“Any ideas?” Bram asked.
“I may have. First I want to see if Jorv and the others can pin down a working phylogeny for those creatures. I can tell you one thing, though.” She hesitated.
“Go on.”
“They’re not a contact species. But they observe a hierarchy of space.” She saw his puzzled look and added, “You see, it would affect their social organization—and the way they communicate.”
“You can tell all that by looking at them from a distance?”
“On average, they maintain a uniform separation between themselves of about one point five limb lengths in close working situations.” She gave a troubled frown. “The limits of fang and claw, you see. In humans, it’s about three feet. But the real clue came from Jorv.”
“You mean when he got too close to that equipment and was warned off? I suppose it shows that these beings are touchy.”
“No, not necessarily. They may inhabit a different universe of perception. Communication with them may not be a matter of language, or symbols, or images.”
She cast a glance at the folded easel of the computer signboard that Jao was removing from the walker.
“I don’t understand,” Bram said.
Heln hesitated again. “I don’t believe they’re aware of Jorv.”
“But they saw him. They rushed him till he backed off.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean they’re not aware of him as an entity. They’re aware of the alteration of hierarchical space that his presence caused.”
Jao paused in his labors. “Just like physics,” he said. “The shape of space is defined by the presence of matter.”
Heln pursed her lips. “I know it might not seem to make much sense…”
“No, no,” Bram said hastily. “In the physical sciences we reason from a single datum sometimes and reach the most astonishing conclusions. You’ve got a new science here. We’ll take your word for it.”
Ame was anxiously surveying the scene within the floodlit area. “Jorv just got himself chased again,” she said. “We’d better get over there before he gets himself into trouble.”
“Yes,” Bram said. First he checked the air bubble of Jorv’s walker. It had deflated because the thickened edges of the gasket were misaligned. Shira had been right about Jorv’s carelessness. He must have shouldered his way out of the vehicle frontally, probably spreading the bubble’s lips apart with his hands, then letting them snap back into place. Bram realigned the closure and saw some of the collapsed folds begin to stir and rise; they might need that air on the way back—Jorv hadn’t bothered to set out with a full complement of reserve air bottles, and if he’d had to get back home on his own, he might have made a close thing of it.
Jao slung his computer over his shoulder, and Bram shouldered the folded easel. Ame, he saw, had a big pad under her arm; she and Shira relieved Heln of some of her excess equipment. Together, they danced lightly across the landscape toward the stick-people’s camp.
As they approached the lit area, two of the spindly creatures trotted by at close hand, bearing a large, lightweight construction panel between them. Their gait was three-legged, and the long tubular abdomens, with gauntleted pincers on the ends, were curled around for extra support. They were backlighted by the brilliant lamps, and through the cloudy sheaths that covered their bodies, Bram got an impression of stiff, slender, many-jointed legs. The huge boxy helmets, concealing their secrets in the reflected glare, made them look like walking packing crates.
Jao stepped forward, holding up an outspread hand, but the creatures veered off to join a work crew at the perimeter of illumination.
“You’d think they’d have stopped,” he said, affronted.
“Different body language,” Shira suggested. “Holding up a hand doesn’t mean the same thing to them.”
It sounded reasonable to Bram, but he saw Heln’s pursed lips and frown of concentration.
They moved into the light. Bram saw Jorv’s space-suited figure ahead, stalking one of the stick-creatures. Jorv approached at a crouch, the lines of his body an exaggerated study in caution. The stick-creature was half turned away, flexing its reedy legs, its sheathed abdomen twitching slightly. It let Jorv get within eight or nine feet, then, abruptly, its legs bunched like springs and it soared over his head and lit down next to a pile of construction materials, where, without preamble, it joined its fellows in putting up one of the polyhedral structures.
Jorv straightened up, every line of his body showing disappointment, and began stalking another one of the creatures.
“We’re not even going to get that close to one,” Jao grumbled.
Every time Bram and his party seemed about to intersect the path of one of the creatures, it veered off and ignored them.
“Just hold on,” Bram said, “and we’ll be in the thick of them.”
“I’m insulted,” Jao said. “Am I invisible, or what?”
Heln said, “They see you … but they don’t see you.”
“Maybe they’re some kind of hive creatures,” Shira put in. “No real intelligence. The intelligence is in that bubble they landed in.”
“They’ve got intelligence,” Bram said. “If intelligence means handling tools and machinery.”
Then, without warning, they were upon one of the creatures. It reared up in their path, the light shining full on it, and for the first time Bram got a good look at what was inside those cagelike helmets.
Its face was the stuff of nightmares—two bulging domes of jelly on either side of a masklike bulb that was split by a vertical cleft. Each of those jellied eyes—if that’s what they were—was the size of a man’s head.
The cleft parted in a hideous vertical smile that hinted at something spiny and complicated within. There was a flicker of movement in front of the ghastly face—and in a moment of startled disbelief, Bram saw why the creatures needed so much room in their helmets.
There was a separate pair of limbs within the helmet!
They grew out of the creature’s face, or the sides of what passed for a neck. They were smaller manipulating limbs—shorter than a man’s arm—and these peculiar beings kept them folded up on the floor of the helmet, like a person resting his elbows on a table.
The creature swiveled its complicated head as if looking for a way of escape, and the facial limbs lifted and swung with it.
A flash of crazy thought went through Bram’s head: It must cramp their style to be deprived of the use of their grasping members whenever they wear space suits! But the creatures’ anatomy gave them no alternative. Limbs projecting through sleeves in a smaller helmet would have immobilized their heads.
Or maybe they simply needed to have their forelimbs available for grooming or self-care. Maybe they would have felt uncomfortable having the limbs enclosed apart from their faces. Bram could sympathize with that—hadn’t he suffered the agony of being unable to scratch an itchy nose while wearing a space suit?
Everything had happened in an instant. Through his radio Bram heard a couple of people gasp—he felt like gasping himself—and then the jelly-eyed horror spun around and galloped away.
“It saw us,” Jao said. “I swear it saw us that time.”
“No,” Heln said. “It saw the effect we were having on its visual field.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Have you ever heard of an animal called a frog?”
“Huh?”
“Wa, in Chin-pin-yin. The children’s story about the mandarin who turned into one.”
“Oh, yar.”
“It saw motion, not objects. It ate an animal called a fly, but it didn’t see the fly until it moved. If you tried to feed a captive frog on dead flies, it would starve to death.”