Donald Moffitt - Second Genesis

“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.

“He took it,” the ostler said. “Your friend. Said he was getting a head start, that you’d catch up with him.”

“Jorv?”

“Short chubby fellow, sort of a restless way with him? I told him that I wasn’t finished packing it up, but he said as long as it had enough air and power on the meter to get him there, it was good enough. He almost wouldn’t wait long enough for me to put in a reserve air tank. I said to him, you don’t want to go out there without one—never mind that you’re only one person in a life-support system that’s supposed to handle three.”

“How long ago?”

“About two hours.”

Bram turned to the others. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but we’d better run him down before he gets there.”

“We’ll have to triple up,” Jao said. He looked at the mound of gear they had brought with them, then his eye lit on the red-haired sociobiologist. “Why don’t you and Ame and Shira ride together, and Heln and I can squeeze in with all this equipment.”

The walkers loped side by side across the dim plain, stretching their legs of plastic and synthetic protein. Their yellow headlamps bored into the endless ribbon of rubblescape ahead of them. They had traveled far enough so that the tethered moon was at their backs, showing its shape like a child’s top. To their right was the bloated face of a disk, casting a rusty light. To their left were the deeps of space with a hoarfrost of stars.

“Not a sign of him,” Bram said.

“Don’t forget, he’s running lighter,” Ame pointed out.

She was squeezed against him on the narrow bench. On her other side, Shira’s bony hip dug into her. The lanky paleobiologist said, “He’s had a two-hour head start. But Jorv’s not a good driver. He’ll try to hurry his walker too much, and that’ll mean that its legs will just be churning around in midair a good deal of the time.”

“Could we have passed him somehow?”

“We can see clear to the edge on either side. We’d have noticed his lights.”

“ If he remembered to turn them on,” Shira said, and fell silent.

“We’ve been running for three hours,” Bram said. “We’ll be there soon. If we were going to catch up to him, we’d have done it by now.”

“Don’t worry, Bram -tsu. ” Ame said. “Jorv is a very intelligent man. He won’t do anything too rash. All he wants to do is study them.”

“They may be studying him by now,” Bram said, and urged the walker on.

An hour later, the great pearly dome of the alien bubble grew out of the dimness ahead. There was no question of it appearing over the horizon—not on the diskworld. It simply became visible as a dot and grew larger.

Bram slowed the walker and approached at a trot. Jao, driving the other walker, fell in beside him.

The aliens were deploying around their bubble, queer sticklike creatures who hurried back and forth, carrying huge cone-shaped containers that they peeled open to reveal equipment and housing materials. Wheeled vehicles, whose barrel-shaped tires seemed to be clustered at one end, leaving a tubular chassis projecting with an upward cant, were being readied. All the activity was taking place under the glare of work lamps set up on tall stands around the perimeter of the camp.

“They like things bright,” Ame said, looking at the pool of light around the tremendous ball.

“Look, there’s Jorv’s walker,” Bram said.

The spindly vehicle, its bubble deflated, stood a short distance from the equipment-littered area of activity. There was no sign of Jorv himself.

“Collapsed bubble,” Bram said. “It should have reinflated itself by now. I hope Jorv’s not—”