He formed a working hypothesis. The source of the radio signals needed, or at least preferred, a cold environment. Either they located themselves on the side away from the source of planetary heat, or they found places high enough for the air to be thin and the radiative heat loss to open space to be high.
Well, as Julian Graves had remarked for some reason, after listening to E.C. Tally’s description of the unfortunate circumstances that led to the destruction of his second embodiment, “It takes all sorts of oddities to make a universe.”
Tally confirmed that the temperature control of his suit was set to a level comfortable for his body, and marched on.
Up, up, up—but that could not continue much longer. He was approaching an isolated peak, from which the land fell away in all directions. The vector of the radio noise pointed directly to the summit.
Tally stared ahead. He was seeking some evidence of intelligent activity. He found none, until he came close enough to the top of the mountain to observe that it formed a clear, flat line. The top had been sheared off.
He paused to give his body a breather. The last two kilometers had been hard going. The upward path had grown steadily steeper, over fresh snow that concealed hard-packed ice. Now was the time to be extra careful. With the line of the summit just ahead, this was no place to slide into a crevasse or fall over an icy precipice.
He scrambled the final thirty meters on hands and knees, digging his gloved hands deep into the snow to make sure that he could not slip backwards or sideways. And then it was suddenly easy. He had topped the final rise and stood on a level plain, clear of all snow and ice. He saw, no more than fifty meters away from him, a hundred moving figures. Sunlight reflected from glittering silver carapaces, scarlet heads, and multiple scarlet limbs.
Oddly enough, they did not seem to notice him. Well, that would change soon enough.
Tally walked forward, until he came to within ten meters of a rounded building that stood roughly in the middle of the cleared area. There he halted and opened the faceplate of his suit. The air was freezing, but this was necessary.
“Good afternoon.” As Tally spoke he sent the same words through every transmission channel of his suit. He stared at the sun, to make sure that he had it right. No point in getting off on the wrong foot. Yes, it was certainly afternoon, with sunset of this planet’s long day still maybe six hours away.
He said again, “Good afternoon. My name is E.C. Tally. I am an embodied computer, incorporated in a human form. I am eager to establish communication with you, and to exchange information.”
The beings all around him stopped moving. They remained silent, but the buzz of radio noise in his suit receiver rose to a crescendo. The task of analyzing that frenzy of signal activity was a difficult one, but Tally was well-suited to tackle it. How fortunate that this work had come to him, with his unparalleled computational and analytic ability, rather than to some organic being poorly equipped for such demanding activities.
The silvery beetle-backed creatures were closing in, forming a ring around him. Tally closed his faceplate. If Sue Harbeson Ando could see him now, she would be proud of him. He was protecting his latest embodiment. Since talk would probably be at radio frequencies, he was avoiding the inevitable wear and tear on his body that would be produced with an open faceplate in such extreme temperatures.
The beetlebacks were larger than a human, but low-built. He squatted down on his haunches, to bring his head level with theirs. It was time to start in on a tricky task for which he was uniquely well qualified: that of cross-species—in this case, cross-galactic arm—communication.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In Limbo, and out of it
Teri Dahl sat alone in the forward observation chamber of the No Regrets and wondered about the name she had chosen for their ship. Outside the port there was nothing—no stars, no faint galaxies, no dark occluding masses of gas. That had been their first hope when they emerged from the Bose node, almost a full day ago. Perhaps they were in the middle of a dark gas cloud that made the rest of the universe invisible; but tests using the sensors of the No Regrets showed that outside the ship lay nothing but the hardest of hard vacuums.
Teri could feel the stirrings within her brain of old legends and myths. All the species of the Orion Arm had discovered spaceflight long after the beginnings of their recorded history. When everything was written down or stored in computer data banks there should be no room for uncertainty. The mechanism for the creation of myths was that of oral memory and imperfect traditions. And yet the stories lived on. Ships had been lost, that was an undeniable fact. A group of unfortunate travelers might enter the Croquemort Timewell and be trapped there until time itself came to an end. Or perhaps you and your party would enter a hiatus, a singularity of spacetime from which you would emerge within half a minute—or this year, next year, sometime, never.
A rational mind rejected all such fancies. If the Croquemort Timewell existed and a ship vanished into it, how would anyone ever learn that fact? It was all imagining, the fancy of uneasy minds. And yet, beyond the No Regrets stood nothing.
For the first few hours, Teri, Torran Veck and Julian Graves had stayed together, comforting each other with useless reassurances that this would soon be over and they would pop out into open space. Teri had endured false optimism for as long as she could, then crept away to be alone. She retreated to the observation chamber and stared—stared so hard looking for something, anything, that her eyeballs felt ready to pop out of her head.
She was frightened, and ashamed of being frightened. So why was it reassuring when suddenly the door to the observation chamber slid open and Torran Veck came lumbering in?
“Oops. Sorry. I didn’t know someone was already in here.”
“Torran, if you are going to lie, you have to learn to be better at it.”
He grinned at her, quite unabashed. “All right. I knew you were here. I’ve been trying something, and I got a result. But I don’t understand it. You’re smarter than me, so I thought I’d ask you to help me out.”
“That’s a lie just as big as your last one.” Teri felt oddly comforted. “Where’s Julian Graves?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t want him in on this, in case it’s nothing. It’s bad enough to make a fool of yourself in front of one person.”
Torran had twice Teri’s body mass, and when he sat down next to her, he as usual seemed to overflow the seat. “You came out here to find out if you could see anything,” he said. “In a way, I did the same thing, except that I went into the control room in case any of our sensors reported finding anything.”
He shook his head at her excited look. “Sorry. Not a peep from any recording instrument that we have. They all insist that the ship is nowhere in the universe. But then I did something stupid and irrational.”
“You mean more stupid than entering a Bose node when you don’t know where or if you’ll come out?”
“About that stupid. I sent a call for help.”
“You did what?”
“I know. It was totally dumb, but I felt desperate enough for anything. I generated a message saying who we were, that we were lost, and if anyone heard this, please would they come and help. I sent it. I didn’t expect any reply, but I sent it anyway.”
“And you had a reply?”
“No.” Torran shrugged. “Hey, let’s be reasonable. What are the chances of anyone picking up a call like that? Zero. But something peculiar did happen. A few microseconds after my message was sent out, the ship’s radio receivers recorded a signal. I call it a signal, but it would be more accurate to say it was a burst of static. I couldn’t make any sense of it, nor could the ship’s computer. But it was something, where before we’d had absolutely nothing.