Schild’s Ladder

The toolkit had developed a Graph Description Language, a precise set of semantic conventions for talking about vendeks, Planck worms, and what would happen when they met. Given some moderately sophisticated mathematical concepts — which could be built up from elementary ideas based on integer exemplars — quantum graphs were far easier to talk about than anything as abstract and contingent as social structures.

If the Colonists weren’t going to degin to reply, though, there’d be no way of knowing if the dictionary of concepts was coming at them too quickly, or even whether the basic syntax was being understood. They manipulated vendeks with skills that no QGT theoretician would dare aspire to, but that didn’t mean they understood them in the same way. Humans had tamed and modified dozens of species of plants and animals before they’d had the slightest idea what DNA was.

Tchicaya started the program running. Without feedback along the lines of "Yes, we understood that, please skip ahead to something ten times harder," it would take four ship-days to complete. He could choose sections to omit, himself — but which ones? What concepts were obvious to a xennobe?

Mariama smiled tentatively. "They haven’t left the room yet."

"It is an alien artifact. That in itself must merit some level of attention."

"They chose the primes," she said. "They picked the language, and it was exactly what we would have picked ourselves."

Tchicaya scanned the room. "We’re missing something here." The Colonists had no faces, no eyes, and he had no way of telling what they were attending to, but they were far better positioned to observe the nucleon nugget than the banner.

He said, "They’re showing it the banner. They’re not even trying to make sense of the message themselves. They expect their meteorite to react."

Mariama was skeptical, but not dismissive. "Why would they think that way? Some kind of category error? They’re intelligent enough to figure out that both these things came from the near side, but they have no concept of inanimacy? Because…everything here is living?" She grimaced. "Are you going to stop me before I start talking complete gibberish? Whether vendeks count as living or not, random collections of them would make very bad translators between xennobe languages."

Tchicaya said, "So are the Colonists suffering from animist delusions, or is this not a random collection of nucleons?" He addressed the toolkit. "Can you make any sense of its structure? What are the odds that nuclear matter in a star or a planet could be in a state that could come through the border like this?"

"Negligible."

"So someone wrapped it? Someone prepared it deliberately?"

The toolkit said, "That’s more likely than it happening by chance."

Mariama said, "Don’t look at me. Maybe someone was running their own secret experiments, but this was not a Preservationist project."

"Then whose was it? And what has it been doing down here?" Tchicaya asked the toolkit, "Can you model its dynamics? Is there information processing going on in there?"

The toolkit was silent for a moment. "No. But there could have been, once. It looks to me like it started out as a femtomachine."

Gooseflesh rose on Tchicaya’s arms. Back on the Rindler, comparing their varied experiences of local death, Yann had definitively trumped him with tales of going nuclear.

He said, "It’s the Mimosans. They’re buried in there."

Mariama’s eyes widened. "They can’t be. The Quietener blew up in their faces, Tchicaya. How much warning would they have had?"

Tchicaya shook his head. "I don’t know how they did it, but we’ve got to look for them." He asked the toolkit, "Can you map the whole thing? Can you simulate it?" The crushed femtomachine was vastly larger than the Sarumpaet, but having started from merely nuclear densities, it would have made far less efficient use of its graphs.

The toolkit said, "I’ll try. It will take time to get the information out; the probes can only move it at a certain rate."

They waited. The mathematics lesson played on through the banner; the Colonists floated in place, patient as ever, expecting…what? The femtomachine had talked to them, once. It must have functioned long enough for its inhabitants to learn their language. Had it told them to make the signaling layer? Or had it commenced its own attempts to communicate with a sequence of primes, which they’d gone on to copy?

After almost an hour, the toolkit declared, "I have a complete model of the structure inside the Sarumpaet. Now I’m trying to repair some of the damage." It juggled connections, looking for gaps in information routes; it searched for redundancies that would allow it to reconstruct the missing pathways.

"There’s a simulation of something resembling a primate body. With standard representation hooks into the model."

"Show us," Tchicaya said.