Arrival: Chapter 22

  Not long after they landed, Sadhika’s scroll began vibrating and chiming.  Unless she specifically turned the feature off, urgent communication requests could override her having set it to vibrate only.   Looking at the screen she saw that it was a comm request from Wiremu, and she thought to herself that it made sense he’d feel his communication attempt urgent at the very least at this point.   With a thought she answered the call and Wiremu’s face appeared on the small screen.

  “Sadhika, what the hell?” Wiremu asked, somewhere between anger and concern.   “Your tracker shows you all the way over at Halley’s camp, and with our shuttle!  What the hell are you doing over there?”  He didn’t seem to know what to think, but he definitely seemed worried.

  Secure channel or not, Sadhika had to tell him the whole story.  She told him about being woken up in the middle of the night and about discovering that Halley had their shuttle, including how it had come to be in his possession.  Wiremu’s fog of confusion and concern burned away to outright anger.

  “Are you telling me, that Nekheny was Aset and Asari’s son, and that he stole our shuttle to go spy on them in the middle of the night!?”

  “It would appear so, yes.” Sadhika somberly answered.

  “God… damn it!” Wiremu exclaimed.  “They must have ordered him to do it, too!”
 “Yes,” Sadhika confirmed, “they found those orders on his PAN when they searched him afterwards.

  “And now he’s dead… and worse still personally killed by Halley.  This is a serious problem…” Wiremu stated grimly.  “We were already sitting on a bomb just waiting to go off… I don’t see any way we can avoid this place from totally blowing up now.   Asari was barely containable as it was, this is… catastrophic.”

  “So what do we do?” she asked him quite plainly.

  “Hold on,” Wiremu told her as he opened channels with Neil and In-Su, and all three appeared on the screen of her wrist pad.  “They’ve been listening in on your story,” he explained.

  “Oh, and In-Su,” Sadhika remarked, “I know we have more important things to worry about right now, but you should know that you were right about the indigenous.   There’s actually a bit more to the story here, but I hadn’t mentioned it yet because it wasn’t relevant to our new and more immediate problems.  The reason that Halley was so keen to protect the squiddies Nekheny was attacking was because he’d also discovered evidence of their intelligence.”

  “What kind of evidence?” In-Su asked, intrigued.

  “Well, they apparently had a similar experience to ours.  One of them fell into a tube like the one you did which led them to a room which he described quite identically as being like the one we found.  Unlike us though, they took it upon themselves to investigate right away, and they found other rooms with what they believed to be writings and drawings carved into the brick walls like… like prehistoric cave drawing on Earth but with what they believed to be some kind of writing.”

  “Really…” In-Su uttered in wonderment.  He was lost in thought about what it all meant.

  “And Neil, you’ll be interested to know that they did indeed find metal and glass components which led them to think it was evidence of some kind of rudimentary electronics technology but like Wiremu suggested, they also figured it to be tens of thousands of years old at least.”

  “That is… at once fantastic, and mortifying…” Neil managed to say.

  “I know,” Sadhika affirmed.  “But whatever capabilities they once had in that respect, they’ve long since lost them.   So… there’s no way we could have known about them before coming here, but either way it doesn’t look like the spirit of our mission protocols have really been violated.  The big mystery though, the one I can’t stop thinking about even when I really should be thinking about more pressing things… is what made them regress like that?  I wonder on both a pure curiosity level, but… as well I find myself concerned that whatever happened to them might pose a threat to us as well.”

  “Right, right…” Neil agreed, now as lost in thought as In-Su.  “It is also interesting, and telling, that they built so similar structures so far away from each other and on a different continent altogether.  It means that their civilization… or whatever, was remarkably widespread and apparently connected.”

  “Speaking of the more pressing things at hand,” Wiremu stated in an attempt to recapture their attention to the immediate threat, “we have a big fucking problem.”  He was irritated with what appeared to him to be their superfluous interests in rather trivial concerns at this point, given the serious threats to the mission which currently faced them.  “I’m sure this is all very interesting, and if we weren’t under immediate threat I’m sure I’d be almost as taken with it all as you three clearly are, but we have more immediate concerns?”  The other three nodded their acknowledgement.

  “You know…” Sadhika thoughtfully added, “I didn’t consciously excluded the information at the time, but I never told Halley that Nekheny had only hours earlier been arguing with Neil and In-Su that there was no way they could possibly be sentient or intelligent.”

  She looked back over at a crowd that seemed to be forming at the far end of the airstrip.   “Now that I think about it I’m worried that telling him so now will only help him to feel justified in his actions and his fabricated sense of moral superiority around what happened.”

  “That’s probably wise,” Wiremu reassured her. 

  “Sadhika!” Halley called out to her from across the airstrip.

  “Oh, gotta go,” she said to her colleagues.

  “Please put your PANE on and feed us the live stream,” Wiremu politely ordered.

  “Oh, okay sure, good idea,” she said as she put the glasses on and thought activated the live feed over the comm channel before hustling over to Halley.  

  As she approached, she saw that Halley and his people were having another encounter with the squiddies, now thought to perhaps be the planet’s indigenous intelligent life.   She wondered if they were coming to investigate the deaths of their fellow beings.  Halley had told Sadhika that after he’d saved the third squiddy which Nekheny was about to kill, it immediately disappeared back into the jungle.

  She wondered if the one which had survived the encounter had somehow managed to convey to the others what had happened and gotten some friends to return with it.   She suspected that there was no way for Halley and his people to be able to tell if any of the animals who were showing up now were the same one which had originally escaped.  There didn’t seem to be any distinguishing features which would differentiate one from the other, at least not to human eyes.  They weren’t all exactly the same size and shape, but that was about all the difference she could make out.  

  Halley appeared to be trying to communicate with the creatures, and despite herself Sadhika was amused with the futility of his efforts which she could immediately recognize.  He was trying to talk to it in slow and simple English as though it were just a slow and simple English speaking human.  The hand gestures he was trying to use were things which Sadhika could immediately and clearly recognize as human cultural artifacts which had no reason to translate in any way to an alien species on an alien planet.  Yet there he was making the attempt, and it amused her.  He held his hand to his chest and said his name slowly and clearly, and then tried pointing to other things and saying their English names while trying to encourage the creature to reveal its own words for the same objects.

  The creatures only appeared confused.  Sadhika was amused because she understood that there was no reason why they should even be expected to understand the concept of pointing itself.  She arrived and made her way to the front of the crowd which was watching Halley’s inept attempts, and allowed her friends watching from the primary colony site to survey the scene along with her.  

  “Fascinating,” In-Su observed in her ear.  “How I wish I was there to try…  I dare say Halley is making a fool of himself.”

  Nekheny’ body was still lying beside the bodies of the two dead squiddies but under a blanket, and Sadhika wondered if they somehow understood that Halley had helped them by preventing him from killing the third.  She figured that that alone would be a pretty solid indication of some kind of sophisticated intelligence.  It would be, she thought, a pretty difficult cognitive task to not simply see all the newcomers as equal, and jointly responsible for all of the activities engaged in by any of them.  At this point, from their perspective, what reason could there possibly be to see them as being in two different and independently operating groups?

  Sadhika moved forward and stood beside Halley to get closer to the creature.  She held her hand out to it, and with its large black eyes the creature looked at her and rippled its arm tentacles up and down a bit.  It produced a noise which sounded something like a falsetto gargle.  The texture of its skin appeared smooth but firm, like a dolphin or orca back home.  Its three thick cylinder shaped legs appeared to be quivering ever so slightly under the strain of remaining turgid and supporting the creature’s weight.  If they were in fact anything at all like the cephalopods she was familiar with back on Earth, then they were surely invertebrates and devoid of any kind of comprehensive skeletal structure.  Humans could stand and walk with relatively little energy spent because they suspended their weight on bones with ligaments.  Much of the effort which went into a human being standing upright merely consisted of small muscular corrections to keep their weight properly balanced and suspended on their solid internal structure.  Sadhika got the impression that this creature lacked a similar system and was condemned to spend much more of their energy merely keeping themselves upright as a result.

  She put her hand out a bit more and tried to appear as friendly and non-threatening as possible.  On the inside she took a moment to laugh at herself though, for being equally as ridiculous and hopeful as Halley seemed to be in his own attempts to communicate.   She silently but with good humour chastised her hypocrisy in seeming to do exactly what she had just mocked him for trying.  Then to her shock and delight, the creature tentatively reached out one of its three arm tentacles and touched her hand.  It then opened up its four small finger tentacles at the end of its arm, and grasped her hand while its antenna mounted eyes looked into hers.

  “Outstanding…” In-Su uttered in her ear.  “Please Sadhika… please come get me.”

  “Not a chance,” Sadhika said with a gentle mirthful laugh.  “I’m not going anywhere,” she explained while still holding the creature’s hands and returning its curious gaze.  “I will however, send the shuttle back to you on autopilot.”