It took a moment, and then her eyes fluttered open.
“Jane,” he said. “Move us about a hundred miles over and drop us into a closer orbit.”
She looked at him quizzically, then must have decided to trust him because she asked nothing. She closed her eyes again, as Firequencher shouted from the control room, “She did it! We moved!”
Miro, drifted back to the others. “Now I know they can’t do that,” he said. Sure enough, his display now reported that the alien ships were no longer approaching, but rather were poised warily a dozen miles off in three — no, four now — directions. “Got us nicely framed in a tetrahedron,” said Miro.
“Well, now they know that we didn’t succumb to their die-happy drug,” said Quara.
“But we’re no closer to understanding them than we were before.”
“That’s because,” said Miro, “we’re so stupid.”
“Self-vilification won’t help us now,” said Quara, “even if in your case it happens to be true.”
“Quara,” said Ela sharply.
“It was a joke, dammit!” said Quara. “Can’t a girl tease her big brother?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Miro dryly. “You’re such a tease.”
“What did you mean by saying we’re stupid?” said Firequencher.
“We’ll never decipher their language,” said Miro, “because it’s not a language. It’s a set of biological commands. They don’t talk. They don’t abstract. They just make molecules that do things to each other. It’s as if the human vocabulary consisted of bricks and sandwiches. Throw a brick or give a sandwich, punish or reward. If they have abstract thoughts we’re not going to get them through reading these molecules.”
“I find it hard to believe that a species with no abstract language could possibly create spaceships like those out there,” said Quara scornfully. “And they broadcast these molecules the way we broadcast vids and voices.”
“What if they all have organs inside their bodies that directly translate molecular messages into chemicals or physical structures? Then they could –”
“You’re missing my point,” insisted Quara. “You don’t build up a fund of common knowledge by throwing bricks and sharing sandwiches. They need language in order to store information outside their bodies so that they can pass knowledge from person to person, generation after generation. You don’t get out into space or make broadcasts using the electromagnetic spectrum on the basis of what one person can be persuaded to do with a brick.”
“She’s probably right,” said Ela.
“So maybe parts of the molecular messages they send are memory sets,” said Miro. “Again, not a language — it stimulates the brain to ‘remember’ things that the sender experienced but the receiver did not.”
“Listen, whether you’re right or not,” said Firequencher, “we have to keep trying to decode the language.”
“If I’m right, we’re wasting our time,” said Miro.
“Exactly,” said Firequencher.
“Oh,” said Miro. Firequencher’s point was well taken. If Miro was right, their whole mission was useless anyway — they had already failed. So they had to continue to act as if Miro was wrong and the language could be decoded, because if it couldn’t, there was nothing they could do anyway.
And yet …
“We’re forgetting something,” said Miro.
“I’m not,” said Quara.
“Jane. She was created because the hive queens built a bridge between species.”
“Between humans and hive queens, not between unknown virus-spewing aliens and humans,” said Quara.
But Ela was interested. “The human way of communication — speech between equals — that was surely as foreign to the hive queens as this molecular language is to us. Maybe Jane can find some way to connect to them philotically.”
“Mind-reading?” said Quara. “Remember, we don’t have a bridge.”
“It all depends,” said Miro, “on how they deal with philotic connections. The Hive Queen talks all the time to Human, right? Because the fathertrees and the hive queens already both use philotic links to communicate. They speak mind to mind, without the intervention of language. And they’re no more biologically similar than hive queens and humans are.”
Ela nodded thoughtfully. “Jane can’t try anything like this now, not till the whole issue of the Congress fleet is resolved. But once she’s free to return her attention to us, she can try, at least, to contact these … people directly.”