Saturn Rukh (30 page)

“Never liked spiders,” he muttered, looking carefully through the dim forest around him, helmet light on high beam and image intensifier on maximum sensitivity.

He didn’t see any giant spiders, so he took another look at the shiny thread in front of him. Being careful not to touch the thread, he followed it to the next feather. There, at the end of the fine line, was a tiny insectlike creature sitting on the edge of the feather. There was a semicircular notch in the feather where the creature had obviously been nibbling away.

“Got something for you to see, Sandra,” Rod reported over the radio link. He turned on his helmet light to illuminate the specimen and set his image intensifier on image transmit.

“Eeeee!”
yelled Sandra over the link.

“Sorry,” said Rod. “Had the image intensifier lens on high magnification. Here’s my finger for comparison. See ... it’s not much bigger than my little fingernail. Looks like a daddy longlegs to me. There’s this small central body with real long jointed legs.”

“Twelve of them,” said Sandra. “The better to grab you with.”

The creature ignored the increased illumination from Rod’s helmet light and continued eating away at the edge of the feather.

“A feather mite, certainly,” said Sandra. “What shall I call it?”

“How about ‘longleg spidermite’ for a name?” suggested Rod.

“Kind of long,” complained Sandra. She paused to think about it. “But ‘longleg’
is
a short, self-descriptive term. I’ll let you get away with it for the common name. If it’s like most vermin, it only infests one species of host. Jeeves? What is the Latin name for a long-legged rukh-spider?”

“Longicrus rukharanea,
“ Jeeves instantly replied.

Sandra went on. “One thing concerns me. I can understand how the longleg survives in its present form, but I can’t understand how it evolved. It has no air bladders, so it can’t float, and it has no wings, so it can’t fly. It must have evolved with one or the other, and lost them once it developed its parasitic lifestyle. Even so, how does it get from one host to the next?”

“It does have the ability to spin a thread, like an Earth spider,” said Rod, trying to adjust the position of his head to pick up the glint from the fine line in the visor imager.

“That’s the answer!” said Sandra, pleased to hear the information. “Once a longleg gets ready to leave the host, it just climbs to the top of a feather and lets out a long line into the breeze coming over the top of the rukh’s wing, and when the line is long enough, the air drag pulls Mr. Longleg Spidermite off its perch and off the back of the rukh, where it slowly falls down through the flock. If it’s lucky, it finds a new feather forest to eat through. They must have started evolution as sinkers, but very slow sinkers because the thread gave them a high surface area-to-mass ratio. Did you remember to take sample bags?” she asked. “I’d like to look at that thing under high magnification.”

“Sorry, no bags,” replied Rod. “I was just going out for a walk, not a scientific expedition.” He thought for a while. “I’ve got it! I’ll empty my water bottle and bring the wee beastie home in that.”

“Don’t forget to bring a sample of the thread,” reminded Sandra as the radio link went back on standby.

With the longleg tucked safely away in his backpack, Rod continued his vermin-clearing operation, now careful to look for vermin on feather edges as well as featherroots. He came to a patch of feathers that were badly infested with quill lice. Soon the meta torch was almost in constant use as he methodically cleared out one louse after another, making sure than none of their spawn survived.

Suddenly, the canopy opened above him and Rod looked up to see a giant eye peering down at him. This had to be the lower eye, since the third air sac segment was collapsed and the creature wasn’t wearing a hextube string tie. When the giant caterpillar saw the meta torch flaring quietly in Rod’s hand, it rose up, first set of foreclaws drawn up out of the way, while the second set of foreclaws kept the canopy held open. Rod finished off the louse he had been working on. Holding the deflated, but still-squirming, body of the quill louse by his gloved left hand, he fried its brain and cooked its egg sac. He added the body to the stack he had been collecting. Then, turning off his meta torch, he stepped back. The gigantic eye came down to look. It picked up one of the bodies, held it close to its eye, and put it back on the pile. Then, one of its foreclaws extended, it slowly approached Rod. With the meta torch at the ready in his left hand, but hidden behind his back, Rod extended his right hand and grasped the tip of the large, stiffly inflated, balloon-like claw. Once, when Rod had needed help to pull the reactor out over the lip of the mouth, he had led that very claw to the Hoytether and asked for its assistance. Now, he found himself being led by the claw, as the eye contracted its neck, clearing the way for them both through the feather forest. They came to a large quill that had five large quill lice jammed down into the follicle pore. The pore was oozing and the skin around the follicle was swollen and scabby. Rod could see from the thickness of their bladder skins that three of the lice were mature and well dug in. There was no way the pneumatic-powered claws of the eye could extract them. Protected by the bladders of their larger mates, two smaller lice had also forced their way into the pore. Even when the mature lice had jetted off, the pore would still remain infected. For all Rod knew, this particular pore might have been under attack for weeks or months.

“I bet that’s sore!” said Rod, letting go of the claw and bringing out his meta torch. “You once helped me, so I’ll help you.” He quickly burst the five sacs to make sure the mature lice didn’t jet off, spreading infection through the forest. Then, one by one, he extracted the creatures and torched them thoroughly. As he finished each one, the eye would pick up the corpse, raise it up to the top of the canopy, then use its canards to fly its head high above the back of the still-diving wing and let the burnt body of the vermin fly off on the wind, to fall into the hot depths below.

The task done, Rod looked up at the giant eye and the eye looked down at him. Rod raised his hand. The giant eye bent down, one of its foreclaws extended in imitation. Rod “shook hands.”

“Any time you need help in getting rid of some more bandits, partner,” he said, “just give me a call.” Dropping the claw, he headed off into the forest, following the macropolyhextube guide line he had been paying out during his journey. By the time he made his circuitous way back to
Sexdent
it was getting dark. Sandra, Dan, and Seichi were waiting on the surface outside the airlock, hoping for a nighttime session with the upper eye. Seichi was holding his keyboard, which was connected to a large “woofer” speaker standing beside him. Dan was monitoring the output of his similarly large-sized low-frequency microphone. As they waited they could hear deep rumblings from inside the rukh as the eyes used the giant body to “gossip” with the other members of the flock during the changeover period between the daytime hunting dive and the nighttime altitude climb. Since the human ear had difficulty hearing such low tones, the actual “listening” was done by Jeeves, who analyzed the signals coming from the laser beam motion detector monitoring the vibrational oscillations of the low-frequency microphone, and raised the frequency of the oscillations to the middle of the humans’ hearing and speaking audio range. Similarly, when Seichi would play a note on the keyboard, or any of the humans spoke, Jeeves would down-translate the frequency spectrum to the middle of the rukh’s audio communications band.

Sure enough, once the nighttime climb of the flock started, the upper eye came visiting again, wearing its “shoestring tie.” It was carrying the loose end of the string tie in one foreclaw. As the eye approached them, it extended the foreclaw proudly to show what it had done.

“It’s tied a bowline in the loose end!” exclaimed Dan. “It must have figured out how to do it from looking at the knot at the other end. Let me get another segment of line and teach it a square knot.”

“Dan!” said Sandra. “We’re not at a Boy Scout camp. Let’s concentrate on the language lessons.” She turned to Seichi. “The rukh body is still talking. Can you imitate the sound?”

A complex rumble was rising up from the air sacs of the beast below them. The sound vibrated the soles of their boots and their bowels quivered in sympathetic response. Seichi listened to Jeeves’s frequency-translated version of the multi-chordal sound through his helmet phones, while at the same time he tried to “feel” what the rukh was saying with the whole of his body. The rumble stopped temporarily and Seichi repeated what he had heard using his keyboard, some of his fingers often having to hit more than one note at a time, then sliding off on another note while sustaining some of the others. Fortunately, the keyboard was designed so he could key in the permanent notes of the chordal phrase as a “drone,” then remove his fingers from those keys and use them elsewhere to bring in other notes. The large ultrabass speaker beside Seichi vibrated visibly as it responded to Seichi’s playing. The deep rumbling sounds coming from the speaker caused the eye to jerk back in surprise, and the surface they were standing on became quiet.

“I think it heard something familiar,” said Sandra, holding her breath in excitement. “Play it again.”

Before Seichi could respond, the eye moved closer to Seichi and the speaker, and the surface below them rumbled again. At the same time the eye used a foreclaw to touch the surface they were standing on.

“It’s the same chordal pattern as before, but just part of it,” said Seichi, repeating the chordal phrase with his keyboard. “Much less complicated and easier to play.”

“But what does it mean?” asked Dan, bewildered.

“The eye pointed down with its foreclaw as it said it,” said Sandra. “Perhaps that’s its name. Let’s try and make sure. Are you ready to repeat that chord?”

“Easy as cake,” said Seichi. “I had the keyboard in record mode.”

Sandra pointed down, making sure she touched the taut skin of the rukh below their boots, while Seichi had the keyboard play the simpler phrase over again. The eye bobbed rapidly up and down in excitement and confirmed the identification by pointing at the body below them while repeating the chord once again. The eye then pointed a foreclaw at itself and again the body rumbled a chord. The eye looked expectantly to see how the humans responded.

“We must have got it wrong,” said Sandra, disappointed. “That was the same chord.”

“Maybe it’s just trying to make clear that the body and the eye are one person,” suggested Dan.

“I do not think so,” said Seichi after a long pause. “Jeeves? Wasn’t there a different note in that chord?”

“You are correct,” replied Jeeves. “The lowest note shifted three hertz upward. Would you like me to repeat it through the speaker? I have a perfect copy in my memory.”

“If I had you do that, then I would not be learning to speak the language,” replied Seichi, fingering the difficult chord once again, with the lowest note now slightly higher. He finished by pointing a finger at the eye.

The eye bobbed excitedly up and down, then inflated the canards on the sides of its head. The wings caught the air and raised the head high in the sky on a rapidly inflating neck while at the same time an organ chord of rising tones emerged from the beast below them. Then, just as suddenly, the canards brought the head back down again and the chord stopped.

“I think that was the upper eye’s equivalent of saying ‘It’s
got
it!’,” said Sandra, smiling at the eye’s antics.

It was now Sandra’s turn. “Sandra,” she said, pointing at herself. Jeeves repeated the word a few octaves lower through the woofer speaker. The huge body of the leviathan strained below their feet as it emitted a short, multitoned, almost stuttering sound.

And the language lesson started.

~ * ~

The computer console turned out to be of great help in getting many concepts across, especially once Sandra had shown the eye how it could draw pictures on the touchscreen with the end of its foreclaw. Soon they jointly knew words for many objects, including the Sun and its planets, and many actions, such as “come” and “go.”

After five hours of lessons, the sky started to get light as morning came. They were joined by the lower eye, which had snaked its way upward from its perch below.

When the upper eye didn’t introduce the newcomer, Sandra decided to take care of that herself.

“Are you ready with the keyboard, Seichi?” she asked.

Going back to the beginning of the language session, she pointed down at the surface below them and Seichi played the chordal phrase that the aliens used for the body of the rukh. She pointed at the upper eye wearing the string tie and Seichi played the same chordal phrase with the single note three hertz higher. Then Sandra pointed at the recently arrived lower eye and waited. The upper eye pointed at the lower eye and the body below them gave out a chordal phrase that was almost identical to the ones Seichi had played.

“The changed note is lower in this chord instead of higher,” said Seichi. “Am I right, Jeeves?”

“Correct,” said Jeeves. “Three hertz lower.”

“It sort of makes sense,” said Sandra. “They are really just different parts of the same animal. They must share the same root chord for their names but have slightly different added notes to indicate which part is which.”

Since the humans couldn’t easily produce chords, they chose the nicknames “Uppereye” and “Lowereye” to distinguish between the two eyes. The string tie of Uppereye and the nonfunctional third air sac on Lowereye made it easy for the humans to tell the two apart.