ridges of Europa, and the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The earliest versions had relayed photographs and telemetry from Mars and from Earth’s moon; later models had let human consciousness piggyback within their circuitry.
Readouts at the bottom of his visual field showed data on atmosphere, pressure, temperature, and other factors. It was as hot, Koenig noted, as boiling water, and the lighting in the room was sizzling with ultraviolet.
The Turusch were there, both of them, mottled black and dark brown, and gleaming wet in the harsh light. It was difficult to judge distance within this new body without practice, but they seemed to be about four meters away. If so, they were each half again longer than a human was tall and half a meter thick. The body might be described as slug-like, at least where the bare, mucus-wet skin was exposed, but large patches of its body were covered by what looked like sections of shell or carapace—large and irregular on the blunt end, and segmented like the scales of a snake along the belly, leaving most of the rest of the body nakedly exposed. Half-meter tentacles, black, whip-thin, and in constantly writhing motion, sprouted at seemingly random points from everywhere on the body except the armored parts.
One end was pointed. The other end, Koenig decided, must be the head, rounded and sheathed in three close-fitting sections of carapace, and showing recesses for at least two dozen eyes or other sense organs arranged in three lines running back from the blunt end. If those were eyes, they were deeply recessed and small, like tiny black marbles. Koenig wondered if that meant the Turusch were from a planet orbiting a star hotter and brighter than Sol. The ultraviolet baking the compartment seemed to validate the idea.
He saw nothing that resembled a mouth. He did see the diaphragms used for speech, however, two set on either side of the head carapace, which took up nearly a quarter of the creature’s length.
“So,” Koenig said. “Cephalopod? Reptile? Sea cucumber?”
“None of the above, Admiral,” Brandt said. “Remember … any resemblance to anything we know from Earth is superficial … either a matter of parallel evolution, or pure coincidence.”
“Right. My mistake.” He felt clumsy. He knew that aliens were never easily categorized. But faced with the truly alien, the human mind always sought points of similarity, easy starting places, something recognizable.
“At this point,” Wilkerson pointed out, “we’re not even sure about whether to call these things animal, vegetable, or mineral. They’re carbon-based, we know, but they appear to manufacture at least part of their metabolic energy with a chlorophyll analogue in the skin pigmentation. Dr. George figured that much out from skin samples she took on Haris.”
Koenig looked at the young woman with new respect. “You actually went in and got a skin sample from one of those things?”
“We used robots, Admiral,” she replied. “Still, they seemed pretty passive. They might have known we were simply trying to find out about their physical needs.”
Koenig nodded. He wondered what his reaction would have been if he’d been captured by a pack of these slimy, tentacled slugs, and they—or their machines—had come after him with a sampling probe or scalpel.
How intelligent were they, really?
“Their biochemistries appear to be driven by both carbon and silicon,” Wilkerson continued. “They also use a lot of sulfur chemistry.”
“What kind of environment?” Koenig asked.
“Hot,” Wilkerson replied. “We think their homeworld is a less-extreme version of Venus. Carbon dioxide atmosphere with traces of sulfur, sulfur dioxide, water vapor, and droplets of sulfuric acid. Temperature in the one-hundred-degree Celsius range. Not our kind of place at all.”
“Sounds like Eta Boötis Four,” Koenig said, thoughtful. He was wondering if the Turusch had attacked the place not because they were working for the Sh’daar, but because they wanted the place for themselves.
“Only superficially,” Wilkerson said. “Eta Boötis is colder, has less CO2, more sulfur compounds, a lot more oxygen and ammonia, and not as much carbonyl sulfide. We think the Turusch homeworld has a much lower surface gravity, too—less than one G.”
Koenig scowled. “Then we’re back to square one in understanding why they attacked us.”
“They appear to be the right-hand … ah … right-tentacle representatives of the Sh’daar,” Brandt said. “I thought that was understood from the beginning.”
“So far as these things are concerned, nothing is understood,” Koenig said. “Remember, we’ve never even seen a Sh’daar … and this is our very first look at the Turusch. For all we know, the Sh’daar could just be some sort of Turusch ruling caste, and not a different species at all.”
“Go ahead and ask them,” Wilkerson suggested.
“How?”
“The language software is running. Just use this to access it.” Wilkerson passed a mental icon to Koenig. He mindclicked it. “Who are you?” he asked, deciding to stick with the basics, at least to begin.
Two alien heads whipped around, facing the white robotic sphere. Damn … these things might look like giant slugs, but they were quick. Koenig could hear a kind of humming or buzzing as the robot spoke. A moment later, the aliens answered with the same pulsing buzz … but they answered together, and the audio translation came out unintelligible as two computer-generated voices spoke at the same time.
Fortunately, a text version of both replies printed itself out in a side window in his in-head display.
“This one was Falling Droplet, of the Third Hierarchy,” one said, while the other replied, “Speak we now with the Mind Here or the Mind Below?”
Koenig read the answers, and blinked, puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said without using the translation software. He was addressing the other humans.
“Don’t feel bad, sir,” Wilkerson said. “No matter how clear your question, the answer always feels fuzzy … like you’re missing something.”
“Can we separate them? Question them singly?”
“We tried that on Haris, Admiral,” George said. “They went into a mope, and appeared to be wasting away. And they wouldn’t answer anything. Our working theory is that they have some kind of gestalt going, a hive mind, maybe. If they’re alone, they don’t function as well. They might even die. Like worker ants.”
“I … see.” This was getting more and more complicated. He mindclicked the translate icon again. “Why do you work for the Sh’daar?”
“The Sh’daar reject your transcendence and accept you if it is only you,” one said, while the other said, “The Seed encompasses and arises from the Mind Below. How would it be otherwise?”
“What do you mean, they reject our transcendence? What is that?”
“Your species approaches the point of transcendence,” one said.
“Transcendence is the ultimate evil that has been banished,” said the other.
This was going nowhere. “Are your needs being looked after?”
