sustaining.’