Chapter 20
“You know, he’s working the computer resources I gave him pretty hard,” Magnus told Telisa.
They sat on mats in the cargo hold across from Shiny, surrounded by bags of equipment and training hardware.
“Right now? I thought he was still working on making noises.”
Shiny’s small sphere module buzzed against the floor again, parodying her voice.
“Riyyyyyt Neow? Rieeeeyt Now?”
“I think he can do lots of things at once. Or at least he has computers with him that can.”
Magnus closed his eyes to check. Telisa kept her eyes on Shiny, considering the alien’s silvery equipment around the trunk of his body. She supposed that part of it did comprise a computer or an alien analog of one.
“That makes sense. It’s a natural progression from where we are with our links,” she said.
After mentioning the links, Telisa felt a loss for hers again. Once the spy program had been detected, Magnus had shut it down so he could clean out the tampering. The entity she had queried every few minutes for her entire adult life now stayed completely silent. Her mind felt empty without it. At least down in the Trilisk compound, the link had responded to her queries with polite error messages and explanations. Now she felt lonely in her own skull.
“Thaaaat makzzzz senzze,” buzzed the device.
“He must be trying to correlate this with our readable files. It’s too bad that we can’t link up to a net source without giving away our location, or we could download some language tutorials for him. He’ll have to make do with our local file cache.”
Telisa knew that the ship had large stores of knowledge that it kept to allow the most common inquiries to occur without having to ask for external data. It wasn’t surprising that there was little information about language, though, given that no one had accessed that kind of data before they had left Earth.
Telisa stood up and carefully walked forward. She pointed to herself and spoke slowly.
“Telisa.”
“Telllizzza.”
Telisa pointed at Shiny. “Shiny,” she said.
There was a pause. “Shhhhineeee,” the device whined.
Telisa pointed back at herself.
“Tellizzza.”
She smiled back at Magnus, but his eyes were closed.
“Shiny just queried the dictionary for several hundred possible phonetic spellings of Shiny and Telisa,” he said.
“He can match the phonetic breakdowns with the words? How could he know that?”
Magnus shrugged. “There must be some kind of probabilistic approach. He hears what we say… he sees what we do and tries to match them up with the images in the dictionary. Then he can make and test assumptions about the phonetic symbols and—”
“So we think it’s possible. I knew it would be difficult; he must have a lot of help, or else he’s a major brain train,” Telisa said.
“To an alien, it wouldn’t even be obvious what part of the information in the definitions represents the phonetic structure,” Magnus said. “Just figuring that out could take a while. Just converting the compressed binary data of the dictionary into characters would take us some time to work out.”
“And he had to figure out what the image data format was. And which data were images. And what it meant… I guess he could have cheated and looked at how one of the wall imagers worked,” Telisa said.
“Well, he’s ahead of where we thought. He probably made a breakthrough when we went through the names of everything in the cargo hold and showed him the imagers. A lot of the pics must have matched up with stuff in the dictionary. Not to mention all the image notations that must be in the ship’s data cache. Everything we looked at for weeks before leaving Earth is in there.”
Shiny shuffled about briefly and then faced them with twitching legs.
“Greeetingz. Hellllo.”
“Hi Shiny!” Telisa burst out. “Hello!”
“Queeeery. Question. Request.”
Magnus and Telisa exchanged amazed looks.
“Ask. I’ll answer,” Telisa said.
“Destination. End point. Terminus.”
“Uh, nowhere. I mean, unknown,” Telisa said. “We’re thinking about it. Someone may be looking for us wherever we go.”
“Request.”
“Request away, Shiny,” Telisa said.
“Destination. Allocate. Set.”
Magnus frowned. “He has a suggestion for where to go?”
“Hrm. I don’t imagine he wants to go anywhere we’re familiar with.”
“Destination. Suggestion.”
“He does have a course plot,” Magnus reported, holding his eyes closed. “It is beyond the frontier. If a human scout ship has been there, then it’s been kept secret.”
“Shiny, what’s there? Is that where you’re from?”
Shiny twitched again on one side and didn’t answer immediately.
“Why should we go there? Can you explain?”
“Destination. Safe. Haven. Sanctuary.”
Magnus frowned again. “Odd. I guess he knows that we’re being chased?”
“I don’t know. Does he mean safe for us or safe for him? Or both?”
“War. Conflict. Battle. Shiny. Safe.”
“Oh. So you will be safe there. Or us too, if whoever you’re fighting finds us.”
“Purple paste,” Magnus interjected. “What if he’s fighting the UNSF? Could they be fighting a secret war against Shiny’s race and we don’t even know about it? This could be bad. If we take him to one of his planets, we could be killed.”
“Let’s try and find out more,” Telisa said. She tried to access her link again and failed. “Dammit. I keep forgetting my link is off. Driving me nuts.”
“I can fix it up. But this is pretty distracting.”
“Of course. I understand. I didn’t mean that it was your fault.”
Magnus stood up. “Let me go take care of that now. I need to make sure that I don’t overlook anything or else they may end up in control of it again. I’m going to go into my quarters and work on it for a while.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep him company while I examine these artifacts.”
“See if you can figure out why he’s obsessed with our destination,” Magnus said.
“Will do.”
“Wheel do,” buzzed Shiny.
Magnus turned to go, but Telisa called after him.
“Magnus?”
“Yeah?”
Telisa gave a weak smile. “I really appreciate this. I appreciate everything. I know that this hasn’t gone the way we planned, but I’m glad you’re here.”
“Kinda rough for your first sortie, huh? Fifty percent casualties,” Magnus said. “I’m glad you’re here, too. You’re tough and smart—we’ll get through this just fine.”
He turned and left the bay. Telisa went over to her bags of tools and set out a small work area on the metal bay floor.
“Let’s figure out what these things are, Shiny,” she said.
“Investigate.”
“Yeah, investigate. And try not to get killed. This is why I’m making the big bucks, Shiny. Messing with artifacts can be dangerous business. Not to mention landing on forbidden planets and taking them in the first place.”
“Caution. Balance. Curiosity.”
“Hrm, yes, you understand, don’t you?”
Telisa carefully took out an artifact, a small double-wrench-shaped link of metal. It had flat panels of some dull gray material on one side, one panel on each end. A hexagonal opening lay next to the panel on one end.
Telisa found a container that would hold the artifact and set it nearby. She looked through her scanners and picked one that did a passive analysis of electromagnetic fields. She knew from previous results with Trilisk artifacts that an active scanner could trigger something inside the device, causing it to perform one of its functions. That could be good or bad, depending on what its function was and whether or not it could
hurt someone.
“Let’s start out safe,” she said.
She turned the passive scanner on and looked at the inside of the wrench object. There appeared to be two solid blocks of what were called “Trilisk ultradense cybernetic blocks” by researchers, one at each end, connected by a series of filaments. The cybernetic blocks were truly black boxes to human investigators. No one had figured out how they were built or how they worked, but each such block was theorized to be capable of receiving mental instructions from alien brains and performing tremendous amounts of computation.
“It has two ultradenses,” Telisa said. “Nothing surprising there. Standard Trilisk fare so far. Who knows what it does?”
Automatically she tried to access the scanner’s wireless infodump through her link and failed.
“Purple paste,” she mumbled.
“Violet conductive putty,” Shiny said.
Telisa chuckled. “You haven’t mastered figures of speech yet. I guess you’re not so stunningly on top of things after all. Not that I can brag. Without my link, I’m not going to be able to get at half the information these scanners can give me.”
Telisa stared at the wrench for a moment longer. Why two ultradense computing blocks for one small device? Why was it shaped like a human double wrench? A lot of Trilisk artifacts had the gray plates which could emit radiation, the supposed viewing panels on them. This tiny device had two of them, presumably one for each block of cybernetic material.
“Well, maybe I’ll just do an overview of everything we have, since my link isn’t working,” she said.
Shiny had no comment, so she put the wrench object into the foam-lined container she had chosen. She taped an ID number to the outside of the plastic box and set it aside.
“Next artifact,” she called out, as if processing a line of customers.
“Neeeext artifayct,” mimicked Shiny. “Function. Investigate. Theorize.”
Telisa smiled and took the next item out of her backpack. It was the glowing ovoid thing, like a slightly yellowish egg with a weave of silver netting wrapped onto it.
“Let’s see what’s inside this thing,” she said.
“Caution. Warning. Device. Active,” Shiny said.
“It’s on? How do you know? What is this thing, Shiny?”
Shiny didn’t answer. The legs on his twitchy side jumped again briefly. Telisa turned on the scanner and looked down at the display. The world melted and suddenly became horribly wrong, twisted into an unrecognizable form. Telisa felt that she must be dying—she couldn’t feel her body, take a breath, or see correctly. Yet there were sensations, input that she found non-sequitur for a moment. Then came the thoughts, invading her mind at first, and then blending with it.
Jangar looked out through the clear panel across a barren, rocky landscape to the far towers. His vision was highly focusable, and the far image shot forward at his will, expanding to a clear view of the distant dwellings. Now he could plainly see the devastation visited upon the surface by the methane-breathers’ assault.
His body twitched, and he stepped into a new stance to let another of his sides take a look. Jangar’s thoughts became more abstract, losing the details of the image he had seen from the original stance. This was the death site for three thousand of his race, yet Jangar bared his auditory sensors in a smile. A small price to pay for the success of the retribution fleet.
Their final revenge, to be inflicted by the assembled home fleet of Body Riken, had passed through two days before the assault here. The carapace-lacking methane-breathers still would not know of its approach. His mouth tentacles writhed at the arrogance of the creatures, to think that his race could be toyed with! Jangar’s only misgiving was that he was not among the Body’s finest, even now cutting deep into the methane worlds. The fleet would be ruthless, of course. The methane-breathers’ worlds would be totally destroyed, made useless forever.
An alarm transmission triggered in the OTHER. The enemy was attacking again! Jangar switched his focus and the OTHER took control. The view dimmed as his primary legs propelled him down the corridor, heading for the vertical translator. While the OTHER had focus, the submerged parts of him made acceleration estimates and reveled in the knowledge that revenge would be enacted.
“Five Holy Entities,” Telisa gasped. “That was high-voltage stuff!”
She cradled her head in her hands. The experience had been overwhelming, stepping into the consciousness of another being. A nonhuman creature, with a body beyond description, feelings that she had never felt before. Telisa felt faint. Without warning, she fell forward and vomited, barely managing to miss her backpack and the scanner. She lay to one side, breathing heavily while her stomach tightened and her heart pounded away.
“Shiny… that was awful… and wonderful all at the same time. It was so powerful.”
“Device. Active. Caution,” Shiny repeated.
“Yeah. Active. No kidding,” she said.
“Partial view. Telisa possess two parts in three.”
“What? You mean the other? That thing had three parts, first one was looking out the window and I could see every tiny detail, enough to make my head hurt. Then he stepped… turned, or something, and just started thinking about what it all meant, and the details became more distant. But there was some alarm or something, then the whole recording washed out, like I was feeling it all secondhand.”
“Two parts in three. Brain sections. Telisa with two. Trilisk with three.”
“Uh, wow. I guess our name for them was better than we realized. We call them Trilisks because the discoverer of the initial ruin decided that they must have been trilaterally symmetrical.”
“Yes. Trilisk, three parts. Three stances. Three facings. Three minds.”
“Yet I could feel the others, some kind of underlying togetherness… like the way my two hemispheres are connected!”
“Similar. Analog. Comparable.”
“Well, what about you? You could understand the Other? How many lobes do you have?”
“Twenty.”
“What! No way! Twenty… hey, you have forty legs?”
“Yes. Twenty nodes along central connection. Analog of human spinal cord. Twenty lobes. Generic. Non-specialized.”
“Generic? They each do the same tasks equally well? Wow. But the Trilisk brains were super specialized… more so than human left and right hemispheres, I think. One did way more abstract thought than the first one. But the Other… I don’t even know what it could be specialized to do.”
“Yes. Trilisk specialized. Telisa brain partially specialized. Right lobe, left lobe. Alien. Fascinating.”
“Yeah. Fascinating is an understatement.”