Damon Knight: Orbit 17

The ravine was at its narrowest when Speed’s endless sonnets were slashed by emptiness and fuzzy non-word data which Launce could not assimilate.

“I could not comprehend that burst. Use words.”

“I just spotted the watchtowers! The work of an alien hand!” “Were you trying to tell me something a moment ago?” “You were just feeling my surprise. My first sight of the unknown minds we were sent to deal with! I am excited.”

“Haven’t got the programming. I have had a visual line on the watchtowers for several minutes.”

“Killjoy!”

Far above them, on either side of the narrow gorge, two spindly wooden structures hunched against the rocks. Each was a pointed cylinder of logs, thatched with grass and tree fronds. Each was pierced with a small opening facing the valley. Proteus suspected their purpose was to warn the nearby village against approach by carnivore packs or hostile beings from other areas.

Launce’s infrared eyes found no betraying blur of life in either.

“No one there.” Launce increased the gain on his eyes. “No. No living thing is in those towers.”

Speed had begun bubbling again. “I can’t wait. I tell you, Launce, I can’t wait! To have something—someone—to reach for, beyond the fetters of words and miserable, ever-changing conventions of language! To bend and mold the great universal life-myths in my hands and pound them into bridges of communication between two races linked only by the common bridge of life! I will be of use. Imagine, Launce, I will be of use!”

“Haven’t got the programming.”

Launce heard Proteus beam to Speed words of encouragement heavy with the data of the new programming. It seemed to put the contact probe more at ease. Launce was satisfied. What Speed had been created to do, he understood. He was to communicate with the natives without resorting to the near-impossible method of language exchange. What those new methods were, Launce could not begin to understand. His programming only went as far as protecting Speed’s welfare. Anything beyond that he left to Proteus.

Beyond the towers the cleft widened and began to merge with the hilly unevenness of the surrounding land behind the moraine. The stream was now a mountain brook running over stone but rimmed by vegetation and grey sand. Along one side a path began to distinguish itself from the grass. Soon it became a trail, and at Proteus’ suggestion Launce veered out of the water to follow it.

The two probes faithfully followed the comings and goings of the map inside them. The main trail led to the village, and by their position on the map the probes knew it was very near.

The village entered Launce’s senses as a vague blur of infrared. Proteus instructed them to slow their progress and make as few alarming noises as possible. Minutes later Launce began picking up hidden beings on infrared among the rocks and grasses. They slowed still more.

“I had wondered about fear,” Speed said. “I’ve triggered the feeling a thousand times, and always it seemed false somehow. Fear rises out of the unknown, and until now Proteus has known everything.”

“Just because some programming is seldom used doesn’t make it invalid or irrelevant.”

Speed’s reply was delayed by a handful of microseconds. “I forget, you don’t know how to doubt.”

The village, when it came in sight, was little different from hundreds of such villages confronted by probes of the Combine on worlds scattered across the galaxy. Eighteen low, broad logframe thatched huts stood in two concentric circles around beaten earth. An elaborate fire-housing, surrounded by icons and fired clay pots, oozed smoke and infrared at the center of the circle. Launce noticed that bleached, bulbous skulls were hung over the wide doorways of the huts.

Proteus was an overpowering pressure inside them, ordering Speed to begin as soon as the creatures made themselves known. Speed was filling Launce with undecipherable fuzzy lumpish data, all connected with the new programming. It was more of that “excitement.” It was mixed with that “fear.” There was another feeling present, entwined with the others. Speed called it “joy,” a sparkly thing. Joy was that which a system felt on the brink of imminent fulfillment.

Everywhere around them smears of infrared life began to move. Seconds later one of the closest left its hiding place in a patch of brush and leaped onto the trail a few meters in front of them.

“Launce, I can begin, I can begin!”

The being was a squat quadruped with a long neck and a skull bulging over two tiny eyes. Two slender prehensile arms were curled beneath the base of the neck. All over the creature’s body hung copper ornaments and iron knives. It threw a grey powder to the ground in front of it, raised a bifurcated snout, and began to howl in two different tonal ranges.

Launce stood by, at hair-trigger readiness to prevent an attack. The creature stood in its place and continued howling. Speed, boiling over with the sonnet-concept “joy,” set his machinery to work. He superimposed the native’s potato-shaped body on a three-dimensional grid, and his thousands of tiny electromagnetic spot-sensors began to map all electrical activity in the alien’s system. Each time the heart beat, a tiny discharge flashed across muscle tissue; that flash was recorded on the growing image. Each time a neuron carried a message across a synapse, the infinitesimal transfer of electrons was recorded. Each recorded datum clarified the positions and relations of several others. Building in reverse avalanche fashion, the electrical picture of the whole creature took form in seconds.

“I’m getting an alpha rhythm . . . no, two . . . joy, joy! Beta coming through, I think . . . three others, not sure . . . parallel to the Beckwith anomaly ... everything in twos. The brain-halves are more nearly independent than in humanity . . . separate entities ... like two beings in one, perpetually battling... strange evolution . . . feel the joy, Launce!”

“Haven’t got the programming.”

Proteus ordered Launce to cease any transmission which might interfere with Speed’s delicate task.

Speed, aided by Proteus’ massive memory, began to draw comparisons. He had the creature’s body rhythms and brain rhythms mapped with great precision. He dove spinning through the creature’s mental webs, touching here and there, observing and comparing and tracing interactions between strange neurons arranged in patterns set down by an evolution far removed from that of any intelligent life in the Combine. Slowly, haltingly, gleaned from millions of miles of wanderings and comparisons on the glittering internal map, the creature’s mythic consciousness began to emerge on a second map beside the first.

“Hunters . . . vicious killers, revel in blood . . . sacrifice . . . war . . . destruction . . . echoes of humanity . . . strongly territorial . . .”

Launce remained motionless, silencing all but the most necessary of his functions so as not to interfere with the tenuous rapport Speed held with the creature.

Watching the ebb and flow of thought-emotion patterns within the tenuous context of the alien mythic consciousness, Speed began to understand some of what the creature was feeling.

Fear . . . puzzlement . . . contradiction . . . frustration . . . (panic?)... Speed poured lumps of data into Launce’s unprotesting consciousness.

“Words, Speed?”

No emissions, Launce!

“Hear how he howls. Deep things are stirring. I see patterns of creation, of destruction and destiny. The great life-myth comes clearly to the fore, again and again, bathed in golden light and blood. The creatures claw and rip their way upward on creation’s ladder, putting all beneath them by force and destruction. To ascend ... to conquer ... to destroy ... to reign. Launce, it makes me afraidl”