Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

Davd laughed. “If the surviving colonies grow up to build more ships like it, then it fits the definition.”
    Trist’s voice cut in. “We’re getting message traffic now between the ship and the lander.”
    “Radio? Laser?” Jao’s voice was impatient.
    “Neither. They communicate by modulating polarized light—switching rapidly back and forth to different planes of polarization. We can’t read the signal, but it’s a signal, all right.”
    “What kind of pattern? Binary, or what?”
    “No, it’s positional. It codes for some kind of grid. And now that you know that, you know as little as I do.”
    “Why would they modulate polarized light?” Bram asked. “If you’re going to communicate by light, there are easier ways to modulate it for a signal.”
    It was Ame, unexpectedly, who answered. “Perhaps because it corresponds to their natural sensory input.”
    “Now, Ame, we use radio mostly,” Jao said condescendingly. “But we don’t see by radio waves.”
    “No,” she said, “but we use it the way we use visible light—by modulating its frequency. Or we use it by mimicking sound—by modulating the amplitude.”
    Bram pondered Ame’s startling supposition. “But where does a positional grid come into it?”
    “I don’t know, Bram -tsu. We use radio waves to build up pictures or sound. And when we use laser, we use it more or less as if it were just an improved kind of radio. It has something to do with the way they think or perceive things.”
    “Trist, can you rig up something that’ll modulate polarized light?” Bram asked.
    “Sure, nothing to it,” came Trist’s cheerful voice.
    “Can you beam some of their own patterns back at them—just as a recognition signal? Just to get them to notice us.”
    “I’ll get on it right away.”
    “And get somebody working on that grid.”
    “The chess club’s already taken it on as a project. So have the linguists.”
    “Get them together.”
    On the screen, the stick ship had moved out of the frame as Jun Davd’s remote camera followed the life-support module. It showed as a pale blob against a rimscape that whizzed by at blurring speed.
    “Looking for a spot to light,” Jun Davd said. “They had a choice of two directions. They chose yours.”
    “How long before they get here?”
    “At their present velocity? About two days.”
     
    Two days later, the thing passed overhead, looking very large. Everybody was outside again for the passage. As it sailed by, everybody waved. A few energetic jumping jacks leaped straight up fifty feet or more, wigwagging with both hands. But the bubble took no notice. It receded into the distance, blank as an egg.
    “They almost nicked one of the moonropes,” Jao said. “They’re flying much too close to the rim’s edge. And too low. The pilot’s a bit impetuous, isn’t he?”
    Bram, sweating inside his helmet, hand-cranked the flywheel-mounted telescope to follow the enormous spheroid. The others crowded close to look at the photoplastic image in the visored plate at the end of the barrel.
    “They’re losing speed and altitude fast,” Bram said. “They’re going to come down about two hundred miles farther on, it looks like. We’ll have them for neighbors.”
    “The pilot’s braking too fast,” Jao said, squinting at the shaded image. “As if he made up his mind on the spur of the moment. Whoops! He changed his mind. He’s lifting up over that escarpment! Almost grazed it. He must be shaking up his passengers.”
    Jao’s commentary may have been unjust. The huge globular object went into a long graceful glide, riding the plume of its jet, and set down with abrupt gentleness in the exact center of a flat circular feature where the plain was smooth.
    “A seat-of-the-pants natural,” Bram said. “Like Lydis.”
    “If he wears pants,” Jao said. “Or has a seat.”
    Ame was looking thoughtful. “What do we do now, great-great-great-grandfather?”
    Bram sighed. “I suppose we’d better pay them a visit.”
     
    Everybody wanted to go. Bram fended them off as diplomatically as possible when they came barging into the bay where he was trying to work out a plan with Ame and Jao.
    “The first meeting is going to be very important,” he told them over and over. “We’ll have just a few specialists, each with a job to do. We can’t take a crowd along.”
    And then, of course, everybody tried to convince Bram that he or she was a specialist.
    “As a sociometrician,”