“Ovipositor?”
“For laying eggs. It was generally equipped to puncture holes in mud, vegetation, or some other hatching medium. Living flesh, I’m afraid, in the case of some of the nastier species.”
“Insects seem to have been a remarkably single-minded life form.”
“In the sense of a will to survive? So were our own ancestors, no doubt. But those creatures building their city out there have developed intelligence. They’ve learned how to survive and propagate through technology. Don’t worry. Once we get a key to their developmental patterns, we’ll find a way to communicate with them.”
“I hope so.”
Jorv frowned. “I still haven’t decided whether their ancestors were plant eaters or meat eaters. The mouth parts are hidden inside that odd facial structure. There were over a hundred million species of insects, and so far I haven’t been able to find anything like it.”
Ame came over with a new sheaf of blowups. “Hunters or browsers?” she mused. “It would be nice to know before we meet them again.”
As it happened, it was the insect-folk who made the first move. Bram was having a meal with Ame when he got a call from one of the watchers he had posted on the plain.
“Bram-captain, one of those tube machines is rolling in your direction. It zigzags a lot, but there’s no doubt about where it’s headed. It should reach the digs in about an hour.”
“Thanks. Stay where you are. Keep an eye out for any more of them.”
He stood up. Ame said, “I’ll get the others.”
“Tell them to keep their distance till we see what they’re up to. Let’s see what they have in mind, for a change.”
He deputized a dozen people for crowd control. “Tell everybody to stay out of their way. Don’t interfere with them. If any approach is made, it will be done by one of the specialists.”
An hour later, the excavated streets were full of waiting people. Word had gotten around fast. They sat on ledges, hung over the low rooftops that had thrust themselves out of the rubble, and loitered in the stone arches. Bram had a vantage point from the top of one of the buildings facing the moon plaza. If the insect surveying party kept to the avenues of rubble leading into town, this would be the major route.
“There it comes,” Jao said beside him.
A tiny shape appeared in the distance and soon resolved itself into one of the tube vehicles, bumping along on its fat tires at about twenty-five miles an hour. The four barrel-shaped rollers were all grouped close together under a cab that seemed to carry most of the weight; the long, slender cylindrical body tilted upward at a thirty-degree angle behind it, doing a lot of vibrating. Bram supposed it made as much sense as any other design for rough country; if the cab had to crawl over an obstacle, the projecting section had plenty of leeway to tilt downward without dragging.
The bizarre vehicle rolled by the crystalline shafts of the moonropes without slowing down and came to a quivering stop at the edge of the wide plaza. Bram could see human figures peeking at it from around corners.
He waited for a door to open, but none did. After a few minutes a boxy helmet emerged from the end of the tube, about twelve feet above the ground. The rest of the insect-person extruded itself, hung rigidly horizontal from the lip of the tube by the claspers at the tip of its elongated abdomen, and let itself drop lightly on all fours to the ground. Seven more of the creatures followed.
They stood around, conferring with twitching movements of their long sterns. Bram saw little, discreet flashes of lights from their helmets and assumed it was the polarized light version of radio communication. After getting everything settled to their apparent satisfaction, they slung equipment over their humped shoulders—or hips, if that’s what they were—and began skittering down the long boulevard with lots of nervous, darting side trips, staying in a loose group.
People began to drift down from rooftops and emerge from side streets to trail after the insect-people at a respectful distance.
“We’d better get down there,” Bram said.
He vaulted over the rooftop and floated to the ground, with Jao close behind him. He strode in thirty-foot bounds across the plaza and caught up with the little parade going down the avenue.
Trouble started almost immediately. A skylarking fool who had been leaping up and down in great swoops shot fifty feet into the air and came down squarely in front of one of the insect-people. Apparently he got a good look at the jelly-eyed face within the helmet, because he backed away with a jerk and stumbled.
The insect-being showed no signs of-stopping, and the skylarker showed no signs of getting out of its way. Jao reached the spot in one long soaring arc and snatched the offending person out of the way with a hand hooked into the webbing of the life-support backpack.
He bore his kicking prize to Bram. He did not set the fellow down on ground, but held him out to Bram at arm’s length.
The face within the helmet was that of a junior archivist named—Bram rummaged in his memory—Alb something-or-other. Alb was less than thirty years old, having been born in the heart of the Milky Way, and hadn’t lived long enough to develop good sense.
“Put him down,” Bram said.
Instead of letting go, Jao rammed the errant archivist into the ground with some emphasis. Alb stood there with a silly grin on his face.
“Alb, I thought I told everybody—” Bram began.
“He can’t hear you,” Jao said. “He isn’t tuned in to your frequency.” He made twisting motions to get the idea across to Alb, but the young man just stood there stupidly, no doubt listening to the gibes of his own circle of friends.
“Oh, chaos take it!” Jao exclaimed. He dialed through his own frequencies till he hit Alb’s. He must have turned the power full up, to judge by the way Alb flinched. Somewhere out there a number of other people must have acquired an earache too. Jao proceeded to give the unfortunate fellow a dressing down. Bram tuned in for the tail end of it: “…brains of a three-legged baggage walker!”
Alb gave Bram a sheepish apology and promised to behave. Bram heard group laughter on the frequency, and Alb turned pink.
They caught up with the insect patrol some distance down the avenue of rubble. Jao’s lecture seemed to have had good effect; the trailing crowd of people was hanging back farther. One of those who wasn’t lagging behind was Heln Dunl-mak. She skipped ahead of the alien party, just beyond what she had described to Bram as the insect-people’s “avoidance zone.”
Heln’s slight figure was top-heavy with improvised equipment—a bulky pack that Jao had put together for her. It was flashing modulated polarized light, some of it drawn from frequently appearing patterns in the stick-ship’s early radio transmissions, some of it repeating and stringing together “phrases” that the darting aliens were blinking at each other.
“Best program I could cobble together at short notice,” Jao said apologetically as he waved at Heln’s dancing form. “Heln doesn’t really know what she’s saying to them, but she can punch in a few crude menus based on their physical behavior, and the computer can try to correlate it with what they’re flashing to each other at the time. Then it runs through all the combinations. With luck, we’ll get a ‘turn right,’ or ‘follow me,’ or ‘look at this.’ It’s up to Heln to recognize a response.”
But there was no sign of recognition from the insect-folk that Bram could see. By stretching his imagination to the limit, he might at best have concluded that they showed a sort of irritation or brief annoyance—analogous to what a human might display if a light were flashing in his eyes or if he were trying to talk with a radio on in the background. But such distractions, really, were below the level of awareness.