Implacable, page 15
“Probably,” Geary agreed.
“Fortunately,” Desjani continued, “we’re sailors. So I suggest that we stay in here and let the sensors in our uniforms collect everything they can, so the specialists in the fleet can analyze it all later.”
“I concur,” Geary said.
They got carefully down off the dresser, Desjani sighing heavily. “Okay. There’s something out there, probably the reason why the Dancers told us ‘stay inside stay safe.’ And whatever it is probably can’t get through the walls. But it’s still out there. So much for a full night’s sleep. I’ll take the first watch.”
“Two hours,” Geary said. “Wake me then.” Was he hearing something scratching at the outside walls? That was probably just his imagination.
Stay inside stay safe. They were definitely going to do that. But it was still going to be a long night.
* * *
THE next morning the streets were empty of anything they hadn’t seen in daylight the day before. There was no trace of whatever had been moving in the night.
“Breakfast,” Desjani said as they pulled out ration bars (not stale and not Danaka Yoruk) from their bags. “There isn’t any food in that kitchen area except those stale ration bars. Do you think maybe the Dancers only eat one meal a day? They took forever yesterday, eating so slowly.”
“Could be,” Geary said. He checked the label of his ration bar. Spicy Sweet Chicken. That explained why it tasted like pork. The only fleet ration bars with meat that didn’t taste like chicken were the ones that supposedly contained chicken.
“Is there a diplomatic way to tell our hosts that Danaka Yoruk ration bars are not a good idea for snacks when humans are involved?” Desjani asked. “Especially not when they expired a decade ago?”
“I think we should leave that to Ambassador Rycerz and her people. She might think we shouldn’t risk offending the Dancers over such an, um, minor issue.”
Desjani snorted derisively. “Making people eat Danaka Yoruk bars is not a minor issue. Somebody’s got to tell the Dancers.”
Both he and Desjani were restless by the time the Dancer escorts showed up to collect them. They found themselves on the bus again, along with several Dancers, Geary wishing that Darus the Taon were along with them today as they had been yesterday.
He’d carefully worked out a question, not about the weather but about something he had to ask, and spoke to the Dancers just as the bus began moving.
“Something in the night,
“Not easy to see in dark,
“What was in the streets?”
No answer.
We don’t talk about that, either, Desjani typed on her pad.
Geary dreaded another long, slow procession, but the ride this time lasted only about half an hour before the bus came to a halt before a structure that didn’t appear to be any different from those around it. That made it all the more surprising when the humans got inside.
The building, designed to look unimposing from the outside, was huge inside, with wide ramps sweeping around the walls, vast open spaces, and floors set beneath ground level so that walls soared high around them.
And on the walls . . .
“Tapestries,” Geary said. “Look at them.”
“Awesome,” Desjani agreed.
The tapestries ranged in size from some as small as the palm of a human hand, to vast sheets covering wide, tall walls from top to bottom. Some showed what were clearly nature scenes. Others were apparently abstract views of space. Several might depict scenes from Dancer history.
“Does that look like a stylized image of a major asteroid strike on a planet?” Geary said, pointing. Dominated by shades of red, orange, and black, the jagged lines of the images on the tapestry and silhouettes of what appeared to be various plants and creatures reinforced the sense of vast tragedy.
“I’d say so,” Desjani said, studying the tapestry. “If the Dancers experienced, and survived, something like that on their home world during their recorded history, it would’ve had a huge influence on them.”
“Like maybe building large structures mostly underground?” Geary said, looking about at the other tapestries. The largest were covered with intricate, interleaving patterns. When Geary tried to follow some of those patterns with his eyes he kept finding himself getting dizzy.
The tapestries were made of various threads, some extremely fine, some coarse and large, others a mix of various thicknesses that created a three-dimensional effect. Or perhaps more than three dimensions, Geary thought, thinking of how trying to follow some of the patterns made him light-headed.
“Huh,” Desjani said. “That’s odd. It’s not finished.” She pointed to one side of the nearest tapestry to them, where loose threads dangled in a waterfall of color. “None of them are finished,” Desjani added, looking around.
Now that she’d pointed it out, Geary saw it, too. Every tapestry, large or small, hadn’t been finished, every one instead ending in a tangle of unwoven thread. “That must have some significance.”
Taking his eyes off the tapestries, he looked at the Dancers in the building. Aside from the escorts near him and Desjani, the other Dancers here were mostly gathered in front of various tapestries, their legs tucked under them, gazing silently at the tapestries before them.
“I was thinking this was an art museum,” Desjani said, gazing about her. “Now I’m starting to wonder. Are those Dancers meditating or praying?”
“They might be,” Geary said. “It feels like it, anyway. Maybe this is a religious building. But look at that tapestry over there. Isn’t it displaying Newton’s law of motion?”
She followed his gesture, studying the images woven into the tapestry. “Looks like it to me. Some of these tapestries might be showing scientific principles as the Dancers see them.”
“I can’t wait to hear what Dr. Cresida thinks when she sees them,” Geary said.
“See, that’s one way we’re different,” Desjani said. “Usually I’m happier not to hear what Dr. Cresida thinks. But I am curious as to what the Dancers are thinking. Why’d they bring us here? Why aren’t our escorts explaining what we’re seeing?”
Definitely not a weather question, but one Geary knew he had to ask.
“Beautiful in here,
“We see many fine works . . . art,
“What is the meaning?”
The Dancer escorts conferred among themselves briefly before one addressed Geary.
“What does human see?
“What meaning does human see?
“What does human hear?”
Geary looked at Desjani, who made a helpless gesture. “How do we answer that in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables?” she asked.
“How do we answer that when we’re not certain what we’re seeing?” Geary said, trying to sort out his thoughts in ways he could express to the Dancers. But his concentration was broken by Desjani, speaking in a low, urgent voice.
“What’s up with this?”
Geary followed her gaze and saw what she meant. The other Dancers in the building, individually and in small groups, were coming closer to them. But, unlike the earlier encounters, something about them did not feel . . . comfortable. “Do they feel hostile to you?”
“Maybe just unwelcoming. They don’t want us in here,” Desjani said. “That’s what I’m feeling.”
They stood together, uncertain how to react, as the angry-seeming Dancers edged closer.
Geary was trying to decide whether a slow retreat would be wise when he realized that their escorts were moving to form a barrier between the humans and the unhappy Dancers, words being rapidly exchanged between both sides. Claws moved and clacked to emphasize the words in ways that made it clear this was a heated discussion.
It was odd to stand here, knowing he and Tanya were the objects of the argument, but also knowing he shouldn’t do or say anything that might trigger more antagonism from the Dancers who clearly objected to humans being here. He could only guess why their presence was unwelcome, using his experience with humans, not Dancers, making it even harder to know what would make the situation better or worse.
Tanya stood next to him, outwardly relaxed, nothing about her revealing what she must be feeling inside as large, unfriendly spider-wolves pressed closer.
Not doing anything must have been the right thing in this case. The pace of the argument diminished, the unfriendly Dancers stopped advancing, and after a few more tense minutes the escorts ushered Geary and Desjani out of the building.
Once they were outside, the sense of growing tension fell away. “Not just an art museum,” Desjani said firmly.
“Definitely not,” Geary agreed. “I wonder how long it’ll be before we learn exactly what it is. Any guesses why we were shown it? The Dancers didn’t tell us.”
“Maybe they did tell us,” she said, pausing, her head slightly tilted as she looked back at the building. “When they answered you. They wanted to know what we thought of what we were seeing. What we ‘heard’ when we looked at those tapestries. Maybe what was important there wasn’t for us to see the tapestries. Instead, it was for the Dancers to see how we responded to them.”
He nodded, wondering why that hadn’t occurred to him. “Was this whole visit a test? To see how humans responded to Dancers? Humans who the Dancers must know have conjured up all sorts of horrible alien threats out of our imaginations through all of our known history.”
“If so, I think we did okay,” Desjani said. “Those unfinished tapestries . . . have you ever heard that saying about how our stories are never finished? That every act leads to new things, every road to new roads? Do you think the unfinished tapestries might symbolize that sort of thing? We can’t finish the picture because the picture is never finished.”
“That might well be,” Geary said. “What was in there certainly seems to confirm our earlier speculations about the Dancers seeing everything in terms of a tapestry, everything interwoven, and everything forming threads to make up the big picture of the universe.”
After a moment, Desjani spoke again. “What did you think of those patterns?”
“The abstract ones?” Geary shook his head. “They made me dizzy.”
“Yeah.” She paused once more. “I felt my ancestors in one of them. As if they were speaking through it.”
He started to reply to that, then himself paused to think, trying to sort out exactly how the patterns had affected him. “They made me dizzy,” Geary repeated, speaking slowly, “as if the world was shifting about me, as if what I was seeing wasn’t what was really there.”
“Visual drugs?” Desjani asked.
“Is that possible?”
“Or aids to meditation, to seeing truth?” she continued. “How can something designed to mess with Dancer brains also mess with human brains?”
“Maybe there’s something in common in those brains that no one has ever thought of,” Geary said.
“It’s not like we’ve been able to study any Dancer brains, yet,” Desjani said. “What do you suppose our escorts are discussing?” They were on the bus once more, but it hadn’t begun moving. The Dancers were clustered in the back speaking among themselves. She started typing. They’re probably saying “Well, that didn’t work.” You’d think they’d have known what would happen when we went in there. We’re not the first other species they’ve encountered.
Other species. He looked from the museum / cathedral / meditation center back to the Dancers talking together. Geary typed his reply slowly, his thoughts trying catch up with his words. Maybe they didn’t know. So far we’ve encountered the enigmas, the Kicks, the Dancers, the Taon, and the Wooareek. What do they have in common?
She thought for a moment. Space travel. Sentience. That’s about it. The Wooareek, the Dancers, and the Taon want personal meetings. Reasons unknown. The enigmas and the Kicks both want to kill us, but for different reasons.
And that’s also true for how humans reacted to the aliens. It hasn’t been the same in each case, Geary typed.
No. Desjani gave him a sidelong look. You’re saying it’s different every time. How they react, how your own species reacts. The Dancers didn’t know what would happen when we went in there until we went in. How would we react to everything there, and how would their own people react to us.
“The ambassador’s staff has been trying to develop a standard protocol for handling first contacts with alien species,” Geary said, deliberately speaking out loud because he wanted the Dancers to overhear. “They haven’t been able to because when they apply anything to one species we’ve met it doesn’t work for others. Maybe a standard way of handling that is impossible, and even people like the Dancers with a lot of experience encountering new species have to wing it each time.”
She eyed him, clearly trying to decide whether to also reply out loud. “How we react to them and their stuff, how they react to us and our stuff,” Desjani finally said. “It’ll always be a different mix for each species. That’s going to be a hard sell, though. You know how bureaucracies work. No one back in Alliance space is going to want to hear that we can’t make a one-size-fits-all approach to first contact. They want a checklist with some if-thens built into it, not a policy that treats each contact as unique.”
“You’re right,” he said.
“I always am.”
“But reality isn’t going to adapt to bureaucratic imperatives,” Geary continued. “We need arguments to convince them that flexibility is required. Maybe the Dancers can help us with that to ensure our contacts with them and others work out as well as possible.” That was a major rewrite of one of the diplomatic talking points that Ambassador Rycerz had provided him, but one that he thought went to the heart of the matter. And it was something he’d wanted to flat out tell the Dancers for some time.
Desjani raised her eyebrows at him, smiling in a way that showed she knew he’d gone out on a limb with saying that last statement out loud. Shifting back to typing, she showed him her reply. Good luck with that, Admiral. Maybe it would help if we reproduce one of those Dancer tapestries that makes a human mind get wacked and make the human bureaucrats and the Dancer bureaucrats stare at it for a while.
He couldn’t help smiling as well at the idea. I’m always open to new approaches, Captain.
But. She pointed upward. The Dancers, as General Charban keeps pointing out, insist they only want to talk to “one.” One representative for all humanity. And when we had that fight with the Syndics in this star system, the Dancers told us it was a human problem for humans to fix. Those both sound like standard policies to me.
They do. He frowned up at the sky. So we have evidence to support unique approaches to each species, and evidence to support standard approaches to each species. Like Dr. Cresida says about relativity and quantum mechanics. Both are experimentally true, but they contradict each other.
Are you going to keep quoting her to me?
Only when necessary. Dr. Cresida had early on clearly communicated her opinion of the fleet her sister had served in and died in, and Tanya Desjani wasn’t the sort to easily let go of something like that.
Having apparently made up their minds, and giving no sign they’d overheard anything Geary had said, the Dancer escorts returned to their nest seats as the bus surged into motion. Moving a bit faster than yesterday, but by no means fast, the bus turned and began heading for the edge of the city.
That edge was clean-cut. Unlike a typical human town or city that tapered off, going from dense development to less dense by stages, the Dancer city simply ended with city on one side of an imaginary line and countryside on the other. But the road kept straight on, and after a short time the bus turned off into a small area next to fields filled with vegetation that didn’t look at all like the monoculture farms that Geary tended to think of.
The Dancers urged him and Desjani off the bus and toward the vegetation, where Geary saw many shapes of differing sizes moving amid the leaves and fronds and needles. Some were natural, the large insect-like creatures that here seemed to fill what were small mammal or bird ecological niches on many other habitable worlds. The others were bots, in what initial glances showed to be four standard models with different tool modifications for specific farming tasks. Geary wasn’t surprised to see that just as human-made robots often mimicked human hands and bodies, the Dancer robots were built around copying the shapes of Dancers and their claw/tentacle hands.
One of the Dancers faced him, the translator instantly providing human words as the Dancer spoke.
“The world gives us life,
“We work with life to feed life,
“All is one design.”
He didn’t need further explanation. On one level, it was simple ecology. Everything was tied together. On another level, it described the Dancer philosophy humans had already guessed at, that the Dancers saw everything in terms of its place in some grand pattern. In fact, Geary thought, looking at how the different kinds of plants were interspersed and arranged, they seemed to themselves make up a pattern or picture of some kind.
The farm didn’t consist of rows or orchards of similar crops. Instead, clearly different types of “trees,” “stalks,” and lower-lying plants occupied the same area. The bot workers moved among the plants carrying out a variety of tasks, the smaller bots working around the roots, plucking up weeds and doing other tasks, while some large bots were picking higher-up fruit, their hands moving with impressive speed, precision, and delicacy.
“Mixed cropping,” Desjani said. “Gunnery Sergeant Orvis made that guess from what we could observe from space. His family back home is involved in farming.”
“Did Orvis say why he thought the Dancers would do this mixed cropping?” Geary asked.
