Centre of Gravity. Ian Douglas

Delver 2: “You occupy your world.”

      Joint: “There is no understanding.”

      A dead end. Again. Wilkerson sighed with pent-up frustration, and not a little exhaustion. He’d been at this questioning for over three hours now.

      This three-part trilogue was a defining characteristic of the Turusch. When they spoke, the speech of one overlapped the speech of its twin. The two sets of sound together generated resonating, harmonic frequencies that produced the third line, carrying a third, higher-level meaning.

      Wilkerson stared through his robotic avatar for several moments. What kind of brain could think on multiple levels at once like that? It was possible, probable, even, that the Turusch in absolute terms were far more intelligent than humans; certainly they were far quicker in their thought. But they were so completely alien that humans might never be able to understand them well.

      There is no understanding. …

      “Dr. Wilkerson? Dr. Wilkerson!”

      He blinked. A communications request light had been blinking at the periphery of his awareness for some minutes now. The voice was that of Caryl Daystrom, one of the other ONI researchers at the facility.

      “Yes, Caryl,” he said.

      “I’m sorry to interrupt, Doctor, but there’s an important message for you. Priority Alpha.”

      He sighed. “I’m coming out,” he told her. Opening the channel to the Turusch pair, he said, “We will continue this later. There must be a way for us to truly understand one another.”

      Deepest Delver 1: “We will share speech again.”

      Deepest Delver 2: “I, too, desire understanding.”

      Joint: “Your thought is shallow.”

      He made a mental note to check in with the R & D lab. “Your thought is shallow” was a frequent complaint made by the Turusch to human interrogators. Used to thinking and speaking with one another on three levels simultaneously, they appeared to be frustrated in conversations with humans, who could carry on only one line of dialogue at a time. So far as they were concerned, that was the greatest impediment to full and intelligible communications.

      To that end, the ONI research and development team was working on AI software that might be able to duplicate Turusch speech patterns. Take two AIs paired together, have them speak separate lines together with the resonant frequencies generating a third level of meaning … simple.

      Except for the fact that you really needed to think like a Turusch pair to use their mode of communication, and that was something that might well forever be beyond the reach of human minds, or even of the minds of AIs programmed by humans.

      He broke his connection with the Noter, as non-terrestrial environmental robots were known in the human research community, and found himself back at his workstation. The Turusch, with their hot and poisonous atmosphere, the intense ultraviolet, the steaming mist of sulfuric acid and sulfur droplets—all were gone. Caryl Daystrom was there, had come to him in person rather than calling him over the link.

      “An Alpha message?” he asked her.

      “A-comm, from Admiral Koenig, on the carrier America,” she replied. “I thought it might be urgent.”

      She was being humorously sarcastic. An Alpha-flagged message was by definition urgent.

      “Thank you,” he told her as she turned and left. He palmed a contact on his desk, opening an avatar comm channel. The room’s electronics projected the image of Admiral Koenig into the space where Caryl had stood a moment before. It appeared to be wearing Confederation naval blacks, with the gold filigree of a flag officer down the left side.

      It was, of course, an avatar only, an electronic image generated by a message AI, and not live.

      “Dr. Wilkerson,” the image said, “I don’t know if you’ve been looking out your window lately, but we’ve got visitors out here.”

      A data display plane opened next to the Admiral’s AI-generated electronic double, showing empty, star-scattered space behind a roughly spherical, deep black object, grainy with the high magnification used to capture the image. As he watched, the object appeared to unfold itself, then split suddenly into twelve separate sections, like segments of an orange.

      “We think it’s H’rulka,” Koenig’s voice went on, “and we think it followed a recon probe we’d deployed to Arcturus for a look-see. It destroyed seven of our warships, then began boosting out-system with an obscene acceleration.”