“But why?” Shira asked. “It couldn’t have seen the holo as real.”
“Something in its neural circuitry reacted,” Heln said. “Something about the image almost tripped a switch.”
“But what?” Bram wondered. “The Cuddly’s size? Its movement? Its resemblance to something it is primed to react to?”
“Maybe all of that,” Heln said. “But it shows that the switch is there, ready to be tripped. And maybe after we get back and have time to study our film and data, we’ll be able to figure out how to get them to notice us.”
They kept at it until their margin of reserve air was almost gone. And then they had trouble prying Jorv away. “They’re insects, all right,” he babbled happily. “Or at least in the insect line of descent. It’s all there in the jointing of the legs—the two short basal joints, femur and tibia meeting at the knees, then the three short joints and former claws of the tarsus. I’d give my eyeteeth to see them out of their space suits.”
Bram had Jao drive Jorv back; he didn’t trust the pudgy zoologist not to return to the alien campsite. Before they entered their separate vehicles, Bram exchanged a few words with Jao.
“Did you notice there were no Cuddlies hanging around? That’s odd … there must be a few burrows in the area, and they’re such curious little beasts.”
“Huh? They’re probably just being cautious till they figure these insect-people out.”
“Heln says that maybe we’ll be able to figure out how to trip that switch in their brains after we learn why they reacted to a Cuddly image.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Maybe we won’t want to.”
It was hard for Bram to keep the curious from sneaking out to the insect-people’s base camp. “Not until we know more,” he insisted. “The specialists are working on it. We don’t want to take the chance of stirring them up till we have some chance of communicating with them.”
In the meantime, Yggdrasil was drifting inexorably farther away. Smeth called several times a day to display fits of ill temper.
“We were supposed to leave this system within two Tendays from now. Jun Davd’s got our course worked out for that window, and my black gang’s warming up the fusion drive. We’re halfway through our checklist. We’ve already got a starter ball of deuterium slush in the throat of the scoop, and it’s evaporating with every second that goes by.” His words became a wail. “And where’s Ame? She was supposed to be back here days ago! The twins are acting up, and I don’t have time to handle them by myself.”
“I’m sorry,” Bram said. “I couldn’t get Ame to leave now if I tried.”
“Well, it’s not every day you run into a new intelligent life form,” Smeth said grudgingly.
“I can’t get anyone else to leave, either,” Bram told him. “We may have to change our plans. We can’t leave this system without knowing more about what’s waiting for us at Sol. We may not own it anymore—not if these are the new inheritors.”
“If we don’t pack up and go soon, Yggdrasil will have to make another circuit. It would use up our whole starter ball. We could be delayed another year.”
Bram broke it to him gently. “I think that’s what it may take. We’re going to have to put it to a vote.”
“Don’t say that! Jun Davd spends all his time looking at the pictures and data you sent up. I’ve been trying to get some revised escape orbits out of him, but his computer’s all tied up with an analysis of the radio traffic that—that colony sent.”
“Sent?”
“Yes, it’s stopped. They don’t seem to have anything more to say to one another. Jun Davd says the colony’s on its own.”
“Is he getting anywhere with his analysis?”
“No.”
Jun Davd was interested in Heln’s theories. “A life form that lacks basic empathy on a neurological level. It’s a chilling thought for us humans. Very frustrating. Our only other relationship with intelligent beings was with the Nar—probably the most empathetic life form in the universe.”
“I’ve forbidden our people here to go visit. But I know they sneak over there anyway, make a party of it. Walkers are checked out and are gone for twelve or fifteen hours. I can only hope they’re watching from a distance. The insect-folk themselves are sending out pickets. Those wheeled vehicles of theirs are spreading outward in reconnaissance patterns. They’re probably looking for expansion sites. I hope there are no encounters.”
“And if there are?”
“According to Heln, they’ll see the human beings as a detail of their environment. An unimportant detail. Irrelevant.”
It was an audio-only circuit, but Bram could almost see Jun Davd shake his head in bemusement. “What if some impatient idiot grabbed hold of one of these creatures?”
“Then he’d be a relevant fact of the environment. That’s the kind of encounter I don’t want.”
“I hope your terrestrial life specialists come up with some answers soon. People here in the tree are agog at your pictures. We can’t keep them penned up much longer. You’re liable to have tourists.”
Bram groaned. “That’s all we need.”
“Heln believes that there may be a switch in the neurological makeup of these insect folk—a switch that would make us a part of their perceptions—and that this switch can be tripped if we find the key?”
“Correct.”
“And that once tripped, it will stay tripped for them as a species?”
“Yes.”
“Extraordinary!”
“Heln’s delved into volumes of biological lore from the buried libraries and says there are all sorts of examples of these neurological switches—they’re called ‘releaser’ mechanisms—in terrestroid life. If the animal’s nervous system is complex enough and there’s a degree of social organization, the perception of the triggered individual becomes the perception of the species.”
“What if the perception is something we won’t like?”
“All we want to do is get them to notice us.”
“Be careful.”
“I’m on my way to see Jorv now, to see if he’s made any progress in tracing their species.”
“The claspers at the tip of the abdomen were characteristic of many insects,” Jorv said happily. “Like paired forceps. Insects developed an opposing grip before our own ancestors did. Only they had it in a different place.”
He looked up at Bram, pleased with his little joke. Jorv had gotten an artist to prepare diagrams from Heln’s pictures, and these were spread out on easels around him.
“Odd place for a hand,” Bram said.
“Not when you consider the purpose.”
“Which was?”
“To assist in copulation.” Jorv licked his lips. “A useful accessory, particularly for species that mated in flight.”
“These creatures don’t have wings.”
“No, but I’ll wager an autopsy would show vestigial wing muscles, just as human beings have vestigial tails. They lost the wings somewhere along the way, as ants did.”
Jorv pointed at a picture tacked on the wall, showing a spiny, many-legged creature with fearsome jaws—a blowup from one of the old texts he and Heln had been delving into.
“Are they ants?”
“No. I haven’t been able to find a form they correspond to—not yet. There’s something puzzling about them.”
Bram looked again at the diagram of the abdominal claspers. They were heavily gauntleted, but their form was plain enough, as a gloved hand is.
Jorv continued happily babbling. “The female claspers for gripping the male would have been in a different abdominal segment, but that doesn’t mean anything. The structures would have been there embryonically, and if evolution decided they would make a useful hand, a similar appendage could have developed from the ovipositor.”