“Obviously not nearly as much as we thought we did. OK, so assume it’s an updraft—a hurricane blowing straight up—why did the signal keep fading?”
“That’s easy,” Steveberg said. “The probe was getting tossed around and it kept losing alignment.”
The Rhino grunted. “That doesn’t feel right. It looks more like something was blocking the signal.”
“What? It was hung up on a tree limb and the branches kept getting in the way or something?”
F. Gary Rhine cocked a furry eyebrow. “Or something.” He scowled down at the latest data. Normally troubleshooting a complex system involves formulating and testing hypotheses. And normally the problem is eliminating the hypotheses down to a testable number. Here they had every engineer’s nightmare. There were simply no testable hypotheses that could explain what had happened in terms of a communications malfunction. Without theories to proceed on the team was just spinning its wheels. Logically that meant the problem was in some other team’s bailiwick, but Rhine knew the other teams were also coming up empty.
He sighed. “OK, let’s go back to the assumption that there was something wrong in the chain of communications. That’s what we’re paid to do, not worry about the weather on Jupiter. Let’s go over it again and we’ll meet in twenty-four hours. Maybe by that time we’ll have some better information.”
Ensign watched the Sun set. Snow hung on his flank like a calf, silent and withdrawn. For more than an hour she had been trapped by Sky Seed, terrorized by its song—or something like a song, he corrected himself—sung in the mode of a lightning warning.
Off to the side The Geek and Melody continued their argument. “I tell you it was alive! It responded to us. It sang!”
“But it didn’t sound like a song and it stopped later.” She paused for effect. “Living things don’t look like that—all hard and smooth and shiny.”
“Plankton don’t look like us and they’re alive. If you could have heard the song yourself—if you’d have flown above it—you’d know it was an intelligent message.”
Melody snorted, “I’ll stay as far away from such things as I can. Look at poor Snow—she croaks one-word responses since she managed to free herself from that thing.”
Ensign interrupted, “Are we ready for Evensong?” At each Sunset the pod prepared for a quieter, more introspective flight.
Suddenly Snow wailed, “It’s coming back! I can hear it!”
Ensign focused his tingle sense and found the signal, faint from the darkness and radio noise in the east. The tingle song was unmistakable but richer in variations. Not harmonic but faintly rhythmic. Snow sobbed.
“Yes! I can sense it, too! But it’s different—a more mature sound.”
Ensign tasted the song again. Normally the High Folk ignored the background noise in their tingle sense, filtered it out automatically without thinking. But by concentrating and bringing the crackling, hissing, popping hash of Jupiter’s natural RF emissions to consciousness he was able to pick out the strange singing.
If Snow hadn’t been sensitized to it by the Sky Seed I never would have noticed it, he thought as he strained his huge eyes for some indication of the singer.
Unseen to those below, Galileo passed beyond the limb of Jupiter, having beamed its message through the upper atmosphere. In about an hour the listeners on Earth would pick up its message and could begin to draw their conclusions about Jupiter. Meanwhile the Jovians were drawing their own conclusions about Galileo.
“That had to be an adult,” The Geek maintained. “The mature form of the Sky Seed.”
“Calling to its calf?” Melody wondered aloud.
“Perhaps.” Ensign tried to sound judicious, mature, and realized he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.
Snow wasn’t saying anything for pod consumption, just huddling close to Melody like a calf with its mother. Ensign strongly suspected Melody was sending a constant stream of high-frequency reassurance to the badly frightened youngster.
“So these things live above and they communicate by tingle sense.”
Ensign rippled a shrug. “Makes sense after a fashion. Our voices grow weaker as we climb higher and the pressure becomes less. Eventually the pressure must become so small voices can’t be heard. The sunlight is stronger up there so plankton can grow large.”
“But where is its calving ground?”
“Not here,” Ensign said. “We would have seen it otherwise. Perhaps it calves above.”
“Or maybe it calves in the layers below us and flies up into the sky to feed before returning to those lower layers.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Then where is it from if not from the lower layers?”
“Here, let’s see if we can find a good candidate. Snow, please loan me the remoras with the songs of the sky.”
A half dozen remoras detached themselves from Snow and darted across the distance to Ensign’s side. There was a certain amount of wiggling and tickling as the newcomers settled in.
“Let’s begin with the ‘Song of the Wanderers.’ ” There was more wiggling and tickling as one of the remoras positioned itself over Ensign’s left dorsal earmouth and began to sing to the membrane. After an instant Ensign began to sing with the remora, transferring the information to his pod-mates.
Although the High Folk were by nature sound-oriented, the remoras’ memories could hold pictures as well. Now the little symbiote wove a complex story of the Wanderers through the sky and what the people of Jupiter knew of them.
The High Folks’s main eyes were more than two meters in diameter and they were backed by an elaborate neural image processing system. A Jovian’s “brain” wasn’t organized anything like a mammal’s, but roughly 80 percent of its central neural structure was given over to receiving, interpreting, and sending signals. For the High Folk planetary astronomy was a naked-eye proposition.
But not a very popular proposition. Except for solar eclipses of Jupiter’s moons, the High Folk paid little attention to what went on above them. However, among the remoras the Bach Choir carried were the remnants of those of Old Simon, the greatest of the Newcomb Pod, which had specialized in studying the skies for generations.
As the song wove on, Ensign, The Geek, Melody, and Snow were all entranced by the images forming before them. One by one the Wanderers spun out before them, as sharply and as clearly as generations of Jovian astronomers had managed to see them. As the first remora reached the limits of its memory, another took its place and another after that. Finally the “Song of the Wanderers” spun away into silence, leaving the images sharp in the minds of the pod members.
“The Second Wanderer!” Melody breathed. “It must be the Second Wanderer.”
The others bobbed agreement. The First Wanderer was a featureless mass and the Third Wanderer apparently had only one, mostly brick-red, cloud layer. But the Second Wanderer showed cloud layers and patterns very like the ones they flew above— if it weren’t for that disconcerting blue-green tinge to the lower layers.
“It seems logical,” Ensign said. “If these things have a calving ground in the sky it would be the Second Wanderer.”
“So we have been visited by a being from the Second Wanderer,” The Geek said slowly, “one who communicates by tingle sense.”
Actually he said much more than that. By his frequency choice and faintly dissonant chords, he expressed how such a story was likely to be received. Like most of his people The Geek was a pragmatist. This thing had happened, so no matter how unlikely it might be, it was so. Accepting the explanation was another matter.
“Offering such a story will not help our reputation,” Melody said at last. And, she did not have to add, it will make it harder to recruit more members.