Starfarers (32 page)

Nansen brought his glance back to the Tahirians. Emil
made a forward gesture. Evidently it was safe to proceed on foot. They started. Human pulses beat high.

In a gravity less than two-fifths terrestrial, the men did not feel weighted down, although they were well burdened. Elsewhere it had sufficed outdoors to wear a breathmask attached to a tank of oxynitrogen, ordinary field garb, perhaps a canteen and food pouch, and whatever scientific equipment seemed appropriate. Here it became helmets with regenerative units, full coveralls, gloves, and boots. The air was noxious from upwellings and ongoing chemistry. The Tahirians wore similar protection, though theirs was mostly transparent and flexible, films enclosing the little four-legged bodies. Fernando carried what must be a locator. A magnetic sense was of scant avail on this planet, and the forest would screen off signals from their vehicle.

Minutes and meters passed. A machine composed of joined modules crawled into view. Emil spoke. Sonic amplifiers conveyed a whistle and purr; the mane shook.

“I wish I knew what en just said,” Cleland sighed. Sundaram had invented the pronoun for members of the race. “That caterpillar— It’s maddening, these scraps of pidgin technicalese we’ve got.”

“We’ve added some vocabulary on this trip,” Nansen reminded. “And Ajit does promise a real language soon.” He grinned. “Of course, then we’ll have to learn it.”

“Meanwhile, though—And we can’t ask what all these lights are for.”

“I can guess,” Brent said. “Whatever else they do, I’m pretty sure the trees make up a sensor-computer network. The blinks are a code, mainly issuing orders to the mobile machines.”

Nansen nodded. “M-m, yes, that sounds like a very Tahirian idea.”

“I wish it weren’t,” Cleland complained. “Confusing. Makes everything seem to jump around. Do you hear a buzz?”

Nansen listened. Only the noise ahead, as of a gigantic kettle aboil, reached him. “No.”

“Imagination. I’m getting sort of dizzy, too.”

“Yeah, can’t say I feel comfortable here,” Brent admitted.

Nansen scowled at the stiff shapes that surrounded them. “Nor I, quite. Perhaps we should turn back. … No, we’ll continue for a while.”

The growling and seething waxed. The group came in view of the source. Cleland jarred to a halt, stood for a moment agape, and uttered a yell. “It is! I was right! It’s got to be!”

They had entered a broad open space, a black and jumbled lava waste. Near the middle squatted a sooty shell wherein power labored. Before it, smoke and steam eddied above a ten-meter pool that glowed red. Even at their distance and through their suits and helmets the men felt its heat. It bubbled, spat gouts and sparks, roared in its fury. A channel bore the molten rock off, to congeal after a while into slaggy masses. Several robots quarried these as they cooled, loaded them into a great open-bed vehicle that rested wheelless above the ground. Metal trees lined the channel. Their lights blinked through the same intricate rhythms, over and over.

Steady state
, Nansen thought.
Repetition, except when something goes wrong and the robots make repairs. A full carrier takes the freight away and dumps it, while another arrives for more. Through millions of years?

The din hammered in his skull. He felt suddenly as if he were falling down a chasm. Tensing every muscle, he hauled his gaze free of the hypnotic
flash-flash-flash.

Cleland’s word’s clattered. “Yes, yes, the pyramid, it holds the magma pump, electromagnetic or however it works, but here’s one of the outlets, and maybe before the stuff’s left to weather the pyramid processes it for calcium, phosphorus, potassium, or maybe erosion and biology do that well enough, but here’s the thermostat, safety valve, renewal—”

He doesn’t sound like himself
, Nansen thought vaguely.
What’s the matter with him?
He recalled the planetologist’s controlled excitement of days—weeks?—ago:

“Plate tectonics keeps Earth alive. It frees the elements that life locks up in fossils, and releases others like potassium. It raises new rock to take up carbon dioxide as carbonate, and takes the old rock down below before the carbon dioxide is too depleted. This planet the Tahirians are converting, it’s got to have that cycle or the atmosphere will never be right for them, but it doesn’t have subduction. Also, I suppose, with a shell enclosing it, they don’t want enormous shield volcanoes. But then they’ve got to bleed off the core energy; and they can use it for more of the geochemistry they need, eventually for stabilizing the air and regulating the greenhouse. I think they’re making a start on doing all this artificially, and in the long run making it natural, self-operating for the next couple of billion years. They’ve drilled clear down to the core. The mills of God!”

Today:

“Science in action,” Cleland chanted at the lava well and the machines. The ground drummed, the wind hissed, the lights flickered and flickered. “Oh, what’s to learn!” He rocked forward across the stone field.

“Something’s damn wrong,” Brent groaned. “I’ve got a headache to kill me.”

“And I—
vertiginoso
—” Nansen looked to Emil and Fernando. They stood calmly, innocently, untouched.

Cleland kept going. Did the Tahirians show concern? They glanced from him to the captain. Leaves stood stiffly in their manes. They twittered.

“Cleland!” Nansen shouted. “Come back! That’s dangerous!”

The planetologist tripped on a lump. He fell, rose, lurched on toward the channel where the trees flashed.

“Hey, is he out of his head?” Brent cried. A fire fountain leaped briefly up from the pool.

“I … don’t know—Cleland, Cleland!”

We’re giddy, muddled, like drunks. What to do, what to do?
“Go get him,” Nansen begged the Tahirians. They stared back, obviously worried but baffled, unwilling to take action … because the man must know what he was doing. …

He doesn’t
.

The knowledge burst over Nansen. He swung around, seized Brent by the shoulders, wrestled the engineer about until they both stood sidways to the lava stream. His brain still gibbered, but it became an undertone. “Listen,” he said fast. “Those lights combine to flicker frequencies that cause something like an epileptic fit—in humans. I remember reading about it. He’s lost all judgment. He’s going for a close look, and probably he’ll fall into the channel, the lava. I can’t explain to our friends and ask them to go after him.”

“Shit in a whorehouse!” Brent exploded. He pulled away from Nansen’s grasp. “I’ll fetch him.”

“No. I will.”

Brent glared. “Like hell. You’re our captain.”

“Yes, I am.”
And the commander sends no man into danger he would not enter himself
. “But you work with machinery. You can better gauge distances and angles. I’ll go blind, eyes shut. Else the lights might take me, too. You call directions. Don’t look at them more than you absolutely must. Can you do that, Mr. Brent?”

The other man snapped to attention. “Yes, sir.”

“Very well.” Nansen wheeled. Before the lights could touch him again, he had squeezed his lids together.

Cleland was already near the channel bank. He slipped and stumbled in the chaos of scoria. It got worse the farther he went.

Nansen strode. “Left about ten degrees,” came Brent’s voice, faint beneath the thunders. Nansen tuned up his amplifier. The well brawled. The formless blobs of blindness floated before him.

But his mind was clearing. Out of the racket he sifted words: “Right just a tad. … Watch out, you’ve got a boulder in your path. … No, Tim’s veered off. Bear left about fifteen degrees. …”

He’s the hero—Brent. He clings to his sanity and forces his judgment to function, while the lights flash, flash, flash.

Could there be something else, some inductive effect on
our brains from the computers everywhere around, making us this vulnerable, Tim the most? I don’t know. I hope we’ll live to know.

Nansen tripped and fell. Pain jabbed through knees and hands. He picked himself up, he groped onward. Heat washed around him and smote through his helmet.

“Sir,” amidst the tumult, “he’s climbing onto the bank. You’d better turn back.”

“No.”

“But you might go over, yourself, into the stream—”

“Guide me, Mr. Brent.”

“Sir. Left, ten degrees. No, a little more right. Careful, there’s a heap of junk ahead. … Better go on all fours.”

Nansen obeyed. The heat in the rock baked through clothing and gloves.

Dimly in the roar: “You’re nearly to him. He’s on the rim, staring down. You could knock him over, if he doesn’t fall on his own account first.”

Nansen opened his eyes. He saw the lava up which he crawled. And two boots, ankles, shins—He surged to his feet. “Come back with me, Cleland,” he said into the noise and the scorching.

The enthralled man made no answer. He swayed where he stood above moltenness. Again the lights attacked Nansen.

He laid hold. Cleland moaned. He struggled. Nansen got a lock on his arms, a knee in the small of his back. He wrenched him around.

The lights were behind them. Nansen saw only stone, the forest that was merely befuddling, Brent and the Tahirians at its edge. Emil and Fernando stood stiff—suddenly realizing what had almost happened? Nansen frog-marched Cleland down the bank and across the waste.

“Hey!” Brent shouted. “We did it! By God, we did it!”

Cleland slumped. “Wha—wha’s uh matter?” he wailed. “I was—I don’t know—”

Nansen released him but kept an arm around his waist.
“You’ll be all right. Come along. And never look back to where you were.”

“Cap’n—Cap’n, was I crazy or, or what—?”

“It will be all right, I say. We simply met another thing we did not know.”

Besides his
research notes, which he entered in the general database, Sundaram kept a journal. At first it was for himself, later he shared it with Yu. In it he set down subjective impressions, tentative ideas, ruminations, remarks, speculations, the raw stuff of knowledge.

“Now that we and the Tahirians have developed the basic structure of Cambiante”—the common language, with the parleurs its means of expression—”and are rapidly increasing and refining its vocabulary, we can try to explain what we are to each other,” he wrote one day. “This may well prove the most difficult task of all, perhaps not entirely possible, but we must try, for it is the ultimate purpose of
Envoy’s
journey.

“Herewith a fragmentary rendition of what I believe our collocutors have been attempting to tell us.

“Their species evolved to cope with the changeable, often harsh, occasionally murderous environments on this planet. Omnivorous but largely vegetarian, they lived in groups with a dominance hierarchy. However, alpha, beta, etc. obtained their ranks not directly by strength and aggressiveness, but by contribution to the group. Thus, in a jungle the primitive alpha might be the strongest fighter against predators, while in a desert en might be the best water finder. This appears to have helped drive the evolution of higher intelligence. The primal psychology persists, cooperative, with solitary individuals
rare, usually pathological cases. The normal, optimal ordering of a Tahirian society appears to be an interaction between what I may very roughly call clans, the ultimate units, as families are the ultimate human units.

“Inevitably, clashes occurred between bands, cultures, ideologies. However, they were always less ferocious than among humans. Empathy is too natural when so much of language is somatic and chemical. Civilizations did rise and fall, with accompanying ruination. I suspect that more often than not the causes were environmental catastrophes, perhaps triggered by misguided agricultural and industrial practices.

“Be that as it may, Tahirians are no more born to sainthood than humans are. When a society no longer works smoothly, respect for the established order decays, the underlying mystique disintegrates, and chaos and suffering follow. This world, too, has known dark ages.

“When science opened a way to the stars, it gave the race unprecedented opportunities, but also enormous challenges.

“Probably in us humans the basic motivations for most of what we do, including science and exploration, fall into two general classes. One is the hope of gain, whether wealth, power, fame, freedom, or security. The other is the need to make sense of the universe, a need that expressed itself originally in myth and religion. I imagine corresponding urges are present in the Tahirians, but not in the same degrees and ways, and more for the group than the individual. To them, I think, science is as much communion as discovery. One shares findings and achievements with one’s society, thereby enhancing it as well as one’s own standing in it. Let us remember that science is itself creative art.

“Thus, I think—in the most vague and general terms, subject to endless qualifications and exceptions—the Tahirians went forth more in search of newness, inspiration, spiritual refreshment, than profit. And for thousands of years their ships traveled among the stars.

“Why, then, did they go no farther? Why did their voyaging fade out as their colonies were abandoned?

“I can only guess. Rather, we can, for our crew has discussed the riddle over and over. Let me list a few considerations.

“The sheer number of stars. Granted that most planets are barren, and most of the living ones bear little more than microbes, still, the variety, the puzzles, the possibilities, within just a few light-years are overwhelming. Data saturation begins to set in.

“As for going farther, one reaches a radius where nobody on the mother world will live long enough to hear about one’s discoveries. Motivation flags.

“The economics is, at best, marginal. Interplanetary enterprise saved human civilization by bringing in material and energy resources that Earth could no longer supply, as well as industrial sites outside the biosphere. But given a recycling nanotechnology, how much is a cargo hauled across light-years worth?

“Planets where people can settle—without needing an investment in life support that goes beyond feasibility—are very rare.