Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years

“Yes, yes, yes. But yondert”

“We need a minimum weight. This ship isn’t big enough to spin for that by itself. Too much radial variation, too much Coriolis force.”

She glared through tears. “I am not an idiot. I have not forgotten. Nor have I f-f-forgotten the robots can fix that.”

“Yes, separate the payload and engine sections, hitch a long cable between, then spin them. The trouble is, that immobilizes Pytheas till it’s reassembled. I think you’ll all agree we’d better hang on to its capabilities, as well as the boats’, at least till we know a lot more.”

“Shall we shelter on the first planet?” Tu Shan.asked. “A seared hell. The third isn’t this large either, but a frozen, barren waste; and likewise every outer moon or asteroid.”

Svoboda looked still toward Xenogaia. “Here is life,” she said. “Forty percent additional weight won’t harm us,” given our innate hardiness. “We will grow used to it.”

“We grew used to heavier burdens in the past,” Macandal observed quietly.

“But what I’m trying to say, if you’ll let me,” Aliyat yelled, “is, can’t the Alloi do something for us?”

By this time considerable information exchange had taken place, diagrams, interior views of vessels, whatever the non-humans chose to offer and the humans thought to. It included sounds. From the Alloi, those were notes high and coldly sweet that might be speech or might be music or might be something incomprehensible. It seemed likely that they were going about establishing communication in systematic wise; but the naive newcomers had not yet fathomed the system. They dared hope that the first, most basic message had gotten through on both sides and was mutually honest: “Our will is good, we want to be your friends.”

Hanno frowned. “Do you imagine they can control gravitation? What about that, Pytheas?”

“They give no indication of any such technology,” answered the ship, “and it is incompatible with known physics.”

“Uh-huh. If it did exist, if they could do it, I expect they’d have so many other powers they wouldn’t bother with the kind of stuff we’ve met.” Hanno rubbed his chin. “But they could build a spinnable orbital station to our specs.”

“A nice little artificial environment, for us to sit in and turn to lard, the way we were doing here?” exploded from Wanderer. “No, by God! Not when we’ve got a world to walk on!”

Svoboda uttered a cheer. Tu Shan beamed. Patulcius nodded vigorously. “Right,” said Macandal after a moment.

“That is provided we can survive there,” Yukiko pointed out. “Chemistry, biology—it may be lethal to us.”

“Or maybe not,” Wanderer said. “Let’s get busy and find out.”

The ship and its robots commenced that task. In the beginning humans were hardly more than eager spectators. Instruments searched, sampled, analyzed; computers pondered. Boats entered atmosphere. After several sorties had provided knowledge of surface conditions, they landed. The mtelligent machines that debarked transmitted back their findings. Then as the humans gained familiarity, they became increasingly a part of the team, first suggesting, later directing and deciding. They were not scientific specialists, nor need they be. The ship had ample information and logic power, the robots abundant skills. The travelers were the embodied curiosity, desire, will of the whole.

Hanno was barely peripheral. His concern was with the Alloi. Likewise did Yukiko’s become. He longed most for what they might tell him about themselves and their tarings among the stars; she thought of arts, philosophies, transcendence. Both had a gift for dealing with the foreign, an intuition that often overleaped jumbled, fragmentary data to reach a scheme that gave meaning. Thus had Newton, Planck, Einstein gone straight to insights that, inexplicably, proved to explain and predict. So had Darwin, de Vries, Oparin. And so, perhaps, had Gautama Buddha.

When explorers on Earth encountered peoples totally foreign to them—Europeans in America, for instance—the parties soon groped their way to understanding each other’s languages. Nothing like that happened at Tritos. Here the sundering was not of culture and history, nor of species, phylum, kingdom. Two entire evolutions stood confronted. The beings not only did not think alike, they could not.

Compare just the human hand and its Allosan equivalent. The latter had less strength, although the grip was not negligible when all digits laid hold on something. It had vastly more sensitivity, especially in the fine outer branchlets: a lower threshold of perception and a wider, better coordinated field of it. The hairlike ultimate ends clung by molecular wringing, and the organism felt how they did. Thus the subjective world was tactilely richer than ours by orders of magnitude.

Was it optically poorer? Impossible to say, quite likely meaningless to ask. The Allosan “wings” were partly regulators of body temperature, partly excretors of vaporous waste, mainly networks (?) of sensors. These included organs responsive to light, simpler than eyes but, in their numbers and diversity, perhaps capable of equal precision. Whether this was so or not depended on how the brain processed their input; and there did not seem to be any single structure corresponding to a brain.

Enough. It would probably take Hanno and Yukiko years to learn the anatomy; it would certainly take them longer to interpret it. For the moment, they understood—borrowing terrestrial concepts, grotesquely inappropriate—they were dealing not only with software unlike their own, but hardware. It was not to be expected that they would readily master its kind of language. Perhaps, beyond some kind of rudiments, they never would.

Presumably the Alloi had had earlier practice among aliens, and had developed various paradigms. The pair found themselves acquiring facility as they worked, not simply struggling to comprehend but making contributions to the effort. More and more, intent clarified. A primitive code took shape. Material contacts began, cautious to start with, bolder as confidence grew.

The fear was not of violence, or, for that matter— “under these circumstances,” said Hanno, grinning—chicanery. It was of surprises that might lurk in a universe where life seemed to be incidental and intelligence accidental. What condition taken for granted by one race might harm the other? What innocuous or necessary microbes might elsewhere brew death?

Robots met in space. They traded samples that they took to shielded laboratories for study. (At any rate, it happened aboard Pytheas.) Nanotech and biotech gave quick responses. While the chemistries were similar, even to most arnino acids, the deviations were such as to bar cross-infection. Yes, the specimens sent by the Alloi had things in them that probably corresponded somewhat to viruses; but the fundamental life-stuff resembled DNA no more than a file does a saw.

After repeated experiments of that general sort, robots paid visits to ships. The Allosan machines were graceful, multi-tentacular, a pleasure to watch swooping about. Within the Allosan vessel, the air was thin, dry, but humanly breathable. Temperatures went through cycles, as they did in Pytheas, the range being from cool to chilly. Light was tinged like that from Tritos, less bright than outside but adequate. Centrifugal weight was as predicted, two-thirds of a gee, also sufficient.

As for what else the great hull bore—

Work on Xenogaia proceeded more straightforwardly. Planetology was a mature discipline, a set of techniques, formulas, and computer models. This globe fitted the pattern. Meteorology and climatology were less exact; some predictions could never be made with certainty, for chaos inhered in the equations. However, the overall picture soon emerged.