Anyway, to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity, each had its fingers held in a different configuration—or perhaps each hand was specialized for a different kind of grasping or manipulation.
Tripod’s torso was particularly interesting. It had four openings in it. Were these meant to indicate actual holes that went right through its body? Or were they orifices, one perhaps for ingestion, another for excretion, a third for respiration, and a fourth for procreation? Perhaps, yet if one were to follow the terrestrial model, the small projection from the bottom of Tripod’s torso would be the genitalia.
But if those openings in the chest were holes, then where did the creature keep its brain? The two structures extending from the top of the torso seemed too tiny to hold a significant brain case. Indeed, although they were the same size, each drawn with four pixels, they seemed to be oriented quite differently. Perhaps they were eye stalks or antennae or other sensory apparatus. Interesting that there were only two of them, not three. The creature obviously wasn’t slavish in its trilateral symmetry.
And the bumps off each side of the torso: were they ridges that ran all the way around the body, seen in cross-section? Perhaps the torso, with hollow spaces and reinforcing ridges, had evolved to absorb shocks. If so, maybe the three splayed legs were used for hopping about its home world, the torso actually compressing on impact. Or, given those arched foot phalanges, perhaps the creature simply danced around on tippy toes, like, like—popular-culture banks kicking in—like Fred Flintstone bowling.
Or perhaps the bumps represented discrete lumps, rather than continuous ridges. Were they breasts? On Earth, mammals tended to have a number of breasts equal to the average litter size plus one, rounded up to the next even number, if necessary to preserve bilateral symmetry. If these were breasts, Tripod appeared to have eight. Presumably a technological life-form could see its offspring through adolescence safely, and no creature could routinely increase its population base by a factor of six or seven with each generation without rapidly developing a severe population problem. I wonder how they dealt with it?
And what about the Pup? Was it a member of the same species? But of a different sex? Pronounced dimorphism, if that was the case. If the bumps on the large ones were breasts, then the Pup was the male. Of course, the concepts of male and female were probably meaningless to a totally alien form of life. Maybe it was a juvenile. The Tripod did look somewhat insectlike, and insects do undergo metamorphosis as they grow. More terrestrial models.
Or maybe the Pup was a depiction of the creature the Tripod had evolved from (or vice versa). Or perhaps they were two different sentient forms inhabiting a single world, much as humans and cetaceans shared the Earth. But the Pup seemed to have only legs and no arms, no manipulators of any kind. Could it be a nontechnological animal? If so, the natives of the Vulpecula world got along better than did primates and whales. I noted that the Pup seemed to have identical sensory stalks to those on the Tripod, even articulated the same way. Did that imply synchronized communication? As for the small knob between the stalks on the Pup’s upper surface, I couldn’t say. It might represent a brain case, or a sex organ, or just a decorative ridge.
Or was the Pup just that, a pet? It would take an unusual psychology to display one’s pet in such a message. Unless … unless the pet was a symbiont, a necessary part of the owner’s life, perhaps as a seeing-eye dog.
The Senders were obligated to use a fifty-nine-bit line, since that was the smallest prime that would accommodate the 1,711 bits of the picture. But I noticed that two of the excess characters were put at each end of the lines, instead of used to further separate Tripod from the Pup. If I had wanted to convey that the two forms lived separately—one on land, one in the water, for instance—I would have put as much distance between them as possible in the frame. That the Senders did not do that implied to me that the two forms did live together.
I did a search of science-fiction literature and the speculative-science volumes on extraterrestrial life. A recurring theme was the idea that tall, spindly beings would be the denizens of low-gravity worlds and that squat ones would call a heavy planet home. It seemed too simplistic: Earth had given rise, after all, to Galapagos tortoises and giraffes, to alligators and brachiosaurs, to platypuses and ostriches. No, the orientation of the body seemed more a function of ecological niche than gravitational pull. What kind of niche would a giant hopping tripod evolve in? Perhaps it fed on fruit. The being’s right arm might be raised not in greeting, but to pluck dinner from a branch up above; the hopping legs might be used to leap up and grab even more distant fruit. Of course, there is a school of thought that says that no herbivore could develop a technological civilization, since toolmaking would only develop as a method of producing weapons for killing and cleaning prey.
Maddening not to know, not to be able to interpret categorically. And yet, parts of the message were even more elusive, more perplexing …
EIGHT
I do not pretend to understand what Kirsten was going through. I mean, here she was, back in the apartment she now shared with Aaron, trying to comfort her lover over the death of his ex-wife. That it was distressing her greatly was evident from her medical telemetry: her pulse was up, her EEG agitated, her breathing somewhat ragged. Although I had no way of measuring gastric acidity directly, she showed all the other signs of having a royal case of heartburn. Kirsten, tall and cool and reserved, wasn’t as demonstrative as Diana had been, but I knew, even if no one else did, that she was usually more sincere.
Aaron had been silent for three minutes, twenty-one seconds, sitting opposite Kirsten in his favorite chair, a bulky lander cockpit seat he had amateurishly reupholstered with tan corduroy. The last thing Kirsten had said was, “She didn’t seem like the type,” meaning, I presumed, that Diana apparently lacked the characteristics Kirsten associated with those who usually committed suicide. I’m sure Kirsten’s medical training had included lectures on this issue, so I didn’t doubt the validity of that observation. But, as I well knew, even the most logical minds, the least emotional souls, could end up killing themselves.
“It’s my fault,” Aaron said at last, his voice a hollow monotone.
“It is not your fault,” Kirsten replied at once, with the firmness Aaron had wished to hear from me earlier. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened.” Psychological counseling was a bit further removed from Kirsten’s field of expertise, and I wondered whether she was just winging it or if she actually knew what she was doing in trying to cheer Aaron. I accessed her academic records. She’d taken a psych elective while at the Sorbonne. One course, and only a C+ at that. “You can’t let this thing destroy you.”
Thing. Their favorite word, an all-purpose noun. Did it refer to Di’s apparent suicide? To Aaron’s insistence on blaming himself for it? Or something larger, less precise? Damn it, I wish they’d be more specific in their speech.
“She’d asked me—begged me—not to leave her,” Aaron said, his head bowed. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell whether he was staring at the floor or had closed his eyes, the better to concentrate on the internal turmoil he was experiencing. Granted, it was true that Diana had not wanted her relationship with Aaron to end, but Aaron’s view of her actions had been colored by his feelings of guilt. Either that, or—a less charitable interpretation—he was deliberately lying to curry further sympathy from Kirsten. In any event, Diana hadn’t beseeched him to stay.
“Don’t blame yourself,” Kirsten said again, meaning, I supposed, that she had already used up all the psychological wisdom she could remember from that one class.