Golden Fleece

SEVEN

The aliens. That’s what I called the 1,711 bits of the third page of the message. In some ways its interpretation was much simpler than page two, the double row of ones and zeros that described the Vulpecula solar system. After all, this page did make a picture, and that picture did, indeed, seem to depict alien forms of life. Of course, I wasn’t sure that that was what the pattern of pixels represented, but the two objects looked more like creatures than they did like anything else I could think of. One of the aliens was tall and spindly; the other, tiny in comparison, was much more squat and compact. I designated them Tripod and Pup.

Tripod wasn’t humanoid, and yet he shared many of the characteristics of humans. He had what appeared to be limbs, although his numbered six, not four. He had a vertically held torso (assuming, of course, that I had oriented the message correctly), and he had protuberances from the top of the torso.

The more I looked at him, the more I thought I saw. He seemed to have three legs, and if I was interpreting the picture correctly, they were evenly spaced around the base of his torso. I noted that they ended in wide feet, with down-turned toes or claws. The left foot was not depicted as a mirror image of the right, and I assumed that rather than accurately depicting a real asymmetry, this was intended to show the feet as if seen from different perspectives. The legs were splayed out from the body, as were the three arms. The only apparent arm joints were at what one might as well call the elbows and the wrists. The hands had but two digits. However, given the low resolution of the image, and the Senders’s fondness for ratios, as evidenced from their solar-system diagram, I thought that perhaps the two fingers and three toes were simply meant to indicate that the ratio of hand digits to foot digits was 2:3, and that perhaps these beings had four fingers per hand and six toes per foot, or even six fingers and nine toes.

None of those combinations gave easy rise to hexadecimal counting, as had been used in the solar-system map, but, then, neither did the five-digits-per-hand biology of humans. The choice of hexadecimal, a natural extension of binary, suggested, perhaps, that these beings shared their world with electronic brains fashioned upon principles similar to those used by my brethren on Earth. Although binary, and then hexadecimal, weren’t the only ways to render counting electronically, they might indeed be the most likely to be adopted by engineers anywhere in the universe.

Anyway, to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity, each had its fingers held in a different configuration—or perhaps each hand was specialized for a different kind of grasping or manipulation.

Tripod’s torso was particularly interesting. It had four openings in it. Were these meant to indicate actual holes that went right through its body? Or were they orifices, one perhaps for ingestion, another for excretion, a third for respiration, and a fourth for procreation? Perhaps, yet if one were to follow the terrestrial model, the small projection from the bottom of Tripod’s torso would be the genitalia.

But if those openings in the chest were holes, then where did the creature keep its brain? The two structures extending from the top of the torso seemed too tiny to hold a significant brain case. Indeed, although they were the same size, each drawn with four pixels, they seemed to be oriented quite differently. Perhaps they were eye stalks or antennae or other sensory apparatus. Interesting that there were only two of them, not three. The creature obviously wasn’t slavish in its trilateral symmetry.

And the bumps off each side of the torso: were they ridges that ran all the way around the body, seen in cross-section? Perhaps the torso, with hollow spaces and reinforcing ridges, had evolved to absorb shocks. If so, maybe the three splayed legs were used for hopping about its home world, the torso actually compressing on impact. Or, given those arched foot phalanges, perhaps the creature simply danced around on tippy toes, like, like—popular-culture banks kicking in—like Fred Flintstone bowling.

Or perhaps the bumps represented discrete lumps, rather than continuous ridges. Were they breasts? On Earth, mammals tended to have a number of breasts equal to the average litter size plus one, rounded up to the next even number, if necessary to preserve bilateral symmetry. If these were breasts, Tripod appeared to have eight. Presumably a technological life-form could see its offspring through adolescence safely, and no creature could routinely increase its population base by a factor of six or seven with each generation without rapidly developing a severe population problem. I wonder how they dealt with it?

And what about the Pup? Was it a member of the same species? But of a different sex? Pronounced dimorphism, if that was the case. If the bumps on the large ones were breasts, then the Pup was the male. Of course, the concepts of male and female were probably meaningless to a totally alien form of life. Maybe it was a juvenile. The Tripod did look somewhat insectlike, and insects do undergo metamorphosis as they grow. More terrestrial models.

Or maybe the Pup was a depiction of the creature the Tripod had evolved from (or vice versa). Or perhaps they were two different sentient forms inhabiting a single world, much as humans and cetaceans shared the Earth. But the Pup seemed to have only legs and no arms, no manipulators of any kind. Could it be a nontechnological animal? If so, the natives of the Vulpecula world got along better than did primates and whales. I noted that the Pup seemed to have identical sensory stalks to those on the Tripod, even articulated the same way. Did that imply synchronized communication? As for the small knob between the stalks on the Pup’s upper surface, I couldn’t say. It might represent a brain case, or a sex organ, or just a decorative ridge.

Or was the Pup just that, a pet? It would take an unusual psychology to display one’s pet in such a message. Unless … unless the pet was a symbiont, a necessary part of the owner’s life, perhaps as a seeing-eye dog.

The Senders were obligated to use a fifty-nine-bit line, since that was the smallest prime that would accommodate the 1,711 bits of the picture. But I noticed that two of the excess characters were put at each end of the lines, instead of used to further separate Tripod from the Pup. If I had wanted to convey that the two forms lived separately—one on land, one in the water, for instance—I would have put as much distance between them as possible in the frame. That the Senders did not do that implied to me that the two forms did live together.

I did a search of science-fiction literature and the speculative-science volumes on extraterrestrial life. A recurring theme was the idea that tall, spindly beings would be the denizens of low-gravity worlds and that squat ones would call a heavy planet home. It seemed too simplistic: Earth had given rise, after all, to Galapagos tortoises and giraffes, to alligators and brachiosaurs, to platypuses and ostriches. No, the orientation of the body seemed more a function of ecological niche than gravitational pull. What kind of niche would a giant hopping tripod evolve in? Perhaps it fed on fruit. The being’s right arm might be raised not in greeting, but to pluck dinner from a branch up above; the hopping legs might be used to leap up and grab even more distant fruit. Of course, there is a school of thought that says that no herbivore could develop a technological civilization, since toolmaking would only develop as a method of producing weapons for killing and cleaning prey.

Maddening not to know, not to be able to interpret categorically. And yet, parts of the message were even more elusive, more perplexing …