Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6) (14 page)

“Um, yes?”

“Is it OK if I put it up on your big screen?”

“Sure.” He turned to face the screen as
an
animal was tossed to the ground in the center of the picture. At first offended at the callous treatment, then dismayed to realize that it had just been killed, then
feeling
the hair st
an
d up on the back of his neck.
It has
eight limbs! And that is no arthropod! Fur? How big is it? Floppy neck. No tail. This was a completely unknown animal! It didn’t even fit into any known phyla! My
G
od
…
and someone had just killed it!
With dismay he considered the horrifying possibility that this might
have been
the only remaining living specimen.
The large upper arms
have
horny looking tips th
at might be adapted for fighting? Or digging?
What if
this species
ha
s been
living
underground
and simply
hidden from modern observation all this time? Please, please don’t let this
have been
the only one?!
He turned to
confront
Donsaii but then a large clawed foot appeared and rolled it over. Could this thing be tiny, filmed with macro lenses
?
A
nd the claw
ed foot
is
on some kind of bird?
If so
the video
must
have been slowed down because
,
in the world of the small,
things happened
much
faster than
what
he was seeing on the screen
.

Wheat’s eyes narrowed. The animal appea
red to have been rolled onto it
s stomach,
four
smaller limbs below. The larger limbs seemed to come o
ff the upper part of the animal. The front pair of the upper limbs
at present dangled down to the ground. Did they normally reach the ground and assist with locomotion? Or did they serve some other purpose and were just dangling to the ground in the flaccidity of death?
Limbs on the
top
, i.e. wings, and limbs on the bottom, i.e. legs, was a common body plan in
Insecta
but this animal didn’t look like it had an exoskeleton and only had four, not six, limbs on the bottom! At first he’d thought that it had a flexible snout like an elephant, but the end of that snout seemed to have eyes on it? Could
that
be a head?

The clawed feet reappeared. Looking like bird feet except with a fuzzy covering rather than feathers
. Then another pair of fuzzy skinned limbs appeared from above, holding a primitive knife! “Hah!” Wheat sat back
,
suddenly enlightened
.
“That’s some very good CG
I
. You had me completely fooled for a minute or two.
” He frowned,
“
So what are you doing in the movie business?”
They want me to consult on some kind of sci-fi movie? It’s comforting to know that
someone
in the movie business is trying to get the science right!
He looked at Donsaii expectantly.

She
had
paused the video and
now
turned to look at him quizzically, head turned to the side. Her smile began as a little quirk of the lip, then spread across her
delicate features,
stopping just short of when he thought she’d begin
laughing
.
She looked positively delighted.
“How about if I get you to watch the rest of this clip, then I’ll show you a few others? Then we’ll talk about how I got into the ‘movie business’
?
”

Donsaii still looked like she
was
suppressing a
laugh
,
but Wheat turned to the screen again raising an eyebrow. On the screen
the
skin was deftly removed with a few strokes of the (flint?) knife
,
peeling it up like taking off a t-shirt
.

The detail here is amazing!
Wheat thought to himself.
For a small throw away part of the movie,
one
that doubtless contributes little to the main storyline, they’ve invested heavily in making
this
look right!
Wheat’s respect for the filmmakers rose immensely. He’d been impressed that they wanted his scientific help, but what they’d
already
done showed amazing attention to detail.

T
he knife then went back to peel
the skin off of the limbs. Then it made a transverse cut the
body of the animal
just behind the front limbs.

The head of the dissector dipped into the view! Wheat leaned forward in amazement. Rather than
creating a
n
inexplicably
different
creature,
like an amateur might have, the filmmakers had put the head of the dissector on a prehensile neck also. It
also
had four eyes
,
like the animal it was cutting up! They had designed this animal like it was a distant relative of the one it was cutting up, like one would
actually
expect on
an
alien world with evolution doing its thing. So many filmmakers would have thought it
“
more interesting
”
to have some completely
different
types of aliens cutting each other up
in their movie
, no matter how unlikely it would be to find
bizarrely
different body structures on the same planet
.
But,
these two
did look
like they could have evolved from the same ancestor.

The alien
pause
d
to break something bony at the back and the front
of the animal
before cutting the rest of the way around to separate the
animal
into a front and back half. Then it cut
the rest of the way
through the body
,
exposing a cavity that
it
quickly pulled organs and intestine looking things out of, casting most of them aside
,
but keeping a few solid looking chunks.
This was done so quickly
that
Wheat suspected the animator hadn’t wanted to spend time showing each of the organs and trying to make them
appear
realistic.
The limbs were twisted and cut loose
from the body
.
Then all
the pieces
, neck, eight limbs and two body parts
were spitted on a stick and hung over the fire.

Putting the spit over the fire the entire alien finally came into view. Wheat’s shoulders sagged a little in disappointment. The moviemakers had decided to give
wings
to
their alien but had made them far too small for them to be useful
for flight in
such a large animal. He tilted his head,
unless of course these are small animals seen greatly magnified. Insects fly with small wings because they’re tiny.
He shrugged to himself,
but then it’s ridiculous to imagine that a tiny animal like that could be intelligent. Well,
and
look at the tiny size of the head on that thing. It couldn’t have enough brain in
that little cranium
to be intelligent, even if it
was
full size.
Wheat quirked his mouth,
the
fire’s wrong too. Look how
energetically
it’s burning with just a little wood. They must have
added
accelerant
to it for it to burn that bright.
Or it could be a CGI fire too
,
I suppose.
He felt disappointed that they’d gotten
these
things wrong after doing such an amazing job with the little alien animal,
but then
, he thought,
they wouldn’t need me
, would they, if they could get it
all
right
without my help
?

Wheat turned to Donsaii, “So you want my critique?”

Eyes twinkling
,
with
a couple of fingers
pressed
to her lips, Donsaii nodded.

Following the principle of
giving
compliments first and
making
criticism
s
second, Wheat told her that he thought the computer algorithms they were using had produced astonishingly realistic imagery. Then he pointed out that when the animal had been first tossed into the frame it had bounced a
bit
too
high. He went on to compliment the similar structure
of
the alien and its prey
,
but to point out that the wings on the alien were too small for flight and the head too small for intelligence. He finished up with the fire that burned excessively for the fuel it
was consuming
.

Donsaii nodded, “Can I show you some more video?”

Wheat checked his watch, he had nothing pressing and
,
they were paying handsomely
. His department would be pleased to have him bring
ing
in the cash
and they would give some of it to him
. He nodded and turned
back
to the screen. An image of a planet appeared on a black background. Almost entirely white with some spots of blue. Donsaii spoke to her AI and the view jumped closer several times then curled in around the planet. A few more jumps and it descended into the atmosphere, then into the clouds, then through the clouds to show splotchy green everywhere
.

The detail continued to astonish Wheat as the viewpoint slowly dropped down to a landing in a meadow surrounded by
an
enormous rain forest. Similar to an Earth rain forest, yet without a single piece of flora he recognized. Some obviously modeled on Earth’s trees
,
but
much
too tall for the diameters of their trunks. He mused,
perhaps
as
if the trunks are constructed of stronger material than the cellulose of Earth’s plants?
Then something flew across the image. His eyes widened,
the alien?
It crossed the field of view again, closer this time. Shortly it crossed the field one more time
as if it were circling. W
hen he would have expected it to cross again it landed, the eyes in that prehensile neck looking at him.
My God, something about that gaze… they’ve managed to make it
look
intelligent somehow!
It has a harness made out of leather or something. And
,
there’s
the hilt of that flint knife. The w
ings
may be
too small but they beat like wings should
,
instead of with that oddly “wrong” motion of most of the
other
CGI wings I’ve ever seen.
The filmmakers
must have studied
small bird
’
s
wing
beating
in slow motion and modeled them
. Or something? He turned to Donsaii, “That’s amazing! You must be dedicating supercomputer time to the CGI or somehow doing something much more sophisticated than the big studios.”

He tilted his h
ead, “But why?
I thought you were into physics, not sci-fi movie making?” He carefully
didn’t express
his disappointment that she would use her prodigious talents for making movies instead of continuing her research, or whatever you would call turning out
profoundly
new technology at an unheard of rate
like she’d been doing
.
He supposed she had the right to do whatever she wanted with the talents God gave her
, but
he felt troubled nonetheless
.

Donsaii seemed to struggle
with her expression
a moment, then her face turned serious. “Thank you for the compliments. It’s gratifying to think that you would believe that I could make such a movie from scratch but I really have no talent along those lines.”