Resurgence

CHAPTER TWENTY Tally on down

E.C. Tally was not built to feel surprise; the sensation of novelty, yes. Also a certain feeling of satisfaction, coupled with a heightened need for self-preservation, whenever a truly different experience presented itself.

As it was presenting itself now.

Entry to a Builder transport vortex always offered an element of uncertainty. You might feel that you were there for a split second, a minute, or no time at all. And to E.C., even that split second was a long period of subjective consciousness. He had therefore done the logical thing and placed himself in intermediate stand-by mode a microsecond before his embodied form encountered the swirling darkness at the center of the planetoid.

Now he emerged and returned to normal cycle speed. The absence of acceleration on his body already told him that he was again in free-fall, but that was not enough to tell him where.

He looked about him. That “where” would surely have justified surprise, had he possessed the capacity for it.

He was in space. More than that, he was in orbit. Below him, filling the sky, floated a substantial planet, all grays and muted greens. And this was more than just any old orbit, it was a low orbit. His suited body was racing forward, fast enough that he could see the planetary surface skimming past. His instant mental calculation told him that his orbital period was no more than an hour and a half. The Builder transport vortex had dumped him close to grazing altitude, not far above the limit of the atmosphere. He knew that there must be an atmosphere, because the ground below was hazy in places. Even now he was passing over a clouded region.

E.C. looked in the opposite direction, above his head. Another great world hung there, almost as big in apparent size as the one that he orbited but much farther away. He could see banded patterns of green, white, and orange around its middle. The superb eyes of his embodiment detected a slight broadening at the planet’s middle. The other world was in rapid rotation, and from its appearance it was almost certainly a gas-giant.

One hemisphere of that great world was in shadow. E.C. looked to his left, seeking the source of illumination for both that planet and the one he was close to. There it was, a shrunken but fiercely brilliant disk of greenish-yellow. His external sensors and internal geometric algorithms combined to tell him a few things almost instantly. That sun was too distant, with its tiny disk, to provide life-giving warmth to any planet. Yet the one around which he moved was clearly a living world, with the telltale evidence of green photosynthesis. The banded planet, farther off, was not merely warm. It was hot. He detected emitted radiation in the thermal infrared, consistent with a temperature close to eight hundred degrees. Therefore, although the sun formed the primary source of light for the whole system, the heat that warmed the world below came from the gas-giant’s thermal radiation.

And did the world below possess more than vegetation? Might intelligence reside there?

Tally recalled Sue Harbeson Ando’s last words to him as he completed his most recent embodiment. “You ruined two perfectly good and valuable bodies by rushing into things. Be patient, E. Crimson Tally. Learn to take things slow and easy.”

Slow would be difficult. His orbit took him zipping across the surface of the planet at better than eight kilometers a second. But he could be patient, evaluating everything before he made his next move.

First, he would inspect his general environment in more detail. This system was well worthy of study. It was unlike any that he had ever seen or heard described. From the look of the general geometry, the gas-giant and its satellite world—the one around which he was orbiting—moved roughly in a plane about the parent star. Assuming that was the case, days and nights on the nearby planet would be of roughly equal length. There would be one oddity. Close to noon at the middle of the hemisphere facing the gas-giant, the light of the star would be cut off for a while, occulted by the body of the gas-giant. E.C. was approaching that position now. He stared down. The terrain here was hidden by a dense cloud layer, but it was the part that received continuous maximum heat from the gas-giant. Beneath the cloud you might expect to find a hot, damp world where plant and animal life luxuriated.

His own orbit had a short period. Already he was past the place where the gas-giant stood at zenith, and was rushing on. The day-night terminator lay far ahead, but the land beneath him was changing. The hazy green of vegetation took on a darker hue, interspersed with patches of white. Those grew in number and extent as he moved on, showing brilliantly in the reflected sunlight.

After a moment or two, Tally comprehended what he was seeing. The light from the distant sun provided ample illumination for vision, and it allowed photosynthesis to continue—provided that the temperature on the surface was high enough. But the star was so far away that it offered only a meager supply of heat. Without the warming influence of the hot gas-giant, the world below would be frozen, hundreds of degrees below zero. It was not so cold as that, but lifegiving warmth was provided only to the hemisphere that permanently faced the gas-giant. The other side faced always away from the source of heat, so any warmth had to be delivered to it by convective air currents between the two hemispheres.

Tally glanced behind him and confirmed his theories. The warm giant planet was sinking toward the horizon, while the surface beneath him was becoming a near-continuous ice sheet.

And now came something new and strange. As the big planet vanished from view, his suit, with its antennas constantly scanning the surface below, picked up a curious burst of radio sound. It did not seem like something intended as a structured radio transmission. More like the random cross-chat of a group of people all wearing suits and talking to each other at once.

He picked up another source, then another—and then scores and hundreds more of them, as his suit tuned in to the exact range of transmission frequencies.

Thousands and thousands of people down on the surface, all talking to each other in tight little groups while wearing suits? That did not rank high on E.C.’s level of probabilities, but he had no other explanation.

The radio bursts remained frequent as he moved over the cold side of the planet. He waited, until at last his orbit carried him around to a place where the gas-giant appeared again over the horizon. The clusters of radio noise disappeared. He looked down. He was over the night side of the world. He sought the lights of towns and cities, but saw nothing. He also detected no highly structured radiation, consistent with a civilization sending evidence of its existence out into space.

Tally visualized the cycle of events on the world around which he moved. It was tidally locked to the gas-giant; therefore, all parts shared the same sequence of days and nights, with day length dictated by the period of revolution around the gas-giant. He computed that to be 39.36 hours, rather more than one and a half standard days. This was the length of the day/night cycle, with light provided by the distant primary star. E.C. did not yet have enough data to estimate the length of the other year, the period of revolution of the gas-giant about the star.

The star formed the source of light for the whole planet. At the same time, only one side of the world enjoyed a supply of heat. The other received nothing but the feeble warmth of radiation from the distant parent star. Presumably it stood locked into a permanent Ice Age. Yet the evidence of life—assuming that those radio bursts were such evidence—came from the frozen hemisphere.

What could it possibly be like down there, on a planet where heat and light derived from two totally different sources? E.C. ran his atmospheric convective models using a variety of different initial conditions and assumed atmospheres, and found his results inconclusive. There was only one way to obtain answers that were undeniably correct. He would have to head down, and see for himself.

But not quite yet. Slow and easy.

There was one other peculiarity about the world below. E.C. had visited dozens of planets, and he held stored in his data bases information about thousands more. This was like none of them, and it failed to conform to any theoretical models. The magnetic field that he measured was huge, orders of magnitude higher than seemed possible for such a planet.

Tally could imagine only one explanation. At the center of the planet must be a rapidly spinning metal core, whose dynamo effect generated the magnetic field. But then, that core must somehow be physically decoupled from the planetary mantle and surface, since the inside was turning hundreds of times as fast as the outside. E.C. filed that oddity away, for future analysis.

At the moment he faced a more immediate issue. He would probably not gain more useful information from orbit. It was time to consider a descent.

He analyzed the problem. Simple re-entry was easy. The suits on the Pride of Orion were designed to permit a descent with no help from a ship. Once down, however, he would be stuck there—the suits, sophisticated as they were, lacked the power needed for an ascent to orbit.

He would worry about a return when the time came. For the moment, the question was, what insert parameters should he use to land as close as possible to one of the bursts of radio signal?

He was hampered by a lack of knowledge of atmospheric parameters. He could estimate the gaseous mix, but the density profile was much more difficult. E.C. was forced to adopt a fatalistic attitude. He would make his best estimates, and fly in. If he was grossly off, not even this suit could fully protect him. It would burn away with the heat of re-entry. His human embodiment would survive only a few seconds longer. It was conceivable that what would finally reach the ground would be only E.C. Tally’s grapefruit-sized brain. It would be in perfect working order, but lack a means of sending information to or receiving information from the outside world.

Well, thank heaven for his stand-by mode. If he had to, he would switch off and wait—wait, either for his awakening in a new embodiment or for the end of the universe, whichever came first.

E.C. made the orbit adjustments needed for a re-entry vector that would bring him in at a scruff of radio signal nearest to the warm hemisphere. It also lay at the planetary equator, so it should be easy to reach. He waited for the exact microsecond, then initiated the suit’s built-in drive. He felt a burst of deceleration, powerful but of short duration. Then there was nothing to do but watch and wait.

The planet sped by beneath him. He had changed attitude, so that the feet of his suit now led the way. A new deceleration, slight at first but slowly increasing, told him that he was within the upper limits of the atmosphere. The forces on his body grew and grew. His suit’s extremities glowed white-hot with frictional heat. E.C. felt satisfaction. All was nominal, all was normal. If the profile continued he would land within a few kilometers of the estimated center of his target source of radio noise.

Upon landing his body would require food and drink, but after that a walk across the surface—with, or even without his suit—would be no problem.

E.C. watched as the glow of frictional heating faded. His thoughts were already moving on, to who or what he might encounter on the ground. A central part of his reason for existence was the collection of new data. He was without a doubt going to exercise that function before the current day cycle on his new planet was complete.

A suit brought you to the surface at an acceptably low speed, but it made no guarantees as to the type of terrain that you might encounter. Tally plopped down feet-first into cold and sticky swamp, coated with a spongy layer of some kind of moss. Even so, he was lucky. A landing fifty meters to his left would have dropped him into standing water of unknown depth.

His legs pulled free with an ugly sucking sound, and he squelched his way toward a higher point of land. He tried to avoid treading on the dozens of small creatures that lay on the ground in front of him, until he realized that none was moving. He bent low and picked one up. It was dead. Presumably they were all dead. Tiny mummified bodies crackled and crunched unpleasantly beneath his feet as he walked.

When he was completely clear of the gluey mud he checked his location. He was just seventeen kilometers from his target. Not bad at all, given the uncertainty in his information about the planet. He could be at the source of the radio signals in just a few hours.

But first things first. He must make observations. This was an unknown world, with unknown dangers. Tally stared around. The gas-giant hovered just above the horizon, where it would remain permanently. It would be many hours before the arrival of night, but a cold, gusting wind blew from his right—the direction opposite to the source of warmth. He was in a permanent “temperate zone.” The surface received a constant supply of heat, but a supply much diminished by the large slant angle from the heat source. At this location, the contribution from the parent star would make a critical difference. Life survived easily enough but it would never run riot, as it should in regions where heat from the gas-giant had its full impact. At night, the temperature at this location would fall far enough for open patches of water to form a surface layer of ice.

Atmospheric mixing would guarantee the same general composition of the air over the whole planet. Tally’s sensors indicated that an unusually large percentage of that air consisted of the inert gases neon and argon. But he, and most other species from the Orion Arm, could breathe it with no ill effects.

He cracked open the faceplate of his suit and sniffed the air. The wind had a chill edge, more bracing than cold. Faint and unfamiliar odors filled his nostrils. It was a pity that the wind came from the cold side of the planet. The scents of life would be stronger and more revealing if they came from the hot side. But idle wishing for circumstances different from what you had was a waste of time. He had chosen this landing spot for other reasons.

Slow and easy.

Was there anything else that he ought to do before he sought the source of those scruffy bursts of radio noise? Tally could think of none. Here he was, and here, until someone came with a ship able to take him back to space, he would stay.

Choosing his path carefully so as to remain on dry land, he started to walk in the direction exactly opposite to the hovering gas-giant; away from warmth, toward the cold side. Toward the unknown source of the radio signals.

When you had little or no information, it was unreasonable to have any expectations. But somehow you did, even if they were often wrong.

Tally had noticed in the final moments before he landed that the local terrain contained plentiful hills and valleys. But the path that he was following, homing in on the intermittent radio chatter, constantly ascended. He was moving higher and higher, and the external temperature constantly dropped. By the eighth kilometer of his march, Tally was forced to close his faceplate so as to ensure the well-being of his flesh-and-blood embodiment.

He formed a working hypothesis. The source of the radio signals needed, or at least preferred, a cold environment. Either they located themselves on the side away from the source of planetary heat, or they found places high enough for the air to be thin and the radiative heat loss to open space to be high.

Well, as Julian Graves had remarked for some reason, after listening to E.C. Tally’s description of the unfortunate circumstances that led to the destruction of his second embodiment, “It takes all sorts of oddities to make a universe.”

Tally confirmed that the temperature control of his suit was set to a level comfortable for his body, and marched on.

Up, up, up—but that could not continue much longer. He was approaching an isolated peak, from which the land fell away in all directions. The vector of the radio noise pointed directly to the summit.

Tally stared ahead. He was seeking some evidence of intelligent activity. He found none, until he came close enough to the top of the mountain to observe that it formed a clear, flat line. The top had been sheared off.

He paused to give his body a breather. The last two kilometers had been hard going. The upward path had grown steadily steeper, over fresh snow that concealed hard-packed ice. Now was the time to be extra careful. With the line of the summit just ahead, this was no place to slide into a crevasse or fall over an icy precipice.

He scrambled the final thirty meters on hands and knees, digging his gloved hands deep into the snow to make sure that he could not slip backwards or sideways. And then it was suddenly easy. He had topped the final rise and stood on a level plain, clear of all snow and ice. He saw, no more than fifty meters away from him, a hundred moving figures. Sunlight reflected from glittering silver carapaces, scarlet heads, and multiple scarlet limbs.

Oddly enough, they did not seem to notice him. Well, that would change soon enough.

Tally walked forward, until he came to within ten meters of a rounded building that stood roughly in the middle of the cleared area. There he halted and opened the faceplate of his suit. The air was freezing, but this was necessary.

“Good afternoon.” As Tally spoke he sent the same words through every transmission channel of his suit. He stared at the sun, to make sure that he had it right. No point in getting off on the wrong foot. Yes, it was certainly afternoon, with sunset of this planet’s long day still maybe six hours away.

He said again, “Good afternoon. My name is E.C. Tally. I am an embodied computer, incorporated in a human form. I am eager to establish communication with you, and to exchange information.”

The beings all around him stopped moving. They remained silent, but the buzz of radio noise in his suit receiver rose to a crescendo. The task of analyzing that frenzy of signal activity was a difficult one, but Tally was well-suited to tackle it. How fortunate that this work had come to him, with his unparalleled computational and analytic ability, rather than to some organic being poorly equipped for such demanding activities.

The silvery beetle-backed creatures were closing in, forming a ring around him. Tally closed his faceplate. If Sue Harbeson Ando could see him now, she would be proud of him. He was protecting his latest embodiment. Since talk would probably be at radio frequencies, he was avoiding the inevitable wear and tear on his body that would be produced with an open faceplate in such extreme temperatures.

The beetlebacks were larger than a human, but low-built. He squatted down on his haunches, to bring his head level with theirs. It was time to start in on a tricky task for which he was uniquely well qualified: that of cross-species—in this case, cross-galactic arm—communication.