When the Colonists burst the banner’s bubble and lured their apparatus closer to it, Tchicaya moved the Sarumpaet away. He didn’t want the ship caught up inadvertently in whatever they were about to do.
Sprayed by vendeks, the apparatus began to shine. It emitted sprites, not the related vendeks the Colonists seemed to favor.
Mariama said, “They’re illuminating the banner with the right kind of lighting. The signal is encoded in its transparency to sprites; they understood that much.”
“I think you’re right.” There was always a chance that they were misreading the action, but Tchicaya felt hopeful.
He surveyed the scene, trying to guess what would happen next. The banner was positioned between the sprite source and the giant bunch of grapes. Meaning what? This was their expert linguist? Another species of xennobe entirely, or some caste of the Colonists who sat motionless in this chamber like a bloated termite queen? He dismissed the notion immediately. They’d seen no other “castes.” A few teeming xennobes in a crowded “hive,” and he was starting to invent ridiculous insectile non sequiturs.
The Colonists moved back from the illuminated banner, and did nothing more. They floated at the edge of the chamber, branches twitching lazily in the gentle currents.
The toolkit said, “I’ve found a way to get probes into the unmapped structure now. This is very strange.”
Mariama said, “We’ll be the judge of strange. Just tell us what they’ve found.”
“Take a cluster of protons and neutrons, and compress it by a factor of a hundred million. That’s what this is.”
Tchicaya blinked, disbelieving, “We’re looking at a nugget of squashed near-side matter?”
“Yes. It’s wrapped in some complicated vendek-based layers that are helping to stabilize it, but basically it’s a pile of ordinary nucleons with most of the empty space squeezed out of them.”
Mariama turned to him. “It could be a kind of meteorite. With all the matter that’s passed through the border, some microscopic speck might have encountered conditions that preserved it.”
Tchicaya didn’t welcome the conclusion this suggested. “So this room could be nothing but a museum display? I can’t believe they’d go to the trouble of building the signaling layer, only to take the reply — proof of intelligent life behind the border — and stuff it in a cabinet for people to gawk at.”
“Or study. People will come to study it.”
“When?”
Mariama said, “If you want to draw crowds, maybe it’s time we changed the loop.”
Tchicaya sent instructions to the banner. It stopped counting out primes, and switched to a simple, ascending sequence of integers.
The Colonists responded with a flurry of activity: moving around the chamber, summoning new equipment. Tchicaya watched them, his hopes rising again. They had to realize that the banner was as good as alive, and ready to talk. Surely they’d reply now.
He was wrong. They aimed no shuttered sprite lamp back toward the banner, they flashed no answering sequence.
He switched to the Fibonacci series. This stirred the Colonists' branches a little, as if they welcomed the stimulation, but whatever the purpose of the equipment they’d gathered after the first change of message, it continued to be all they required.
They were happy to watch, but they had no intention of replying. They were politely, respectfully observing the alien emissary, but too cautious to engage with it and speed up the process of understanding its message.
“What do we have to do to get through to them?”
Mariama said, “We could push ahead with the mathematics leading to the GDL.”
“Just like that? As a monologue?”
“What choice do we have?”
The toolkit had developed a Graph Description Language, a precise set of semantic conventions for talking about vendeks, Planck worms, and what would happen when they met. Given some moderately sophisticated mathematical concepts — which could be built up from elementary ideas based on integer exemplars — quantum graphs were far easier to talk about than anything as abstract and contingent as social structures.
If the Colonists weren’t going to degin to reply, though, there’d be no way of knowing if the dictionary of concepts was coming at them too quickly, or even whether the basic syntax was being understood. They manipulated vendeks with skills that no QGT theoretician would dare aspire to, but that didn’t mean they understood them in the same way. Humans had tamed and modified dozens of species of plants and animals before they’d had the slightest idea what DNA was.
Tchicaya started the program running. Without feedback along the lines of “Yes, we understood that, please skip ahead to something ten times harder,” it would take four ship-days to complete. He could choose sections to omit, himself — but which ones? What concepts were obvious to a xennobe?
Mariama smiled tentatively. “They haven’t left the room yet.”
“It is an alien artifact. That in itself must merit some level of attention.”
“They chose the primes,” she said. “They picked the language, and it was exactly what we would have picked ourselves.”
Tchicaya scanned the room. “We’re missing something here.” The Colonists had no faces, no eyes, and he had no way of telling what they were attending to, but they were far better positioned to observe the nucleon nugget than the banner.
He said, “They’re showing it the banner. They’re not even trying to make sense of the message themselves. They expect their meteorite to react.”
Mariama was skeptical, but not dismissive. “Why would they think that way? Some kind of category error? They’re intelligent enough to figure out that both these things came from the near side, but they have no concept of inanimacy? Because…everything here is living?” She grimaced. “Are you going to stop me before I start talking complete gibberish? Whether vendeks count as living or not, random collections of them would make very bad translators between xennobe languages.”
Tchicaya said, “So are the Colonists suffering from animist delusions, or is this not a random collection of nucleons?” He addressed the toolkit. “Can you make any sense of its structure? What are the odds that nuclear matter in a star or a planet could be in a state that could come through the border like this?”
“Negligible.”
“So someone wrapped it? Someone prepared it deliberately?”
The toolkit said, “That’s more likely than it happening by chance.”
Mariama said, “Don’t look at me. Maybe someone was running their own secret experiments, but this was not a Preservationist project.”
“Then whose was it? And what has it been doing down here?” Tchicaya asked the toolkit, “Can you model its dynamics? Is there information processing going on in there?”
The toolkit was silent for a moment. “No. But there could have been, once. It looks to me like it started out as a femtomachine.”
Gooseflesh rose on Tchicaya’s arms. Back on the Rindler, comparing their varied experiences of local death, Yann had definitively trumped him with tales of going nuclear.
He said, “It’s the Mimosans. They’re buried in there.”
Mariama’s eyes widened. “They can’t be. The Quietener blew up in their faces, Tchicaya. How much warning would they have had?”
Tchicaya shook his head. “I don’t know how they did it, but we’ve got to look for them.” He asked the toolkit, “Can you map the whole thing? Can you simulate it?” The crushed femtomachine was vastly larger than the Sarumpaet, but having started from merely nuclear densities, it would have made far less efficient use of its graphs.