Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

And more about Travancore, too. Naturally we’ve thought about nothing else since we got here. There are plenty of mysteries not even mentioned in the briefing documents. For example: gravity and air. The surface gravity is only a little more than a quarter of Earth’s. So now can it hold onto a substantial atmosphere, and support this massive cover of vegetation? The air should have bled away into space long ago.

Well, according to S’glya, Travancore has its atmosphere because of the strange vegetation layer. The canopy of plant life is so dense and continuous that it can trap air molecules within and beneath it. We know there is something close to a pressure discontinuity up near the top here.

And of course it’s a chicken-and-egg situation because the atmosphere is absolutely necessary for the vegetation to exist! The plant cover must have developed very early in Travancore’s history. And if S’glya is right, the shafts we saw can’t go down uninterrupted all the way to the solid surface, because otherwise they could act as escape vents for the air. So we may have to cut our way through barriers, one more little difficulty. But just to add to the confusion, Angel says that S’glya’s idea about the relationship of the atmosphere and the vegetation is wrong — for six reasons still to be specified.

Well, what’s the good news? The team is the good news. We’re an odd assortment. We have a Tinker whose real name sounds like a breaking window, but who asks me to call it Ishmael. Its big ambition in life seems to be to snuggle up to the rest of us. Then there’s Angel, who won’t stop using human proverbs and clichйs, and who insists that Angels don’t have names. And last of all there’s S’glya, who seems to know what I’m thinking and feeling without being told. S’glya’s not her real Pipe-Rilla name, either, because that’s unpronounceable too.

Weird. But it all works! Once we got to know each other we’ve been achieving an unbelievable level of communication and cooperation. It seems as though anything that one of us can’t do, another one can. We first noticed it back on Barchan, and it has just gone on getting better and better.

Better and better — but God only knows if it will be good enough. Angel says that the Morgan Construct is a superior being, beyond even Angel.

Full night here now. Time to sleep.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, Chan, wherever you are. I love you, and I’ve always loved you since you were a baby. I can’t forgive myself for running away and refusing to speak to you when you were on Ceres with Tatty. But it was awfully hard for me to admit that I don’t own you any more.

I hope that you can forgive me. And I hope that some day I can make up for what I did then.

Yours, Leah.

Chan had read it through again and again. After the third time he could have repeated it word for word.

He kept going back to the last few paragraphs. Leah’s words of love bowled him over — and her remarks about the level of communication between her team members baffled him completely. Over the past couple of days he had become convinced that his own team would never work well together. They had too much trouble understanding each other. Well, maybe Shikari, as the Tinker liked to be called, would be all right. Shikari sometimes made perfect sense. So did the Pipe-Rilla, now and again, although neither she nor the Tinker seemed to have the equivalent of facial expressions. If they had some kind of body language for use with their own species, he had no idea how to read it.

As for the Angel, that was mystery personified. The creature had no face, no mouth, no method of communication except through a computer interface. And even that output was often incomprehensible, though Shikari and the Pipe-Rilla understood it (or pretended to).

And this mismatched assembly was supposed to be able to track down and destroy the most dangerous being in the known universe! They would be lucky if the Artefact simulation of the Construct, here on Barchan, didn’t tie them in knots.

They had established their camp down near the planet’s south pole. Until they knew the Simmie Artefact’s location there was no point in enduring the dreadful summer heat of the equator and northern hemisphere. On this third evening, as the dark sands of Barchan gradually cooled, the Pursuit Team settled down to its first strategy session.

The Tinker had increased noticeably in size as the sun set and the air was less scorchingly hot. The central mass contained almost twice as many components as when Chan had first met it, and its response time was painfully slow. The other three waited (impatiently, in at least Chan’s case) while Shikari’s speech funnel made its preparatory wheezes and whistles.

The Pipe-Rilla, S’greela, was crouched next to Chan and nervously stroking her multi-jointed forelimbs along the side of her head. If her performance to date was any guide, when confronted by anything the least frightening she would chitter in horror and terror and run away with great spring-legged leaps.

The Angel at least would not run away. It could not. No matter how intelligent the crystalline Singer might be, it was bound within the vegetable body of the Chassel-Rose and suffered that plant’s extreme slowness of movement. When the Angel wanted to move, the bulbous green body first lifted the root-borers up close underneath it. When they were stowed safely away it could creep along on the down-pointing adventitious stems at the edge of the body base. Chan guessed that if it was in a real hurry it might manage up to a hundred steps an hour.

Which left only the Tinker, Shikari, as a possibly useful ally. But its reaction to danger had already been demonstrated. It at once dispersed to individual components, and they flew away.

The curious thing was that the other three did not share Chan’s worries at all.

“We think that we have a satisfactory approach.” Shikari was finally speaking, slow and ponderous. “The Simulated Artefact lacks circadian rhythms and is indifferent to night or day. But our team is not. We Tinkers prefer to cluster by night, and Chan needs to become dormant. However, S’greela is naturally nocturnal, and like the Chassel-Rose she has excellent night vision. This, therefore, is our suggestion. Angel and S’greela should perform a night survey, seeking the Simmie. Human and self will remain here and rest. If there is no success in the search, then when daylight comes we will reverse the roles.”

The long blue-green fronds at the top of the Angel began to wave slowly in the air. Chan, ready to speak, paused. He had seen that motion before, when the Angel’s computer communicator was beginning its translation. Maybe even an Angel had some kind of body language.

“We agree,” said the translator’s mechanical voice. “However, we propose one difference. We believe that we now know the probable location of the Simulated Artefact. Therefore, the mission for Angel and Pipe-Rilla should be one of confirmation, not of search.”

“But how can you? — ” Chan stopped. The ferny fronds were still waving.

“We have completed the analysis of imaging radar records obtained during orbital survey,” went on the Angel. “There are two significant anomalies. One of them is our base. The other is almost certainly the Simulacrum. We request a brief pause, while we perform a confirming analysis. We have stored a copy of the ship’s data record.”

The Angel had answered Chan’s half-spoken question, plus another one about the ship’s records that he had thought but not even started to ask.

Telepathy? Even as the thought came, Chan rejected it. He remembered what Flammarion had told him during a Ceres briefing: “An Angel doesn’t normally think like a human, but not because it can’t. When an Angel wants to, it can put part of its brain into what we call ‘emulator mode.’ Then that piece can be instructed by the Angel to think like a human, or a Pipe-Rilla, or a Tinker of any number of components, or maybe like all three at once. And probably any other creature you care to name, maybe even like a Morgan Construct. And while all that’s going on, the Angel still performs logical analysis in its own way. Whatever that might be.” At that point Kubo Flammarion had seemed puzzled by his own words, and rugged at his uniform as though it had become too small for him.