Chapter One ~ The Meaning of Art

As we scanned them in a systemic fashion, the paintings were even more fantastical. The animals were nearly always solitary, but some of them were unmistakably mammoths and cave bears. "What are they doing here? Does anyone have an answer for that?"

Perhaps because I had a humanities training, I approached the question differently than the rest. Mei was meticulously gathering evidence, Zeid was making careful note of the locations and evidence of older paintings that had been covered. Divya was all for starting up the machines' ape-vivisection program again, and Mahek and Tabish seemed to shrug the startling find off as yet one more strange element of an odd planet. I wasn't sure they really understood how profound the questions were that immediately arose as soon as the paintings were discovered.

Zeid and I would have never seen them on our own, but as soon as Mei's light struck them, we found they extended for dozens of metres. Always in the dark, and higher than an ape could reach. "Cave people," I said out loud. "Was that the colonization plan?"

"And where would someone get cave people who knew what a mammoth looked like?"

Divya was right. There was no explanation.

"I think the apes are more intelligent than we gave them credit for. And," Divya paused as if for dramatic effect, "these animals must exist on Eliam."

"That's a jump," Zeid argued. "They might have seen a picture and are trying to imitate it."

"We ever find out where they sleep?"

"No," Divya answered me. "We decided on a policy of non-interference, remember?"

I'd been the most outspoken. I thought the apes should be able to live their lives without being harassed by more robots from the skies. Now the question of how much they knew was a crucial one and we didn't know where to find them. "No signs of habitation here." I looked at the level floor of the cave.

"I'd guess they stay in the jungle, most like home. I bet they make temporary nests like orangutans."

I ignored Zeid. Of course he had an opinion, we all did. But there was as much chance that he was right about where the apes were as he would be about where they found the models for ice age animals.

"Does this even change anything?" Tabish asked. "It's a curious find, don't get me wrong, but we shouldn't tie ourselves into knots about what it means. Maybe this was the result of the Hive's humour, that they designed machines which imitated Lascaux."

I did some digging. That was the name that swam to the top of my mind as well. Divya was more interested, and in her lengthy way, she didn't mind telling us why.

Even while she talked, Zeid and I wrapped up the recording. They'd seen the first run, but when we got more serious and took images of the entire back wall, we scanned it in visible as well as infrared. Mei was right, some of the pigments were phosphorescent in the low light of the cave. She said that some of the paints were probably reacting to the energy sources, but the pictures that came to light showed a three dimensional effect when viewed in both spectrums.

I stood looking over the canopy while I thought about it, pouring through the images, until it struck me. "The apes can see into the infrared range. That's why the active pigments. They can paint depth by using that."

"Makes sense," Zeid agreed. He was at the far eastern edge of the cave, where there were no paintings at all, but more signs of flooding.

"This might not be the safest place." Zeid beckoned and I went to join him. "You see the back of the cave has debris piled against it?"

I went closer, excited at the thought of finding the artists' lair, but it was merely twigs and leaves from the forest above the cavern. "Most of this is old." I picked up a log which fell apart in my hands. "I didn't even squeeze it. Been here too long."

"I've dated the paintings," Mei announced. "Spectrograph on the paint. No more than fifty years."

"I'm not even sure what that would mean." I kicked the pile of dried brush and it fell into dust. "I'm not even sure that makes sense. They would have to send the probe around the time of World Builder's first project. Or someone like Vince from Derian and his people did it."

"This has all the markers of the Corps," Zeid argued. "Like them to think ahead. I'll give them that. But how long and the why doesn't matter. I think we should leave a few sensors here, keep an eye open for the apes, and see what we discover when they find we're here too."

"There is theoretically time," Mahek was almost whispering. "A self-replicating colony. Send it as a burst of code catching up with a solar sail machine, like the early probes to Alpha Centauri. Then they do the work when they arrive. Complete with updates from the Corps."

None of us were convinced, but we didn't have a better explanation. Zeid was all for running into the jungle to find the larger lifeforms, but Divya denied that any could be roaming around without us knowing.

"Maybe they're hiding," Zeid argued. "With that many probes coming in, I wouldn't wonder."

"The other planets," I suddenly thought. "We know that Alpha Three has liquid water. It's just a little colder than here. What if the apes come from there, and the paintings represent their history?"

"That leaves us with an even bigger problem of intelligent apes moving around in the solar system," Divya argued.

There was no easy explanation. If I'd found cave paintings in Illinois, I would have shrugged that early Indigenous people were likely responsible. But now that we suspected that the apes were the painters, all bets were off. Alpha Three might be littered with massive ice-age life seeded by the same machines which had presumably made the apes.

Or the apes might not be the simple forest dwellers we originally thought they were, and instead had been studying us since we landed. Even now they might be planning their attack. It was unsettling, how little we knew. They could also be a generally stupid species that occasionally gave birth to someone brilliant, like a Leonardo da Vinci of the ape world. Or the place had been settled by people who'd been supplanted by apes, or whose culture had been subsumed by the disaster at the Deccan Traps. The apes might have been their pets.

I immediately thought about Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes. In his horrifying vision of the future the astronauts who return to Earth discover that humanity has died out and left behind their pets. The great apes, at a loss for how to live without their masters, and having long since lost their own culture, have taken over the human positions. But tragically, the apes are merely imitating and have no idea how to operate in the human world. They spend their time misusing and gradually breaking machinery without the skills or intelligence to fix it. They go to church and perform rituals with no sense of what it all means, just as they pretend to read books-because that's what they'd seen humans doing-even though they have no idea how to read or what the content the book might mean.

I couldn't stop thinking about worse and worse implications of finding apes capable of art, but when I said that to Mei she told me to get some perspective.

"We know nothing, but we haven't been attacked. The ape realized you were helping him. This could have been a pile of bones from other murdered apes, and the forest below heaving with homicide. Be happy that all we found was art."

"I don't like the idea that we were so wrong. I feel like we're peeling an onion, and that each molecule-thick layer uncovers even less."

"That doesn't even make any sense," Zeid said. "I say we go looking for mammoths. Now that we know they're here, they shouldn't be too difficult to find."

"In the meantime . . ." Tabish said leadingly.

"This is a good place." Zeid gestured at the rock around him. "Slightly higher. The water is coming in through that hole if the dripping is any indication." He pointed. I'd seen the area too, where the largest piles of debris had fallen.

"I sent a processor," Mei declared. "You should have it in a few cycles."

"So you knew it was a good location?" I asked.

"Either way, we would need to have a processor somewhere in this area. Even if we dug a hole to tuck it into."

"We really have to figure out what the apes are doing, Zeid. This is too crazy."

"That's more my department," Divya answered. "I'll send more probes. We'll figure it out."

Zeid switched to a private channel. "A few more of these processors. Mahek has the satellites in place. She's adding more capacity all the time."

"What's the end goal, Zeid? Are we going to be installing processors in orbit too?"

"That would make sense. Hopefully we can automate that, so that we're not sending anyone up and down with those launches."

Since Mahek wasn't carrying personnel, and making multiple launches carrying rather primitive CubeSats, she wasn't worried about safe rocketry. Her failure rate was one in four so she angled her launches over the Tethys. She claimed they were slowly improving, but no one seemed to worry too much about it. On Earth the losses would have been grounds to shut down the program, fire a bunch of people and make an environmental assessment. On Eliam, we couldn't even detect whether we'd made any difference in the local ecosystem. The sea creatures we'd seen before hadn't returned, but we might have arrived during a lull in their migration. We had too little information to work with. That was part of why we needed the disposable satellite program Mahek had put into place.

"She can automate that. And I'm sure factories in orbit spinning out processors and solar capacity is somewhere on Tabish's list. This is feeling too much like life on Earth. But Zeid, don't you feel we should just build something more robust?" I struck the side of my chassis. "And wander off into the woods? Small wonder we never found mammoths or whatever. We've never gone any more than a day or two from home."

"And your proposal?"

"Expand the drone program. Cover the planet. Get an idea of what's going on. Remember that Jorge found several anomalies before the Deccan Traps. We only landed here because of the Tethys. That and resources."

"I'd hate to become a mechanical Bedouin only to have a circuit blow or a joint wear out. And if Tabish is right. If Jorge is coming back and he's mad as hell that we're doing our own thing . . ."

He didn't continue the thought but I felt the same way. We were preparing for an eventuality that might never arrive. If we didn't, then we were fools, and if we spent several lifetimes building capacity for a war that we never lived to see, then we were also fools.

"Let's get this installed." I could hear the drone's arrival. "Then hike back. Maybe take a detour."

Zeid laughed. He knew exactly what I was going to propose. We'd worked together for years now, ship time, and he was starting to predict my suggestions just as much as I was his. That wasn't true of the rest of them, now that I thought of it. I'd suspected that Mahek and Tabish were predictable, as if I knew each decision they would make in any given circumstance, but now I wondered if that was true. It was a story I told myself so that I wouldn't waste time trying to sort their signal from the noise. Divya was unpredictable. She seemed so logical by times and others she was so emotionally bound to her ideas that she became intractable.

I wasn't so logical myself, now that I thought about it. There was nothing holding me in the Traps. I could have left any time after we substantiated into a chassis. Some test runs, repairs, a few spare parts, and I could have left the others. In fact, I was reluctant, for all my talk. The jungle of Eliam was daunting, and I hadn't spent enough time under the trees for it to seem like a human-sized place. Maybe I just need to build bigger chassis. To match my new environment.

Zeid was just as happy to have me lost in my thoughts. When he wanted help bolting the processor into place, and setting up the power supply, I helped but didn't interfere. He was the worker in the colony, I sometimes thought. The war and then the Earthquake had taught him that life was struggle, while in my family, I'd learned that struggle didn't pay. My grandfather had blown half his hand off like a fool, just because he was dreaming of a war that was long over. As a family, we'd taken that lesson to heart. He had more of a chance of raising revolutionaries if he'd stayed in the house and kept the old stories about the genocide alive. As it was, we merely remembered him as an old man who went crazy in the basement, and the black soot on the ceiling was a visceral reminder that he'd almost ended us all.

He represented a cautionary tale. Go along, work toward an attainable goal, and try not to make any major changes. Zeid had lost the family that would have given him that type of advice. In their absence he'd had to build something himself, and if he'd leaned too far toward fulfilling other's goals, then none could blame him. At least he was a good citizen.

"You've been quiet for a while," he remarked.

"Thinking about what to do."

"Angle back through the ape garden?" He uncoiled the rope that Mei had thoughtfully included in the processor load, and sent a line down the steep hillside.

I wrapped the line around my arm like Zeid showed me and we let the friction lower us to the bottom. "There." Zeid didn't point but I checked where his cameras were angled.

I saw them. The apes were watching us from the trees. Had we violated their sacred site? Or could what we did be considered an offering? "I wonder what they think."

"Probably the same as we would. What the hell are those machines doing now?"

"Do they associate us with the Hive, I wonder."

"Shut down now. Just as we arrived. I think they associate us with emptying the Hive."

"Maybe that's where we should go. No one said anything about it. You notice that? I wouldn't mind looking through the site. See what Tabish is building over there."

"Processors. I can guarantee you that. Get moving. Do we visit the apes or not?"

I waved to the apes in the trees. There were perhaps fifteen of them, watching us, their hands curled around branches. Are those the hands that painted in the cave? That harvested and distributed seeds?

"We need some way to talk to them."

"You have your speaker."

"That's what I mean. We never bothered to learn their language, if they have one. We could have easily. Set up a process to gather sounds, grab context, and soon we've parsed it. Instead, we're as much in the dark as when we first arrived."

It wasn't really a fair assessment. We had a distributed network extending for three hundred kilometres around the Tethys Sea. And a communications system in orbit. We'd only scratched the surface of the planet, but we'd explored our local area thoroughly. We knew where the caves went, Mei had mapped the water drainage and Divya was exploring the permanent pools underground which held bioluminescent animals which had never seen the light of day.

"I wonder if we would accomplish more in virtual."

Zeid coiled the rope around a chunk of rock which must have fallen from the cliff like a spear. It was thrust into the ground. "Hard to say what capacity is now. Over three hundred machines, we know that. On top of the hardware the Hive brought in." The apes watched us silently from the trees, although they'd moved back at our approach. "I hope this isn't some kind of miracle rock and they're going to go crazy when I hitch a rope to it."

"I don't think so. They don't seem like they care at all, just curious." To my eyes, they were waiting, as though we were about to perform a miracle.

"I say we get you into a better designed body. I saw you on the cliff. You need an upgrade."

"This works fine. And it's hauled your butt out of the fire a few times."

"Something that breaks down less often. Something that would allow you to go into the jungle for a year if you wanted."

I wasn't sure what I wanted. Perhaps it was the schedule of my old job. Before the crackdown, before the colleges were closed and professors were on the wanted lists, I'd been accustomed to periods of frenetic activity interspersed with boredom. I wanted that back. We'd been pushing hard ever since we'd arrived.

The trail was mashed down already by our arrival, so we tramped over the bowed branches and leaf litter. The apes disappeared into the forest, and the insect hum retreated as we moved through the understory. When the larger trees rose around us, the understory opened up, and we could see a few metres on either side.

"Like a giant building, with columns." Zeid gestured to the trees around us.

"We used to have forests like this," I reminded him.

"Not sure we ever did, at least since the ice age. Turkey has been arid for a long time."

Do I think like that too? I wondered. Always about the home country? It was true, when I mentioned the trees I was thinking of the northwest. The temperate rain forests I'd seen in pictures as a kid. That's why people die. To provide a clean slate for the next generation. Get the old ideas out of the way. I suddenly felt ancient, as though I were dragging around bones that would be better in a grave.

"Better get those vines off you." Zeid reached out to help. "You're dragging half the forest here."

It was something we watched for typically, but without sensors over the entire carapace, we could pick up vegetation and drag it for kilometres without even noticing. We looked out for each other.

"The Hive?"

"We're heading in that direction. Vaguely. Better to stay in the old growth."

Another concept we'd brought with us. As if anything here wouldn't be old growth. I suddenly wondered again what Divya had discovered about the genetic history of the plants. She'd suggested before that they were related to plants from Earth, as if panspermia had seeded both planets at the same time, but she'd never followed that up with evidence or a timeline, or even a lecture about how we had genetics in common.

"There could be hives all over the planet."

"What? You thinking about that again?"

I'd advocated for finding the location of each Hive, emptying the hillsides of them and taking over their machines. Seeing the biolab had set me off, although no one seemed to share my outrage. Even Divya seemed to sympathize with the machines dissecting an animal-an intelligent animal-alive.

"Something has come through here. Something big."

"Found your mammoths after all, maybe." Zeid paused to take a sample of the crumbling edge of the prints. "Too disturbed to get a clear sense of what it is. But I bet there's DNA in the ground."

"What if the mammoths, and megatherium and all, what if they were a remediation strategy?"

"Like what?"

"Some way of thinning the forest to make it more habitable. Think of it. We'd never been able to land if it wasn't for the Deccan Traps. The jungle is too thick."

"Could have landed near the poles." Zeid tucked away the sample container in one of the many pockets that Mei had designed into his chassis.

"And learned nothing. But maybe that's the purpose of the megafauna. The most efficient way to trim the jungle down to a human size."

"Makes sense. Ask Divya about it."

"I'm listening," she interrupted.

I'd forgotten that communications were much improved with the satellite networks. I was used to the jungle hiding our signals from the rest.

"It would make sense. If they wanted to modify the forest, a self-replicating animal would be the way to do it. Not as quick as mechanical interference, but far more efficient. And it would add nutrient to the system."

"So all that worry about destroying the ecosystem, about introducing animals we shouldn't. We were wrong about that?" It was an awkward question, for most of that talk had come from me.

"Not wrong exactly. The principle is sound. But we never knew about the probes then. And we don't know how far the interference stretched over the planet. Maybe only the Tethys is affected."

"If I wanted to clear out the plants, especially in the understory, that's the way I would have done it."

It was comical in a way. With only footprints to go on, we'd established an entire Earth ecosystem and a strategy to clear underbrush. Like our certainty that the Traps had been caused by asteroids, and then probes at relativistic speed, and then both together, we had each time been certain. In this latest case, I wondered if we were just bringing notions with us and applying them, even as the real Eliam escaped our grasp. Earth had been thoroughly mapped and fenced. Everyone knew what property belonged to who, and when the ecosystem was decimated by human society, we knew how many species lived on the planet. Such bodies of knowledge made us think that we could easily wrap Eliam into a neat bundle, but we'd forgotten how monstrously huge a planet could be. Eliam was larger, more diverse, and so incoherent that we could only hope to make a guess with less than a year on the surface.

"We'll track them with infrared," Divya repeated. "We'll find out what they eat. Their population, and then we'll know why they were set loose."

"I wonder if it matters," I asked her. "Maybe we should worry about carving out our own niche here, and let the rest of it merely happen."

Divya paused before she answered. "What can merely happen could lead to massive storms. The mammoths might migrate right through the Traps. We just don't know. And without knowing, we will tamper with things that might well be left alone."

I agreed, mostly to deflect her attention. Zeid was done examining the tracks and was beckoning me onward, so I joined him dodging the boles of massive trees and skirting the open areas of creeks where the understory was too thick to easily traverse.

"We should have realized this earlier," I told him.

"That travel was easier in the deep forest? No way we could have known. And wading the creek seemed to offer a better view at the time."

"What did Tabish say about the Hive?"

"Most of the machines are running again, and he's restarted the self-replication."

"That's where the processors have been coming from. But anything about the intention of the place?"

"The biolab had traces of other animals. Divya says they are off-prints of Earth DNA, massive ruminants. So your theory might be right."

"And the database in the main processor?"

"That's where it gets tricky. He said he might have tripped a safeguard, or maybe we did when we invaded the place. Much of the data was overwritten. Corrupted with the same file repeated a few million times."

"Large scale data corruption. Sounds like the Corps had something to hide."

"That's the thinking. Over that next ridge. No more tracks either, you notice."

I hadn't. Are they avoiding the place? "What would the animals know about the lab?"

"The place where they were tortured? Hard to say."

"And the cave paintings. If the Corps were using the apes to tinker with animal intelligence, I wonder if they let it go at that. They might have modified the larger animals too."

It was another question without an answer in the oppressive jungle. I wondered what our surroundings would be like in a human body. If I could tolerate the toxicity of the place, what wonders might await? The jungle would smell of intense greenery, the animals' dung would no doubt be detected by my nose at least as well as my chemical sensors, and the heat would likely be overwhelming. It was nearly always at three hundred Kelvin. I still remembered the Waukegan summer when the breezes came from the west instead of from the lake.