Sundiver

21. DEJA PENSE

“Have you ever wondered why most of our starships jump out with crews that are seventy percent female?”

Helene handed Jacob the first liquitube of hot coffee and turned back to the machine to punch out another for herself.

Jacob peeled back the outer seal on the semi-permeable membrane, allowing steam to escape while keeping the dark liquid contained. The liquitube was almost too hot to hold, in spite of its insulation.

Trust Helene to think up another provocative topic! Whenever they were alone together, as alone as one could get on the open deck of a Sunship, Helene deSilva had. never missed a chance to engage him in mental gymnastics. The odd thing was that he didn’t mind a bit. The contest had lifted his spirits considerably since they had left Mercury ten Hours before.

“When I was an adolescent, my friends and I never really cared about the reasons. We just thought it was an added bonus for being a male on a starship. ‘Of such thoughts are pubescent fantasies born…’ Who was it who wrote that, John Two-Clouds? Have you ever read anything by him? I think he was born in High London, so you may have known his parents.”

Helene sent him an accusing glare. Jacob had to fight back, for the nth time, a temptation to tell her that the expression was endearing. It was, but what fully-grown female professional wanted to be reminded that she still had dimples? It wasn’t worth getting a broken arm, anyway.

“Okay, okay,” he laughed. “I’ll stay on the subject. I suppose the male-female ratio has to do with the way women respond better to high acceleration, heat and cold… better hand-eye coordination and superior passive strength. That must make them better spacemen, I guess.”

Helene sipped from the siphon of her liquitube. “Yes, all that’s part of it. Also more fems appear to be more immune to Jump-sickness. But you know those differences aren’t all that big. Not enough to make up for the fact that more males volunteer for spaceflight than females.

“Besides, more than half of the crewmen on in-system ships are male, and seven out of ten on military craft.”

“Well, I don’t know about commercial or research ships, but I’d think that the military selects for an aptitude for fighting. I know it’s still not proven, but I’d guess that…”

Helene laughed. “Oh, you don’t have to be so diplomatic, Jacob. Of course mels make better fighters than fems… statistically that is. Amazons like me are the exception. Actually, that is one factor in the selection. We don’t want too many warrior types aboard a star-ship.”

“But that doesn’t make sense! The crews on starship go out into an immense galaxy that hasn’t even been fully explored by the Library. You have to face a wild variety of alien races, most of them temperamental as hell. And the Institutes don’t forbid fighting among the races. They couldn’t even if they tried, judging by what Fagin says. They only try to make it tidy.”

“So a starship with humans aboard should be ready for a fracas?” Helene smiled as she rested her shoulder against the wall of the dome. In the mottled red light of the upper chromosphere in hydrogen alpha, her blonde hair looked like a close fitted ping cap. “Well you’re right, of course. We do have to be ready to fight. But think for a moment about the situation we face out there.

“We have to deal with literally hundreds of species whose only thing in common is the one thing we lack, a chain of tradition and uplift stretching back two billion years. They’ve all been using the Library for aeons, adding to it, albeit slowly, all of the time.

“Most of them are cranky, hyper-mindful of their privileges, and dubious of that silly ‘wolfling’ race from Sol.

“And what can we do, when we are challenged by some two-bit species whose extinct patrons uplifted them as talking; obedient riding steeds, who now own two little terraformed planets that sit right astride our only route to the colony on Omnivarium? What can we do when these creatures with no ambition or sense of humor stop our ship and demand an incredible forty whale songs as a toll?”

Helene shook her head and her eyebrows knotted.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to fight, at a time like that! A great beauty such as Calypso, filled to the brim with things badly needed by a struggling little community, and with an even more precious cargo of… stopped dead in space by a pair of tiny, ancient hulks that were obviously bought, not built, by the “intelligent” camels aboard!” The woman’s voice thickened, as she remembered.

“Picture it. New and beautiful, yet primitive, using only the tiny portion of Galactic science we’d been able to absorb when she was refitted, mostly in the drives… stopped by hulks older than Caesar but made by someone who used the Library all his life.”

Helene stopped for a moment and turned away.

Jacob was moved, but even more he felt honored. He knew Helene well enough, now, to know what an act of trust it was for her to open up like this.

She’s been doing most of the work too, he realized. She asks most of the questions — about my past, about my family, about my feelings — for some reason I’ve been reluctant to ask about her, the person inside. I wonder what’s been stopping me? There must be so much in there!

“So I suppose the idea is not to fight, because we’d probably lose,” he said quietly.

She looked back and nodded. She coughed twice, behind a closed fist.

“Oh, -we’ve a couple of tricks we think we might surprise somebody with sometime, simply because we haven’t had the Library and it’s all they’ve known. But those tricks have got to be saved for a rainy day.

“Instead, we flatter, fawn, bribe, sing spirituals… tap dance… and when that fails, we run.”

Jacob imagined meeting a shipload of Pila.

“Running must be awful hard at times.”

“Yes, but we have a secret way of keeping cool,” Helene brightened slightly. For a moment those appealing recesses reappeared at the corners of her smile. “It’s one of the biggest reasons why the crew is mostly women.”

“Now come on. A fem is just about as likely as a mel to take a poke at someone who insulted her. I don’t see that as much of a guarantee.”

“Nooo, not normally.” She eyed him again with that “appraising” expression. For an instant she seemed about to go on. Then she shrugged.

“Let’s sit,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

She led him around the dome and across the deck to a part of the ship where none of the crew or passengers were, where the circular deck floated two meters away from the shell of the ship…

The sparkling glow of the chromosphere refracted eerily where the stasis screen curved away below their feet. The narrow suspension field allowed light to pass, but twisted it slightly. From where they stood, part of the Big Spot could be seen, its configuration changed considerably since the last dive. Where the field intervened, the sunspot shimmered and rippled with new pulsations, added to its own.

Slowly, Helene lowered herself to the deck and then approached the edge. For a moment she sat with” her feet inches from the shimmering, holding her knees under her chin. Then she placed her hands behind her on the deck and allowed her legs to drop into the field.

Jacob swallowed.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he said.

He watched as she swung her legs languidly. They moved as if in a thick syrup, the snug sheathing of her shipsuit rippling like something animate.

She lifted her legs straight out and up above the level of the deck, with apparent ease.

“Hmmm, they seem to be all right. I can’t push them down very deep, though. I guess the mass of my legs shoves a dimple into the suspension field. At least they don’t feel upside down when I do it.” She let them drop again.

Jacob felt weak in the knees. “You mean you’ve never done that before?”

She looked up at him and grinned.

“Am I showing off? Yes I guess I was trying to impress you. I’m not crazy though. After you told us about Bubbacub and the vacuum cleaner I went over the equations carefully. It’s perfectly safe, so why don’t you join me?”

Jacob nodded numbly. After so many other miracles and unexplainable things since he left Earth, this was rather small, after all. The secret, he decided, was not to think at all.

It did feel like a thick syrup that increased in viscosity as he pushed downwards. It was rubbery and pushed back.

And the legs of Jacob’s shipsuit felt almost, disconcertingly, alive.

Helene said nothing for a time. Jacob respected her silence. Something was “obviously on her mind.

“Was that story about the Finnila Needle really true?” she asked at last, without looking up.

“Yes.”

“She must have been quite a woman.”

“Yes, she was.”

“I mean in addition to being brave. She had to be brave to jump from one balloon to another, twenty miles up in the air, but…”

“She was trying to distract them while I defused the Torcher. I shouldn’t have let her,” Jacob heard his own voice, remote and faded. “But I thought I could protect her at the same time… I had a device, you see „…”

“…but she must have been quite a person in other ways as well. I wish I could have met her.”

Jacob realized that he hadn’t said a word aloud.

“Um, yes, Helene. Tania would have liked you.” He shook himself. This was getting no one anywhere.

“But I thought we were talking about something else, uh, the ratio of females to males on starships, wasn’t that it?”

She was looking at her feet. “We are on the same topic, Jacob,” she said quietly.

“We are?”

“Sure. You remember I said there was a way to make a largely female crew more cautious in dealing with aliens… a way to guarantee that they’ll run rather than fight?”

“Yes, but…”

“And you know that humanity has been able to plant three colonies so far, but transportation costs are too great to carry many passengers, so increasing the gene pool at an isolated colony is a real problem?” She spoke rapidly, as if embarrassed.

“When we got back the first time and found that the Constitution stood again, the Confederacy made it voluntary for the women on the next jump instead of compulsory. Still, most of us volunteered.”

“I… I don’t understand.”

She looked up at him as she smiled.

“Well, maybe now isn’t the time. But you should realize that I’m shipping out on Calypso in a few months and there are certain preparations I have to make beforehand.

“And I can be as selective as I want.”

She looked straight into his eyes.

Jacob felt his jaw drop.

“Well!” Helene rubbed her hands on her lap and prepared to stand up. “I guess we’d better be heading back. We’re pretty near the Active Region, now, and I should be at my station to supervise.”

Jacob hurried to his feet and offered her his hand. Neither of them saw anything funny in the archaism.

On their way to the command station, Jacob and Helene stopped to examine the Parametric Laser. Chief Donaldson looked up from the machine as they approached.

“Hi! I think she’s all tuned and ready to go. Want a tour?”

“Sure.” Jacob hunkered down next to the laser. Its chassis was bolted to the deck. Its long, slender, multi-barreled body swung on a gymballed swivel.

Jacob felt the soft fabric covering Helene’s right leg brush lightly against his arm as she stepped over beside him. It didn’t help him keep his thoughts straight.

“This here Parametric Laser,” Donaldson began, “is my contribution to the attempt to contact the Sun Ghosts. I figured that psi was getting us nowhere, so why not try to communicate with them the way they communicate with us — visually?

“Well now, as you probably know already, most lasers operate on just one or two very narrow spectral bands, particular atomic and molecular transitions, mostly. But this baby will punch out any wavelength you want, just by dialing it in with this control.” He pointed to the central of three controls on the face of the chassis.

“Yes,” Jacob said. “I know about Parametric Lasers, though I’ve never seen one. I imagine it has to be pretty powerful to penetrate through our screens and still look bright to the Ghosts.”

“In my other life…” deSilva drawled ironically (she often referred to her past, before jumping with the Calypso, with defensive sardonicism) “…we were able to make multicolored, tunable lasers with optical dyes. They put out a fair amount of power, they were efficient, and incredibly simple.”

She smiled. “That is, until you spilled the dye. Then, what a mess! Nothing makes me appreciate Galactic science more than knowing I’ll never have to clean a puddle of Rhodamine 6-G off the floor again!”

“Could you really tune through the whole optical spectrum with a single molecule?” Donaldson was incredulous. “How did you power a… ‘dye laser,’ anyway?”

“Oh, with flashlamps sometimes. Usually with an internal chemical reaction using organic energy molecules, like sugars.

“You had to use several dyes to cover the whole visible spectrum. Poly-methyl coumarin was used a lot for the blue and green end of the band. Rhodamine and a few others were dyes for tuning in red colors.

“Anyway, that’s ancient history. I want to know what devilish plan you and Jacob have cooked up this time!” She dropped down next to Jacob on the deck. Instead of looking at Donaldson, she fixed Jacob with that disconcerting, appraising look.

“Well,” he swallowed. “It’s really quite simple. I took along a library of whale songs and dolphin-ditties when I boarded Bradbury, in case the Ghosts turned out to he poets along with everything else. When Chief Donaldson mentioned his idea of aiming a beam at them to communicate, I volunteered the tapes.”

“Well be adding a modified version of an old math contact code. He rigged that one up too.” Donaldson grinned. “I wouldn’t know a Fibonacci series if one came up and bit me! But Jacob says it’s one of the old standards.”

“It was,” deSilva said. “We never used any of the math routines, though, after the Vesarius. The library makes sure everyone understands each other in space, so there was no use for the old pre-Contact codes.”

She pushed lightly on the slim barrel. It rotated smoothly on its swivel. “You aren’t going to let this thing swing freely when the laser is on, are you?”

“No, of course we’ll be bolting it firmly, so the laser beam fires along a radius from the center of the ship. That should prevent those internal reflections you’re probably worryin’ about.

“As it is, we’ll all want to be wearing these goggles when it’s on.” Donaldson pulled a pair of thick, dark, wraparound glasses from a sack next to the laser. “Even if there were no danger to the retina, Dr. Mar-tine would insist on it. She’s a positive bug on the effects of glare on perception and personality. She turned the whole base upside down, finding bright lights no one even knew were there. Blamed them for the ‘mass hallucination’ when she arrived. Boy did she change her tune when she saw the beasties!”

“Well, it’s time for me to get back to work,” Helene announced. “I shouldn’t have stayed so long. We must be getting close. I’ll keep you men posted.” Both men rose as she smiled and departed.

Donaldson watched her walk away.

“You know, Demwa, first I thought you were crazy, then I knew you had it all together. Now I’m starting to change my mind again.”

Jacob sat down. “How’s that?”

“Any mel I know would grow a tail and wag it if that fem so much as whistled. I just can’t believe your self-control, is all. None of my business, of course’

“You’re right. It isn’t.” Jacob was disturbed that the situation was so obvious. He was beginning to wish this mission was over so he could give the problem his undivided attention.

Jacob shrugged. It was a mannerism he’d made a lot of use of since leaving Earth. “To change the subject, I’d been wondering about this internal reflection business. Has it occurred to you that somebody might be pulling a big hoax?”

“A hoax?”

“With the Sun Ghosts. All someone would have to do is smuggle aboard some sort of holographic projector…”

“Forget it,” Donaldson shook his head. “That was the first thing we checked. Besides, who’d be able to fake anything as intricate and beautiful as that herd of toruses? Anyway, a projection like that, filling our whole view, would be given away by the columnated rim cameras on flip-side!”

“Well, maybe not the herd, but what about the ‘humanoid’ Ghosts? They’re rather simple and small, and the way they avoid the rim cameras, spinning faster than we can to stay overhead, is pretty uncanny.”

“What can I say, Jake? Every piece of equipment carried aboard is carefully inspected, along with everyone’s personal items as well, for that very reason. No projector’s ever been found, and where could anyone hide one on an open ship like this? I’ll admit I’ve wondered about it myself at times. But I don’t see any way anyone could be pulling a hoax.”

Jacob nodded slowly. Donaldson’s argument made sense. Also, how could one reconcile a projection with Bubbacub’s trick with the Lethani relic? It was a tempting idea, but a hoax didn’t seem very likely.

Distant spicule forests pulsed like waving fountains. Individual jets fenced with one another along the rim of the slowly thobbing supergranulation cell that covered half the sky. In its center lay the Big Spot, a huge eye of black, rimmed by areas of hot brightness.

About ninety degrees around the deck from them, a group of dark silhouettes stood or knelt near the Pilot Board. Only the outlines could be made out against the bright crimson blaze of the photosphere.

Two clumps of shadow could be distinguished from those near the command station. The tall, slender, figure of Culla stood slightly to the side, pointing ahead at a tall, wispy filament arch that hung, suspended, over the Spot. The arch grew slowly, perceptibly closer as Jacob watched.

The other identifiable clump of shadow detached itself from the crowd and began to creep in fits and starts toward Jacob and the chief. It was rounded on top, bigger above than below.

“Now there’s where you could hide a projector!” Donaldson motioned with his chin toward the bulky, massive silhouette as it creeped toward them with a swaying, twisting motion.

“What, Fagin?”

Jacob whispered. Not that it would make any difference, with the Kanten’s hearing what it was. “You can’t be serious! Why he’s only been on two dives!”

“Yeah,” Donaldson mused. “Still, all of those branches and such… I’d have sooner searched Bubbacub’s undies than have to pry in there after contraband.”

For an instant Jacob thought he caught a bit of a burr in the chief engineer’s voice. He stared at his neighbor but the man had on his poker face. That in itself was a small miracle for Donaldson. It would be too much if the man were actually being witty.

They both rose to greet Fagin. The Kanten whistled a cheery response, showing no sign that he’d overheard them.

“Commandant Helene deSilva has expressed the opinion that solar weather conditions are surprisingly calm. She said that this will be of great value in solving certain solonomical problems unrelated to the Sun Ghosts. The measurements involved will take very littie time. Much less than the time we will be saved, by these excellent conditions.

“In other words, my friends you have about twenty minutes to get ready.”

Donaldson whistled. He called Jacob over and the two men set to work on the laser, bolting it into place and checking the projection tapes.

A few meters away, Dr. Martine rummaged through her space-crate for small pieces of apparatus. Her psi helmet was already on her head and Jacob thought he could overhear her softly curse, “Damn it, this time you’re going to talk to me!”

22. DELEGATION

“ ‘What is their purpose, these creatures of light?’ the reporter asks. But he’d do better to ask, ‘What purpose has man?’ Is it our job to scramble on our metaphorical knees, ignoring the pain with chin upthrust in childish pride, saying to all the universe: ‘See me! I am man! I crawl where others walk! But isn’t it great that I can crawl anywhere?’

“Adaptability, the Neoliths claim, is the ‘specialization’ of man. He cannot run as fast as a cheetah, but he can run. He cannot swim as well as an otter, but he can swim. His eyes are not so sharp as a hawk’s nor can he store food in his cheeks. So he must train his eyes and create instruments from bits and pieces of tortured earth; not only to let him see, but to outrun the cat and to outswim the otter as well. He can walk across an arctic waste, swim a tropical river, climb a tree and, at the end of his journey, build a nice hotel. There he will clean up and then boast of his accomplishments over dinner with his friends.

“And yet for all recorded time our hero has been dissatisfied. He yearned to know his place in the world. He shouted aloud. He demanded to know why he was here! The universe of stars only smiled down at his questions with profound, ambiguous silence.

“He longed for a purpose. Denied, he took his frustration out on his fellow creatures. The specialists around him knew their roles and he hated them for it. They became his slaves, his protein factories. They became the victims of his genocidal rage.

“ ‘Adaptability’ soon meant that we needed no one else. Species whose descendents might one- day have been great became dust in the holocaust of man’s egoism.”

“It is only by the slimmest of luck that we became environmentalists shortly before Contact… thus keeping from our heads the just wrath of our elders. Or was it luck? Is it an accident that John Muir, and those who followed, appeared soon after the first confirmed ‘sightings’?

“As the Reporter lies here, in a bubble, in a swaddling of deceptive pink vapor all around, he wonders if the purpose of man may be to be an example. Whatever original sin drove our Patrons off, long ago, is being paid off in a comedy.

“One hopes our neighbors are edified, as well as amused, as they watch us crawl about, gaping in wonder and often resentment at those who are fulfillment incarnate, without ambition.”

Pierre LaRoque took his thumb off the recording button and frowned. No, that last part wouldn’t do. It sounded almost bitter. More whiney than poignant. In fact, all of it would have to be reworked. There was too little spontaneity. The sentences tried too hard.

He took a sip from the liquitube in his left hand, then began absently stroking his moustache. In front of him the brilliant herd of spinning toruses rose slowly as the ship righted itself. The maneuver had taken less time than he’d expected. Now there was no more time to digress on the plight of mankind. He could, after all, do that any day.

But this, this was extraordinary.

He pressed again on the switch and brought up the microphone. “Note for rewrite,” he said. “More irony, and more on advantages of certain types of specialization. Also mention the Tymbrimi… how they’re more adaptable than we’ll ever be. Keep it short and upbeat on outcome if all humanity participates.”

Heretofore the rising herd had consisted of little rings, fifty or more kilometers away. Now the main body came into view, along with a small sliver of the photosphere. The nearest torus was a bright, spinning, blue-green monster. Along its rim, thin blue lines swiftly mixed and shifted, like meshing moire patterns. A white halo shimmered all around it.

LaRoque sighed. This would be his greatest challenge. When holos of these creatures were released everyone and his chimp butler would be tuning in to see if his words measured up. Yet he felt the inverse of what he must make them feel. The deeper the ship went into the Sun, the more detached he became. It was as if none of it was really happening. The creatures didn’t seem real at all.

Also, he admitted, he was scared.

“Pearls of serendipity they are, strung on necklaces of lambent emerald. If some galactic galleon once foundered here, to leave its treasure on these feathery, fiery reefs, its diadems are now safe. Uncorrupted by time, they sparkle still. No hunter will carry them off in a sack.

“They defy logic, for they should not be here. They defy history, for they are not remembered… They defy the power of our instruments and even those of the Galactics, our elders.

“Imperturbable as Bombadil, they ignore the passing of oxygen and hydrogen in their incessant bickerings, and take nourishment from the most timeless of fonts.

“Do they recall… could they have been among the Progenitors, back when the galaxy was new? We hope to ask, but for now they keep their counsel to themselves.”

Jacob looked up from his work when the herd came into view again. The sight had less effect on him than it had the first time around. To experience the emotions he’d felt during that first dive he’d have to see something else for the very first time. And to see anything anywhere near as impressive, he’d have to Jump.

It was one of the drawbacks of having monkeys for ancestors.

Still, Jacob could spend hours looking at the lovely patterns the toroids made. And for a few moments at a time, when he remembered the significance of what he was seeing, he was awe-struck once again.

The computer board on Jacob’s lap bore a shifting pattern of curving, connected lines, isophotes of the Ghost they’d seen an hour before.

It hadn’t been much of a contact. One isolated Solarian had been caught by surprise as the ship came out from behind a thick wisp of filament near the edge of the herd.

It darted away from them, then hovered suspiciously at a few kilometers distance. Commandant deSilva had ordered the ship turned so that Donaldson’s Parametric Laser could bear on the fluttering creature.

At first the Ghost had backed away. Donaldson muttered and cursed as he adjusted the laser, to carry the various modulations of Jacob’s contact tape.

Then the creature reacted. It’s (tentacles? wings?) shot out from the center as if snapped taut. It began to ripple colorfully.

Then, in a flash of brilliant green, it was gone.

Jacob examined computer readouts from that reaction. The Solarian had presented the rim cameras with a good view. The earliest recordings showed that part of its rippling was in phase with the bass rhythm of the whale melody. Jacob was now trying to find out if the complicated display it emitted just before jetting away had a pattern that might be interpretable as a reply.

He finished drawing the analysis program he wanted the computer to pursue. It was to look for variations on the whale-song theme and rhythm in three regimes, color, time, and brightness across the surface of the Ghost. If it found anything definite he’d be able to set up a computer linkup in realtime during the next encounter.

That is, if there was a next encounter. The whale song had only been an introduction to the sequence of scales and mathematical series Jacob had planned to send. But the Ghost hadn’t stuck around to “listen” to the rest.

He put the computer board aside and lowered his couch so that he could look at the nearest toroids without moving his head. A pair of them swung slowly by at forty-five degrees from the angle of the deck.

Apparently the “spinning” of the torus creatures was more complicated than had been previously thought. The intricate, swiftly changing patterns that swept rapidly around the rim of each represented something in their internal makeup.

When two of the toroids touched each other, nudging for better positions in the magnetic fields, there was no change in the rotating figures. They interacted with each other as if they weren’t spinning at all.

The pushing and shoving became more pronounced with time as they -transited the herd. Helene deSilva suggested that it was because the active region they were above was dying out. The magnetic fields were getting more and more diffuse.

Culla dropped into the couch next to him, bringing his mashies together in a clack. Jacob was starting to recognize some of the rhythms Culla’s dental work made in various situations. It had taken a long time to realize that they were part of a Pring’s fundamental repertoire like facial expressions for a human being.

“May I shit here, Jacob?” Culla asked. “This ish my firsht opportunity to thank you for your cooperation back on Mercury.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Culla. A two-year secrecy oath is pretty much de rigueur for an incident like this. Anyway, once Commandant deSilva got orders from Earth it was pretty clear that no one would be going home until they signed.”

“Shtill, you had every right to tell the world, the galaxy. The Library Inshtitute hash been shamed by Bubbacub’sh actionsh. It ish admirable of you, the dish-coverer of hish… mishtake, to show reshtraint and let them make ammendsh.”

“What will the Institute do… besides punishing Bubbacub?”

Culla took a sip from his ubiquitous liquitube. His eyes shone.

“They will probably cancel Earth’sh debt and donate Branch shervices free for shome time. A longer time if the Confederacy agreesh to a period of silence. I cannot overshtate their eagernesh to avoid a shcandal.

“In addition, you will probably be rewarded.”

“Me?” Jacob felt numb. To a “primitive” Earthman, almost any reward the Galactics chose to give would be like a magic lamp. He could hardly believe what he was hearing.

“Yesh, although there will probably be shome bit-ternesh that you did not keep your dishcoveriesh more private. The magnitude of their generoshity will probably be invershe to the notoriety Bubbacub’sh case getsh.”

“Oh, I see.” The bubble was burst. It was one thing to get a token of gratitude from powers-that-be, and quite another to be offered a bribe. Not that the value of the reward would be any less. In fact, the prize would probably be even more valuable.

Or would it? No alien thought exactly the way a human would. The directors of the Institute of the Libraries were an enigma to him. All he knew for certain was that they wouldn’t like to get a bad press. He wondered if Culla was speaking now in his official capacity, or simply predicting what he thought would happen next.

Culla suddenly turned and looked up at the passing herd. His eyes glowed and a short buzzing came from behind the thick, prehensile lips. The Pring pulled the microphone from the slot next to his couch.

“Excushe me, Jacob. But I think I shee shomething. I musht report to the Commandant.”

Culla spoke briefly into the microphone, not moving his gaze from a position about thirty degrees to their right and twenty-five degrees high. Jacob looked but saw nothing. He could hear a distant murmuring of Helene’s voice filling the region of the head of Culla’s couch. Then the ship began to turn.

Jacob checked the computer board. The results were in. The previous encounter had elicited nothing recognizable as a reply. They’d just have to keep on doing as they had before.

“Sophonts,” Helene’s voice rang out over the intercom, “Pring Culla has made another sighting. Please return to your stations.”

Culla’s mashies clacked. Jacob looked up.

At about forty-five degrees, a tiny flickering point of light began to grow just beyond the bulk of the nearest toroid. The blue dot grew as it approached until they could make out five uneven appendages, bilaterally symmetric. It loomed up swiftly, then stopped.

Sun Ghost manifestation, type two, leered down at them in its gross mockery of the shape of a man. The chromosphere glowed red through the jagged holes of its eyes and mouth.

No attempt was made to bring the apparition in line with the flip-side cameras. It would probably have been futile and besides, this time the P-laser took precedence.

He told Donaldson to continue playing the primary contact tape, from the point where the last contact broke off.

The engineer raised his microphone.

“Everyone please put on your goggles. We’re going to turn on the laser now.” He put on his own, then looked around to make sure everyone in sight had complied (Culla was exempted; they took his word for it that he was in no danger). Then he threw the switch.

Even through the goggles, Jacob could see a dim glow against the inner surface of the shield wall as the beam punched through toward the Ghost. He wondered if the anthropomorphic figure would be more cooperative than the earlier, “natural-shaped” manifestation had been. For all he knew, this was the same creature. Maybe it left, earlier, to “put on its makeup” for this present appearance.

The Ghost fluttered impassively while the beam from the Communication Laser shone right through it. Not far away, Jacob could hear Martine curse softly.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong!” she hissed. Her psi helmet and goggles made only her nose and chin visible. “There’s something but it’s not there. Dammit! What in hell’s the matter with this thing!”

Suddenly, the apparition swelled like a butterfly squashed flat against the outside of the ship, The features of its “face” smeared out into long narrow strips of ochre blackness. The arms and body spread until the creature was nothing but a ragged rectangular band of blue across ten degrees of the sky. Flecks of green began to form, here, and there, along its surface. They dodged about, mixed and coalesced, and then began to take on coherent form.

“Dear sweet God in heaven,” Donaldson murmured.

From somewhere nearby Fagin let out a whistling, shivering, diminished seventh. Culla began to chatter.

Across its length, the Solarian was covered with bright green letters, in the Roman alphabet. They spelled:

LEAVE NOW. DO NOT RETURN.

Jacob gripped the sides of his couch. Despite the sound effects of the E.T.’s, and the hoarse breathing of the humans, the silence was unbearable.

“Millie!” he tried as hard as he could not to shout. “Are you getting anything?”

Martine moaned.

“Yes… NO! I’m getting something, but it doesn’t make sense! It doesn’t correlate!”

“Well try sending a question! Ask if it’s receiving your psi!”

Martine nodded and pressed her hands against her face in concentration.

The letters immediately reformed overhead.

CONCENTRATE. SPEAK ALOUD FOR FOCUS.

Jacob was stunned. Deep inside he could feel his suppressed half shivering in horror. What he couldn’t solve terrified Mr. Hyde.

“Ask it why it’ll talk to us now and not before.” Martine repeated the question aloud, slowly.

THE POET. HE WILL SPEAK FOR US. HE IS HERE.

“No, no I can’t!” LaRoque cried. Jacob turned quickly and saw the little journalist, scrunched, terrified near the food machines.

HE WILL SPEAK FOR US.

The green letters glowed.

“Doctor Martine,” Helene deSilva called. “Ask the Solarian why we shouldn’t come back.”

After a pause, the letters shifted again. WE WANT PRIVACY. PLEASE LEAVE.

“And if we do come back? Then what?” Donaldson asked. Grimly, Martine repeated the question.

NOTHING. YOU WON’T SEE US. MAYBE OUR YOUNG, OUR CATTLE.

NOT US.

That explained the two types of Solarians, Jacob thought. The “normal” variety must be the young, given simple tasks such as shepherding the toroids. Where, then, did the adults live? What kind of culture did they have? How could creatures made of ionized plasma communicate with watery human beings? Jacob ached at the creature’s threat. If they wanted to, the adults could avoid a Sunship, or any conceivable fleet of Sunships, as easily as an eagle could a balloon. If they cut off contact now, humans could never force them to renew it.

“Pleashe,” Culla asked. “Ashk it if Bubbacub offended them.” The Pring’s eyes glowed hotly and the chattering continued, muffled, between each word he spoke.

BUBBACUB MEANS NOTHING. INSIGNIFICANT. JUST LEAVE.

The Solarian began to fade. The ragged rectangle grew smaller as it slowly backed away.

“Wait!” Jacob stood up. He stretched out one hand grabbing at nothing.

“Don’t cut us off! We’re your nearest neighbors! We only want to share with you! At least tell us who you are!”

The image was blurred with distance. A wisp of darker gas swept in and covered the Solarian, but not before they read one last message. With a crowd of “young” gathered around it, the adult repeated one of its earlier sentences.

THE POET SPEAKS FOR US.