Samantha's Talent (51 page)

***

Samantha stared at the being. Seeing it in person was much different than it had looked while being shown on the shadowed and grainy images of the phone-recorded videos. It was humanoid to a degree but unworldly, like something created by a CGI master. A crest that vaguely resembled Sheik's feathers began as a point on the top of its oval shaped head and continued on, widening as it presumably went on down its back. Anton didn't know, since it had never turned around during the time he had tried to initiate communication all those years ago.

It was shorter than humans but had four appendages in approximately the same places as humans. The double jointed arms had two opposing thumbs on each hand and one thumb on each foot that looked as if it might be an unused relic of evolution. It wore no clothing but sexual denotation was not obvious because of innumerable loose flaps of material that might be skin, a keratin-like substance or perhaps the evolutionary remnants of feathers. They were colored erratically, like a mixed-up rainbow. The face, if it could be said to have one, had a round, featureless bulb tacked to the middle of where a forehead on a human would have been. Slightly below and on either side of the small protrusion were large, human-like eyes that moved independently of each other. In order to look straight ahead it had to move both eyes toward the center of its head. Watching the movements was faintly nauseating at first, like wearing glasses with an incorrect focal correction. What they assumed was its mouth looked more like a very short beak with dozens upon dozens of tiny rasp-like teeth along its edges. There was nothing resembling a nose unless the featureless knob between and slightly above its eyes served the purpose.

"Go ahead, Sammie. Do your presentation before it decides to leave," Anton said nervously.

She was so excited she fumbled the keys and touch screen at first. She quickly got herself corrected and brought up the graphic she and Juan had painstakingly created. She turned the computer screen to face the alien and set it on the stand it had come with. She touched the key that began the animation.

"It's at least following it," Anton said. "See its eyes moving?"

"Shh," Juan cautioned. He didn't want anything to disturb Samantha while she was working.

She had brought Sheik along, as well as Shufus, hoping they might rouse something in the Alien if it noticed her talking to them. She had cautioned both not to make a sound while the animation was playing in color and sound and full three dimensions.

The alien stood mute when it was finished. On a hunch she asked Shufus and Sheik simultaneously, "Shall I play it again?"

"Yes," Shufus said and nodded his head as well. His nose twitched, but she couldn't tell whether it was a smell he liked or not.

"Play it again! Play it again!" Sheik said loudly in Avian.

The alien moved. It stretched a hand out to Sheik. Samantha noticed it possessed what looked like retractable claws but if so, they were almost completely sheathed. Sheik flapped his wings and landed on the alien's outstretched arm. The being brought its hand back toward its head and examined the parrot closely while Sheik was doing the same to it. Sheik stayed for a few minutes as they watched then flew back to Samantha's shoulder. The alien's reaction had given her another idea.

"Juan! I wonder if it speaks in a sound wave we can't hear? Don't some birds sing above 20 Megahertz? And isn't that the maximum that humans can hear?"

"Yes, and the minimum is about twelve hertz. Seems like I've read somewhere that females have a slightly higher range, and of course the higher frequencies we can hear deteriorate with age. I wonder... Sammie! Can you get Sheik to do the sound of our animation if you said it first, then asked him to repeat the words to the alien in as shrill a voice as he can manage?"

She thought for a moment then shrugged. "I don't see why not. Sheik is smart enough to do that and he can repeat words even if he doesn't know what they mean." She reached up her hand to her shoulder, a signal for Sheik to come down. When the parrot was sitting on her hand, she asked it, "Sheik, I want say some words to Reddy there, and I want you to repeat them after me. Repeat them real shrill. Can you do that?" She had to explain again before he got it.

"Can do! Can do!" he shrieked. The alien moved again, a shrug of its almost non-existent shoulders.

"You'll have to handle the animation from the side, Juan, and stop it every fifteen or twenty seconds while I give the words to Sheik and he repeats them to the alien. I'll be on the other side so I can make sure I'm following in sequence."

"Got it. Let's try." He had already put the animation back to the beginning.

It went much slower this time as Samantha had to say the words matching the animation each time when Juan stopped it, then wait while Sheik screeched the same words to the alien, hopefully in a sound register audible to it. It was certainly shrill enough, being comparable to a fingernail scraping across a blackboard. The noise grated on her auditory nerves and made Samantha think of bringing partial ear plugs the next time they came, or even sending for some. When the animation reached the end, Reddy flapped its arms.

"I wonder what that means." Juan said.

Samantha shrugged. "If we're lucky it means it understood at least partially. Juan, you're much better at animation than me. Can you fix up a quick CGI that will ask it to wait for two days by using a representation of that red circle the way it did?"

He thought for a moment. "Yeah, I can do something like that. I'll make a circle and then an extension to show a small part of it, then on that part try to expand it to represent only two days, in correlation to the time it took for the circle to completely convert to red. Mr. McAllister, do you know exactly how long it's been since it was visible the first time? I want be as accurate as possible."

"I'll never forget. I can give you the exact day and year."

"Do it then and I'll get busy."

While he worked Sheik talked to the alien but not much of it made sense to Samantha. It was making sounds she hadn't heard before. She doubted the alien understood either, but perhaps it would get the idea that the parrot was a friendly helpmate to humans. A sudden thought almost made her giggle. What if Reddy thought Sheik was the master race, not the humans? Wouldn't that be hilarious!

It took Juan only fifteen minutes to complete a new graphic, this one without sound, and far sooner than Samantha could have done it. "I'm ready," he said and turned the computer screen to face the alien. It began to play. When it was completed, the creature flapped its wings. Then it and its craft disappeared into stealth.

"What was the wing-flapping about?" Anton asked.

"I hope it means okay or yes or something like that," Juan said. "Anyway, now we have to get an acoustic engineer to convert the sound of our original graphic to a megahertz range both higher and lower than our hearing. I think that birds can sing in a range above the ultimate of our hearing, about twenty megahertz. Also we'll get it converted to different ranges of sound above and below our hearing just in case, but I'm betting on a range between twenty and thirty megahertz. We've got two days so we'd better get busy!"

"Jane, I know you have contacts with some sound engineers. I want the best one you know, and I want whoever it is here by tonight."

Jane Carruthers stared aghast at Anton. She had never seen him so agitated. "Mr. McAllister, that sounds a bit unreasonable. Everyone has a job they have to attend to and families and so forth. I can get you a good one but--"

"I said tonight. If I have to call the President to have one here, I will. And while I'm at it, I want David standing by to do some astronomical work using CGI animation. Now get to it. No excuses."

"Yes, sir!" she said and meant it. She liked her job and she had never heard that tone of voice from him.

At eight o'clock that evening a helicopter delivered a mussed and extremely aggravated acoustics engineer. Jane had told everyone the man held a doctorate in wave length interpretation of various bird species and a consultant to the military in research on using finely directed sound waves as a weapon. His first words to Anton, who met him as he finished running from beneath the still-turning blades were, "What in the hell is all this goddamned rush and no excuses bullshit?"

"Just what I said it was, Dr. Olson. A national emergency. Get in the car and let's go."

"Do you mind if I unload my equipment first?"

An hour later he was ensconced with Juan, Jane and Samantha, as well as Shufus and Sheik. He was taking orders from everyone but Shufus. Perhaps the German Shepherd felt sorry for him. Occasionally he came over to the sweating engineer and nudged his head into range for a head pat or ear rub. The big friendly dog seemed to relax Dr. Olson and get him settled in to work as long as necessary. He heard the young woman who was his owner admonish him not to bark under any circumstances but was doubtful her order would stop any barking if the dog decided it wanted to. As he fiddled with sound equipment, ear phones and oscilloscopes in order to convert the sound from the animation put together by Juan and Samantha, he began to wonder why he was performing the task and what the dog was doing there. He was afraid it would bark unexpectedly at a crucial moment and ruin hours of work despite the warning not to.

It was only when a wayward glance away from his instruments happened to catch both Samantha and Shufus together in a familiar pose, similar to one he had seen on the internet, that he recognized them for who they were. After the realization came over him, his grumbling stopped. He paused after that only to ask for more coffee or a snack or to take a ten minute nap, at the end of which he appeared remarkably refreshed. Samantha wanted to ask him how his cat naps worked so effective but dared not interrupt him for fear of a mistake occurring.

Once he completed the sound conversion and synchronized it with the animation, David Marston was rushed into Olson's impromptu sound engineering and acoustical dynamics laboratory to begin a new job. He began working at the end of an assembly line consisting of Juan and Samantha devising rough astronomical data into CGI form, then David correcting and revising so that all their hurried animation and explanations were astronomically correct. Dr. Olson took over from there, converting their words into a range of MHz sound waves above and below those audible to human hearing and making certain they were again synchronized to the animation. The astronomical data was designed to let Reddy point out his home star system if he would.

All this took time, of course. As dawn broke, Anton consulted with Juan and Samantha and gave everyone six hours to get some food and sleep. By noon they were toiling again. Everything they thought might possibly be useful had to be ready by the following morning.

"That's it," Samantha said at ten o'clock that night. "I quit because we've got it all ready. If that blasted feather-looking, independent-eyed, rainbow-colored runt doesn't catch on to all this then it's too damned dumb to work with."

"Too dumb!" Sheik reiterated. He was becoming bored at not having enough to do or enough attention paid to him. Shufus simply stretched out and slept when everyone was too busy to scratch behind his ears or ruffle his fur.

***

Again, Samantha, Juan and Anton waited at the site where the alien craft had effectively vanished. Juan leaned forward until he felt the side of the craft and knocked in a "Shave and a haircut, two bits!" rhythm. The second time the alien craft and its inhabitant blinked into visual existence.

"Ready, ready, ready!" Sheik screeched just in case the creature wasn't well awake yet. Shufus gave it a loud bark just to be sure.

"That's enough, guys," Samantha said.

"Yup. Let's get started," Juan said.

The animation began to play. None of the humans could hear the sound but it was there. The alien being they were calling Reddy among themselves stood silently until the end then flapped its arms excitedly.

"That must mean either yes or okay," Juan said.

"It might mean for us to play it again, but never mind. Let's feed it the astronomical data now," Samantha said. She was almost as excited as Sheik. He had moved his wings in concert with the varicolored alien's flapping arms.

Apparently it appreciated the astronomical animation. It waved its arms again and disappeared for ten minutes. When it came back into view it produced an animation of its own.

"Damn showoff," Anton muttered at the speed with which it had composed its own CGI animation and then somehow caused it appear on their own computer screen without inserting a memory chip. How it did the trick wasn't nearly as important presently as the sheer beauty of its three dimensional depiction.

Strange symbols began appearing with corresponding pictures. Juan understood what was being represented immediately. Samantha got it only a moment later. Specialists in problematical first contact with alien cultures had always claimed that math would be a universal language. Evidently they were right, up to a point. The problem was that its symbols, already strange, were arranged in three dimensional arrays. Again, Jane was called forth. She appeared in less than fifteen minutes, sleepy-eyed but eager. Her face was still pretty despite its lack of makeup. Her taffy-blond hair was essentially uncombed but gathered in a bundle behind her neck with a ribbon. She saw the problem immediately.

"We need to get Liadra here, but in the meantime record Reddy's presentation."

"We have, right from the start. Why Liadra, though?"

"She can convert the recording from three dimensional to how we normally look at a screen, in the regular two dimensions. After that I can make better sense of those symbols--up to a point. She'll have to take over soon, though. Possibly she can even see the relationships in 3D where I either can't or have a really hard time of it. Then there's the fact that she's a much better and more advanced mathematician than me. I'll be lost pretty soon regardless of how Reddy is presenting its data. In fact, I may already have misinterpreted some of the first parts of it.