“Because moss isn’t interested in just making light! Its real concern is growth and repair; it can’t do that without inputs.”
“We need to make repairs, too.”
“Of course,” Carla agreed. “Even if this device works perfectly, it won’t make us self-sufficient for eternity. We’ll still be using up all our limited supplies, including sunstone for cooling and other purposes. It won’t buy us another eon to contemplate the ancestors’ plight. The most I’m hoping it can do is get us back to them—with an idea worth trying for the evacuation.”
“So you’re saying that our grandchildren might see the home world?” Carlo joked.
“Maybe our great-grandchildren,” Carla replied. “We’re not going to be firing up these engines tomorrow.”
The note of caution only made her sound more serious. Carlo turned the idea over in his mind; it was shocking just how alien it felt. This would be their purpose, finally fulfilled. No one was prepared for that.
“If we could see ourselves returning within a few generations…” He faltered.
“You don’t sound too happy about it,” Carla complained.
“Because I don’t know how people would take it,” he replied. “Would it make it easier to keep the population stable, if we knew there was an end to the restraint in sight? Or would it be harder to stay disciplined, if we could tell ourselves that there won’t be enough time for a little growth to do as much damage?”
“I don’t know either,” Carla said. “But as problems go, aren’t these the kind worth having?”
Carlo reorganized the shifts so that Amanda and Macaria could work beside him on the playback experiments. The changes they’d be looking for might be subtle, so they’d need as many eyes on the subject as possible.
Eyes and hands. With Benigna tranquilized and locked to her plinth, he decided, they could palpate her body safely enough. How else would they be able to characterize small changes in the arborine’s flesh?
Their record of the onset of Zosima’s fission had been ruined by the torn tape, but Carlo had identified a subsequent pause in the activity and isolated the first unbroken set of instructions that followed. He had considered playing back the tapes from the individual probes one at a time, but when he wound the recordings from the three lower probes through the viewer together it was clear from all their shared, synchronized motifs that these signals were acting in concert. If he disregarded this, he risked unbalancing the light’s effect to a point where it was merely pathological. He wouldn’t have tried to decipher a piece of writing by throwing out two symbols in every three before offering it to a native speaker, and if his intuitive sense of the structure of this language meant anything, the three probes’ recordings—over a period of about a lapse and half—constituted the smallest fragment with any chance of being intelligible to the arborine’s body.
On the morning of the experiment Carlo arrived early and started administering the tranquilizer to Benigna. The drug he pumped into her gut through the plinth was far milder than the paralytic in the darts, and would not act anywhere near as quickly. Benigno didn’t take long to notice the effects, though: he let out a series of low hums, and his co’s steadily weakening replies did not reassure him.
“I’m sorry,” Carlo muttered. He’d planned to put up curtains to block Benigno’s view of the procedure—and Zosimo’s too, for good measure—but he hadn’t thought to do it so early.
Macaria turned up as he was finishing the task. He tied the last corner of the fabric into place, then dragged himself over to Benigna. Her eyes were still open, but when he tugged on her arms the muscles were slack. Macaria joined him, and they set about establishing a baseline for the arborine’s anatomy. Carlo had decided not to make any exploratory incisions; as informative as they might have been, there was too much risk of disrupting the very effects they were hoping to measure.
Amanda arrived and started setting up the light players in the equipment hatch. Carlo went down to help her, and to satisfy himself that nothing would get shredded this time. The tapes themselves were merely copies of the recordings, but a garbled message could wreak havoc on Benigna’s flesh.
“Are you ready?” he asked Amanda.
“Yes.” Though she’d shown no enthusiasm for the experiment, no one had more experience with the players.
“We can try for a breeding in a few days’ time,” Carlo promised her.
“You really think she’ll still be fertile after this?” Amanda gestured at the tapes.
“Maybe not,” he admitted. “Then again, maybe her body will just ignore these signals without the whole context they had for Zosima—then we’ll have learned that much about the process, and we’ll still have a chance to record her undergoing quadraparous fission.”
Amanda didn’t argue the point. “You know what we should be studying in the arborines?” she said.
“What?”
“The effect of the male’s nutrition on biparity.”
Carlo said, “That would take six years and dozens of animals. Let’s finish what we’ve started first.”
He clambered back up into the cage. Benigno was still humming anxiously, but Carlo shut out the sound. He dragged himself into place beside Macaria and put his palms against Benigna’s skin.
“Start the playback,” he called to Amanda.
As the clatter rose up from beneath the cage a tremor passed through the arborine’s body, but it was probably just a vibration transmitted from the machines themselves. Carlo glanced at Macaria, who was moving her fingertips gently over the opposite side of Benigna’s torso. “I think there’s some rigidity,” she said.
“Really?” He pressed a thumb against the skin; it was a little less yielding than before.
The players fell silent. Carlo tried not to be too disappointed by the unspectacular result. He’d chosen a short sequence in the hope that it would elicit a single, comprehensible effect, and if this hardening of the skin—a prerequisite for fission—could be attributed to the motifs they had sent in, that would be one modest step toward deciphering the entire language.
But the response to the tapes hadn’t played itself out yet: the arborine’s skin was still growing more rigid. As Carlo tested it, he saw a faint yellow flicker spreading through the flesh below, diffuse but unmistakable.
Macaria said, “I think we might have triggered something.”
The body did its best to confine its signals, to keep them from spilling from one pathway to another; only the most intense activity shone through to the surface. These errant lights reminded Carlo of the sparks that tumbled out when he set a lamp spinning in weightlessness: each spark drifted away, fading, but there was always another close behind. The tapes, it seemed, hadn’t issued a simple instruction to the arborine’s flesh: do this one thing and be done with it. They’d provoked it into starting up its own internal conversation, sufficiently frenetic to be glimpsed from outside the skin.
Could they have pushed the body into fission? Carlo was confused; Benigna hadn’t even resorbed her limbs, and all the optical activity he could see was confined to her lower torso. He reached up and touched her tympanum gently, then her face; the skin here was completely unaffected. “This is some minor reorganization,” he suggested. “Some local rigidity and a few associated changes.”
“Perhaps.” Macaria ran a finger across Benigna’s chest. “If by ‘associated changes’ you mean a partition forming.”
Carlo prodded the place she’d just touched; not only was the surface hard, he could feel the inflexible wall extending beneath it. “You’re right.”