Then they went to the largest of their number, flashing their little beams of light, and drew out more branches from its hide. Burgess realized that the complicated protrusions were actually not part of the creature; they were somehow attached to it, and could be removed. It was as if he were carrying them, without carrying appendages. The aliens were as strange in their subtle ways as in their obvious ways.
They fetched more fallen branches, and started to spread more dirt. Burgess didn’t know what this dirt was for, as the ground in this glade was level and needed no path for him, but he was willing to help on the assumption that they were accomplishing something useful. He wanted to be part of the hive, as every floater did. So he went to where the larger two-footed alien was, and sucked up some dirt from the place where it was being excavated with the stick, and blew it out where it was being piled. The creature stepped back, then indicated where more dirt should go. Another creature flashed the light there, so that there was no question. Burgess was able to move the loosened dirt faster than the creature could with the stick. Soon he had moved all of the loose dirt and there was a long mound at the edge of the glade.
The creature used its stick to loosen more dirt, and this facilitated Burgess’ effort. He blew it to the end of the mound, extending it. In this manner they formed a small valley and ridge that entirely surrounded the glade.
Meanwhile the Nona creature had gathered more branches, and had rolled some large stones to the glade. Now the aliens set the stones on top of the ridge of dirt, and put the branches up by the stones. They fashioned some of the branches into straight sections, and used stones to pound on these, so that they sank endwise into the ground.
Now at last Burgess came to understand what they were doing: they were making a hive-barrier! What the hivers did entirely with dirt, making a mound that no hiver could cross, the aliens were doing with dirt and stones and branches. Inside the circle it should be safe.
Now the two smaller aliens returned to their shelter. The two larger remained outside it. The four-footed one merely silently, as before, but the other came to Burgess. It put an extremity on a contact point. Faintly its information came through. It was male. His identity was “Darius.” He was a friend. He was watching.
Burgess sent images of his own. He was not sure how well they were being received, but there did seem to be partial communication. Now at least he knew the contact pattern of a second alien. This was reassuring.
Burgess was tired. He had alerted the creatures to the threat, and they had responded in what had turned out to be a sensible manner. He was reassured. He sank back down to the ground and retracted his eyes.
HE resumed consciousness when another alien contacted him. This was the smallest one, who turned out to be female. There was something special about her; she was intense, and her thoughts forged through with sharper definition. She was “Colene.” She was watching now.
But she wasn’t satisfied just to be alert for danger. She wanted to know about Burgess. Where did he come from, why was he alone, why had he invoked the Virtual Mode? Her determination to know cut through the problem of communication. He found it relatively easy to understand her, and she was understanding him. Her pictures were coming through with increasing clarity. She let him know what her own world was like: similar plants to this one, but no creatures like him, and many variations of her type. Creatures who had ridges down their length, through which their bodily communications flowed, and four legs, and minds at one end. Strange!
He tried to clarify for her what his world was like. It was dominated by a number of creatures she thought of as “arthropods”; she knew what spiders, insects, and crabs were. But the dominance by power was the “phylum” to which the floaters ultimately belonged: the vast array of “triramous” animals. That was her term, and she presented it with such wonder that he had to explore the matter further. It seemed that this was the key difference between their worlds: the triramous phylum existed in one, and the “chordates” in the other. In each, the numerically inferior type nevertheless had achieved the greatest influence over other types, and had the greatest freedom of action.
The time in the development of life when their two worlds had been the same was, by Colene’s reckoning, the “Cambrian.” The records of his world had no indication of her type of creature, known also as the “vertebrates”; the records of her world lacked indication of the triramous creatures. But surely the two coexisted in that time, 550 million years ago. The time of the great proliferation of species, most of whose phyla later was lost. Colene’s kind had become aware of this early abundance by inspecting a layer of rock they called the Burgess Shale. Now her identification of him was associated with this, so that he was “the creature of Burgess” and his world was “the Shale rock.” It was just the way she visualized it, she explained, and she intended no disparagement. She rendered this concept with such a friendly corollary that Burgess had to respond.
This “friendly” concept was as alien to him as the matter of individuality or self. He focused on it, because though it was vague, it was pleasant. It was another type of patterning. It was what Colene presented as “emotion”: an attitude about things that related to the self. For a hiver, pleasure was achieved by conformance to the consensus of the hive, which was achieved by frequent contacts. To be current was to be satisfied; to lack currency was to be unsatisfied. There were no other significant indications. But with Colene’s pattern of self came emotions which related to the individual, and currency was irrelevant. Since Burgess would slowly fade and die without currency with a hive, this alternate system was of interest; could he learn to survive without currency? If so, he would be unique among his kind.
Colene was eager to know more about Burgess and his species and culture. He was as eager to know about hers. Already the alien pattern she transmitted was taking hold, showing him the way to think in her fashion, and he was coming to feel friendly to her. He had never liked another creature before, because such emotion did not exist among floaters except in the sense that each member of the hive needed his hive. Colene, more than the others, was relating to him. She seemed like a discrete entity to him, and he saw himself as a discrete entity in her view. That was something new and valuable. So he tried to obtain more information about her and her kind. Their intellectual pattern was as strange as their physical pattern.
She responded with yet another new emotion: a pleasant, odd, paradoxical mood she called “laughter.” She would make him a “deal,” a summoning of chance which would determine who learned first about whom. They would watch the other two creatures of her type, and see which of them was first to move body or limb. If it was the male, then Burgess, being male, would prevail, and Colene would inform him of all he wished, to the extent of her ability. If it was the female, then Colene, being female, would prevail, and Burgess would inform her similarly. This deal was so strange that Burgess did not understand how to decline, so he agreed by default.
They watched, and in a moment the Nona creature rolled over. “I win,” Colene sent with another thrill of momentary pleasure. “But I will tell you everything, the next time.” She communicated increasingly in linear chains of thoughts, which were relatively slow compared to floater contact, but seemed to be the key to contact between their species. They were linear creatures throughout, he realized; they applied food to one end of their bodies and eliminated the residues from the other end, and their thinking was similar. But as he came to understand this, and attune, his ability to communicate with Colene improved. Now there were few confusions, and concepts of increasing complexity were being exchanged.