“Does he feel how our curiosity burns?” Zeyd asked.
“I think curiosity must be universal to intelligence,” Mokoena replied, “though it may not always express itself in the same ways.”
The laboratory(?) in which they ended was long and wide, a hemiellipsoid out of which poured illumination. Several benches (?) were vaguely familiar, though no drawers were visible; did they extrude on command? The paraphernalia on top and standing elsewhere was unrecognizable.
Three more Tahirians waited. All had been in the camp from time to time. They gave their guests a few minutes to look around. Thereupon one stepped forward. His(?) leaf-mane waved. He uttered a few piping notes. Arms and tentacular fingers wove through a series of gestures. A sweet smell drifted into air that otherwise hung warm and quiet.
“A polite greeting?” Mokoena hazarded.
Zeyd bowed. “Salaam,” he responded. His companion raised a palm.
The being trotted off. They followed. He stopped between tall cabinet-shaped devices on three sides of a square. An associate operated controls. A screen of some kind slid out to make the fourth side.
A three-dimensional image of the scientist appeared in it. “Holographic projection,” Zeyd muttered. “Limatza — why?”
Skin vanished from the image. The watchers beheld muscles, unlike theirs but serving the same purposes. After a minute this was gone and they saw deeper layers, vessels through which ran fluid, pale streaks of a solid material. . . . “Tomographic fluoroscopy,” Zeyd said unevenly. “Why don’t they just show us anatomical models?”
“I expect they wish to use it on us, and are demonstrating it’s safe,” Mokoena opined.
“Allah akbar! That skeleton — modular trusses —”
Mokoena gasped. She had dissected small animals that Ruszek and Brent shot. This, though, was a different line of evolution, even a different phylum, if “phylum” meant anything here.
“See, see,” she breathed. The view moved inward. “That big organ, does it do the work of our heart and lungs? It could be how they inhale and exhale, in spite of the rigid body —”
“Ionic and osmotic pumps?”
“Oh, Selim, revelation!” She caught his hand and clung.
“Well, they have bowels,” he said, as if prosaic words could fend off bewilderment. “What those other things are —”
The view went back outward, step by step. The humans focused their attention on the head. A brain was identifiable, however peculiar its form. Instead of teeth, convoluted bone ridges extended from the flesh of the jaws, presumably regenerating continuously. The fernlike shapes of four tonguelets, two above and two below, suggested they were chemosensors, perhaps among other functions. Indeed, Tahirians generally kept their mouths partly open.
“What do the antennae do?” puzzled Zeyd.
“I’d like to know more about the eyes, too,” Mokoena said. “So far we’ve only guessed the inner pair is chiefly for day vision, the outer for night.”
“And for peripheral.”
She glanced at him before her gaze jumped back to the screen. “Yes, of course, but why do you make it sound so important?”
“This was a dangerous world in the past. Life developed ways to cope with it.”
“Every world is dangerous.”
Zeyd spoke in a rapid monotone. They both kept watching the screen. “Here more than most. Tim and I were talking about it a few days ago. He pointed out that a planet this size must go through bouts of enormous volcanic and seismic activity, with radical effects on climates. The core and spin give it a strong magnetic field, but the field will vary more than Earth’s and in some geological periods the background count goes high. The moon is too small to stabilize the axial tilt, like ours. Chaotic variations must cause still more ecological disasters. I said to Tim that all this must have bred many different biomes. Probably ancestral Tahirians often wandered into territories where animals and plants were unknown to them. They needed a wide sensory field.”
“And range? I hope you can explain the biochemistry of those eyes to me.”
“What?”
“I’ve been noticing things. Don’t you remember that wall panel in the aircar? An inscription on it, slashes and squiggles and — Red on red. Very hard to read. It has to be easy for them. That implies better color vision than ours. More than three receptors, I would guess. Not incredible. Shrimp on Earth have seven. If ‘receptors’ is the word I want.”