The Spheres of Heaven

If we have a posterity, thought Bony. But the choice was pretty clear: either Liddy stayed here, or he did. And if there was trouble, he had a better chance of saving her than she did of saving him.

“You’ll need to be able to communicate with the ship, sir, if everything is to be recorded.”

“Sure, sure. Make arrangements for that while Liddy puts her suit on. You can’t expect me to do everything. And jump to it!”

Bony jumped to it — but not because Indigo had ordered him to. For Liddy’s sake he wanted the best possible link between the ship and the outside party. The easiest way was to run a cable directly from the ship’s external line tap to the portable translation unit. It would handle only voice communication, but Friday Indigo and Liddy didn’t need to see what was happening to Bony, and he would be able to watch their every move using the ship’s imaging systems.

As Bony worked he kept an eye on what was happening outside. The Limbics maintained their circle around the ship, but they had backed away and risen a couple of meters above the seabed. Apparently they had some invisible way of varying their buoyancy and could hover at any depth they chose. They had moved beyond the region flattened by the arrival of the Mood Indigo , to where the forest of spears still stood upright. One by one they drifted downward. Bubble arms stretched down, gripped, and broke off the sharp-tipped spikes. Bony watched in amazement as the long spears were lifted and then inserted, sharp end first, into the wide dark slit on the top of the globular body. It was the ultimate sword-swallowing act. Slowly and easily, centimeter after centimeter, the whole long shaft vanished.

Were they eating the pikes? What else could it possibly be? Bony recalled how the shafts had broken under his slightest touch. Like the strange ship that he and Liddy had seen on their trip to the ocean surface, the Limbics were not just alien, they were alien alien.

“Why the hell are you standing there gaping?” Friday Indigo’s voice was loud in Bony’s ears. “I’m all set to go. Do you have that communication connection ready?”

“Just a couple more minutes.” Bony bent over the translation equipment and went back to work at maximum speed. He hated the idea of Liddy going out there among those creatures. They had a soft, jellyfish appearance, and they hadn’t done anything threatening so far; but they also had had no opportunity to do so. It was his fault that Liddy was going. Why hadn’t he kept his stupid mouth shut?

He adjusted a final setting and lifted the translator. It wasn’t big, and it wasn’t heavy. Friday Indigo could have carried it easily enough without any help from Liddy. She was waiting patiently at Bony’s side with her suit helmet ready to close, and he handed the instrument to her. “Here, Liddy. Be careful. It looks safe enough out there, but it may not be. If you see anything you don’t like, don’t wait to find out what it is. Head straight back for the ship.”

He had spoken softly, but not softly enough. Friday Indigo came over to him, his boots clanking on the deck plates. “How many captains can a ship have, Rombelle?”

“One, sir.”

“And who’s the captain of the Mood Indigo ?”

“You are, sir.”

“Quite right. Don’t forget it. You don’t give orders, I do. Come on, Liddy.”

He led the way into the airlock. Liddy, carrying the translator, followed. As the inner hatch closed she gave Bony what seemed to him like a forlorn little wave. It was a long minute before he could see her again on the imaging display, dropping silently toward the seabed with Friday Indigo.

Their exit from the ship had been noticed elsewhere. The Limbics ceased their grazing on the sea-spears and drifted back toward the Mood Indigo . They formed a compact group, about five meters away from the humans.

Indigo held up one hand and said loudly, “Greetings, people of this planet. I, Friday Indigo, captain of the Terran ship Mood Indigo , and representative of all Terrans and all species of the Stellar Group, come in peace to your world.”

There was a silence, during which Bony wondered if the Limbics used sound at all as a means of communication. At last, a pair of slits opened in one of the bubble creature’s rounded sides. After a preliminary few seconds in which the openings pulsed like a bellows, Bony heard a strange mixture of hoots, whistles, gurgles, and hiccups.

Friday Indigo said, “What the hell is all that? Rombelle, I thought this thing was supposed to be a translator.”

“It is, sir. But with a language it has never heard before, the translator needs a sample before it can begin to translate.”

“So what did it do with my message?”

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t think it did anything. It needs a sample of their speech first.”

“How big a sample?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s no answer. Why didn’t you warn me, before you let me come out here and make a fool of myself? I want to know about this planet, and all I get are a bunch of nonsense sounds.”

“Just a moment, sir.” Bony could see the slits on the side of the body opening and closing again. “I believe the Limbics don’t use their mouths for speech.”

“So what are they doing, farting at us?”

“No, sir. They use gill slits. One of them is going to talk again.”

The translator produced another string of gurgles. This time it went on for almost a minute. Gradually the sounds modulated into something with the cadences of human speech.

“Can you understand that, Rombelle?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor can I. Liddy, give me that thing.” Indigo grabbed the translator from her and shook it violently. “Goddam heap of junk. It’s not working. If I could get my hands on the assholes who sold it to me, I’d gut and garrotte them. I paid a lot for this worthless piece of crap.”

It occurred to Bony that if Indigo’s speech was still being recorded, this was going to make an interesting entry in the annals of first-contact history.

“It is working, sir. The translator sounded more like human speech toward the end. Just keep talking.”

“About what? I can’t have a one-way conversation with these stupid blobs.”

The translator, unexpectedly, whistled and said “Globs of blobs.”

“Hear that, sir? Greet them again.”

“Right.” Indigo returned the translator to Liddy, struck a pose, and said, “Greetings, people of Limbo — damn it, the bubble heads surely don’t call their own planet that . It’s your fault, Rombelle, giving this place such an asinine name and getting us all thinking of it like that — anyway, where was I? I, Friday Indigo, captain of the Mood Indigo , come in peace to your world, whatever you call it, and wish you well in the name of humans and whoever. There. That should do it.”

The Limbics appeared to be listening attentively. Their spokesman’s gill slits opened, and after a few moments of silence the translator gurgled and said, “The second walking makes it new after four braces. Next water will open the lonely day for gold.”

“Damn and set fire to it, I told you it was a piece of junk. Are you going to tell me that you could understand that?”

“No, sir.”

“It was gibberish.”

“Perhaps it needs a larger sample.” But Bony was not convinced. He had seen translation machines perform successfully after unbelievably small samples of languages. Of course, that was for human languages. “Sir, I’m not sure this is going to work.”

“Of course it’s not working, you dummy. Didn’t you hear what it said?”

“I mean the translator may never work, no matter how big a language sample we give it.”

“It was sold to me as a general translator.”

“Between pairs of human languages. Maybe it even works with Tinker and Pipe-