“On the morning of October eleventh of this year,” Janet said, “I was introduced by Unitek executive Tobias Hardy to a gentleman whose name I was not given, but who was identified to me as an agent of the United States of America…”
The pandemonium as she continued was even grander than she'd anticipated. She wasn't surprised when Shijie Shu got up from the Chinese table, made his excuses to the premier, and headed for the door. She did notice that none of his security or the PanChinese attachés went with him, and thought that was a little odd, but she wanted to get what she had to say into the record before her nerve broke once and for all.
She kept talking. It wasn't like she'd be the first politician to wind up in jail.
The Benefactors were still singing. And Leslie was still trying to overlay his map-in-song of local space with their map-in-curved-space time. It was interesting, because not even the relative significance of objects was the same; for Leslie, a bright object was of more significance than a dark object. For the birdcages, the emphasis lay on heavy objects, although their scale of reference was fine enough that objects no more massive than Leslie's fist registered at a distance, and up close they could sense on a fine enough scale to read the text on his space suit by the different specific gravity of the letters compared to unmarked portions.
It was promising. If they could only be made to understand the concept of symbology, and of words, he might be able to start establishing a pidgin. If the boredom didn't kill him first.
It wouldn't have been so bad if Leslie actually had nothing to do. He could have sat back, played long-distance draughts with Charlie, and dreamed of good lager. Unfortunately, the interior of the shiptree was exactly where he needed to be right now, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it except ride resolutely behind Charlie's eyes and swear quietly in his ear.
This was what he had come for. Charlie and Jeremy had discovered an environment — an entire ecosystem—populated by dozens of never-before-seen species, all of them seemingly communicating in some matter that was neither intuitively obvious nor easily dismissable. Leslie's dream, his obsession, his life's work, spread out for him like a banquet on the other side of a wall of shatterproof glass. He could see through Charlie's eyes, hear through his ears, lay his hands on something as if Leslie ran his own hands over the surface. Charlie's body became, for Leslie, a sort of almost-perfect remote drone or probe.
But it wasn't the same as being there. And it got in the way of Charlie doing his own work, too.
Richard helped out as best he could, keeping Leslie supplied with live images of Earth, of Piper Orbital Platform, of a 3NN anchor providing analysis of Frye's “explosive” testimony, and of the birdcage and the shiptree hanging calmly in the void, of the Gordon Lightfoot bright with reflected sunlight, a single sharp-edged dot like the morning star, still synchronized with the vaster, darker shape of the shiptree. He also let Leslie watch his own view of the Montreal's bridge — full of people, unusually so for a ship not under way. Genie was on her way through with her HCD in her hand, headed for the pilot's ready room that was now her exclusive domain. Wainwright was in her chair, sipping coffee and going over reports.
Leslie's fingers itched, and he suddenly wished he'd screamed for rescue, twisted the captain's arm until she yelped. Third time's the charm. He wanted to be where Charlie and Jeremy were, doing what they were doing, not somewhere bodiless, cold and eyeless in the dark.
Greedy, he reprimanded. He might not be able to see, or feel, or even feel his body — Richard assured him the suit was still intact, that the Benefactors were still keeping him breathing in there somehow, as bizarre and unsustainable as that seemed — but he could sense things no human had ever sensed before: The weight of the Montreal and the shiptree curving space time. The gravity well of the sun, like a mountain looming on the horizon, the foothills that were the Earth and the moon, the local flickers and fluctuations of the birdcage aliens surrounding him, manipulating epic forces on a scale as precise as the stroke of a surgical scalpel, in patterns modulated and refined to echo themes he gave them.
Playing him the music of the spheres.
He wouldn't permit himself to remember that the odds were a thousand to one that he was going to die out here.
You're where you belong. And you'll get home somehow.
Eventually.
In the meantime, he kept himself busy talking to Charlie, and to Jeremy — through Charlie — and writing exhaustive reports on the data he could collect in between Charlie's xenobiological pursuits. Although, right this instant, both of them were too focused on Dick's feed-via-Casey of what was going on in New York for either one of them to be accomplishing a lot.
There's something to be said for hive minds, Leslie thought.
Charlie didn't have to look up from his perusal of a recovered feather—feather-analogue—to engage the conversation. Ours, or the shiptree's?
Don't you think two hive minds would be a bit coincidental?
There is that. Charlie hooked a toe under a projecting root to keep from drifting, curling his legs to hunch himself closer to the tree-analogue he was examining. Leslie's kinetic sense wanted to echo the movement, wanted to feel his muscles stretch and play as Charlie's did. Bad enough he found himself imagining breathing hard when Charlie clambered around the chambered arboretum that seemed to comprise the majority of the shiptree's interior. And frankly, I'm not sure what we have here is a hive mind, so much as a Gaia-type intelligence. The whole ecosystem, including the ship, seems to function as one beastie; not a threaded intelligence, like Dick, and not separated intelligences, like humans, and not a single big unified brain split into however many bodies it happens to need at a given moment, as I suspect the birdcages are, but something more like the internal structure of the human mind, where various sections handle various functions autonomously, irrespective of whether the consciousness knows what's going on at all.
So you're suggesting this thing's reptile brain is—
Actually housed in a reptile. More or less. Yeah. Charlie's knees ground as he straightened his legs, letting himself drift. Leslie winced in sympathy. Or maybe a shrubbery. The plants are awfully friendly around here. He brushed away a vine that tried to twine around his waist.
And how do they communicate, then?
Leslie felt the shrug as Charlie continued. Chemically? Electrically? Same way your brain does, I guess. Jeremy's done a little poking around here and there; not only is the air we're not breathing a soup of pheromones, but there's nanosurgeons through all this plant life and the whole thing is threaded with conductive material. Heck, if I'm right, the buckytubes that give the thing's hull its tensile strength are also its brain. Based on Richard's theory that all you need for consciousness is the right kind of piezoelectric activity in any sort of substrate that will support it, buckytubes are ideal, as long as they have neurons and synapses. More or less.
“I'm not defining consciousness this week,” Richard said.
Good. Then I won't have to wrestle you for my Nobel Prize. Charlie reached out and caught the branches of a tree-analogue in his gauntleted fist, wiping beads of condensation off his face plate. Dammit. I've had it with this suit. Still nothing doing with the culture plates?