Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8) (4 page)

Because Sigma Draconis was a
somewhat metal poor star and the sigmas’ home world had far less metal than earth, metal was precious to them. With limited access to metals in their civilization they’d learned to use carbon as their structural material of choice early on. They’d rapidly moved from plant cellulose, to carbon fiber, to nanotubes, to graphene, saving metals for other more important uses. They’d been making things from carbon for so long and did it so well and so cheaply that finding a structural object made from metal suggested wasteful extravagance to a sigma. It affected Querlak much like finding a gold car would strike a human. Carbon structure was cheaper, lighter and so,
so
much stronger. Making something out of metal suggested a clade that wished to impress with its wealth.

Then the top of the o
bject rotated and faced Querlak. It had two lenses reminiscent of eyes but arranged horizontally!

Astonished and feeling out of her depth with
just a seven person TS, Querlak put out a call for more members. The clade connected thirteen more sigmas to her, boosting her IQ to approximately 124. Because Querlak’s clade wasn’t large, taking this many members away from their assigned tasks to help process this single phenomenon represented a large commitment, but no one complained. This… object… or machine… or being… represented a
singular
event in sigma history.

The 20 person TS
studied the metal object. Most, if not all of it looked like it was made of the twelfth element magnesium. Magnesium was the second most common metal after iron and much lighter. If you
were
going to make a mobile artifact out of metal, using magnesium would make some sense. Still magnesium was a lot heavier than carbon and much, much weaker, why would anyone do that? The object stood on two lower projections and had two upper projections that looked like they might be used for manipulation.
Why so few?

As Querlak watched, the bottom two projections moved independently to rotate the entire object so that the opposite side of the object now faced toward Querlak. The TS decided from their movements that the lower projections were in fact legs of some sort. The lenses or eyes at the top rotated as the object did so that they remained facing Querlak. Surprisingly, despite having legs like an animal, the obje
ct had no wings! Querlak had, of course, never seen an animal, but records showed that a few of the historical animals of the sigmas’ home world had lived flightless lives. However, even
those
animals had possessed vestigial wings. The first truly successful body plans on the sigmas’ home world had all had wings, so essentially all animals, even the few flightless ones, had descended from winged ancestors.

Querlak wondered,
could the object be some kind of metallic animal?
It seemed so misshapen. Only two legs and those very thick and blocky. Only two arms, also overly bulky and powerful looking. No wings. The rotating part up top with the presumed eyes on it, that almost made sense, but it seemed much larger than it needed to be. And why only two eyes in a horizontal arrangement? Querlak knew that you had to have more than one eye to have depth perception which was determined by the angle between the two eyes and an object. But why two medium sized eyes rather than one large high quality eye with a few, little, low quality, wide angle eyes that served only to determine the angle to an object and watch the periphery? Such an arrangement had been nearly universal for the animals on Sigma. As Querlak studied the eyes, she realized that the two eyes pivoted and swiveled toward and away from one another as if both had high acuity vision and measured the angle to an object by the direction they were pointed! This seemed highly inefficient as compared to a single very high acuity eye with low acuity ones that only registered direction by where light fell on their receptors…

Everything about the strange… object… seemed so bizarre. If it was an animal, how had it evolved so strangely and why had no one in
her clade ever heard of one? If someone had built it as a device… why!? And if you were going to build a strange animal-like device, why such a bizarre layout of parts? Why magnesium?! It must be difficult to balance it on only two legs. Its thick and heavy metal construction would be so expensive and require so much power just to move it! It almost seemed like someone had made it as a joke… a hugely expensive joke.

Shan and Ell gawked at the sigma on their screens. It had four long, slender, multijointed legs that seemed somewhat insectile. They looked too small to hold it up, but of course the gravity was low. The four wings came off the nearly horizontal body, one pair forward, the other pair nearer the back. Four lightweight limbs at the front had three digits each. They appeared to be for manipulation.

Sprouting from between the “arms” was a somewhat heavier limb with what appeared to be eyes near
its end. Because of the eyes Ell categorized that limb as a “head” even though it seemed too small to be a head. Of course, the teecees had a small and prehensile head too. The teecee’s brains were in the main body rather than in the head so that might be true here too. The sigma’s head was barely wide enough for what appeared to be one very large eye. The head narrowed above that, where some smaller eyes formed a column going up to the top of the head and perhaps even over the top to the back? The eyes didn’t appear to swivel like earth’s animal’s eyes do. Rather the sigma seemed to move the entire head to point it at things. Right now it tilted up, then down as if examining Sigwald from top to bottom. Then the head swayed to the left and right, turning the eye back toward Sigwald from each side. The head didn’t seem to have ears, or a mouth, or actually, an orifice of any kind.

Ell had Allan lift one of Sigwald’s hand
s slowly to a palm forward position. She wondered if this peaceful human gesture would be perceived as friendly by the sigma. She turned to Shan, “I’ve got to get to my house where I’ll have better control of the waldo. Do you want to come with?”

“I thought I wasn’t to be seen at your place?”

“We’ll have to sneak you in,” she said, getting up.

T
hey drove to the house that Ell’s security team kept in the neighborhood next to her little farm. In transit they watched the sigma on their HUDs. It didn’t move but they could hear it making noise. No mouth moved so it wasn’t clear where the sound came from.

The
y parked in the security team’s garage and hustled down into the tunnel. As they rode the golf cart through the tunnel to Ell’s house the sigma began gesticulating on their HUDs. As they couldn’t walk and watch their HUDs very well, Ell wound up leading Shan by the hand so that at least one of them could watch the movements of the sigma’s hands. None of the motions made much sense to Shan though.

Once in the house, they went to the extra bedroom where Ell had
another one of her waldo controllers. Ell mounted the controller saddle and had the images from Sigwald thrown up on the big screen for Shan. Once she had control of Sigwald she squatted down and made a mark in the dust on the black surface of the roadway.

The mark was visible, though she could have wished for something better. She made two marks next to it and then pointed to the single mark, saying, “
One.” She pointed to the double mark and said, “Two.” She made three marks and said, “Three.” She had considered having Sigwald project marks with his laser, but in the bright daylight she didn’t think they would be very easy to see.

Ell waited a moment, then pointed at the single mark while looking at the sigma. When the sigma said nothing Ell began again, pointing at the single mark and saying, “
One,” then moving on to the double and triple marks.

Ell pointed at the single mark once again while looking expectantly at the sigma. It was relatively easy to tell what the sigma was looking at because
its entire head would move and tilt in that direction. First it looked down at the marks, moving from one to another, then it looked up at Sigwald, then back down at the marks. Then two arms reached out and touched the single mark and it uttered a sound. It sounded a little like a chorus of voices humming in different pitches.

The sound wasn’t something that Ell could reproduce so she told Allan to make the sound back at the sigma while she reached out and touched the single mark again. Once Sigwald had reproduced the sound the sigma made, she moved on to the double mark and said, “
Two.”

The sigma pointed back at the single mark and said, “
One,” in English, then pointed at the double mark and said, “Two.” After a moment the sigma uttered another sound that Ell would be unable to reproduce, then pointed to the triple mark and made a third sound, then looked expectantly at Sigwald.

Ell had Allan copy the
sigma’s sound, then said, “Three.”

It didn’t take long to get through the numbers and determine that the sigmas used base 12
counting. Ell moved Sigwald closer to where the harvester had passed. The thicker dust on the road made writing easier there. She drew a picture of the ring and said, “Ringworld.”

Over the next several hours they exchanged words for the objects in
their immediate vicinity and in the sigma’s solar system. The name of the sigma they were speaking to sounded like “Querlak,” if the word were to be spoken by an off key choir. They derived units of measurement from the dimensions of the system and of the ringworld and the road itself. They named the plants and each other and their various parts. Learning body parts allowed Ell to examine the sigma. A crevice beneath the bases of the arms looked as if it might be a mouth but it remained closed while the sigma spoke. Querlak had a number of openings around its body that Ell thought it was breathing through. Though Ell couldn’t localize sound well through Sigwald’s microphones she thought that perhaps the sigma made sounds through those same breathing holes.

Ell felt somewhat apprehensive about having the sigma examine Sigwald, but after Querlak had stood patiently for her own examination
, it only seemed fair. Querlak carefully studied the bottom of Sigwald’s feet and the underside of the arms where the compressed air jets were.

Having named nearly everything nearby
, they moved on to verbs starting with walk, then fly and eventually everything else that they could demonstrate to one another.

Interrogatives were more difficult. With some hand waving Querlak made it evident that it wanted to see Sigwald travel on the road and to understand how
he did it. This allowed them to settle on a word for “how” before Ell lifted Sigwald’s foot and turned on its air jet ports. Ell lowered the foot to the roadway and generated a near frictionless state. She turned on the jets under the other foot then a jet on Sigwald’s back to send him sliding down the road in a demonstration of that hovercraft mode of travel.

Querlak’s TS reached out for even more members, further boosting its intelligence. This… intelligent animal or machine—there could no longer be doubt about its intelligence—named Sigwald must have come from elsewhere. It couldn’t be from Querlak’s own Sigma Draconis system because it was simply too bizarre to have come from the minds of
any
sigman TS. Even if someone wanted to create it as a joke, Querlak couldn’t believe that this would be the creation. For one thing it wasn’t funny. The sigmas had thoroughly explored their own solar system in the process of creating the ringworld and Querlak could say with confidence that there were no other intelligent beings in the system. In fact, there was no longer any non-sigma animal life at all. At least, nothing larger than a centimeter. When the sigmas had gained intelligence they had rapidly eliminated other animals because those animals consumed resources needed to feed the sigmas’ ever burgeoning population. Thus this bizarre and essentially unimaginable… machine… or being… that confronted Querlak
must
have come from another solar system. From somewhere across the uncrossable gulf between the stars.

If Querlak’s clade could discover the secret of travel between the stars… they would immeasurably boost their wealth and status. With that secret
, the sigmas could build ringworlds in other systems. The sigmas couldn’t build another ringworld in their own system for lack of raw materials. However, the population of their homeworld had by now increased to the point that they were using
all
the food that even the enormous ring could produce.

The sigmas had
once again been forced to severely limit reproduction to prevent starvation. The resulting inability to increase the size of their clades led to worldwide dissatisfaction and depression.

During the massive world
-girdling undertaking necessary to build the ringworld, the sigmas had banded together and made tremendous sacrifices toward their mutually desired goal of unlimited reproduction. They built huge ports to harvest hydrogen from one of the gas giant worlds in their system. Using catalysts in 350
o
C tubes near the sun they mixed that Jovian hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of the small rocky world closest to their sun. There the Sabatier reaction gave them methane and water. The methane was used to spin much of the graphene that comprised the ringworld.  They froze the water in the outer system until the ringworld had been constructed. Then they moved the water back to the ringworld to water the crops and broke it down electrolytically to provide oxygen for the ringworld’s atmosphere. Nitrogen came from the ammonia atmosphere of a large Jovian moon. The sigmas had needed more hydrocarbons to make the ring than they could generate from the CO
2
of the first world, but another of the Jovian moons had supplied enough additional hydrocarbons from its enormous methane lakes.