lU-twO insisted they walk the short distance to the Impactor nearest to the camp. EUe didn't begrudge the old bird in the slightest; with age, flight put more and more strain on the body. If anything, that was one of the upsides of being a Gatherer: unless you joined in old age, as Uka-yen had done, you wouldn't live long enough to suffer the loss of your youth.
EUe got a splendid view of the ocean as they reached the top of a nearby hill; the water was maybe a minute's flight away.
Unfortunately, it made him anxious.
As the sun came out from behind a cloud, he'd been disturbed to see that there weren't any dEka-UE out in the water. The gentle giants should have been wandering just below the surface, but they weren't. On a spring or summer day, the coastal waters would have been thick with the large, vine-woven fins of dEka-UEs. The creatures' dorsal fins were festooned with symbiotic plants, and when dEka-UEs rose to the surface to feed on spawning plankton, they'd stick their fins out through the water's surface to sun their vines. dEka-UEs were so numerous in the summer months that the region's offshore waters ended up looking like they'd been invaded by flocks of standing wings.
EUe didn't like the creatures' absence. As excited as he was about getting to contact an alien species for the first time, it didn't change the fact that his instincts were screaming at him about possible threats. The possible progress that could come from first contact was matched only by the glut of ways in which things could go wrong.
"Where are the dEka-UE?" EUe asked.
lU-twO shook his head. "We don't know. When we were cleaning up the damage caused by the objects' impacts, gEl pointed out how empty the forest and shallow waters were. At first, we thought they'd just fled the fires, but, maybe…"
EUe nervously twitched his tail feathers.
"Hopefully, the aliens will know," lU-twO said.
"Assuming they aren't the cause of it," EUe replied.
"Well, Whatever the answer is, I trust that you'll be able to find it."
"R-Really?"
That caught EUe off guard.
The old bird nodded. "You have to have faith."
"I do have faith," EUe replied, "in the Gods, in the strength of the dreamshards and the Gatherers that wield them. It's…" He lowered his beak. "It's the faith in myself that I'm afraid I lack."
"I know we've only just met," lU-twO said, "but I trust you. You're a Gatherer. People like you are what make the Ecumene great. I'm sure you'll prevail."
The sea breeze rustled EUe's wings.
"Okay," lU-twO said, "enough talk."
"Right."
lU-twO walked off, and EUe followed behind him, clutching tightly to the slabboard tlE-la had given him. It bore the notes the scholars had recorded during their prior attempts to understand the Impactors.
The Impactor came into view as they went down the back side of the hill.
EUe noticed that this Impactor was smaller than many of the others. If he had to guess, perhaps it was because the Impactor had shed much of its mass by changing it into drones. Certainly, the sounds of drills, falling rocks, and other heavy machinery buzzing and thumping in the distance suggested as much.
The Impactor itself had the shape of a short, rounded triangular prism. EUe noted that its cross-section would have been an isosceles right triangle. The Impactor had struck a gently sloped hillside, with one end embedded in the earth and the other sticking up about halfway to a right angle. The extruded end had a roughly circular opening on its underside, about three body lengths above the ground. The entrance was more than wide enough for a twEfE to enter, albeit only one at a time.
lU-twO looked up at the hole before jumping up off the dirt and flying inside. EUe followed after, hovering up slowly, to avoid crashing into the old bird.
The interior was… astonishing. It immediately brought to EUe's mind the famous columnar basalt formations off ErU-hrUa's coast. The hexagonal columns had fascinated him ever since childhood, when he'd seen them on a family trip. They'd seemed like soldiers to him, standing guard against the pummeling waves, honoring their duty, even to the end. He'd had his nuptial flight over ErU-hrUa's columns, early in the morning, so that he and eUna could greet the glory of the day together, without interruption.
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eUna would have been amazed by this.
Hovering forward, EUe slowed his wingbeats almost imperceptibly just before he dropped down on the floor of the Impactor's interior.
Damn, he thought.
It was like being inside a geode. The chamber was roughly cylindrical in shape, with columnar walls the silvery color of raw natrium. It was well lit, with the light seemingly coming from both everywhere and nowhere at once. The walls weren't very reflective; at best, EUe and lU-twO's presences were little more than vague green blurs moving along the walls' base.
The chamber was filled with movement, like a forest glade. Its very geometry was alive. Dodecahedral trails rippled up the sides of the walls, like columns or trunks, while, here and there, cones of composite icosahedra jutted out. Chains of octahedra snaked out into branches that reached overhead. The components gyrated in place like pinwheels in the wind. Even the sound was arcadian: a soft soughing, like the rustle of leaves.
Checking through his second lids, EUe gasped at all the not-light. It wound its way beneath the surface of everything in sight, more ornate and dense than anything he'd ever seen, except for the Sacred Blade and the Great Dream's Door. It seemed more like a continuous blur than any work of engineering he could recognize.
Its complexity was nothing short of madness!
EUe slowly stepped forward, muttering in disbelief. "Incredible…"
He looked around the room like a flighty hatchling.
The entry hole was near the edge of the room; the rest of the chamber gave no indication of the Impactor's external shape. There was plenty of space to be had; it was bigger than EUe's nest. He figured maybe two-dozen twEfE could have stood inside with plenty of personal space to spare.
lU-twO pointed at one of the walls. "Other than this big, flat wall over here," he said, "there's no indication of an interface of any kind."
"Who do you think they were?" EUe said, struck by a poetic feeling.
"What?" lU-twO asked.
EUe looked up. "The beings that made this," he said. "Who were they? What were they like? What were their hopes?"
lU-twO sighed. "You could ask the same thing of the fallen clans, and you'd get the same answer: silence. Whoever or whatever built this, they're long gone. We back-extrapolated the Impactors' trajectory, and the first star system in that direction is nearly 20,000 lightyears away." lU-twO turned to EUe, eyes narrowing. "Right now, what matters is—"
EUe folded his wings against his back. "—You don't need to remind me." He cleared his throat. "So, what have you tried?"
"Pretty much everything we could think of." lU-twO shook his head, letting his wings and tail feathers droop behind him. "We don't even know how to interact with it. All in all, we've learned precisely four things."
"Show me."
"The first thing?" lU-twO said. "It responds to touch."
The astrophysicist walked up to the tall, broad, smooth wall opposite the entry hole, and then reached out and placed his hand on it. Once he'd touched it, metalloid material rose up around his hand in a shallow berm. Within the wall, a rosette of not-light quivered around his hand, like a halo, and when he slid his hand across the wall, both the berm and the rosette followed.
This was so cool…
"Yet it only reacts like this to living things," lU-twO added. To demonstrate, the astrophysicist pulled off his helmet and pressed it against the wall, which didn't respond to its touch in the slightest.
"The second thing?" lU-twO said. "You can leave markings in it, as if it was made of wet clay."
He dragged a finger claw from his right hand across the wall, as if to carve into it, while keeping his left hand pressed against the wall the entire time. The wall's material moved out of the way, forming a furrow.
"As long as you keep at least one part of your body in contact with the wall, it will record anything you scratch into it."
"And if you break contact?" EUe asked.
lU-twO lifted both of his hands off the wall. A moment later, the furrows vanished, leaving the wall pristine—perfectly smooth once more. "It vanishes," he said, "just like that."
"And the third thing?"
Stepping back, lU-twO stuck his hand out toward the wall and communed with lightning's will, beseeching a storm god—kerek-zUek, if EUe had to hazard a guess—with a rod-shaped web of pure not-light he conjured in his hand. lU-twO threw the web-rod at the wall almost immediately, causing a small lightning bolt to blast at the metalloid wall.
Storm-scent stung at EUe's nostrils as circular ripples emanated from the point of impact and spread across the wall, both in true-light and not-light, only to fade a moment later.
"Does it do anything?"
lU-twO shook his head. "If it has, we haven't noticed it."
"Have you tried other lEs?"
"Yes," lU-twO nodded. "Sometimes, the shapes of the ripples change. Lightning makes circular ripples. Fire makes triangular ripples. There are a couple others."
"If it recognizes different kinds of input," EUe said, "you could use that as a basis for logic gates and binary code."
The old bird chirruped in amusement. "tlE-la said the very same thing." He shook his head. "Unfortunately, it amounted to nothing. For one thing, there's not much rhyme or reason in how the thing reacts. The Impactor reacts the same way to communions of ice as it does to those of fire or wind—triangular ripples—but for some reason, electricity gets circles."
"Did you try different Gods?" EUe asked. "Perhaps it's sensitive to lE variance."
"Yes, but—"
—Suddenly, the wall erupted with wild activity. Ripples of many different shapes bubbled up from different spaces on the wall. Reticulated valleys and hills lowered and rose as they crawled across the surface, branching as they moved. The not-light moved along with it, in just as spectacular a display.
"What was that!?"
"The fourth thing," lU-twO said. He crossed his arms. "Every once in a while, it does this, usually after we've given it a good deal of input. We call it the Scream."
"Is it angry with us?" EUe asked, softly.
"I don't know," lU-twO said. He sighed. "Do you think you can crack it?"
"I don't know, but I'll have to try."
lU-twO nodded. "Good, just don't burn yourself out." He turned to leave, only to do a double take and glance back at EUe one last time. "Oh, and dinner is at sundown. We get daily shipments of nectar and other rations. I believe we're having dashcrickets tonight."
"I'm looking forward to it."
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