<<Any luck yet, Laotyn?>>
Rygiae’s tone was joking, almost teasing, but Laotyn kept himself a staid, sober ash-colour.
<<Not yet,>> he answered, perfectly seriously. <<But maybe today.>>
Rygiae just laughed. <<Good luck!>> xe chuckled. <<I can’t wait for the day when you tell the Elders you’ve found actual life on New Home.>>
And then he was zipping out through the chamber’s exit, and Laotyn just exhaled a body-full of gases and propelled himself onwards toward his pod. Thank the ancestors he didn’t share a shift with Rygiae. He wouldn’t be able to maintain the patience to deal with that excuse for humour on a regular basis.
With a muttered greeting to Lyia, he slipped straight into his pod and plugged in. Forming the required sixteen tendrils was as easy now as flying; sometimes outside of work he would lose his concentration for a moment and then realise he had accidentally produced them, sixteen identical shapes. And he would have to shake himself and force relaxation to return.
But there was no question of that now. Not now that he was here, in the one place that truly mattered. The place where he came alive.
The dim pulsing glow of the planet was now familiar to him. It only occurred in the non-liquid sections of the planet’s surface, and then only for a few hours at a time. It was strongest in one spot, on the largest of the non-liquid masses — and, strangely, down at the very lowest point of the atmosphere, right against the planet’s core. It was bizarre: on Home all the lifeforms had evolved in the upper echelons of the stratosphere, where the gas-winds blew strongest. Only the algae had scraped out a form of life on the surface of the planet’s core, and algae wouldn’t be strong enough to light up Laotyn’s receptors like this.
But with every day, the Taelo grew closer, and the glow of the planet grew brighter. And now that they were only a matter of weeks away from Issia, Laotyn could hear it.
Days slipped by. Laotyn had never been very good at taking his mandated rest periods — why would he want to, when everything good in the future of the people was there for the watching? — but now they vanished entirely. He traded shifts, called in favours, and when nothing else worked, resorted to begging. He had to watch Issia and its planet: especially its planet. It was so bright now. Only a candle flame compared to the roar of the Taelo, but contrasted with the endless dark they had travelled through — it was like starlight. Weak and flickering, but there.
When he listened – when he pushed all of his heightened senses in that direction and tried to listen to whatever down there – he heard something that was almost, almost the buzzing baseline of a sentient mind. There were no words, no colours, no thoughts; just a deep, persistent buzz that seemed to hint that something somewhere down there was thinking.
There was still a pattern to it. Strongest in one place, strongest when Issia was on the other side of the planet from that spot. Laotyn watched Issa’s revolutions, waiting impatiently for Issia to leave so that the barely audible crackle would blossom forth into that telltale buzz once more.
<<Laotyn, I’m getting a bit worried,>> Lyia said, through the closed door of his pod. <<When was the last time you photosynthesised? When did you last visit the algae pools?>>
He didn’t answer her. He had no time. Every fibre of his being was focused in on the planet. Waiting, waiting, agonised waiting for he hardly knew what.
And then, when it finally happened, Laotyn almost burst from the shock of it.
A spike in the hum. A bulge, a hump — a flash, almost. A nearly audible whisper.
Quivering in excitement, Laotyn manipulated the controls and pushed his augmented perception to its limits. Outside of his own body, looking down at the surface of Issia’s planet from the upper reaches of its own atmosphere. The buzz of the planet’s life was at its zenith. He was closer than he had ever been, and that buzz suddenly crescendoed into a muted roar — and Laotyn suddenly saw.
There were minds down there, on the surface of that planet.
He could feel them. Untold multitudes of them, mumbling and near-silent, like nascent embryos growing inside a parent before Merging.
Somehow, life had evolved down there, in a biome unimaginably different from the only sentient species known heretofore. The pure, gaseous regions of Issia’s planet were colourless blanks, but down on the surface — there they were. Minds growing amid the muck, like so many plants.
Half-formed thoughts crested and broke like waves, an ocean of them. All so quiet as to barely be audible. But the sheer volume of them…Laotyn was adrift, floating on a sea of whispers and stars.
As he pushed his receptors further still, tuning in to the strange frequency these beings seemed to operate on, fuzzy images wafted in and out of view. Strange creatures, utterly foreign — one fixed colour each, their moods a mystery. And worse than that, their shape…fixed, solid, rigid as a rock. They moved in set, strange ways, with no give or fluidity. Strange holes and decorations adorned their surfaces, and as Laotyn watched these creatures through the mirror of their own thoughts, he trembled.
After all this time. After all the searching that the people had done, in the halcyon days of their past, when spacefarers had been explorers and heroes. They had searched the universe for kindred spirits — for any spirits — and every expedition had returned with nothing to show for it. Dead worlds, no hint that life had ever existed or ever would. Failure after failure, and the people had turned their focus inward again. They had concluded they were alone.
For that to be proven wrong now, after the extinction event, after Home was gone — for the new species to inhabit the very world that the people hoped to colonise — there was a dreadful sort of irony in it all.
They had come seeking a new world, but it was already occupied.
And how would the people share with a species so alien, so other?
Laotyn knew that he should disconnect. That he needed to go straight to Lyia — no, straight to the Council of Elders — he needed to warn everyone. This was a discovery that it would shake the Taleo to its very foundations.
Rationally, he knew all that, but still he lingered. He listened to the fragmented thoughts of the creatures down below, still so many months distant from him, and he tried to imagine what their life would be like.