‘Play, yes. Their assaying of this world has evidently been very extensive, and it’s hard to imagine a few random ore samples given them by uneducated kids can be of any real value. It’s a chink of hope we might somehow get through to them. And that they’re not evil. Not if they can be playful.’
‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Even the conquistadors loved their children, Dr Bowring. Even the Nazis, probably.’
‘True enough. Anyhow that’s as far as we’ve got. We have one of the SETI crowd here who’s been trying to get them to recognize prime numbers in symbols, heaps of stones. You know the kind of thing: mathematics is supposedly the universal language. The beetles just walk away.’
Abrahams laughed. ‘I’d walk away if you started counting out prime numbers to me. How boring …’
Jha leaned over the beetle on its table, a facemask over her mouth. The dissection had progressed a lot since Jha had last seen the specimen, but in the body’s interior she made out nothing but a kind of spongy mass, undifferentiated. ‘I’m just a lowly plant biologist, but even I can see we’re lacking in internal structure here. No obvious organs, no skeleton.’
Bowring shrugged. ‘We think the ceramic shell acts as a kind of exoskeleton, to support the weight. And there is a lot of weight; that spongy stuff is very high density. We’ve run various scans – MRI, sonar. There is structure in there, but it’s a kind of network with identifiable nodes, not a collection of organs like the human. The same kind of structure extends to the head, which seems to be more a sensor pod than a brain pan.’ He glanced at Abrahams. ‘Which could be significant. The human skull has grown over our evolutionary history, but even so there’s only so much room in there – and cerebral functionality has to share space with extensive areas devoted to sight processing, for instance.’
‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Whereas if these creatures have their brains in their stomachs, so to speak—’
‘Room to grow. And if they are potentially very smart, they’re also very capable. Take a look at this.’ Bowring picked up a tablet, which showed an image of a bug’s manipulator arm. He swiped the image to magnify a section.
Jha saw that the ‘limbs’ terminated with splits, into twig-like appendages like fingers. But the ‘fingers’ bifurcated too, into still finer manipulators.
‘It goes on down to the nano scale,’ Bowring said. ‘We think these creatures could manipulate molecules.’
Abrahams said, ‘You call it a “creature”. We return to the point. Is it a creature, though? Is it biological?’
‘As Commander Jha said, opinion is divided on that. Animal or robot? My own theory, for what it’s worth, is that this is some kind of very advanced cyborg. And a very old design, to the point where the technology and the biology have merged, seamlessly. The manipulator substructures certainly look engineered. On the other hand the basic body plan looks like a throwback to some biological origin, to me. I mean, it’s not efficient. Why not have the whole body as a kind of modular robot? That way you could split off substructures, merge whole bodies to form larger structures … Certainly the capability to engineer on a molecular scale and upward gives them enormous manipulative power. Dr Abrahams, I think a beetle could make anything from almost any ingredient, given the right elemental composition.’
‘Including a copy of itself?’
‘Yes. We know these things have – reproduced.’
‘Using locally sourced materials – beetles grown from the substance of this world. I found that out myself. This is a von Neumann replicator, then. A machine capable of reproducing.’
‘Among other capabilities, yes. And when they combine they are clearly capable of tremendous feats, like their globe-spanning viaducts.’
‘But these creatures don’t come from Earth at all,’ Abrahams said. ‘I mean, from any of the worlds of the Long Earth.’
‘Right,’ Bowring said grimly. ‘And of course our best evidence for an extraterrestrial origin—’
‘Is the Planetarium.’
And to get there, to travel from the mundanity of New Springfield into the utterly unknown, the highly trained and heavily armed crew of a Navy twain had to submit to being stepped over hand in hand by local children, just as had Lobsang and Agnes from the beginning. Children who had figured out how to do this by themselves years ago.
40
MARGARITA JHA HAD stood beneath this alien sky several times since the twain’s arrival here at New Springfield. She’d never got used to it, and never expected to. The party of marines and scientists who were working here in the Planetarium, at a small base camp of tents and trestle tables – and a gun emplacement – were a welcome dose of the mundane. There was even a place for the local kids, the vital stepping link, with food and drink and books to read, even toys.
Once the party had stepped through, Colonel Jennifer Wang, who was in charge here, approached Jha with a brisk nod. Wang, the commander of the Cowley’s small marine detachment, wore body armour and a facemask, though nobody had any proof that the latter was necessary; the Planetarium air was benign. ‘Commander Jha.’