“Meat’s reinforceable,” Sarasti said.
“If it’s got that much scaffolding you might as well stop splitting hairs and call it a machine anyway.”
Surface morphometrics were absolutely uniform. Four hundred thousand divers, every one identical. If there was an alpha male calling the shots among the herd, it couldn’t be distinguished on sight.
One night—as such things were measured on board—I followed a soft squeal of tortured electronics up to the observation blister. Szpindel floated there, watching the skimmers. He’d closed the clamshells, blocked off the stars and built a little analytical nest in their place. Graphs and windows spilled across the inside of the dome as though the virtual space in Szpindel’s head was insufficient to contain them. Tactical graphics lit him from all sides, turned his body into a bright patchwork of flickering tattoos.
The Illustrated Man. “Mind if I come in?” I asked.
He grunted: Yeah, but not enough to push it.
Inside the dome, the sound of heavy rainfall hissed and spat behind the screeching that had led me here. “What is that?”
“Ben’s magnetosphere.” He didn’t look back. “Nice, eh?”
Synthesists don’t have opinions on the job; it keeps observer effects to a minimum. This time I permitted myself a small breach. “The static’s nice. I could do without the screeching.”
“Are you kidding? That’s the music of the spheres, commissar. It’s beautiful. Like old jazz.”
“I never got the hang of that either.”
He shrugged and squelched the upper register, left the rain pattering around us. His jiggling eyes fixed on some arcane graphic. “Want a scoop for your notes?”
“Sure.”
“There you go.” Light reflected off his feedback glove, iridescing like the wing of a dragonfly as he pointed: an absorption spectrum, a looped time-series. Bright peaks surged and subsided, surged and subsided across a fifteen-second timeframe.
Subtitles only gave me wavelengths and Angstroms. “What is it?”
“Diver farts. Those bastards are dumping complex organics into the atmosphere.”
“How complex?”
“Hard to tell, so far. Faint traces, and they dissipate like that. But sugars and aminos at least. Maybe proteins. Maybe more.”
“Maybe life? Microbes?” An alien terraforming project…
“Depends on how you define life, eh?” Szpindel said. “Not even Deinococcus would last long down there. But it’s a big atmosphere. They better not be in any hurry if they’re reworking the whole thing by direct inoculation.”
If they were, the job would go a lot faster with self-replicating inoculates. “Sounds like life to me.”
“Sounds like agricultural aerosols, is what it sounds like. Those fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy bigger than Jupiter.” He gave me a scary grin. “Something’s got a beeeg appetite, hmm? You gotta wonder if we aren’t gonna be a teeny bit outnumbered.”
Szpindel’s findings were front and center at our next get-together.
The vampire summed it up for us, visual aids dancing on the table: “Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the accretion belt. Some perturbations in those orbits; belt’s still unsettled.”
“Haven’t seen any of the herd giving birth,” Szpindel remarked. “Any sign of a factory?”
Sarasti shook his head. “Discarded, maybe. Decompiled. Or the herd stops breeding at optimal N.”
“These are only the bulldozers,” Bates pointed out. “There’ll be tenants.”
“A lot of ’em, eh?” Szpindel added. “Outnumber us by orders of mag.”
James: “But they might not show up for centuries.”
Sarasti clicked. “Do these skimmers build Fireflies? Burns-Caulfield?”
It was a rhetorical question. Szpindel answered anyway: “Don’t see how.”
“Something else does, then. Something already local.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. James’ topology shifted and shuffled in the silence; when she opened her mouth again, someone indefinably younger was on top.
“Their habitat isn’t anything like ours, if they’re building a home way out here. That’s hopeful.”
Michelle. The synesthete.
“Proteins.” Sarasti’s eyes were unreadable behind the visor. Comparable biochemistries. They might eat us.
“Whoever these beings are, they don’t even live in sunlight. No territorial overlap, no resource overlap, no basis for conflict. There’s no reason we shouldn’t get along just fine.”
“On the other hand,” Szpindel said, “Technology implies belligerence.”
Michelle snorted softly. “According to a coterie of theoretical historians who’ve never actually met an alien, yes. Maybe now we get to prove them wrong.” And in the next instant she was just gone, her affect scattered like leaves in a dust-devil, and Susan James was back in her place saying:
“Why don’t we just ask them?”
“Ask?” Bates said.
“There are four hundred thousand machines out there. How do we know they can’t talk?”
“We’d have heard.,” Szpindel said. “They’re drones.”
“Can’t hurt to ping them, just to make sure.”
“There’s no reason they should talk even if they are smart. Language and intelligence aren’t all that strongly correlated even on Ear—”
James rolled her eyes. “Why not try, at least? It’s what we’re here for. It’s what I’m here for. Just send a bloody signal.”
After a moment Bates picked up the ball. “Bad game theory, Suze.”
“Game theory.” She made it sound like a curse.
“Tit-for-tat’s the best strategy. They pinged us, we pinged back. Ball’s in their court now; we send another signal, we may give away too much.”
“I know the rules, Amanda. They say if the other party never takes the initiative again, we ignore each other for the rest of the mission because game theory says you don’t want to look needy.”
“The rule only applies when you’re going up against an unknown player, ” the Major explained. “We’ll have more options the more we learn.”
James sighed. “It’s just—you all seem to be going into this assuming they’ll be hostile. As if a simple hailing signal is going to bring them down on us.”
Bates shrugged. “It only makes sense to be cautious. I may be a jarhead but I’m not eager to piss off anything that hops between stars and terraforms superJovians for a living. I don’t have to remind anyone here that Theseus is no warship.”
She’d said anyone; she’d meant Sarasti. And Sarasti, focused on his own horizon, didn’t answer. Not out loud, at least; but his surfaces spoke in a different tongue entirely.
Not yet, they said.
Bates was right, by the way. Theseus was officially tricked out for exploration, not combat. No doubt our masters would have preferred to load her up with nukes and particle cannons as well as her scientific payload, but not even a telemattered fuel stream can change the laws of inertia. A weaponized prototype would have taken longer to build; a more massive one, laden with heavy artillery, would take longer to accelerate. Time, our masters had decided, was of greater essence than armament. In a pinch our fabrication facilities could build most anything we needed, given time. It might take a while to build a particle-beam cannon from scratch, and we might have to scavenge a local asteroid for the raw material, but we could do it. Assuming our enemies would be willing to wait, in the interests of fair play.