Alternate Gerrolds (30 page)

Complicating the argument, the thing wasn’t a complete thing. Mostly, it was a tray fragments. Mom had spent a week scanning them, manipulating
the pieces around, extrapolating what the thing might have looked like when it was whole. That was a month’s worth of squabble, right there—how did the fragments fit together?—with Daddy and Dr. Blom fussing over asymmetry, polarity and even which end was up.

What they finally agreed to was that in size and shape, the thing could have been some kind of table vessel. Like a punch bowl or a centerpiece or a coffee pot. One end of the thing was a bowl-shaped flare, like the horn of a trumpet; it narrowed into a hollow pedestal. The thing could have stood on the large end or the small, but it was obviously more stable resting on the large end.

Dr. Blom had initially suggested that it had a ceremonial function, like a wine-glass or a chalice, except that the thing had three scooped-out openings in the sides of the flared end. The openings were supposed to be there; they were sculpted in. Daddy suggested that the sculpting suggested that another object was to be placed in the horn, perhaps a triangular bowl, or even a symbolic representation of the tripodal makers.

So then Dr. Blom decided that they were looking at it upside-down. The horn-end was the bottom and the pedestal was a support for something else. Maybe it was a flower-holder, or a vase. Then she decided that it had a ceremonial function and was used for lustral rites. Some kind of purification ritual.

Whenever she said this, Daddy rolled his eyes in exasperation and began muttering about Occam’s chainsaw—whatever was the simplest, most obvious explanation had to be the right one. Finally, in frustration, Mom fabbed a couple dozen replicas of the thing and passed them out like party favors. Very quickly it became the symbol of everything we didn’t know about the tripods. If it had been half a size larger, we could have worn it as a dunce cap.

If only there had been wall-markings in the domes or illustrations on the side of jars or something like that. But there weren’t any. Apparently, the tripods didn’t make images of themselves. And that was good for another whole area of argument—that maybe something about the way their eyes worked, or their brains, they didn’t have visual symbology.

That could have been an even bigger disagreement than the argument about the
thing
, except by that time we’d found the first skeletons, and that’s when the real excitement began. Everything before that was just a warm-up.

Hank was on the exo-biology team, so I heard about lots of stuff
before it was presented, and some stuff that wasn’t presented at all, because it was still only speculation. Most of the skeletons were complete and fairly well-preserved; carbon-dating and iridium-scanning showed that this village had died when the sun flared up.

Hank had a lot of ideas about that. His team had fabbed copies of three skeletons, two adults and a juvenile, and now they were working on the nature of the tripod musculature. As bad as the arguments were about
the thing
, the arguments about tripod biology were even worse.

First off, the tripod brain case was too small. It was a dorsal hump opposite what was assumed to be the rear leg. Channels in the bone suggested routes for optic nerves. Other structures might have been a nasal chamber, which would indicate an “anterior” as opposed to “posterior.” But there was also the suggestion of some kind of a collagenous snout, like an elephant’s trunk, only it seemed to serve as a mouth, not as a nose. But nobody wanted to say for certain in case it turned out to be something else, and then they’d be embarrassed for guessing wrong; so for the moment everything everybody said about the tripods was prefaced with “suggests,” “could be,” “possible,” “might serve as” and even an occasional “probable.” But the size of the brain case was clearly insufficient for sentience.

A full-grown tripod was only waist-high. Not much more than a meter tall. The exo-biology team estimated that it would mass no more than eighty kilograms. So that would make it the size of a large dog, or a small ape; but the estimated size of the brain wasn’t large enough even for that size a creature. The exo-biology team estimated that the tripods maybe had the intelligence of a cocker spaniel—just smart enough to pee outside. So that was another mystery.

And then there was the business of the fingers. They were short and stubby, more of a splayed paw than a hand, and not really suitable for grasping large or heavy objects. The simulations showed that if a tripod squatted on its hind leg, the two forward paws could be used to manipulate simple objects, but that was about the limit. The tripods would not have been very good typists. That is, if they had anything to type.

Dr. Blom said that intelligent creatures needed the ability to handle objects, not just as tools, but more importantly because the ability to understand an object was directly related to the ability to touch, feel and manipulate it. “Fingers are the extension of the mind,” she said.

Wisely, Daddy did not disagree with her on that one. Instead, he took
a gentler tack, pointing out that dolphins and other cetaceans had demonstrated sophisticated language and intelligence skills without any grasping limbs at all; so clearly there was something else at work here. But dolphins and whales have very large brains, and tripods didn’t—so that just brought us back to the problem of the too-small brain case.

But those were only sidebar discussions. The main event was much more serious.

Hank explained it to me at dinner in the mess tent. Nowhere else in the universe—not in simulation, and not in the laboratory, and not on any other life-bearing planet—had nature produced a three-legged creature. The asymmetry of the species was unprecedented, and Hank said that it was going to cause a major upheaval in both biological and evolutionary thinking. There was no way it couldn’t. This was the real issue: whatever the tripods had been, they were so far outside the realm of what we had previously known or believed to be possible, that they represented a massive breakdown in biological science. That’s what was so exciting; this was a real opportunity for genius to prove itself by reinventing the paradigm.

After dinner, most folks gathered in the rec-area for news and gossip and mail. Sometimes we’d see a movie, sometimes we’d have a dance or celebrate someone’s birthday. Some of the folks played instruments, so we had a makeshift band. And the bar was open for two hours if people wanted to have a drink.

But not everybody wanted to be sociable all the time. Some folks had to be alone for a while. They’d go outside and sit under the stars or maybe walk out to one of the boundary markers. It was hard to get lost in the desert. The camp gave off a bright glow, and if that weren’t enough, the housekeeping team had installed three bright red lasers pointing up into the sky. They were visible for kilometers, so anyone who ventured too far out only needed to head for the light at the edge of the world. Folks who wanted a bit of solitude sometimes planned midnight picnics and hiked a few kilometers out to sleep on the warm sand. And no, sleeping wasn’t all they did.

I wanted to go out on a midnight picnic with Hank, but Mom wouldn’t allow it; she wouldn’t even let me appeal to Daddy and said we didn’t need that fight in the camp. So the most I could do with Hank was walk around the big tent once in a while, mostly when Mom wanted to be alone with Daddy. Some of the girls on the toddler-team went out for a midnight
picnic once, I went with them, but all we did was giggle about the boys we liked and make lewd guesses of what we thought they looked like naked. Maybe that’s fun when you’re fifteen, but I was too old for that now. I wanted something more than embarrassed giggling.

And, there was that other thing too. I didn’t want to be the
last
one in the group. I didn’t want to be the only one who didn’t know what the others were giggling about. Though sometimes it seemed so silly I couldn’t imagine any serious person wanting to do it at all, sometimes I couldn’t think about anything else. I wondered if it was that way for anybody else. I wanted to ask Mom about it, but she was so busy she never had time; the one time I brought the subject up, she asked me to wait until we got back home so she and I could spend some serious time talking about it. But when your insides are fizzing like a chocolate soda there’s no such thing as patience.

So that night, when Hank put his arm around my shoulder and I pulled me close against him, he smelled so good kissing him just felt like the right thing to do. The thing about kissing someone you like kissing—once you start, it’s hard to stop. And I didn’t want to stop, I just wanted to keep going. But then Zakky’s diaper-monitor chimed and Hank pulled away gently and said, “Come’on, Swee’pea, I’ll walk you home,” as if that was all there was to it, and I wondered how he could be like that. Didn’t he have any normal feelings?

And that’s the other thing about changing diapers. Mom says that they’re punctuation marks in the paragraphs of life. Whatever thoughts you might have been working on, they end up in the diaper pail with all the rest of the crap. And that night, I understood exactly. Whatever fizzy feelings I might have had inside of me, they were all fizzed out by the time Zakky’s messy bottom was clean again.

So when some of the team members said to me stuff like, “You can’t understand how frustrating it is to be this close,” I just smiled weakly and said, “Yeah, I guess so.” They were the ones who didn’t understand.

After a couple weeks of tinkering, Hank’s team fabbed a walking tripod, just to see if they could build one that could walk, run, squat or even mount another for mating; the only thing it couldn’t do was lift a leg to pee on a lamp post.

The team went through several iterations until they hit the right combination of musculature and autonomic intelligence; then they fabbed a bunch more for everyone else to play with or experiment on. The bots
weren’t very big; the largest was the size of Zakky. Some of them had scales, some had fur, some had feathers, some had naked skin; and they were all different colors. At this point, the team was still guessing. It was kind of like having a pack of three-legged dogs from the rainbow planet running around the camp, but Hank said it was necessary for us to observe these things in action to get some sense of what the real tripods might have been like. I wasn’t exactly sneaking out to see him behind Mom’s back, but I did make sure that my regular chores took me through the bio-tent during his shifts. Mom certainly couldn’t complain about me doing my regular duties. Of course, she didn’t have to know why I had traded shifts with Marlena Rigby either.

Hank liked my visits. He gave me one of the robots, and even programmed it to follow Zakky around like a baby-monitor, so we would always know where he was. Zakky decided the tripod was a chicken and called it “Fuffy.” I thought it looked more like a yellow cat with a limp.

When I said that, Hank admitted that getting the creature to walk right had been his biggest problem. He had started by studying the algorithms for three-legged industrial robots, but plastic autonomy is different from biological, and there are a lot of different ways a three-legged creature can walk. It can move one leg at a time, each one in turn, which means it sort of scuttles or zig-zags or walks in circles. Or it can alternate moving its two front two legs with its single rear leg in a crippled imitation of a four-legged creature. That was was faster but it created musculature issues that weren’t resolved in the actual skeletons.

Hank finally resolved it by not programming the tripod at all. Instead, he gave it a neural network and let it teach itself to walk. What it came up with was—well, it was just weird, but efficient. But it still looked like a yellow cat with a limp.

As a joke, Hank taught the tripod to squat on Zakky’s potty chair. That made me laugh, and for a moment I thought Zakky might take the hint, but the devil-baby was actively disinterested. Instead, he put a plastic bucket on his head and banged it with a spoon, and laughed delightedly at being inside the noise.

On the last full day before the skywhale arrived, I was helping Mom disassemble the last three fabbers. We wrapped all the pieces in plastic and packed them in stiff boxes. Nobody knew if the Institute would authorize a second expedition. There was a lot of disappointment that we hadn’t found more—no books or wall carvings or statues—so the
folks who passed out the money had lost some of their enthusiasm. Despite their effusive praise at a job well done, despite their protestations of support, it was no secret that this expedition was considered only a partial success, which is a polite way of saying “an ambitious failure.”

Some of the more aggressive members of Daddy’s team were arguing for mothballing the entire site as a way of forcing the issue. With all of the equipment still in place, the Institute would have a financial investment in returning; but Daddy shook his head. If a return were guaranteed, then storing the hardware onsite made financial sense; but if the Institute decided not to fund a return, they would write off the machinery, and then it wouldn’t be available for any other enterprise anywhere else, and that would hurt everybody. Daddy was right, of course.

Some of the folks were eager to head back home—like Hank; he said he had enough material to fund a dozen years of study, and he could hardly wait to get the skeletons back to the lab and begin micro-scanning and DNA-reconstruction; it was his hunch that the DNA sequences were too short for a creature this size.

But most folks were sad that the adventure was ending so abruptly, and without a real resolution. That was how I felt. Hank was going back to wherever, and I’d probably never see him again. So, I’d sort of made up my mind that I was ready to sneak away from tonight’s party with him for an hour or two.

We finished packing the last fabber, and then the toolkits, and we were done. Mom sat down on a bench and sighed. “This was fun.”

“Are you going to miss it?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Once we get back home, I’ll have so much work to do just sorting everything out, I won’t have time to miss anything.” And then her hand flew up to her mouth. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I promised you that we would find some time together, just for us.”