The Sunborn (17 page)

“I am not a guy, despite your nicknaming me, but thank you,” the program answered in melodious male tones.

“We’re going to feed you microwave code,” Jordin put in. “Make the usual assumptions, as per training protocol number three. Decode in real time.”

“Now we…wait,” Shanna said, mostly to be saying something. The chill was biting into her feet and hands, and she wanted to move, get blood circulating. “Stay still,” she sent to Jordin.

“Wiseguy,” Jordin said, “can you make anything of those birdcalls?”

“Melodic structures, simple,” the program said.

“Thought so,” Jordin said. “Maybe singing is a universal.”

With the Pluto Project already far over budget, the decision to send along Wiseguy—which took many terabytes of computational space—had been hotly contested. The deciding vote was cast by an eccentric but politically astute old skeptic, who hoped to disprove the “bug-eyed monster Rosetta stone theory,” should life unaccountably turn up on Pluto. Shanna had heard through the gossip tree that the geezer was gambling that his support would make ISA bring along the rest of the DIS metasoftware package. The geezer had devoted decades to it, and he passionately believed in it. This would be a field trial nobody could have foreseen.

Wiseguy had learned Japanese in five hours; Hopi in seven; what smatterings they knew of dolphin in two days. It also mastered some of the fiendishly complex, multilogic artificial grammars generated from an Earth-based mainframe.

The unexpected outcome of $6 billion and a generation of cyberfolk was simply put: a good translator had all the qualities of a true artificial intelligence. As systems got apparently smarter, the philosophers fretted over how to tell an AI from just very fast software. By now the distinction had blurred. Wiseguy
was
a guy, of sorts. It—or she, or he; nobody had known quite how to ask—had to have cultural savvy and blinding mathematical skills. Shanna had long since given up hope of beating Wiseguy at chess, even with one of its twin processors tied off.

“I am laboring, though I must edit and substitute,” Wiseguy said.

“Okay, just hurry.”

“There are six transactions capable in human languages,” Wiseguy said. “To make assertions, ask questions, issue commands, wish, promise, request. Further, all can be done negatively—”

“So? Hurry!”

“If there are others that aliens use, I will not even recognize it. I suspect that is happening here. I shall place blanks where I suspect this is happening.”

“Great—get on with it.” She waved again, hoping to get the creature’s attention. Jordin leaped high in the 0.1-g gravity and churned both arms and legs in the ten seconds it took him to fall back down. Excited, the flying wings swooped silently over them. The scene was eerie in its hush. No calls now. The auroras danced, filmy. In Shanna’s feed from
Proserpina
she heard Wiseguy stumbling, muttering…and beginning to talk. Not in English, but in the curious pips and dots of the microwave wave trains.

She noted from the digital readout on her helmet interior display that Wiseguy had been running full bore while eavesdropping on the radio cross talk. Now it was galloping along. In contrast to the simple radio signals she had first heard, the spoken, acoustic language turned out to be far more sophisticated. Wiseguy, however, dealt not in grammars and vocabularies, but in underlying concepts. And it was
fast.

Shanna took a step toward the swarthy cylinder that heaved and rippled. Then another.
Careful.
Ropy muscles surged in it beneath layers of crusted fat. The cluster of knobs and holes at its front moved. It lifted its “head”—the snubbed-off, blunt forward section of the tube—and a bright, fast chatter of microwaves chimed through her ears. Followed immediately by Wiseguy’s whispery voice. Discourse.

The big body had small cuplike appendages. Ears? But there were smaller openings below, too, with leathery flaps that moved to track the sound of her footsteps. She guessed the cuplike ones were microwave antennas.
On a living creature,
she thought, and then put aside her sense of awe. If they were like the human-made mechanical antennas, they could both transmit and receive with them—unlike, say, eyes.

Another step. More chimes. Wiseguy kept this up at increasing speed. She was now clearly out of the loop. Data sped by in her ears, as Wiseguy had neatly inserted itself into the conversation, assuming Shanna’s persona, using some electromagnetic dodge. To her ears it was just a noisy, spurting stream. The creature apparently still thought it was speaking to her; its head swiveled to follow her.

The streaming conversation verged now from locked harmonies into brooding, meandering strings of chords. Shanna had played classical guitar as a teenager, imagining herself performing before concert audiences instead of bawling into a mike and hitting two chords in a rock band. So she automatically thought in terms of the musical moves of the data flow. Major keys gave way to dusky harmonies in a minor triad. To her mind this had an effect like a cloud passing across the sun.

Wiseguy reported to her and Jordin in its whisper. It and the alien—Ark—had only briefly had to go through the “me Tarzan, you Jane” stage. For a life-form that had no clearly definable brain she could detect, the alien proved a quick study.

She got its proper name first, as distinguished from its identifying signal;
its
name, definitely, for the translator established early in the game that these organisms had no gender.

The
zand,
they called themselves. And this one—call it Ark, because that was all Wiseguy could make of the noise that came before—
Ark-zand.
Maybe, Wiseguy whispered for Shanna and Jordin alone, Ark was just a “place-note” to show that this thing was the “presently here”
of
the zand. It seemed that the name was generic, for all of them.

“Like Earth tribes,” Jordin said, “who name themselves the People. Individual distinctions are tacked on?—maybe when necessary or socially pleasant.”

Jordin was like that—surprising erudition popping out when useful, otherwise a straight supernerd tech type. Nobody was going to find an alternative here to Earth’s tiresome clash of selfish individualisms and stifling collectivisms, Shanna thought. The political theorists back home would still make much of this, though, she was sure.

Shanna took another step toward the dark beach where the creature lolled, its head following her progress. It was no-kidding
cold,
she realized. Her boots were melting the ground under her, just enough to make it squishy. And she could hear the sucking as she lifted her boot, too. So she wasn’t missing these creatures’ calls—they didn’t use the medium.

One more step. Chimes in her ears, and Wiseguy sent them a puzzled “It seems a lot smarter than it should be.”

“Look, they need to talk to each other over distance, out of sight of each other,” Shanna said. “Those waxy all-one-wing birds should flock and probably need calls for mating, right? So do we.” Not that she really thought that was a deep explanation.

“How do we frame an expectation about intelligence?” Jordin put in.

“Yeah, I’m reasoning from Earthly analogies,” Shanna admitted. “Birds and walruses that use microwaves—who woulda thought?”

“I see,” Wiseguy said, and went back to speaking to Ark in its ringing microwave tones.

Shanna listened to the ringing interchange speed up into a blur of blips and jots. Wiseguy could run very fast, of course, but this huge tubular thing seemed able to keep up with it. Microwaves’ higher frequencies had far greater carrying capacity than sound waves and this Ark seemed able to use that. Well, evolution would prefer such a fast-talk capability, she supposed—but why hadn’t it on Earth? Because sound was so easy to use, evolving out of breathing. Even here—Wiseguy told her in a subchannel aside—individual notes didn’t mean anything. Their sequence did, along with rhythm and intonation, just like sound speech. Nearly all human languages used either subject-object-verb order or else subject-verb-object, and the zand did, too. But to Wiseguy’s confusion, they used both, apparently not caring.

Basic values became clear, in the quick scattershot conversation. Something called Rendezvous kept coming up, modified by comments about territory. Self-merge, the ultimate, freely chosen—apparently with all the zand working communally afterward to care for the young, should there luckily occur a Birthing. Respect for age, because the elders had experienced so much more. But respect tempered by skepticism, because the elders embroidered experiences when telling the young the tale of the raiders from Darkside.

“And what’s Darkside?” Jordin asked. He stirred restlessly, watching the sea for signs that others might come ashore. But the big bodies bobbed in the liquid a few hundred meters away.

Wiseguy supplied a guess: “The Outer, they call it also. Perhaps meaning beyond Pluto’s orbit? Far into the darkness? There are other possible interpretations I can display in order of descending probabilities—”

“That’s good enough,” Shanna said. “On with it.”

“Hey, they’re moving in,” Jordin said apprehensively, mouth working.

Shanna would scarcely have noticed the splashing and grinding on the beach as other zand began to arrive—apparently for Rendezvous, and Wiseguy stressed that it deserved the capital letter—save that Ark stopped to count and greet the new arrivals. Her earlier worry about being crunched under a press of huge zand bodies faded. They were social animals, and this barren patch of rock was now Ark’s turf. Arrivals lumbering up onto the dark beach kept a respectful distance, spacing themselves. Like walruses, yes.

Standing motionless for so long, Shanna felt a sharp cold ache in her lower back. The chill had crept in. She was astounded to realize that nearly four hours had passed. She made herself pace, stretch, eat and drink from suit supplies.

Jordin did the same, saying, “We’re 80 percent depleted on air.”

“Damn it, I don’t want to quit
now!
How ’bout you get extra from the lander?”

Jordin grimaced. He didn’t want to leave, either. They had all dedicated their lives to getting here, to this moment in this place. “Okay, Cap’n, sir,” he said sardonically as he trudged away.

She felt a kind of silent bliss here, just watching. Life, strange and wonderful, went on all around her. Her running digital coverage would be a huge hit Earthside. Unlike Axelrod’s empire, the Pluto Project gave their footage away.

As if answering a signal, the zand hunched up the slope a short way to feed on some brown lichenlike growth that sprawled across the warming stones. She stepped aside. Ark came past her, and another zand slid up alongside. It rubbed against Ark, edged away, rubbed again. A courtship preliminary? Something about their movements made Shanna venture the guess.

The zand stopped and slid flat tongues over the lichen stuff, vacuuming it up with a slurp she could hear through her suit. Tentatively the newcomer laid its body next to Ark. Shanna could hear the pace of microwave discourse Ark was broadcasting, and it took a lurch with the contact, slowing, slowing… Then Ark abruptly—even curtly, it seemed to Shanna—rolled away. Its signal resumed its speed.

She laughed aloud. How many people would pass up a chance at sex to get on with their language lessons? All along the shingle beach, stretching to the horizon, the zand were pairing off. Except Ark.

“Y’know, sex took a couple billion years to evolve on Earth,” she said.

“Huh?” Jordin’s voice sounded surprised. “Oh yeah. Here…well, how old is this ecology, anyway?”

“Pluto must’ve formed early, from condensation. This could be lots older than us.”

She muted the furious bips and dots of the Wiseguy-zand conversation. Occasionally Wiseguy sent them a quick term for help—“Is this sensible?” the program asked. “Ontological?”

“Hey, is Wiseguy into philosophy already?” Jordin asked. “I dunno what that means.”

“Ummm. The biology saying is
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
—meaning, in development of the embryo you see the past stages of the species. Once we had gills, back in our fishy days.”

“Hey, pretty heady stuff,” Jordin said skeptically. “So soon?”

“Well, Wiseguy did train on the SETI messages.”

“Seems like it’s digging at how the zand see their place in this weird world.”

“Maybe canned brains are natural philosophers.”

“Yeah, they don’t have sex to distract ’em.” They both laughed at that, releasing tension.

Here we are,
Shanna thought,
the Columbuses of a new world, and we’re waiting for a computer to do the introductions.

“Y’know, I gotta move or I’m gonna freeze,” she said.

Jordin grunted assent. “Feels great to move. Hey—the zand are moving inland.”

“Uh-oh. Toward the lander.”

Shanna walked back carefully, feeling the crunch of hard ice as she melted what would have been gases on Earth—nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen itself. Low-g walking was an art. With so little weight, rocks and ices that looked rough were still slick enough to make her slip. She caught herself more than once from a full, facedown splat—but only because she had so much time to recover, in a slow fall. As the zand worked their way across the stony field of lichen, they approached the lander. Jordin wormed his way around them, careful not to get too close.

“Wiseguy! Interrupt.” Shanna explained what she wanted. It quickly got the idea and spoke in short bursts to Ark—who resent a chord-rich message to the zand.

They all stopped short. “I don’t want them burned on the lander,” Shanna said to Jordin, who replaced her suit oxy bottles without a hitch.

“Burned? I don’t want them eating it,” Jordin said.

Then the zand began asking
her
questions, and the first one surprised her: Do
you come from Lightgiver? As heralds?

In the next few minutes Shanna and Jordin realized—all from their questions alone—that in addition to a society the zand had a rough-and-ready view of the world, an epic oral literature (though recited in microwaves), and something that resembled a religion. Even Wiseguy was shaken; it paused in its replies, something she had never heard it do before, not even in speed trials. It was learning not just an alien language but an alien mind.