“We hear you,” the voice called back. “We know you’re there.”
“I don’t believe it,” Tobias said, coming to listen in over her shoulder.
“Don’t give up…” the voice called. “The ships are on the way.”
As it turned out, however, the ships were still forty-eight hours away. When Cantrell thought Liz and Tobias were dead, he’d ordered the ships to reduce speed—to save on fuel expense—which meant that Liz and Tobias would be trapped under the ice for another two days.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Tobias said after they’d broken off contact. He frowned, shaking his head. “That man would sell his…” He paused, looking at Liz, who was kneeling beside the pool. “What are you doing?”
“Look at the way the colonies are all crowding toward our side of the pool,” she said, glancing back at him over her shoulder. “It’s almost like they realize we’re getting ready to leave, like they don’t want us to go.”
Tobias sighed. “I don’t know. That’s pretty hard to swallow.”
“But look at the colors,” she said. “They’re so pale, so sad.” Especially Glimmer, she thought, who had worked his way toward the front of the group.
Tobias grimaced. “Maybe they’re a little paler…” he began, then his brow tightened and he leaned forward, studying the patterns of light sliding across the Glimmer’s surface. “Keep talking. I want to record this.”
As Liz spoke, he held out his forearm, using the analog interface built into his mission assistant to record both her voice and Glimmer’s responses.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
Tobias grimaced. “I’m not sure, but I think Glimmer’s mimicking more than just the cadence of your voice. It’s almost like he’s capturing the shape of the individual words. With the colors, I mean. It’s like he’s giving us back a visual analog of the sound.”
As Liz continued to talk, she saw that all the bundles were now mimicking her voice. All, that is, except Glimmer, who had stopped mimicking her and was now repeating back a distinct pattern of his own.
“Do you think he’s trying to tell us something?” she asked.
Tobias shook his head. “I don’t know, but there’s definitely a correlation between the patterns of light and specific words… like he’s repeating back something he heard earlier.”
They watched the waves moving across the screen on Tobias’s mission assistant as he continued to record more data.
“There, I think we’ve got it,” he said.
He pressed a virtual button at the bottom of his screen, instructing the program to play back the results of its correlation. The voice that came from the assistant’s speaker was flat, a monotone without emotion or intonation, but there was no mistaking the words.
“Don’t leave us…” the voice droned. “Please, don’t leave us…”
Liz blinked, glancing up at Tobias. “That’s what I kept saying when I was trying to reach the Arrow. You don’t think…?”
“I don’t know…” Tobias looked from his assistant to the worms and back again. “They’ve been watching us for nearly two days. I suppose they could have realized you were trying to reach someone.”
“That’s it,” Liz said excitedly. “The return call from the Arrow—that would have confirmed what I was saying, what the words meant.”
Tobias sucked in a breath. “I guess they could have picked out a phrase or two, maybe figured out…” He shook his head, struggling to come to terms with the idea.
As they listened, the monotone emanating from Tobias’s assistant began to modulate. Additional waves joined the first single line undulating across the screen. Liz realized she was hearing multiple voices, but it wasn’t until she looked up and saw the same pattern of light flowing across all the bundles in the cavern that she realized all the worms were now broadcasting exactly the same message.
“Don’t leave us…” the combined voices repeated. “Please, don’t leave us…”
“I’m so relieved to see that you’re all right,” Advocate Lassiter said when he met Liz in the Arrow’s shuttle bay. He scurried up to her, his purple robe swirling around his oversized belly. “You gave us quite a scare, young lady.” He thrust a pudgy arm around her shoulder. “Quite a scare, indeed.”
“Cost us a shuttle, is what she did,” Superintendent Cantrell grumbled. He scratched the whiskers bristling from his chin. “It’s beyond me why you and that quack doctor had to go mucking around with all those worms in the first place.”
“Yes, but that’s all behind us now, isn’t it?” Advocate Lassiter said. He smiled brightly, turning Liz toward the exit. “Now the superintendent can get on with the business of mining, and we can get you back to the Fleet where you belong.”
“Actually, we can’t,” Liz said. “Not just yet.”
“What do you mean, not just yet?” Superintendent Cantrell said. He squinted suspiciously down at her.
Liz smiled—rather pleasantly, she thought. Then she turned, gesturing toward the ramp that led down from the shuttle’s cargo bay, where, at that moment, Tobias just happened to be wheeling out a large transparent tank with Glimmer inside.
“Intelligent worms?” Cantrell snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
They were again seated in the conference room, where Liz had just demonstrated Glimmer’s responses to her spoken words. The worms that composed his bundle were now swimming freely in the large transparent tank sitting just beyond the far end of the table.
“That little lightshow may have impressed you,” the superintendent continued, “but all I saw was you talking to your mission assistant. If you think the Consortium’s going to hold up a mining operation just because Tobias here wrote a program that assigns word values to flashes of light, you’ve got another thing coming.” He glared at the worms as they glided back and forth behind the glass. “Half of what they said didn’t make any sense, anyway.”
“That’s because we haven’t had the time to teach them enough of our language,” Tobias said calmly. “We only learned they could communicate two days ago.”
“Nevertheless, Superintendent Cantrell does have a point,” Advocate Lassiter said. “All we really know is that your mission assistant can assign words to the worms’ light patterns. If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we aren’t really hearing their voices at all.”
“Exactly,” Cantrell said. “Make it say something right now.”
“It can’t, because it’s feeding,” Liz said. “You know that.”
“Then it really isn’t intelligent, is it?” he snapped back. “In fact, it isn’t even an it. It’s a them—a bunch of worms.”
“The fact that the individual worms don’t exhibit intelligent behavior doesn’t mean the colonies lack intelligence,” she said. “If we put one of your neurons out here on the table, it wouldn’t have much to say, either.”
Cantrell leaned forward, thrusting out his chin. “Yeah? Well, here’s the bottom line,” he growled. “Now that my ships are here, we’re going to start digging, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”
Liz’s green eyes narrowed. “In other words, not only are you going to destroy a world where the Anunnaki themselves modified the ecology, you’re also going to destroy the species they lifted to consciousness.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Cantrell snarled back at her. “You need to come back to the real world.”
Liz turned abruptly toward Advocate Lassiter. “Have you told the Council you’re going to throw away the best chance we’ve ever had to find out where the Anunnaki were headed?”
She’d hoped to catch the advocate off guard, to see at least a flutter of nervousness at the corner of his mouth, but Lassiter only smiled back at her.