Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

insect-being showed no signs of stopping, and the skylarker showed no signs of getting out of its way. Jao reached the spot in one long soaring arc and snatched the offending person out of the way with a hand hooked into the webbing of the life-support backpack.
    He bore his kicking prize to Bram. He did not set the fellow down on ground, but held him out to Bram at arm’s length.
    The face within the helmet was that of a junior archivist named—Bram rummaged in his memory—Alb something-or-other. Alb was less than thirty years old, having been born in the heart of the Milky Way, and hadn’t lived long enough to develop good sense.
    “Put him down,” Bram said.
    Instead of letting go, Jao rammed the errant archivist into the ground with some emphasis. Alb stood there with a silly grin on his face.
    “Alb, I thought I told everybody—” Bram began.
    “He can’t hear you,” Jao said. “He isn’t tuned in to your frequency.” He made twisting motions to get the idea across to Alb, but the young man just stood there stupidly, no doubt listening to the gibes of his own circle of friends.
    “Oh, chaos take it!” Jao exclaimed. He dialed through his own frequencies till he hit Alb’s. He must have turned the power full up, to judge by the way Alb flinched. Somewhere out there a number of other people must have acquired an earache too. Jao proceeded to give the unfortunate fellow a dressing down. Bram tuned in for the tail end of it: “… brains of a three-legged baggage walker!”
    Alb gave Bram a sheepish apology and promised to behave. Bram heard group laughter on the frequency, and Alb turned pink.
    They caught up with the insect patrol some distance down the avenue of rubble. Jao’s lecture seemed to have had good effect; the trailing crowd of people was hanging back farther. One of those who wasn’t lagging behind was Heln Dunl-mak. She skipped ahead of the alien party, just beyond what she had described to Bram as the insect-people’s “avoidance zone.”
    Heln’s slight figure was top-heavy with improvised equipment—a bulky pack that Jao had put together for her. It was flashing modulated polarized light, some of it drawn from frequently appearing patterns in the stick-ship’s early radio transmissions, some of it repeating and stringing together “phrases” that the darting aliens were blinking at each other.
    “Best program I could cobble together at short notice,” Jao said apologetically as he waved at Heln’s dancing form. “Heln doesn’t really know what she’s saying to them, but she can punch in a few crude menus based on their physical behavior, and the computer can try to correlate it with what they’re flashing to each other at the time. Then it runs through all the combinations. With luck, we’ll get a ‘turn right,’ or ‘follow me,’ or ‘look at this.’ It’s up to Heln to recognize a response.”
    But there was no sign of recognition from the insectfolk that Bram could see. By stretching his imagination to the limit, he might at best have concluded that they showed a sort of irritation or brief annoyance—analogous to what a human might display if a light were flashing in his eyes or if he were trying to talk with a radio on in the background. But such distractions, really, were below the level of awareness.
    “The computer’s learning all the time,” Jao said defensively. “Sooner or later it might hit on something.”
    “What you’ve done is amazing,” Bram assured him.
    Jao brightened. “Want to know what the hardest part was? It wasn’t the program. It was inventing the gizmo to recognize the polarization through different planes of orientation, then to transmit the same way. That’s what takes up so much room in the backpack. I had to scavenge the faceplates of a whole bunch of helmets to build it.”
    Heln, arms spread low, purposely penetrated the avoidance zone and dropped to one knee, then danced back as the creatures showed restlessness. Her equipment blazed a signal that looked sustained to human eyes but that to the aliens, of course, would have flickered. Bram saw the shadowy facial limbs lift as if to ward off something, but the creatures never stopped their prowling movements.
    “They still don’t see it as speech,” Jao said. “Something missing.”
    “Very frustrating,” Bram said.
    One of the insect-people was using an odd camera— a sizable box with one curved face studded with thousands of pinhole lenses. It took its