It's a slow, silent procession — six of us in formation like pallbearers miming an invisible coffin. The lieutenant's slaved our maneuvering jets to her own controls, so we follow in an orderly fashion — even those of us with no clue what we're doing.
Like any of us have a clue what we're doing anymore.
A kilometer sounds pretty far, but really, it's no distance at all. Two laps around a footrace track. You can run that far in a few minutes if you're in decent shape. The Montreal herself is close to three kilometers long.
We cover the distance in twenty minutes flat, in silence except for the occasional murmured instruction over the suit radios, and the thrilled, terrified rattle of our hearts. I'm waiting for some response, some acknowledgment. Some change in the steady, erratic flicker of the silvery teardrops from one place to another across the width of the birdcage. Some indication of whether to continue forward or move back.
I haven't been so roundly ignored since the time when Leah was twelve and she wouldn't talk to me for three days because I refused to help her run away from home so she wouldn't have to share a room with Genie anymore.
The good news is, she had nothing on emotional blackmail compared to her dad, or she almost might have broken me. I took her camping instead. A girl knows what it's like to need to get out of town once in a while.
Hey Richard.
“Jenny?”
You with me, sport?
“I wouldn't miss this for the world.”
I don't suppose you have a theory about what those birdcage aliens are?
I feel him shrug, and then his voice comes over my suit radio instead of inside my head. “The master warrant officer wants to know if this particular alien intelligence has any theories about what those other alien intelligences might be like,” he says.
“Whatever they are, they're swimming around in space bare-assed,” Charlie comments, his voice made tinny in transmission. “I don't think those are suits.”
“Could they be remotes? Waldos?” Jeremy, and he twists his upper body inside his suit to look at me, as if I have any idea whether he might be right or wrong. “Some sort of nanotech construction?”
“The probes couldn't tell,” Charlie says. “And when we tried to bring a sample back for analysis, all we got was nanotech and hydrogen.” We're close enough to see them clearly now, without magnification. The aliens are featureless gleaming spheres until they move, and then they stream out from a rounded bow to a trailing point.
“That's weird,” Richard says. “There's no drag. No air resistance to push them into a teardrop shape.”
“That's why I think those are the aliens,” Charlie answers. “That looks like an adaptation to moving through fluid.”
“Or atmosphere?” Leslie asks.
“Technically, atmosphere is a fluid, in the fluid dynamics sense,” Dick says.
I keep my damned mouth shut. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, etcetera, etcetera. Charlie, bless him, has no dignity. “I wonder where something like that grows up. Dick?”
“You're wondering if I have a theory where they evolved?”
“I'm wondering if you have a theory what they're made of.”
“I'd say they're probably patterns of electrical impulses in some sort of supercooled, possibly superconductive colloid. They carry a nanomachine infestation, but while I can sense those machines, I can't piggyback their operating system the way I can the ones you bred, Chuck. They're even farther out of my ambit than the Chinese nanonetwork.”
“Not only do we not speak their language, or have any kinetics in common, we can't even hack their computers.” Jeremy touches the override on his thigh, adding a little more thrust to what the lieutenant gives him, and drifts to the end of the line that binds us together. I compensate for the gentle tug; he makes a smooth job of it, overall.
Peterson draws us up a few short yards outside the birdcage, and we spread casually apart. Not too far, though; there isn't any safety in numbers, but the reptile part of our brains can't be made to believe that, no matter how many millions of years of evolution we layer over it.
“Supercooled?” Charlie asks. “Doesn't that get problematic out here in the sunlight?”
“They aren't fazed by vacuum, at least,” Jeremy says. “Maybe they come from an extreme environment of some sort—” Stopped cold, he bumps the brow of his helmet with the side of his gauntlet. “Leslie, what if they come from someplace with an opaque atmosphere? Or nearly opaque? Or no light to speak of? Like Venus, say. Or Pluto.”
Leslie's been silent since the comment about the atmosphere, but the way his suit rocks on the end of its line tells me he just reflexively tried to glance over his shoulder. He looks very small against the massive filigree of the birdcage, a white plastic spaceman doll floating in front of a shifting, faceted fretwork of spun glass. “No physical semiotics,” he answers when he's stable again. “Jeremy, that's pretty damn smart.”
“Thank you.”
“More than that,” Charlie puts in. “A completely different set of senses and manner of processing information than we have. No sense of sight, of smell, of hearing. Those would be more foreign to them than… a dolphin's sonar sense is foreign to us. No wonder we're having a hell of a time talking to them.”
“That's what I've been trying to explain,” Leslie says. “It's like Anne Sullivan teaching Helen Keller how to talk, only we can't even take them outside and pump water over their hands until they get that we're trying to show them something.”
“Les,” I say, “what on earth are you babbling about?”
“Semiotics,” Leslie answers. Which doesn't help me, but judging by the richness in his tone, he's quite pleased with himself. “Never mind,” he finishes. “Just doing my job.”
A scatter of the birdcage aliens drifts diagonally across the starship, passing beside and through one another. “So, what do you say we invite ourselves in and sit down?” Richard asks.
“Do you suppose they're safe to touch?” Leslie's already let himself drift forward; he's ahead of the rest of us by a good three meters now. Lieutenant Peterson is eyeing her end of the lines between them as if she's about to grab a fistful and haul Leslie back to her hand over hand.
“No. I don't think it's safe to do anything to them.” They're all looking at me. I blink. I hadn't intended to speak just then; it slipped out. “But if I understand you right, Les, you think they can't talk to anything they're not touching?”
“Got it in one,” he says, straining at the end of his leash. “I'm not sure they can notice us unless we wander in among them.”
“Forgive me if that sounds like a thoroughly lousy idea.”
“I know,” he answers, and this time he does grab the ropes and turns himself completely around, so we can see his broad white grin reflecting the running lights of the Buffy Sainte-Marie. “But it's also what we came out here for, isn't it?”
And they're all waiting for me. Waiting for me, even though the lieutenant ranks me. Waiting for me because I'm Genevieve Casey, dammit. And calisse de chrisse, I hate this shit.
“All right,” I say, and I do it without reaching out for Richard, because I already know what Richard's going to say. “All right, guys. Spread out. Let's go on in.”
Richard watched silently through Min-xue's eyes as Clarke receded behind the Gordon Lightfoot. It was only Min-xue's third trip in a Canadian shuttlecraft. Richard kept an ear on Min-xue's thought process, certain that Min-xue would call for his attention shortly. Right now, the pilot was musing on how he'd never expected to find himself in space again, much less headed for a billet aboard the Canadian flagship. Richard knew that Min-xue had assumed this part of his life was over. Had assumed that his life was over, destroyed in an act of conscience that was also an act of treason. He'd never expected to sit where he sat, the lone passenger on a hastily detoured shuttlecraft, a startling extravagance by Chinese standards.