Family Law 3: Secrets in the Stars (22 page)

"You're welcome. I'm afraid I didn't try to quote you, because I didn't trust my memory, and didn't record. I paraphrased what you said. If I got it wrong please tell me," Ernie said.

"No, when I read it you had the right of it. If you'd asked the bridge audio is all recorded. Gordon would have probably OK'd a word search for research purposes. But I didn't think it was such a surprising thought you'd even take note of it. I wouldn't have been offended if you'd just used the concept without attribution."

"You are too modest! It never occurred to me. I can assure you I get a lot of comments on the public postings and other people were surprised by the idea too," Ernie told her. "I'm going through the images the
Dart
made of the planet and will incorporate this information in the paper too. It's subject to revision until we get home. I've gotten good comment from people who asked for clarification or made suggestion that have improved it. I'll detail the important changes in the bibliography."

"Are you finding the things you expected?" Choi asked.

"Some, but not necessarily where I expected them, and in patterns I didn't anticipate. I'm looking at all the surface features the computer tagged as having regular forms that might mark them as artificial constructions rather than natural formations. I've eliminated sixteen already, and have that many to go that the computer assigned high values. After I've done them I'll go back and study the fissures and tracks when my mind has had a break from them. You understand?"

"Sure," Choi nodded. "If you stare at something long enough it starts to look all the same, or worse your natural inclination to find patterns starts making you see things that aren't there."

"Exactly." Choi still looked interested and wasn't sliding to the front of her seat and looking at the exit, so Ernie spoke further. "This for example
looks
like a pyramid, but it is obvious it isn't a constructed pyramid when you examine it closely. The programming picks it if it is within certain parameters. If you set it too tightly it might not show you a constructed pyramid that was weathered or damaged. So one more eliminated. Next image," he told the ship's computer.

The pointy hill disappeared and a flat almost featureless plain showed. There was an area with some dark dots bracketed by the computer and Ernie zoomed in on it. The lighting was oblique, and the dark dots resolved as shadows. He zoomed in closer.

"Computer, can this image be reconstructed from overlapping shots show more detail?" he requested.

"Processing. Heavy usage will delay the result for twenty seconds," the pleasant voice said. It took almost that long to inform him of that.

The picture sharpened considerably. Neither of them said anything, just looked. The shapes beside the shadows resolved to polygons, but of such perfect form to preclude a natural origin. If there was any doubt they were spaced evenly around a common center.

"Well... " Ernie said, stunned.

"They missed," Choi said. It took Ernie a moment to understand what she meant.

"Perhaps not. There may have been a bigger facility, base if you will. Especially if there were spacecraft there. This may have been an unimportant outpost not worth bombarding. Or they may have known there would be no rescue and the folks here doomed. Indeed if the quake was sufficiently severe from the strike they may have all been killed or injured beyond recovery even this far removed."

"Maybe," Choi allowed. "We'll have to go see now."

"Well of course. We'll tell Gordon. I can't imagine he won't send a ship back. Perhaps even take the entire fleet there. Ernie looked at the clock. "They have two hours still before their shift. I'm off until two shifts from now for my engineering duty as long as we are on a light orbital schedule. How fortuitous I wasn't on my usual schedule opposite you, and took a late turn sitting with you."

"Hey, I think you'd have found this anyway," Choi said, nodding at the screen. "You were going to search for fissures and boulder gouges and stuff, right?"

"Yes, but not artificial structures. That was a direct result of your hypothesis," Ernie assured her.

"Oh... Well, glad to be of help," she said modestly.

* * *

"I wonder if the Caterpillars just trailed along watching the Badgers, or if they did their own survey of the planets?” Lee said, after the possible structures were revealed.

"Ask Captain Fussy," Gordon suggested. "I never thought about it since they are so hard to talk to. They seem content to just watch us. It's too difficult to ask them. Maybe he had some clue from how they maneuvered. Whether they stuck tight with him as he orbited the planets or stood off."

"They
are
hard to talk to... " Lee's voice caught changing pitch, and she looked hard struck.

Thor and Gordon looked at each other and then stared at Lee. She seemed to be unaware. In fact her mouth was hanging open from whatever epiphany had seized her.

"I presume you have some
further
insight about that?" Thor prompted her.

"Maybe," she said, suddenly shy. "I mean I don't
know
, but I had a thought. The Caterpillars seem to be ahead of us technologically in some areas... "

"In
most
," Thor said, when she let the statement hang.

"Maybe," Lee allowed again, much more tentatively than she usually was, "but remember how we noticed right away that the Badgers were very skilled at communicating with us when we met? We're ahead of the Badgers in a lot of ways, yet we saw right away we weren't as slick as them, having just been through meeting the Bunnies.

“I think we are more generally advanced than the Badgers and their friends, but they seem to have learned a lot in meeting each other. The Badgers may be holding back figuring it's our fleet and command. I think we may have assumed the Caterpillars, being so advanced, must be just as advanced at meeting and communicating with new alien species. Maybe expecting them to step up and initiate it. But if they don't have experience that's not true and it's not going to happen. For all we know when they ran into the Biters that may have been their first alien contact."

"It's not like nobody was trying at all," Thor said. "Luke sent quite a few images and words to them. He finally just burned out, because he wasn't getting any response. A couple people have tried to find some pattern in the hooting sounds and gotten nowhere."

"Luke works hard but doesn't have a lot of imagination," Lee said as kindly as possible.

"Well, meeting the Biters as a first contact could put you off meeting new races at all," Thor said.

"Really! But it makes me wonder if it isn't more than having a very different video format that's been holding us back. They may have no skills with meeting strangers. We are a
lot
different than them. I mean, everybody we've met has hands and feet. Well, except whatever dragged our lander under on the water world. We're much more like everybody else we've met, and it helps. They may not even have the concept of translation," Lee guessed. "What if they only have one language?"

"Derf only have one language," Thor asserted. But after the look Gordon gave him he modified that. "Somebody from the other side of the ocean may sound pretty strange, but the written language is, uh, very similar."

"Huh, somebody from the Isle of Fire sounds like an ill cow bellowing," Gordon said. "Though it isn't a good idea to tell them quite so plainly."

"I'd like a chance to try drawing pictures and seeing if I can establish a few words with them. I did pretty well with the Badgers, didn't I? Could I use the 3D?" Lee asked Gordon.

"Sure. It's not my private system. I can trade consoles with you and let you sit here to use it. All the functions will route to any seat on the bridge," Gordon assured her. "But if you aren't that impressed with Luke, and think the Badgers are so much better at interspecies communication why aren't you asking your friend Talker to help you get through to the Caterpillars. You certainly seemed... affable enough with each other."

"Affable... " Thor said, and snorted disdainfully. "She's got him wrapped around her finger, too."

"Thanks, I'll start making some notes and sketches," Lee said, ignoring Thor. Gordon ignored him too so she must have been right not to dignify it with a response. Especially the
too
.

"You know, being able to talk about tentacles might be handy for whoever goes back to that water world."

Gordon just blinked and looked at her.

"Well, they do have that in common," Lee said, reasonably.

"I know. It's just jarring how you jump around from one idea to the other with no warning," Gordon said. "They don't always look
connected
to us."

* * *

When the fleet got ready to return across the system to the planet with structures, Lee asked Talker to come over and help her try to talk to the Caterpillars. He irritated her a bit by asking if Gordon was aware of the project. She almost told him she wasn't Tish, and bit it off before she said it. When they brought him over he had a bag, so she was happy he understood it wasn't a one shift project. She took his hand, Badger style, and took him to his room and the bridge. Hand-holding he understood at a deep emotional level and it calmed him. It had taken her a while to understand how important it was to Badgers. Maybe there was hope that what had moved the Caterpillars would reveal itself too.

Lee and Talker sat at the 3D camera and tried to tell them why they were backtracking. Lee made sure to put on shoes for groundside with treaded soles so she could show them that they were like the boot they'd found and the one on the whole leg. They held a com tablet with pictures of the boot and a diagram of where they found it in the system. They showed the leg they'd given the Caterpillars and the new boot beside the one still attached. They even showed a separate image with the boot on the leg circled. The Caterpillar watched, but were impossible to read.

"Perhaps they can't really process flat images?" Talker said in frustration.

"They sent and received images of the different races back at your world," Lee said.

"From this ship?" Talker asked. "The one following us?"

Lee looked surprised and then embarrassed. "I'm not sure. There were three ships. A smaller one." She grimaced. "Not really smaller. Way bigger than any of ours, but under a kilometer, smaller than the other two that came in with it. The smaller one seems to have been the one our people met off in another system chasing the Biters. Then they showed at Far Away. We assumed they followed our guys back. But it's not like they ID'd themselves in the transmission. We might have been talking to the smaller ship, not this one that took
The Champion William
away."

Talker got that crease between his eyes she suspected was a Badger frown.

"Show me the messages," he said.

Lee got the images that Chance Ochocinco on the fast courier
Road Runner
had been in charge of, with a small away fleet doing survey work. He'd ordered the images sent to the first Caterpillar ship they met. Einstein on the
Sharp Claws
actually composed and transmitted them. Talker studied the mosaic image of all the races sent to them. The Biters were excluded.

"Then later, around your world, Gordon exchanged this images with the three Caterpillar ships," Lee said, "As you pointed out I'm not sure which ship he was talking to."

"May I point out, these successful communications are all multiple images," Talker said.

"Mosaics, yeah. Well, except for the one. That's an outlier," Lee admitted.

"I suspect that image was like them shouting – LIE!" Talker told her.

"OK, so what is your point. Why does it matter?" Lee asked.

"I suspect that they think a little differently than us. Not to judge it as better or worse, but very much differently, than how Humans or Badgers think. We on rare occasions have a Badger born who has a very hard time thinking the same as what we consider 'normal'," Talker said. "They may not speak grammatically. Indeed they may not even speak sequentially. And often they don't process written language correctly and get it all jumbled if they try. Perhaps these folk are
all
like that and it is normal for them. They might make perfect sense to each other."

"So it isn't really the video format that was the problem?" Lee asked.

"No, I mean, what are the chances they went straight to super definition 3D? Pretty hard to do without a long development path," Talker insisted. "No, it's how we edit the video, even if they did have a hard time processing it. I suspect our plain
sequence
of images doesn't make sense."

"I remember reading something similar. Give me a second to do a search," Lee asked. Talker was patient while Lee looked through the web fraction and read.

"Yeah, Humans have cognitive disorders like that. People who can't use normal syntax in speech or have difficulty reading facial expressions, sometimes even recognizing individuals. They write letters backwards and such, but they may be
better
at odd things like mental calculation."

"I propose we try presenting our information in a matrix. Each image should be positioned with its relationship to the other in mind," Talker said.

"Well the lone boot should be next to the connected boot," Lee suggested.

"And we need to connect it to the planet and site we want to visit," Talker said. "Otherwise it is just associated with the mining site.”

"Yes, but on another side touching the image of where it was found," Talker agreed. But alone, just connected on one edge, so we aren't saying we are
going
there."

"Yes, if we are going back put a picture of our fleet touching the planet and site." Lee said.

"Yes, and a separate image of the possible buildings we want to visit also touching, but include an image of
their
ship with ours if we want them to come along," Talker added.

It took them another twenty minutes to shuffle the images around until they were satisfied. Starting at the top left they had boot – blank – boot and leg. Second row the site the foot was found – blank – the site the leg was found. Third row, blank – a square with the planet and buildings with all their ships so it touched at the corners with the row of sites above.