“What’s this all about, Mary? I just got a message via aug to come and meet you at these coordinates to see something of interest to me.”
She shrugged as they turned to walk toward the clearing. “That was from B’Tana. He likes rubbing people’s noses in the rougher side of our job whenever the opportunity presents.” She glanced at him. “Are you squeamish?”
“I’ve been working for Taxonomy as a field biologist for fifty-three years. What have you got here?”
“A corpse, or rather, some remains.”
Jonas halted. “Should I be here, then?”
“Don’t worry. This is not murder and you won’t be bringing any contamination to a crime scene. We got everything that happened here on sateye shortly after he screamed for help over his aug.”
Entering the clearing, Jonas glanced around. No doubt about what that red stuff was staining the flattened grasses and spattering nearby upright stalks. Mary held back to talk to one of her companions while Jonas walked forward to stand beside the man working with the remains. There were fragments of bone scattered all about, the shredded rags of an envirosuit, one boot. The skull lay neatly divided in half, stripped clean, sucked dry.
“May I?” Jonas asked, gesturing to the bone fragments.
The man looked up from the handheld scanner he was running over the rhizome mat.
Beside him rested a tray containing a chrome aug, a wristcom and a QC hand laser-all still bloody.
“Certainly-he’s past caring.”
Jonas immediately nailed the forensic investigator as a Golem android. That was the way it was sometimes: a disparity between speech, breathing, movement, maybe even a lack of certain pheromones in the air. It never took him long to see through human emulation programs.
He turned his attention to the fragments, squatted down, and picked one up. It was a piece of thigh bone: as if someone had marked out a small diamond on that bone, drilled closely along the markings with a three millimeter bit, down to the marrow, then chiseled the piece free.
“Hooder,” he said.
“Medium sized,” the Golem replied.
Jonas turned to him. “Who was this?” He nodded toward the remains.
The Golem winced and glanced toward Mary Cole, then said, “A xenologist who came here to study mud snakes. We lose between five and ten each year.”
Jonas called over to Mary, “Is this what you would call an educational outing for me?”
Glancing over she said, “Jonas, you would not have been sent here if you needed that.”
She nodded to her companions and they headed back toward the transport, then she came over and gestured at the remains. “We get them all the time. They upload skills then come here thinking they’re going to brilliantly solve all the puzzles. You, as you say, have worked for Taxonomy for fifty-three years. The maximum experiential upload is less than a year-enough for a language or some small branch of one of the sciences.”
Jonas watched the Golem stand, extend the head of his scanner on a telescopic arm, and begin swinging like a metal detector.
“I upload,” he observed.
“Yes, on top of your fifty-three years of experience.”
“Granted,” he said. “So you get a lot like this?”
“Certainly-there’s a great deal here to study.”
Jonas knew that. Prior to twenty years ago, this world had been Out-polity and ruled by a vicious theocracy. With the help of undercover ECS agents, rebels managed a ballot of the planetary population, the result of which was the Polity subsuming this world. But events had been somewhat complicated. During that time, some biophysicist had come here in a stolen Polity dreadnought and caused all sorts of mayhem. Jonas did not know the details-all he knew was that it had taken ECS twenty years to clear up the mess, and that some areas of the planet were still under quarantine. Also, at about the same time, one of the four spheres of a transgalactic alien bioconstruct called Dragon had arrived and suicided on the planet’s surface, and, in the process, out of its mass, created a new race: dracomen. These creatures alone were worthy of centuries of study. They used direct protein replication rather than some form of DNA transcription and could mentally control their body growth and substantially alter their offspring.
Their initial shape was based on a human thought-experiment: what might dinosaurs have been like if there had been no extinction and they had followed the evolutionary path of humans. But, besides these, the planet boasted much weird fauna: the tricones forever churning the soil, a multitude of herbivores, mud snakes, siluroynes, heroynes, hooders, and the decidedly strange gabbleducks. And those were only the larger wild creatures.
“Do you know if there are any instructions concerning his remains?” Jonas asked.
“We will know, soon enough,” said the Golem. He was squatting down now, digging at the ground with a small trowel. After a moment he stood, holding up some item about the size of a little finger.
“Memplant?” Jonas suggested.
The Golem nodded.
Jonas turned back to Mary. “I’d like to make some recordings and measurements, and take a few samples. That okay?”
“That’s fine. And if he has no special requirements concerning his physical remains I’ll have Gryge,” she gestured to the Golem, “box them up for you.”
“And a copy of the sateye recording?”
“Certainly.”
“Thanks.”
Jonas headed back to the aerofan for his holocorder and sampling equipment. He did not suppose he would learn anything new here, or from the recording-it would just be more information to feed Rodol’s appetite. The AI was already digesting everything the locals knew about hooders, plus twenty years of ECS data, but its hunger was never satisfied.
Shardelle noted that within the last hour another forty-three linguists had come online, but that hour had also seen off sixty-two. Their number, now standing at just over seven hundred thousand, was in steady decline in the network. Comparative analyses with just about every language on record had been made. New languages had been generated for comparison-still no joy. Syntactic programs ranging from the deeply esoteric to the plain silly had been employed, but they had not come close to cracking one word or a hint of a morpheme, of what was now being called The Gabble.
What precisely did Yaw-craggle flog nabble goop mean, or Scrzzz-besumber fleeble? Even the AIs seemed to be failing, and they were making comparative analyses across a huge range of data: an enormous list of environmental parameters including the creature’s location, the ambient temperature, variations in air mix, what the creature was looking at, hearing, smelling, or otherwise sensing; the time of the day or night, what objects were in the sky; variations in the speakers themselves including size, sex, number of limbs and what they happened to be doing with them at the time, what had happened to them earlier. Occasionally concurrence did occur.
Two gabbleducks had said yabber, while peering into the distance and gesturing with one clawed limb. There had been other concurrences too. But utterly bewildering was that, statistically, if the five hundred creatures under scrutiny had been generating random noise, there should be more concurrences than this. It was a maddeningly negative result. Shardelle, however, felt this was a negative that must indicate something.