By the way, we've got the lab results back. I've got to say, these guys really put the xeno into xenobiology. Except what he gave Leslie and Richard wasn't exactly words, but more a concentrated lump of his own experience and the test results and what it all might mean, or might not mean, without the ambiguities of language. For Jeremy and Elspeth's sake, he summarized: They're hydrogen based. What we call metallic colloidal hydrogen, probably supercompressed in their home environment. Something like the rocky core of a gas giant.
Elspeth had her back to the corner, her arms folded over her breasts, just listening. Almost nothing went over her head, but she usually stayed very quiet when the rest of the team was talking about subjects unrelated to her own specialty. Charlie suspected her thought process was keyed to intuition, and her long silences were her way of encouraging the penny to drop.
Leslie's thought, startlingly clear and tight for someone who was wrapped in a bubble of metallic colloidal hydrogen, kilometers away in the cold of space: You can have a hydrogen-based life form?
Leslie, Richard said, apparently you can make a life form out of anything, as long as it has the power to conduct and regulate piezoelectricity.
Exactly, Charlie agreed. Don't ask me what keeps them from evaporating out here, though, or just… discombobulating. Or — and here's the kicker — how the hell it got that way. The weird part is that that means there's some process by which little informational and structural heterogeneities can arise and persist at pressures that smoosh hydrogen itself down to liquid. That's just wild.
Richard gave a scientist's chuckle, the sort that is usually preceded by the phrase “it is intuitively obvious.” Charlie. You have a creature whose sensory system and technology seem to be predicated on perceiving and manipulating gravity.
He set the coffee cup down, sat back in his chair, and folded his hands behind his head. That would tend to indicate that they're the original source of the nanotech, since we know the shiptree uses… visible light. For something. His palms were sweating again, and he resolutely ignored it. If he got too nervous Richard would adjust his biochemistry. He hated relying on that. This was his life, a change that had been wrought on him, as randomly and unfairly as if he had lost a limb.
As long as he thought of it that way, and held up for himself the example of Jen Casey — her steel hand winking with machined precision and her absolute refusal to accept pity or, it seemed, to acknowledge even to herself that she had lost anything at all — he could hold it together. Thank you for not actually laughing at me, Dick.
The AI grinned in his head. No sweat.
In the other work space, Jeremy looked up from his interface. Charlie experienced the rearrangement of Leslie's attention as the xenosemiotician used the lab motes to follow his old schoolmate's gaze. It wasn't that different from inhabiting somebody else's body along with his own in a VR suit — the ghostly sense of limbs was identical, except it was his own body he felt slightly attenuated from, and the one he cohabited with that floated as if in a sense-dep tank.
Jeremy cleared his throat. “So now that we know what they're made of and how they experience their environment, how do we develop a symbolic system so we can move information?”
Leslie nodded. And I ask on my own, when do we get started on the shiptrees?
Well, we could always send an EVA team over there, too, and infect their nanites with our nanites. Give them one of our scientists. After all, fair's fair.
Bring a camera, Richard said. Charlie laughed, because of course Richard could record everything that he saw.
Wow, he said. Somebody write the date down. You realize that we've just witnessed the death of an ancient concept. Privacy.
Oh, I don't know, Richard answered. We can wall each other out more or less effectively. And if you squint at it from the right angle, you already have a bunch of individual consciousnesses inhabiting your head. Freud's id and ego and superego and so forth, or, if you prefer, Jung's “collective unconsciousness” or the left brain and the right brain and the—
“Modular-mind theory, more like,” Elspeth corrected. And then said, “Christ, Dick.”
Elspeth? What?
She straightened, her hands swinging as she stepped away from the wall and started to pace like a professor lecturing a class. “I think you just got yourself that second Nobel Prize, sir. You're absolutely correct. We have got a whole bunch of animals living in our heads already. Alien animals, animals that don't really communicate all that well. You ever hear about the experiments where somebody whose corpus callosum had been severed could be taught completely different things on each side of his brain, and couldn't articulate them to himself?”
Now that I pause to look it up.
“Well, your right brain and your left brain — well, not yours, Richard. You're a special case, of course. But say, Jeremy's, here—”
Jeremy laughed first, and swatted her mocking hand out of his hair. “I've known you not even a month, Elspeth, and already you take liberties with my person.”
She squeezed his shoulder before she stepped away. She folded her hands in front of her again, instead, leaned against the back of a swivel chair, and cleared her throat. “Essentially, the nonverbal side of the brain will resort to hand gestures and drawing images to get its message to the verbal brain. In extreme cases, the left hand will even grab and redirect the right hand when the left brain is about to make a mistake and the right brain knows it. But my point is, the hemispheres don't talk the same language on their best day. They communicate in terms of symbols and emotions and sometimes dreams or uneasy sensations or… hunches, for lack of a better term. Which is why so much of any therapist's work is interpreting between the subconscious and the conscious mind, and teaching them to understand each other, and that greedy little reptile in the back of all of our heads, as well.”
Charlie found himself standing, grinning until his cheeks hurt, his hands tight on the edge of the lab bench. So you're saying we need a therapist, Elspeth?
They were all under tremendous stress, and his timing had been better than usual. When the hysterics dwindled into subdued coughing, Elspeth wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist and said, “In that analogy, I think we are the therapist. Or maybe the corpus callosum. In any case, I think we're halfway there.” Which was bad enough that even Richard groaned. “Leslie, are you getting this? Are you following me?”
You want me to try… Oh. Elspeth, Dick. Can you talk to Jenny and see if she can pass along an impression of what space feels like through the Benefactor stardrive?
“You want to see if it matches up with what you feel from the birdcages.”
I want to see if it's the same melody. Charlie had a distinct sense of Leslie grinning. Charlie shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and for a moment couldn't remember whose gesture that had been, originally, Leslie's or his own. Which would have turned the faint seasick unease in his stomach into full-fledged nausea, if he'd been willing to let it.