The Star Carrier Series Books 1-3: Earth Strike, Centre of Gravity, Singularity. Ian Douglas
was a psytherapist on loan from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and both had considerable experience with nonhuman psychology.
“Welcome to RC Central, Admiral,” Wilkerson’s virtual image said. “Thanks for linking in.”
“Does this mean you’ve gotten something, Doctor?” Koenig asked. “Something useful?”
Wilkerson shrugged, his lined face momentarily twisting in an expression of frustration. “That, sir, you’ll have to decide for yourself. We have established communications.”
“You know, sir,” Dr. George said, “it took over five years to establish basic communications with the Aglestch a century ago.”
“Yes,” Koenig replied, “and what we learned was LG. I thought you were using that with these … people.”
LG—Lingua Galactica—was an artificial language learned from the alien Aglestch. Evidently, it wasn’t one of that race’s native languages, but it was the way they communicated with the Sh’daar, their galactic masters. Koenig had assumed that the Turusch would know LG as well.
“We did, Admiral,” Wilkerson replied. “But it’s not that simple.”
“It never is.”
Wilkerson took a deep breath. “The Aglestch speak using phonemes generated through vibrating vocal cords like we do … except of course that they use air expressed from their first and second stomachs instead of from lungs or air sacs. The Turusch speak, we think, by modulating a humming or thrumming sound generated by vibrating diaphragms set within the dorsal carapace.”
“Meaning they don’t use words,” Koenig guessed.
“Exactly. Variations in pitch and tone, and the shifting harmonies created by four separate diaphragms, convey the information. Even the name ‘Turusch’ comes from the Agletsch. We don’t know what they call themselves.”
Brandt chuckled. “Maybe something like …” and he hummed the opening bar of a popular song, “We Were Strangers.”
“In four-part harmony,” Dr. George added.
“In any case,” Dr. Brandt said, “we did use LG as a basis—without it I expect it would have taken another five years or more to break the Turusch language and figure out how to speak it. We do appear to have established communication. At least … we’ve gotten some meaningful syntax out of them. But an awful lot of what they have to say doesn’t make much sense.”
“There’s also the xenopsych angle to consider, Admiral,” Dr. George told him. “I’ve been working with these two since we picked them up, and that was a couple of weeks ago. We don’t have a lot of leads on how they think.”
Koenig nodded. He knew how difficult it was to learn, not just another language, but a language spoken by a being with a completely nonhuman physiology and a completely alien psychology. One species—the primitive Glo of Epsilon Eridani II—appeared to communicate with one another by changing patterns of light and color on their black, oily torsos, using luminous chromatophores like the squid of Earth. The Glo had been known for almost two centuries now, and the experts still didn’t know if they were really talking … or if they even were intelligent enough to have anything to talk about. There was simply no comprehensible common ground from which to begin either a linguistic or a psychological understanding.
“I wasn’t expecting miracles, people,” Koenig told the three. “Let me have a look.”
“Yes, sir,” Wilkerson said. “Um … brace yourself. This can be unsettling.”
“We’ll be projecting into NTE robots,” Brandt added.
Koenig felt an inner shift, a momentary dizziness, and then he was someplace else, a ship’s compartment with blank, white-painted walls and one transplas wall. There were a number of machines in the compartment attached by universal joints and articulated metallic arms to the low overhead. Koenig’s own point of view now seemed to be residing within one of those devices, a white sphere supported on the end of a slender, jointed arm.
Non-terrestrial environmental robots—NTEs, or Noters—had been in wide use for almost three centuries, exploring places as hostile as the surface of Venus, the ice ridges of Europa, and the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The earliest versions had relayed photographs and telemetry from Mars and from Earth’s moon; later models had let human consciousness piggyback within their circuitry.
Readouts at the bottom of his visual field showed data on atmosphere, pressure, temperature, and other factors. It was as hot, Koenig noted, as boiling water, and the lighting in the room was sizzling with ultraviolet.
The Turusch were there, both of them, mottled black and dark brown, and gleaming wet in the harsh light. It was difficult to judge distance within this new body without practice, but they seemed to be about four meters away. If so, they were each half again longer than a human was tall and half a meter thick. The body might be described as slug-like, at least where the bare, mucus-wet skin was exposed, but large patches of its body were covered by what looked like sections of shell or carapace—large and irregular on the blunt end, and segmented like the scales of a snake along the belly, leaving most of the rest of the body nakedly exposed. Half-meter tentacles, black, whip-thin, and in constantly writhing motion, sprouted at seemingly random points from everywhere on the body except the armored parts.
One end was pointed. The other end, Koenig decided, must be the head, rounded and sheathed in three close-fitting sections of carapace, and showing recesses for at least two dozen eyes or other sense organs arranged in three lines running back from the blunt end. If those were eyes, they were deeply recessed and small, like tiny black marbles. Koenig wondered if that meant the Turusch were from a planet orbiting a star hotter and brighter than Sol. The ultraviolet baking the compartment seemed to validate the idea.
He saw nothing that resembled a mouth. He did see the diaphragms used for speech, however, two set on either side of the head carapace, which took up nearly a quarter of the creature’s length.
“So,” Koenig said. “Cephalopod? Reptile? Sea cucumber?”
“None of the above, Admiral,” Brandt said. “Remember … any resemblance to anything we know from Earth is superficial … either a matter of parallel evolution, or pure coincidence.”
“Right. My mistake.” He felt clumsy. He knew that aliens were never easily categorized. But faced with the truly alien, the human mind always sought points of similarity, easy starting places, something recognizable.
“At this point,” Wilkerson pointed out, “we’re not even sure about whether to call these things animal, vegetable, or mineral. They’re carbon-based, we know, but they appear to manufacture at least part of their metabolic energy with a chlorophyll analogue in the skin pigmentation. Dr. George figured that much out from skin samples she took on Haris.”
Koenig looked at the young woman with new respect. “You actually went in and got a skin sample from one of those things?”
“We used robots, Admiral,” she replied. “Still, they seemed pretty passive. They might have known we were simply trying to find out about their physical needs.”
Koenig nodded. He wondered what his reaction would have been if he’d been captured by a pack of these slimy, tentacled slugs, and they—or their machines—had come after him with a sampling probe or scalpel.
How intelligent were they, really?
“Their biochemistries appear to be driven by both carbon and silicon,” Wilkerson continued. “They also use a lot of sulfur chemistry.”
“What kind of environment?” Koenig asked.
“Hot,” Wilkerson replied. “We think their homeworld is a less-extreme version of Venus. Carbon dioxide atmosphere with traces of sulfur, sulfur dioxide, water vapor, and droplets of sulfuric acid. Temperature in the one-hundred-degree Celsius range.