The Mind Pool (30 page)

I said that we are “down on Travancore” but that’s more like a figure of speech than anything else. We don’t know where the true surface of the planet begins. No one does. We’re hanging in a sort of half-balloon tent with a flat, flexible base, about a hundred feet down from the topmost growths of vegetation. There’s another five-kilometers-plus of plant life underneath us.

Animal life, too. We saw the first signs of that on the low-altitude automated survey. The whole planet is riddled with holes, circular shafts about five meters across. They dive down from the top layers, and at first we thought they might be natural rain channels because it rains every day over most of Travancore. But now we’re not so sure. S’glya—she’s the Pipe-Rilla on our team—saw something big wriggling away down one of the tunnels when we were flying in. Scary. But I was mainly happy that it wasn’t the Morgan Construct, because we were a sitting target. I tried to hide my panicky feeling but of course it didn’t work. S’glya has this absolutely uncanny ability to read human feelings and she told the others.

They didn’t seem worried. It’s an unpleasant thought for me, the idea that soon we’ll be heading down one of those tunnels, but the Tinker feels quite different about that. It argues that the tunnels are a big boon to us, since without them it would take forever to explore the vertical forest on Travancore. Maybe it will take forever anyway. We’ll know, as soon as we get down to the interior.

Even before we made the final descent we decided that the training program had missed the point. We were sent to Dembricot for final training, because it’s a vegetation world like Travancore and everyone thought it would be good experience for this place.

Logical idea, but totally wrong. You must have seen the training films of Dembricot by now. Flat, water plains of plant growth, but they’re no more like Travancore than Barchan is. This planet is dense, tangled hillocks of jungle, boiling up in swirls and breakers like one of Earth’s seas in a bad storm.

One good thing: I can breathe the air with just a compressor. I should be able to manage without even that when we get down to a lower level where the pressure is higher. We’re all doing well. S’glya needs a heating unit, and Angel had to do some mysterious interior modification before the atmosphere was acceptable, but that’s all.

The view from the top layer of vegetation is spectacular at the moment. Travancore’s primary, Talitha, is close to setting, and when it’s low on the horizon it shines through mile after mile of ferns and leaves and vines. No flowers, I’m afraid—Travancore wouldn’t please old Bozzie. Everything in sight is greener than green, except for the Top Creepers. That’s not their official biological name, but it’s a good description. They are purple, gigantic lateral creepers that snake away across the top of everything as far as you can see. And I mean
gigantic.
They’re only a few meters across, but each one is many kilometers long. In spite of their size they are not at all dense and heavy. I tried to take a sample from one, because I couldn’t see how the rest of the vegetation could possibly support that much weight.

When I cut into it there was a hissing sound and a horrible smell, and the level of the vegetation around the Top Creeper went
down
a fraction. The whole thing has to be nothing more than a wafer-thin shell stretched out over a hollow center full of light gases. Now I suspect that they are actually holding the other plants
up.

I told you I was going to babble, and I think I’m doing it, but I hope that I’m justified. If you do have to come here, the more you know about the place ahead of time, the better. We were trained as well as we could be, but it surely wasn’t enough. No one has ever looked closely at Travancore before. With no defined surface and no open water, no one thought that it was worth it. We have more questions than answers.

More about those mysterious holes. They keep preying on my mind. Angel’s imaging organs (can’t call them eyes) can be tuned to the thermal infra-red. Angel took a heat-wavelength look down one of the shafts, and claims that it isn’t vertical at all. It spirals down in a helix, which rules out the natural rain-channel idea. We’ll soon have a better explanation, I expect, because we’ll be going down one. I hope that I’m around after that, to send you a description. Anyway, whatever happens to us our ship ought to be receiving a full record of it.

And more about Travancore, too. Naturally we’ve thought about nothing else since we got here. There are plenty of mysteries not even mentioned in the briefing documents. For example: gravity and air. The surface gravity is only a little more than a quarter of Earth’s. So now can it hold onto a substantial atmosphere, and support this massive cover of vegetation? The air should have bled away into space long ago.

Well, according to S’glya, Travancore has its atmosphere
because
of the strange vegetation layer. The canopy of plant life is so dense and continuous that it can trap air molecules within and beneath it. We know there is something close to a pressure discontinuity up near the top here.

And of course it’s a chicken-and-egg situation because the atmosphere is absolutely necessary for the vegetation to exist! The plant cover must have developed very early in Travancore’s history. And if S’glya is right, the shafts we saw can’t go down uninterrupted all the way to the solid surface, because otherwise they could act as escape vents for the air. So we may have to cut our way through barriers, one more little difficulty. But just to add to the confusion, Angel says that S’glya’s idea about the relationship of the atmosphere and the vegetation is wrong—for six reasons still to be specified.

Well, what’s the good news? The team is the good news. We’re an odd assortment. We have a Tinker whose real name sounds like a breaking window, but who asks me to call it Ishmael. Its big ambition in life seems to be to snuggle up to the rest of us. Then there’s Angel, who won’t stop using human proverbs and cliches, and who insists that Angels don’t
have
names. And last of all there’s S’glya, who seems to know what I’m thinking and feeling without being told. S’glya’s not her real Pipe-Rilla name, either, because that’s unpronounceable too.

Weird. But it all
works
! Once we got to know each other we’ve been achieving an unbelievable level of communication and cooperation. It seems as though anything that one of us can’t do, another one can. We first noticed it back on Barchan, and it has just gone on getting better and better.

Better and better—but God only knows if it will be good
enough.
Angel says that the Morgan Construct is a superior being, beyond even Angel.

Full night here now. Time to sleep.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, Chan, wherever you are. I love you, and I’ve always loved you since you were a baby. I can’t forgive myself for running away and refusing to speak to you when you were on Ceres with Tatty. But it was awfully hard for me to admit that I don’t own you any more.

I hope that you can forgive me. And I hope that some day I can make up for what I did then.

Yours, Leah.

Chan had read it through again and again. After the third time he could have repeated it word for word.

He kept going back to the last few paragraphs. Leah’s words of love bowled him over—and her remarks about the level of communication between her team members baffled him completely. Over the past couple of days he had become convinced that his own team would
never
work well together. They had too much trouble understanding each other. Well, maybe Shikari, as the Tinker liked to be called, would be all right. Shikari sometimes made perfect sense. So did the Pipe-Rilla, now and again, although neither she nor the Tinker seemed to have the equivalent of facial expressions. If they had some kind of body language for use with their own species, he had no idea how to read it.

As for the Angel, that was mystery personified. The creature had no face, no mouth, no method of communication except through a computer interface. And even that output was often incomprehensible, though Shikari and the Pipe-Rilla understood it (or pretended to).

And this mismatched assembly was supposed to be able to track down and destroy the most dangerous being in the known universe! They would be lucky if the Artefact simulation of the Construct, here on Barchan, didn’t tie them in knots.

They had established their camp down near the planet’s south pole. Until they knew the Simmie Artefact’s location there was no point in enduring the dreadful summer heat of the equator and northern hemisphere. On this third evening, as the dark sands of Barchan gradually cooled, the Pursuit Team settled down to its first strategy session.

The Tinker had increased noticeably in size as the sun set and the air was less scorchingly hot. The central mass contained almost twice as many components as when Chan had first met it, and its response time was painfully slow. The other three waited (impatiently, in at least Chan’s case) while Shikari’s speech funnel made its preparatory wheezes and whistles.

The Pipe-Rilla, S’greela, was crouched next to Chan and nervously stroking her multi-jointed forelimbs along the side of her head. If her performance to date was any guide, when confronted by anything the least frightening she would chitter in horror and terror and run away with great spring-legged leaps.

The Angel at least would not run away. It could not. No matter how intelligent the crystalline Singer might be, it was bound within the vegetable body of the Chassel-Rose and suffered that plant’s extreme slowness of movement. When the Angel wanted to move, the bulbous green body first lifted the root-borers up close underneath it. When they were stowed safely away it could creep along on the down-pointing adventitious stems at the edge of the body base. Chan guessed that if it was in a real hurry it might manage up to a hundred steps an hour.

Which left only the Tinker, Shikari, as a possibly useful ally. But its reaction to danger had already been demonstrated. It at once dispersed to individual components, and they flew away.

The curious thing was that the other three did not share Chan’s worries at all.

“We think that we have a satisfactory approach.” Shikari was finally speaking, slow and ponderous. “The Simulated Artefact lacks circadian rhythms and is indifferent to night or day. But our team is not. We Tinkers prefer to cluster by night, and Chan needs to become dormant. However, S’greela is naturally nocturnal, and like the Chassel-Rose she has excellent night vision. This, therefore, is our suggestion. Angel and S’greela should perform a night survey, seeking the Simmie. Human and self will remain here and rest. If there is no success in the search, then when daylight comes we will reverse the roles.”

The long blue-green fronds at the top of the Angel began to wave slowly in the air. Chan, ready to speak, paused. He had seen that motion before, when the Angel’s computer communicator was beginning its translation. Maybe even an Angel had some kind of body language.

“We agree,” said the translator’s mechanical voice. “However, we propose one difference. We believe that we now know the probable location of the Simulated Artefact. Therefore, the mission for Angel and Pipe-Rilla should be one of confirmation, not of search.”

“But how can you?—” Chan stopped. The ferny fronds were still waving.

“We have completed the analysis of imaging radar records obtained during orbital survey,” went on the Angel. “There are two significant anomalies. One of them is our base. The other is almost certainly the Simulacrum. We request a brief pause, while we perform a confirming analysis. We have stored a copy of the ship’s data record.”

The Angel had answered Chan’s half-spoken question, plus another one about the ship’s records that he had thought but not even started to ask.

Telepathy? Even as the thought came, Chan rejected it. He remembered what Flammarion had told him during a Ceres briefing: “An Angel doesn’t normally think like a human, but not because it
can’t.
When an Angel wants to, it can put part of its brain into what we call ‘emulator mode.’ Then that piece can be instructed by the Angel to think like a human, or a Pipe-Rilla, or a Tinker of any number of components, or maybe like all three at once. And probably any other creature you care to name, maybe even like a Morgan Construct. And while all that’s going on, the Angel still performs logical analysis in its own way. Whatever
that
might be.” At that point Kubo Flammarion had seemed puzzled by his own words, and tugged at his uniform as though it had become too small for him.

During Chan’s moment of recollection, the Pipe-Rilla S’greela had unfolded its long, telescoping limbs and was reaching down to pick up the Angel. The Angel had objected to this the first time, protesting that it was quite capable of independent locomotion. But after two minutes of watching the Chassel-Rose’s lumbering progress, the other three had been unanimous. In any travel involving them, Angel would be carried.

Chan watched S’greela now as she easily picked up Angel’s pear-shaped bulk. More and more he was aware of the power in the thin, pipe-stem body. S’greela was gentle, but if she ever chose not to be she could swat Chan like a troublesome insect.

Shikari remained a few feet away from Chan. The Tinker did not speak as S’greela and Angel left in the aircar. It occurred to Chan that he was observing another data point. The others were very economical of words unless he became involved in the conversation; then human-style verbal padding was added for his benefit. They had realized that redundant words were part of human social interaction, as important to Chan as stroking to a Pipe-Rilla or clustering to a Tinker.

Chan stood up and moved across to sit by Shikari. After a few moments he felt the feathery touch of long, delicate antennae on his arms and legs. The Tinker Composite was quietly performing a partial disassembly and rebuilding. Thumb-sized components were leaving the far side of the great clump and re-attaching themselves close to Chan’s body. Within five minutes Shikari was molded solidly against Chan’s left side, touching him all the way from breast to ankles.