Bram said, “I thought you’d stay here and—”
“What?” Jao gave a roar of outrage. “Who’s going to operate the equipment? I’ve rigged up a computer signboard. I’ve programmed it with an image library and everything.”
“All right, all right,” Bram said hastily. “I wish we had a linguist.”
“They’ve all gone back to the tree with their tons of books and micromedia in their own pet languages. What do we need a linguist for, anyway? Languages all either have a grammar more or less like Inglex, or they don’t, like Chin-pin-yin. And I remember my childhood Chin-pin-yin as well as anybody. And when it comes to nonhuman speech, all us old-timers have a smattering of the Small Language.” He squinted at Bram. “And one of us, if memory serves, even has a smattering of the Great Language.”
“There won’t be anything like that from any kind of terrestrial stock,” Bram said.
Jao turned back to his console. “Trist’s getting more radio traffic between the stick ship and that camp out yonder. Want to hear it?”
He turned up the volume, and a series of rapid, hard clicks came out of the speaker, like twenty people snapping their fingers as fast as they could.
“When did they switch from modulated polarized light to radio?” Ame asked.
“At about half a million miles. But Trist’s analyzed the signals. He thinks they simply reproduce the patterns of the polarized light version—same positional code on a grid. He still hasn’t figured out how the grid is organized, though. One thing’s for sure—it isn’t any simple up-and-down-and-across raster. Trist thinks it’s irregular.” Jao looked troubled. “But that’s crazy.”
Bram listened to the snapping sounds for a while. “Maybe their receiving equipment is better than my ear,” he said, “but it sounds as if those noises are coming on. top of each other—overlapping. How can they extract an information-beating signal out of that?”
“Trist’s taken the signals apart. He says he thinks they’re organically produced.”
Ame scrunched up her features. “It’s a language, then. A language where sounds have visual coordinates.”
“I don’t understand,” Bram said.
“Bram-tsu, our group’s done a lot of work on sensory impressions and perception,” Ame said. “Back during the years when we were trying to build up the new sciences. Doc Pol helped us with the medical aspects.”
“That old curmudgeon!” Jao exclaimed. “I thought he didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t tap, prod, or take a urine sample from.”
“He says polysenses are very common among human beings—much commoner than is believed. People who hear sounds as smells, for example, or who taste colors.”
“Crossed wires,” Bram said.
“No, it isn’t just that. It’s normal in all of us to some extent.”
Bram thought it over. “Like Edard reading an orchestral score and hearing the music.”
“Something like that.”
“Or Mim swearing that different keys have different textures—G-major being hard and brittle, D-flat soft and velvety. She had an argument with Ang about it. Ang said the only difference between keys is that they’re higher or lower.”
“Colors!” Jao said suddenly. “Numbers have different. colors. That’s how I remember them. Equations transform the colors. I thought everybody saw numbers that way.”
“Drugs will induce that kind of cross talk sometimes,” Ame said. “Your nervous system just happens to work that way naturally.”
Jao grinned. “Hey, Ame, what if you see flashing lights when you bump your elbow?”
“What about it?”
“Me, I get a pain in my elbow when I see flashing lights.”
Bram cut through the clowning. “So our new neighbors have a neural hookup between the sounds of their language and some sort of visual grid?”
“And they see the different planes of polarized light, don’t forget that.”
“What kind of eyes must they have?” he wondered.
“Nothing like ours. Or the longfoots. Or the Cuddlies. Or any other kind of mammalian life we know about.” She hesitated. “They may not have a continuous field of vision. They may see things as a mosaic.”
It was a very strange thought. “What would the world look like to them?” Bram wondered aloud.
“We’ll have to ask them, won’t we?”
Bram turned his attention to Jao’s screen. Jao was fiddling with images. He had made a sort of netlike structure out of green lines. The net kept stretching itself out of shape and changing the relationships between its warp and woof. It also kept trying to bend itself around various abstract three-dimensional shapes.
The snaps and clicks kept pouring from the loudspeaker. Bram could see that each one generated an orange dot within the distorted squares of the net. The showers of dots kept trying to arrange themselves into patterns within the ever-changing net.
“Are we still trying to get their attention on the frequency they use?” Bram asked.
“Yar, I’ve got a loop going on the transmitter. Trist is trying to raise their ship with the same program. Imitating their grid without knowing the coordinates is gobbledygook, but they still should extract a pattern.”
Bram shook his head. “I thought they might have tried to contact us by now. The way they set down so abruptly after their flyover of our camp.”
“We’re keeping watch from a little way up the moonrope,” Jao said, “Some volunteers set up a telescope station on top of the stalled moon car. They’ll let us know right away if anything starts moving in our direction.” He adjusted a dial. “But I don’t think they’re coming. It’s going to be up to us.”
Jorv showed up a few minutes later, impatient to start. He wore a vacuum suit with the helmet tucked under his arm. “I’ve been suited up for an hour,” he said. “When do we go?”
“Not for a couple of hours,” Bram said. “They’re getting the walkers wound up and rounding up supplies and equipment. And some of our people need time to get ready.”
That was Heln. She was putting together her material on ants, bees, beavers, wolves, rats, apes, elephants, antelopes-all the vanished animals of Earth that had lived in groups. If intelligence had evolved from any of them, their descendants would resemble them as little as man resembled the tree shrew. Heln wanted to be prepared to spot basic characteristics and extrapolate from them.
“Why delay?” Jorv said pugnaciously. “Pick up a few extra air bottles and get going.”
“Don’t you want time to get organized?” Bram countered. Jorv had nothing with him, not even a camera or a pad to take notes on.
“What for? Get a look at them, I say. Plow through the data afterward.”
Ame came around and put a hand on Jorv’s arm. “It’s not just a case of observing them, Jorv,” she said. “We’ll work from your opinions—but we have to try to communicate with them, too.”
“Why don’t you meet us at the vehicle air lock in, say, two hours,” Bram said.
Jorv walked out, shaking his head and muttering.
Bram helped Jao pack up his computer signboard and image library, while Ame went to give Heln a hand and to collect Shira, her paleobiologist colleague. Heln turned out to be a small, pert redhead, loaded down with a portable reader, cartridges, pad and easel, recorder, and other equipment.
When they arrived at the walker stables, Bram saw that only two walkers were equipped and ready for him, not the three he had arranged for.
“Where’s the other vehicle?” he asked the ostler, a squat, muscular man who was strapping a spare air tank on one of his charges.