Not that he visited any part of the new wing in person, of course. Not that he was even able to, not without suiting up and jumping across the hold. The whole compartment had been disconnected from its spinal lock and pushed to a tethered anchorage midway between spine and carapace: Sarasti’s orders, given to minimize risk of contamination. It was no skin off Cunningham’s nose. He was happier leaving his body in pseudogravity anyway, while his consciousness flitted between the waldoes and sensors and bric-a-brac surrounding his new pets.
Theseus saw me coming and pushed a squeezebulb of sugary electrolytes from the galley dispenser. The Gang didn’t look up as I passed. One forefinger tapped absently against their temple, the lips pursed and twitched in the characteristic mode that said internal dialog in progress. I could never tell who was on top when they were like that.
I sucked on the squeezebulb and looked in on the pens. Two cubes suffused in pale red light: in one a scrambler floated center stage, waving its segmented arms like seaweed in gentle surge. The occupant of the other cage was squeezed into a corner, four arms splayed across the converging walls; four others extended, waving again, into open space. The bodies from which those arms sprouted were spheroids, not flattened disks as our first—sample had been. They were only slightly compressed, and their arms sprouted not from a single equatorial band but from across the whole surface.
Fully-extended, the floating scrambler was over two meters across. The other seemed roughly the same size. Neither moved, except for those drifting arms. Navy-blue mosaics, almost black in the longwave, rippled across their surfaces like the patterns of wind on grass. Superimposed graphics plotted methane and hydrogen at reassuring Rorschach norms. Temperature and lighting, ditto. An icon for ambient electromagnetics remained dark.
I dipped into the archives, watched the arrival of the aliens from two days past; each tumbling unceremoniously into its pen, balled up, hugging themselves as they bounced gently around their enclosures. Fetal position, I thought—but after a few moments the arms uncoiled, like the blooming of calcareous flowers.
“Robert says Rorschach grows them,” Susan James said behind me.
I turned. Definitely James in there, but—muted, somehow. Her meal remained untouched. Her surfaces were dim.
Except for the eyes. Those were deep, and a little hollow.
“Grows?” I repeated.
“In stacks. They have two navels each.” She managed a weak smile, touched her belly with one hand and the small of her back with the other. “One in front, one behind. He thinks they grow in a kind of column, piled up. When the top one develops to a certain point, it buds off from the stack and becomes free-living.”
The archived scramblers were exploring their new environment now, climbing gingerly along the walls, unrolling their arms along the corners where the panels met. Those swollen central bodies struck me again. “So that first one, with the flattened…”
“Juvenile,” she agreed. “Fresh off the stack. These ones are older. They, they plump out as they mature. Robert says,” she added after a moment.
I sucked the dregs from my squeezebulb. “The ship grows its own crew.”
“If it’s a ship.” James shrugged. “If they’re crew.”
I watched them move. There wasn’t much to explore; the walls were almost bare, innocent of anything but a few sensor heads and gas nozzles. The pens had their own tentacles and manipulators for more invasive research needs, but those had been carefully sheathed during introduction. Still, the creatures covered the territory in careful increments, moving back and forth along parallel, invisible paths. Almost as if they were running transects.
James had noticed it too. “It seems awfully systematic, doesn’t it?”
“What does Robert say about that?”
“He says the behavior of honeybees and sphex wasps is just as complex, and it’s all rote hardwiring. Not intelligence.”
“But bees still communicate, right? They do that dance, to tell the hive where the flowers are.”
She shrugged, conceding the point.
“So you still might be able to talk to these things.”
“Maybe. You’d think.” She massaged her brow between thumb and forefinger. “We haven’t got anywhere, though. We played some of their pigment patterns back to them, with variations. They don’t seem to make sounds. Robert synthesized a bunch of noises that they might squeeze out of their cloacae if they were so inclined, but those didn’t get us anywhere either. Harmonic farts, really.”
“So we’re sticking to the blood-cells-with-waldoes model.”
“Pretty much. But you know, they didn’t go into a loop. Hardwired animals repeat themselves. Even smart ones pace, or chew their fur. Stereotyped behaviors. But these two, they gave everything a very careful once-over and then just—shut down.”
They were still at it in ConSensus, slithering across one wall, then another, then another, a slow screw-thread track that would leave no square centimeter uncovered.
“Have they done anything since?” I asked.
She shrugged again. “Nothing spectacular. They squirm when you poke them. Wave their arms back and forth—they do that pretty much constantly, but there’s no information in it that we can tell. They haven’t gone invisible on us or anything. We blanked the adjoining wall for a while so they could see each other, even piped audio and air feeds—Robert thought there might be some kind of pheromonal communication—but nothing. They didn’t even react to each other.”
“Have you tried, well, motivating them?”
“With what, Siri? They don’t seem to care about their own company. We can’t bribe them with food unless we know what they eat, which we don’t. Robert says they’re in no immediate danger of starvation anyway. Maybe when they get hungry they can deal.”
I killed the archival feed and reverted to realtime. “Maybe they eat—I don’t know, radiation. Or magnetic energy. The cage can generate magnetic fields, right?”
“Tried it.” She took a breath, then squared her shoulders. “But I guess these things take time. He’s only had a couple of days, and I only got out of the crypt myself a day ago. We’ll keep trying.”
“What about negative reinforcement?” I wondered.
She blinked. “Hurt them, you mean.”
“Not necessarily anything extreme. And if they’re not sentient anyway…”
Just like that, Susan went away. “Why, Keeton. you just made a suggestion. You giving up on this whole noninterference thing?”
“Hello, Sascha. No, of course not. Just—making a list of what’s been tried.”
“Good.” There was an edge to her voice. “Hate to think you were slipping. We’re going to grab some down time now, so maybe you could go and talk to Cunningham for a bit. Yeah, do that.
“And be sure to tell him your theory about radiation-eating aliens. I bet he could use a laugh.”
He stood at his post in BioMed, though his empty chair was barely a meter away. The ubiquitous cigarette hung from between the fingers of one hand, burned down and burned out. His other hand played with itself, fingers tapping against thumb in sequence, little to index, index to little. Windows crawled with intelligence in front of him; he wasn’t watching.
I approached from behind. I watched his surfaces in motion. I heard the soft syllables rising from his throat:
“Yit-barah v’yish-tabah v’yit-pa-ar v’yit-romam…”