Zeyd chuckled. “Please. This is too much for a single hour.”
“I know. It’s like being a child in a toy shop. What shall we play with first?”
The image became that of a complete Tahirian. It blinked out.
Exhilaration brought levity. “Isn’t sex more interesting than eyes?” Zeyd japed. “Did you get any idea of how they reproduce?”
“No. It’s still as baffling as those dissections of mine.” Mokoena grinned “Perhaps they’ll show us some explicit scenes.”
“Or enact them?”
She sobered. “Let’s hope for no serious misunderstandings.”
The screen retracted. The scientist emerged, approached, beckoned. He was gray-pelted, though presumably not aged, and wore a pouched belt around the torso. “What comes next, Peter?” Zeyd asked. As they began to tell individuals apart, humans had given them names, because humans need names. Zeyd could as well have put his useless question in Arabic, but Mokoena was listening.
Snaky fingers reached up to pluck at clothes. “Are we supposed to — to undress?” Zeyd exclaimed.
Again Mokoena’s teeth flashed white in the dark face. “They may be thinking about the same subject we were.”
“A demonstration?”
“I trust not!”
They looked at one another. Laughter pealed. They removed their garments. For an instant they could not hide enjoyment of what they saw. Then the four Tahirians crowded around to examine them, peering and sniffing(?), touching and feeling, gently but with unmistakable fascination, prior to putting them in the tomograph.
“Do they wonder if we’re separate species?” Zeyd speculated.
“As our good captain would say,” Mokoena answered, “viva la diferencia.”
In a vast, twilit chamber, shapes bulked, soared, curved, coiled, phantasmagoria reaching beyond sight. Some moved, some whirred. Lights danced and flashed in changeable intricacy, like fireflies or a galaxy of evanescent stars.
“Beautiful,” Dayan said, “but what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Yu replied softly. “I suspect the beauty isn’t by chance, it’s there for its own sake. We may find we have much beauty in common, we and they.”
The two were at the end of a tour. They had walked through twisting kilometers with their guides, and had stood looking and looking without understanding, but their daze came less from an overload of the body than of the mind.
The frustration in Dayan broke through. “We won’t make sense of any of this till they can explain it to us. Can they ever?” She gestured at the nearest Tahirian. “What has Esther, here, really conveyed, today or back at our camp?”
As if to respond, the native took a flat box with a screen out of her(?) pouch belt. Such units were the means of pictorial communication. Fingers danced across control surfaces. Figures appeared. Yu leaned close to see. Minutes passed. The other hosts waited patiently. Dayan quivered.
Yu straightened. “I think I have a hint.” Her voice rejoiced. “The symbols we have developed — I think one of these assemblies, at least, is a cryomagnetic facility for studying quantum resonances.”
“Don’t they already know everything about that?” Dayan objected. “These people were probably starfaring before Solomon built the First Temple.”
“I suspect this whole complex is a teaching laboratory.”
Dayan nodded. “That sounds plausible. It would be the best for us.” She paused before asking, “Do they do any actual research anymore?”
“What?”
“Would they? They gave up starfaring long ago. We may be the first newness they’ve encountered for thousands of years.”
Yu pondered. “Well, did not the physicists on Earth believe the ultimate equation has been written and everything we discover hereafter will only be solutions of it?”
Scorn replied. “They believed. What about those jetless flyers here?”
“That may be an application of principles we know in ways we have not thought of.”
“Or maybe not.” Dayan’s mettle forsook her. “You will doubtless find out,” she said wearily. “Technological tricks. The science underneath them is something else.”
Surprised, Yu said, “No, the basic laws will come first. They are far simpler.”
Dayan shook her head. “Not without a proper vocabulary, verbal and mathematical. We won’t reach that point soon, will we? Newton’s laws, yes — but the Hamiltonian, Riemannian geometry, wave functions? Not to mention Navier-Stokes, turbulence, chaos, complexity, all the subtleties. It’ll be years before we even know whether the Tahirians know something fundamental that we don’t. What shall I do meanwhile?”