I began to think it might take weeks to find the Blues, and the thought almost made me despair. I had no idea how far down they were. They might be above me, living in a narrow band that was comfortable for their race. Or they might be much deeper, in a place I would never be able to reach because it would kill me to do so.
I tried to reason it through. If they had built ships and sent them up to space, they must have worked with the molten core at the bottom of this endless fog. I thought about the creature I’d met named Introspection. The Blue had been huge, and thinly spread out. But perhaps on this world, floating in the hot thick atmosphere, the creature would have been compressed in comparison. I could only make guesses.
At last, after having circumnavigated the world from pole to pole, I ordered Alamo to take me down deeper. Another thousand miles-then two. Then three.
I felt sick. I could no longer see, except in flashes. When I finally heard something different, a voice talking to me, it was like hearing angels singing in the distance.
“Why do air-thoughts disturb our peace?”
“What?”
“The noise must stop.”
I blinked, but my eyes didn’t work anymore. I struggled to think. I’d been dozing-dreaming and awake at the same time. I’d fit the messages into my dreams, which had been about talking clouds with frowning faces of gauze.
“Halt descent,” I ordered. “Stop contact message loop. Halt all transmissions into the atmosphere.”
The groaning, warbling cries finally ceased. That was a relief to me. Nothing else happened for a while, and I began to wonder if I’d dreamt the entire affair. Then the translator spoke again.
“The thought has ceased. Peace is restored.”
“What is your name?” I asked.
“Curiosity,” the voice said.
I smiled slowly. I wasn’t totally sure, but I figured I’d found myself a Blue. Apparently, I’d done it by annoying him until he made contact. Who said spamming never worked?
— 34
Curiosity quickly lived up to his name. I’d expected to be learning from him, but he was the one asking most of the questions. I wasn’t sure he was a he, of course. There didn’t seem to be any comprehension among these creatures concerning gender. As best I could figure out, they didn’t exactly mate. Being a mass of aerogel, they spawned new young by flying high and being ripped apart by the high winds. Viable bits with complete enough structures floated back down and regrew until they reached adulthood again. It was very strange, but not really a lonely existence. They ran into one another often and shared mass whenever they did so. It was rather like mating. For them, exchanging body mass and communicating were the same activity.
After an hour or two of back-and-forth discussions, Curiosity asked to taste me. I said I could do that, but only if we flew up to a higher level. He was reluctant, but I assured him we wouldn’t go all the way up to the upper turbulence, which I surmised would be deadly to him-or might cause an unscheduled “spawning”.
At about nine thousand miles from the top of the atmosphere, I was able to move about in relative comfort. As a nanotized man, I would have been flat on my back and nearly unconscious. As a regular unaltered human, I would have quickly died. But after the Microbes had done their strange, bizarre work on my internal organs and external epidermis, I was not only functional, but willing to try exiting my craft.
I came out in my battle suit, after forcing Alamo to build me an airlock. The ship didn’t like it, and gave me plenty of objections. I was command personnel, I was not authorized, etc. I didn’t feel like explaining Microbes and Marvin and the rest. I didn’t entirely know what it was I’d become, anyway.
At last I wriggled out of an airlock that was about as big as a household oven and swam in the blinding murk of Eden-12. Alamo didn’t let me go entirely free, however. It maintained a firm grip about my midsection with a set of three black cable-thick fingers. The ship held me in a death grip. I felt like a new Christmas toy in a toddler’s hand.
The scene around me was like deep-sea environment. The world was still, and pitch-black, with floating particles of unknown matter everywhere. These bits of fluffy mass hung in clumps as I turned my suit’s lights on and surveyed my surroundings. I suspected they were some kind of vegetation, organic matter that the living creatures of this world consumed as they swam through the atmosphere which was quite similar to an ocean.
That’s what this world really was, I’d figured out after talking to Curiosity at length. A vast, atmospheric ocean a million times the size of Earth’s combined seas. It had many layers and stratums, with various forms of life at every level. I had to wonder if Jupiter or one of our other gas giants had a similar ecosystem underneath the surface. I doubted it, due to their relatively cold temperatures. Instead of floating scraps of algae, deep layers on those other worlds consisted primarily of frozen ammonia and methane. They must be very unforgiving environments.
“Where are you?” I asked the creature that had invited me out to play.
“Where are you?” it responded. “I cannot sense you. Unless you are a mass of metal and polymers. If so, you are a machine, and an interloper.”
I laughed. “No, I’m not a machine. I’m inside a casing that protects me from your environment. I’m flesh and blood-which is to say I’m alien, yes. But not as different from you as the machines.”
The time had come to put up or shut up. I closed my eyes and flipped up my visor. Warning buzzers sounded in my helmet, but I ignored them.
The immediate sensations were not exactly pleasant, but they weren’t overtly painful, either. Cold, semi-liquid breezes touched me. I estimated the temperature to be about forty degrees Fahrenheit. I felt a film forming on my face. It was as if I’d coated myself in soap and shut off the water. An itching sensation began soon after that-I knew this was due to the more dangerous elements in the atmosphere. There were highly reactive chemicals invading my suit. I couldn’t open my eyes without burning them. I could however feel the wetness on my skin, and the saliva-like dribblings that ran down into my suit.
Something else touched me a moment later. I recoiled from it. This had been a purposeful touch-I was sure of that. Curiosity had touched me. It had reached out a gossamer hand and stroked my cheek. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. It enveloped me. I was glad I had a gasmask fixed onto my face. I didn’t want to breathe it in and have mini-Blues in my lungs.
After about a minute of being felt-up by a sentient cloud-being, I figured I’d had enough. I couldn’t talk to it, as I was all but holding my breath. I reached up and began to slowly ease my visor shut. Finally, the Blue got the message and pulled out its tendrils-or whatever you want to call them. When the visor was closed my suit pumped and gurgled again. I let it exchange chemicals for a while, until an all-clear tone chimed. I opened my eyes and sucked in a breath. I coughed immediately. It was like sucking in a lungful of oven-cleaner.
“You are not like us,” Curiosity said. “You are intensely alien.”
Finally, when I was able to speak, I cleared my throat and utilized my translation device. “We both live, die and eat,” I said.
“So do the machines, after a fashion.”
“Well, we don’t want to exterminate all our competition.”
“Competition? A threatening choice of words.”
Inwardly, I groaned. These things liked to read deep meaning into everything you said. Worse, they didn’t seem to have any sense of humor at all.
“We come in peace. We have the same foe. I’m here to ask you for your help.”
“Help? Why would we want to help you?”
“I’m proposing a mutually beneficial arrangement. The Macros will come here eventually. They will destroy you all.”