“Are you saying that these tomato-eyed beasts are frogs?”
“No,” Heln said patiently. “I’m saying that they have a queer sort of brain wiring that enables them to cooperate as a species but that makes other life forms irrelevant to them—as irrelevant as a fly is to a frog … until the fly moves. We’re no part of their experience—or their instincts—so we don’t exist for them.”
Bram looked around at the teeming campsite. “Aren’t you overstating the case? These aren’t primitive animals. They’ve got space travel. They must process information somehow in those heads of theirs. Can you have intelligence without curiosity?”
Something was bothering him. It was Jao’s description of the creatures as “tomato-eyed.” It was true. The eyes were reminiscent of gigantic green tomatoes. A memory nagged at Bram somewhere below the level of consciousness.
“Maybe.” Heln stood her ground. “And maybe you can have intelligence without empathy. Maybe we’re going to find that these new neighbors of ours lack basic empathy-that it’s literally impossible for them to relate to any life form but their own.”
“That would certainly make it hard to communicate with them,” Ame said with a strained smile.
“To say the least,” Bram said.
“I hope not,” Heln said, shifting some of her technical accoutrements on their carrying straps. “There has to be a way for us to plug ourselves into their sensory wiring. We’ll just have to find it. Let’s hear what Jorv has to say. Maybe he has some ideas about their phylum by now.”
Jorv saw them coming and ambled over to greet them. He seemed preoccupied. “They may be descended from terrestrial insects,” he said without preamble. “Did you notice those wraparound eyes? They probably carry the efficiency of the compound type of eye as far as it can go—their visual acuity may surpass our own. And the muscle attachment—I wish I could make out more through those space suits. They don’t move as if the muscles were operating proper skeletons!”
Bram tried a mild reprimand. “Jorv, you shouldn’t have come out here on your own. We may be running up against a very queer situation.”
“Queer? I’ll say it’s queer. They won’t stand still long enough for me to get a good look at them. Did anybody bring cameras? Ah, Heln—you’d better start taking some pictures.”
“Did you try to talk to them?” Bram asked.
“Talk? They won’t talk. Ame, I think you may have hit on something when you deduced a hookup between sensory input and a visual grid from their radio signals.”
Ame looked excited. “The compound eye means there’s no overall image—just a very large number of separately perceived patches. The visual information jumps from facet to facet, whether the object is moving or the creature’s head is moving, and the sum of the signals is processed somewhere in the brain—”
She broke off. Everybody looked at Heln. “Your frogs,” Jao said.
“What have frogs got to do with it?” Jorv said irritably. “These are insects!”
“Very big ones if that’s true,” Shira murmured. “Insects shouldn’t be able to grow to that size, with exoskeletons as a limiting factor. And they were lungless, weren’t they? They transported oxygen through tracheae. That would limit their size, too.”
“We won’t know till we examine one!” Jorv’s eyes were gleaming. “Do you think you could help me get one back to our camp?”
“Sit on him if you have to,” Bram told the three women. “Jao, let’s get your computer signboard set up.”
They worked at it for fifteen hours, taking turns going back to the parked walkers to replenish their air supplies and to fetch various items that Heln or Jao had brought along in hopes that they would help.
Nobody ate a lot during that time—just a few hasty handfuls of travelfood that had been included with their rations—and nobody slept at all, despite the fact that all of them had been awake for more than twenty-four hours.
They got nowhere.
Every once in a while one of the stick-beings would dart over and pause for a look at the computer display or at an earnestly semaphoring human being. At least they seemed to be looking. But they always trotted on past without showing any reaction.
Once an exasperated Jao had stepped squarely into the path of an ambulating beastie and attempted to herd it with blocking movements of his wide torso toward the little communications arena. An observer could not have said that the intercepted individual exactly tried to evade Jao. Simply, it was somehow past him without appearing to have noticed his presence.
It was a pity, because Jao had knocked himself out to prepare his visual displays. There was a beautiful sequence in simplified diagrams and actual images that showed the human itinerary from the Whirlpool Galaxy to the Milky Way to the vicinity of the enclosed star that was presumed to be Delta Pavonis. Another sequence ingeniously arranged as a query showed the presumed progress of the tomato-eyed strangers from a presumed Sol.
Jao never got anywhere near to unveiling his masterpieces—a sophisticated scenario that showed the ancient origin of humankind on a planet of Sol, showed bright schematic images of DNA, and showed the diskworld itself with stylized radio waves spreading from it toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies. It went on to show the Whirlpool in the Canis Venatici cloud, halfway to Virgo, being bathed in the radio waves, the reemergence of the colorful DNA schema, then the recreation of human beings and their return to the planet that had given birth to their genes.
“They don’t take visual information!” Jao said in disgust. “And them with eyes as big as my head!”
“It’s not visual information, it’s abstractions,” Bram said. “Let’s show them something closer to home.”
They displayed images relating human figures to Yggdrasil, with much pointing at the green blob that could be seen over the horizon. They showed the fuzzy images of the stick-ship and finally life-size holos of the jelly-eyed creatures themselves, played back from Heln’s camera.
But when Jao projected one of the fearsome holos in the path of one of the trotting creatures, it passed through it without pausing. “It didn’t see the image as real,” Ame said. “Not polarized for their eyes.”
“But sometimes they do seem to pause for a second and show body reactions, particularly with the moving images,” Shira said, sounding frustrated. “And certainly when we get too close to their precious equipment.”
“The same way your feet find stepping-stones when you cross a stream,” Heln said. “Doesn’t mean you’re really aware of the stones.”
Heln, tree-born, had never seen a stream and certainly never had crossed one on stepping-stones, but Bram appreciated the aptness of the simile.
“Going to try just one more thing,” Jao grunted.
He generated an animated image of a Cuddly, and the next time a stick-creature intersected their little communications arena, he sent it scampering toward the being.
The alien being stopped dead in its tracks and stood stock still for all of two or three seconds. For a moment Bram thought it was going to rear up and change direction, as it did when a human got in its way. The nightmare face seemed to expand as the central cleft widened, and Bram thought he saw a flicker of movement within the cavity.
Then, apparently, the creature dismissed the holographic Cuddly and darted off on its interrupted errand.
“We almost had it that time!” Jao exclaimed. “Did you see that?”