“How did Tom’s group know where to find them?”
—Unknown. The maps I retained of our journey are insufficient. The two tribes may have had previous encounters or the scouts of Top Clan Two-Four found the spoor of Top Clan Eight-Six in the past."
“But they meet outsiders all the time.”
—Yes. Tom’s group was understandably wary of me after confronting our other probes, yet they allowed opportunity after opportunity for me to prove myself. Presumably they thought I was an outcast or a lone survivor, and I believe solitude is an extremely stressful state for any sunfish. They were patient in rehabilitating me.
“They took care of you.”
—They treated me like I was schizophrenic, but they accepted me anyway. After the blow-out, they needed all the assistance they could get. Otherwise they might have killed me.
“Compassion, foresight, organization,” Vonnie said. “We already have enough to make a substantial case to Earth.”
—Von, the sunfish accepted me because Dawson is correct.
His words felt like a knife in the stomach. Unconsciously, she dropped her hand to her mid-riff, protecting herself. “I don’t understand,” she said. She didn’t want to understand, but Lam continued in his cool, inflectionless voice:
—Many of the sunfish have regressed. Unfavorable mutations took root among their species many, many generations ago. At least sixty percent of their population consists of individuals who are mentally deficient or suffer from internal or external deformities.
“That’s why they didn’t reject you for having the wrong smell and fake body parts, isn’t it?” Ash said.
They’d built their probes with gills, lungs, and a genital slit, but while the probe could convincingly inhale and exhale, it could not generate pheromones, sperm, or more than its minimal reserves of synthetic blood and saliva.
“They think you have birth defects,” Ash said.
—Yes. Many of them are handicapped, insane, or infertile. Others are forcibly spayed or neutered.
“Who makes those decisions?” Vonnie said. “It sounds horrible to us, but if they’re evaluating their offspring to maintain or improve their species’ viability, isn’t that more proof they’re sentient?”
—Yes and no. Much of it is instinctive. From what I’ve seen, a tribe operates as a group consciousness led by consensus, not a single matriarch. No individual rules absolute. There is always give-and-take based on the composition of the tribe and their need for hunters, scouts, and mating pairs, however crippled.
“Oh God,” Vonnie said.
—Metzler is correct, too. There’s a genetic imperative to adopt newcomers, because inbreeding furthers the mutations. Sickness increases sickness. Mental impairment, deafness, malformed cartilage, and stunted arms run rampant among the sunfish.
Sudden fury clashed with her grief. “If that’s true, why haven’t we seen any of these monsters?”
—Because the tribes practice murder and infanticide on their undesirables, then freeze the corpses until needed. Von, they eat them.
51.
A window blinked on Vonnie’s display. It was Koebsch. His sober gaze shifted from her face to Lam’s datastreams, where the sunfish flexed in their self-absorbed dance.
“I have orders from Berlin,” he said. “They want me to lock down all systems and take you and Ash into custody until further notice. I’ll protest, but it will have more weight if I can show them something — anything — like a conversation between Lam and the sunfish.”
“We don’t have it, sir,” Ash said. “Not yet.”
“There must be something.”
“No,” Vonnie said, and Koebsch stared at her, clearly puzzled by her dispassionate tone.
“They won’t transmit kill codes from Earth,” he said. “Too many things can go wrong. But they want me to shut you down. I’m running out of excuses.”
“Give us as much time as you can, sir,” Ash said before he cut his link.
Vonnie sighed, fending off a sense of resignation. How could she have been so wrong? Lam, the real Lam, had seen the fatal truth when they first discovered the carvings at the top of the ice. We’re too late, he’d said.
Thousands of years had passed since the rise and fall of the sunfish empire. The tragedy wasn’t that huge numbers of them had died. It was that by now, today, their potential had faded.
Vonnie remembered what Dawson had said about the increasing demands on the sunfish. They’d adapted to both water and atmosphere environments, consciously breathing through their gills or their lungs, but the same versatility that aided their survival had also doomed their intelligence. Dawson said they could only use one hemisphere of their brains at a time. One half rested, moderating some involuntary functions like heartbeat and digestion, while the other controlled their movements, their breathing, and their cognitive abilities, however limited those thoughts had become. Too much of their neural tissue was dedicated to scent, taste, sonar, and spatial awareness.
Vonnie’s eyes were downcast as she whispered, “So it’s over. They’re just animals.”
—Yes.
She pressed her hand tighter against her belly, feeling hollow. More than anything, she felt like she’d failed Pärnits and Collinsworth. They’d died for nothing.
Lam said:
—It would be inaccurate to classify a majority of the sunfish population as any more self-aware than wolves or cats. Some are even less intelligent. But not all.
Vonnie glanced up.
—I’ve reconstructed my files. Look at this.
He opened a sim of four females scratching at a sheet of ice. They held rock chunks and groped at each other’s work with their pedicellaria, screeching and clumping together. Were they trying to scrape through the ice to something inside?
Lam enlarged several images, zooming on their tools. Some weren’t made of rock. Hidden in the muscular coils of the females’ arms were crudely honed blades of metal — the light, durable alumalloy from Probes 112 and 113. One female also held a nub of ceramic armor from an ESA spy.
“Tom’s group brought the wreckage with them,” Vonnie said with new hope.
—They considered it more valuable than anything else. In fact, they carried very little food, choosing to keep the metal, plastic, and ceramics they’d scavenged. They made gifts of the best pieces to the colony.
“That won’t convince anyone,” Ash said. “Monkeys and birds like shiny junk.”
—No. Look. They’re writing.
He replayed his sim of the four females etching at the ice. They’d drawn curls and lines like bent arms, not complete sun shapes, merely arms. It was a written language unlike the carvings, and Vonnie shouted, “Lam, you beautiful son of a bitch! Where did this come from!?”
—Yesterday. It was recorded inside the colony.
Ash grinned as Vonnie banged on her station. “Koebsch!” she said. “Koebsch! I’m sending you a new file!”
—There’s more.
She was jubilant. “We’re sending you more!” she said, but Koebsch didn’t reply, preoccupied with his messages from Earth.
—I have EEG scans showing some of the sunfish using both hemispheres of their brains simultaneously. The most gifted are exclusively female, although there are also a few males capable of waking both hemispheres. They do this in regular councils of the strongest individuals of both sexes.