“What the hell is that?” Yeager bellowed as the deep thrumming sound reverberated through
Deirdre clapped her hands over her ears. The sound was painful.
Dorn ran his fingers across the electronic keyboard of his main console. “Turning off the sonar and the exterior microphones,” he muttered.
Deirdre could barely hear him through the overwhelming blare. The sound undulated through the bridge, rising and falling, an impossibly deep bass pulsation that rattled the bones and shook the insides of the four humans. Deirdre felt as if her lungs were about to burst.
Corvus pointed a quavering finger at Dorn’s central screen. Deirdre saw his lips moving but she couldn’t make out his words. Looking at the screen, she saw that the sharks were swimming away as fast as they could, fleeing the overpowering sound.
“It’s coming from the leviathans,” Deirdre said, barely able to hear her own voice. She felt as if her head was stuffed with thick goo, as if she were going deaf.
Max was wincing with pain, Andy had clamped his hands over his ears and was shaking his head in misery. Dorn remained stolidly at his post before the main control console. The noise didn’t seem to be affecting him as much as the others, Deirdre thought.
Abruptly the sound shut off. Deirdre felt it rather than heard it. The pressure inside her head suddenly disappeared, although her ears were throbbing with the pain of it.
“They’re gone,” Dorn said. She heard his perfluorocarbon-deepened voice as if through a pair of pillows stuffed against her ears.
The sharks had left the area. Dorn’s central screen showed no sign of them, only the two massive leviathans. Deirdre read the numbers from the ranging laser displayed across the bottom of the screen: The creatures were twelve kilometers away, but still so huge that they loomed like a pair of giant monsters.
“They drove the sharks away,” Corvus said, with awe in his voice.
Max Yeager rubbed at the bridge of his nose with both index fingers. “Damned near split my skull,” he muttered.
Their voices were still muffled in Deirdre’s ears, but she could hear them well enough now.
Dorn said, “They’re coming closer.”
Leviathan and its replicate edged closer to the alien. Strange, thought Leviathan, the replicate does exactly what we do. Then it thought, Of course. It is us. A duplicate of us. Or are we a duplicate of it? Which of us is the original, which the replicate?
It didn’t matter. In time the two leviathans would change as they faced different life experiences. It is all part of the Symmetry, Leviathan told itself. We begin as a unity but diverge as we learn and grow.
The alien seemed quiescent now. It floated before them, inert and seeming almost dead except for the narrow beam of light that lanced from its skin and splashed against the hides of the two leviathans, first one and then the other.
It’s not dead, Leviathan realized. But it is strangely dark.
It was perfectly spherical, although studded with finlike appendages, Leviathan’s sensor parts reported. Its skin was hard, unyielding; it echoed back the sound waves the sensors beamed at it with no absorption at all.
It must be intelligent, Leviathan thought. It attacked the darters when we were dissociated and vulnerable. It protected us. Why?
Leviathan flashed questions to the alien. Who are you? Why are you here?
The alien remained dark, except for that one narrow beam of light.
“I wish we had bigger screens,” Deirdre said.
Yeager nodded, his eyes fastened on Dorn’s central display as the leviathans swam closer. “I should have plastered the whole interior bulkhead with screens,” he said.
The gigantic creatures were coming so close that the screens could no longer show all of their enormous bulk. Deirdre saw that their massive bodies were studded with oarlike appendages. And eyes! Those must be eyes, she realized. Hundreds of them running the length of their bodies. And all of them looking at us. It made her blood run cold.
Suddenly the flanks of both leviathans lit up with a display of bright colors: red, yellow, green, bright periwinkle blue.
“Wow!” Corvus goggled at their display.
“That’s not false color from the visual subprogram,” Yeager shouted. “That’s real!”
“Activating the visual cameras,” Dorn said. Even his voice trembled a little.
The images shifted, changed, colors coming and going, shapes altering, transforming before their staring eyes.
“They’re showing off for us,” Corvus said.
Deirdre suddenly understood what was happening. “No,” she said, feeling a trembling excitement. “They’re trying to talk to us!”
COMMUNICATION
“Talk to us?” Yeager asked, incredulous.
“That’s the way they communicate with each other,” Deirdre said. “Visually. Through images.”
“That’s why we have the display panels on the outer hull, isn’t it?” Corvus said.
“Yeah,” Yeager admitted. Somewhat grudgingly, Deirdre thought. “But are those images supposed to mean something? They look like gibberish to me.”
“You don’t speak Jovian, Max,” said Corvus.
“Should I light up the panels?” Dorn asked.
“Yes,” said Deirdre. “And could you give me control of them on my console? Please?”
“Done.”
Deirdre had to enlarge the view from the outside cameras to see the entire display flashing from the leviathans’ flanks. With trembling fingers she traced an outline of the huge creatures and displayed it on the ship’s light panels.
Both leviathans immediately changed the images they were displaying. The colored shapes flickering across their flanks turned to a mixture of various shades of yellow and pale lavender.
“Look!” Deirdre shouted. “We’ve made contact with them!”
Max Yeager, leaning over her shoulder, said sourly, “Contact my hairy butt. They’re just flashing colors, that’s all.”
“But it must mean something!” Deirdre insisted.
“Yes,” said Dorn. “But what?”
Leviathan could see that the alien was flashing images, but they made no sense. Mere gibberish. Its replicate swam around the strange spherical creature, asking it where it came from, why had it come to their domain. Leviathan was trying to thank it for keeping the darters at bay while it was budding.
The alien obviously was trying to picture something for them, but its images made no sense. Splashes of color without form, without inner structure, without meaning.
Bring it to the Elders, the replicate suggested just as Leviathan itself thought of that possibility. But how can
