Lemuria

The Intrepid was never meant to stand on end. The two main hatches were near the bow of the ship, which was now 200m from the platform below. To reach the city below, it would be necessary to repel downward a considerable distance. Vertigo overcame Vigo as the airlock opened to the outside.

Kat placed a gloved hand on his shoulder. “Hey, V, don‘t worry. If anything happens to you, we’ll make another copy.” Vigo grimaced. He frankly didn’t want to know what the ship would do if it lost a vital crewmember, and didn’t want to discuss it.

The two double-checked each other for leaks. The tough, black, atmosphere suits Kat had chosen were not much thicker than normal clothing. It was a good choice; freedom of movement was essential for this job, and the environment outside was fairly benign. It was -4 degrees Celsius outside, with an inert atmosphere eighty seven percent as dense as Earth’s. Except for the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere, and bombardment by high-energy particles from space, the planet was habitable to humans. The biggest danger posed by a leak in the suit was the possibility that an alien microbe could enter undetected. Even this was unlikely, he thought. In all probability, the presence of oxygen in the ship’s atmosphere would kill anything that evolved on a planet like this.

Kat went first, her dark figure repelling downward with the grace of an acrobat. Even thorough the gear, her figure was undeniably feminine, projecting the enthusiasm of a person cooped up in close quarters for a long time and finally set free. He stopped and admired her for a moment, enjoying his own maleness. Vigo’s own technique was less graceful. He learned to climb on Earth, collecting specimens from remnants of the planet‘s alpine vegetation. The helmet took some getting used to as well, and by the time he reached the steel eye beneath the ship, he had come dangerously close to making a fool of himself.

She met him at the bottom with a smile that was easily visible through the ovoid faceplate. Her voice sounded a little distorted over the radio. “Don’t worry, we won’t have to climb back up. There’s a winch at the other end of that rope. Is that interference natural or are they jamming us?”

Vigo shrugged and walked to the edge of the dish. He kneeled and put his hand to it. It was very smooth, but close-up, he noticed it to be composed of irregular, interlocking plates of steel. They had the look of amebas frozen in place-thousands of them. An inspiration struck him, and he eyed the vast cityscape that enveloped them. They were curios set on a shelf. “I think I’ve figured out what they wanted to know by separating one of us from the others.”

She looked at him and didn’t answer.

“Individuality. You know what a cellular slime mold is?”

She nodded, kneeling to the ground and examining the outlines of the Lemurians, each frozen in place to build the structure with their bodies. “They live in the dirt. When conditions get rough, they come together and build a stalk. Only, some of them die building it.”

“The lifestyle is similar, but the organism is different. These things look like an electroautotroph. This might be the first one ever discovered.” Vigo was animated. The disparate pieces of evidence were falling into place for him. “Perhaps the original biosphere was sustained by high-energy electrical activity resulting from interaction with the magnetic field of the gas giant. Those energy sources fed the producers. Heterotrophs evolved to eat the producers, or perhaps they retained the ability to use electrons and become facultative autotrophs instead. Intelligence evolved, probably in response to competition for energy. Perhaps there was a selective advantage to the ones who, rather than using trial and error, could intentionally design systems to intercept energy from their environment. Creatures learned to build increasingly complex things with their own bodies. One of them invents a fusion-powered electric generator and the sky is the limit. They generate their own high energy electrons.”

Kat touched the top of his hand and magnetized it. “I don’t trust them not to move around if we attach a cable here. We’re gonna climb the rest of the way. Like frogs.”

Their descent was unnerving. The ledge beneath them had a shallow, vertical overhang. Below that, the cylindrical wall of the supporting tower dropped into obscurity and shadow. They descended a hundred meters or so and dropped to an interconnecting branch. Its cross section was ovoid, and its texture was rougher. Vigo wondered what was moving within it.

They walked over the branch as if it were a tree fallen over a ravine. It led to a tall, graceful archway set in the face of a parabolic tower. Through it was a vast, domed space with a sloping floor. Above, light streamed through ovoid openings in the vaulted ceiling. It had the look of a gothic cathedral, constructed out of wax, melted by afternoon sun, and refrozen in planet’s chill air.

Kat touched him and motioned upwards. Viscous black liquid oozed from holes clustered at irregular intervals along the floor and ceiling. Instead of rushing downwards, the liquid streamed along the walls and collected into dark, obsidian pools. Some of the pools crusted over with a surface suggestive of pig iron. Others shot out fine tendrils reminiscent of bread mold. More were arriving by the minute, and soon, they numbered in the hundreds. “Lemurians” she whispered.

“Helga, are you getting this?” Kat spoke into her radio. There was no response. “Just as I thought, they’re jamming us.”

“That may not be intentional.” muttered Vigo, “It could be a product of their own biology. Perhaps they are using the same band for their own language. It could be our radio sounds like rusty nails on a chalkboard to them, so they neutralized it. Or perhaps...”

Kat finished his sentence “Perhaps they really do want to isolate us and see how we react. Well, if our curiosity didn’t override our survival instinct, we wouldn’t be out here, right?”

Vigo nodded.

Kat led the way, occasionally waving to the forest of shapes like a twentieth century rock star. Vigo admired her courage. Before this foray from the ship, he had judged her uninteresting. Clearly, he had underestimated her.

About twenty meters down the gallery, one of the black pools dripped from the ceiling in an inky rope resembling a strand of mucus. On the ground, it condensed into a perfect circle. “Very nice.” Vigo said. “A perfect circle. Show me another.”

Instead of responding, the oil slick merely sat there, growing dozens of bumpy spherical structures, each with a single pinhole in the center.

Vigo tapped Kat on the shoulder. “Eyes. Pinhole eyes. Like a Nautilus.”

Impulsively, Kat knelt down and touched it at its edge. Parts of it rushed up her hand and enveloped it. Vigo watched in amazement as it sent rivulets up her arm and over her faceplate. “What do I taste like? Aluminum plated acrylic?” she laughed, and the entire creature turned a coral color before receding from her arm.

“I think they just figured out there is something inside the suit” Vigo quipped, turning for a better look at the other Lemurians. “It could have killed you and didn’t.”

As they walked further, the strange shapes surrounding them rose into columns and froze in place. Some of them began to look increasingly human. There were the beginnings of a head and shoulders on a few, and, more disturbingly, pairs of pinhole eyes set at random locations on the face and torso.

“Do you think they can hear us?” Vigo pointed to a Lemurian shape, frozen about ten meters in front of them. It was a grotesque obsidian mannequin standing in a pool of hairy crimson fibers. The two pinhole eyes were set unevenly on the forehead. A gash just above the chin suggested a mouth.

Kat walked over to it and mockingly extended the stereotypical human greeting-an outstretched hand. Vigo had always laughed at the notion that an extended hand was somehow an invitation for friendly discourse. He briefly imagined the Lemurian reaching forward to bite it off. Instead, the mannequin melted into a shape suggesting a tree trunk. Curvilinear tendrils resembling the fiddleheads of a fern sprouted from it and began to unfurl. Whatever it was trying to say, it was lost on both of them.

The gallery looped around upon itself and ended in a newly-grown archway. At the base was an arching ramp leading back to their ship. It was a strange walk, something like hiking up the cable of a giant suspension bridge. Somehow, the Lemurians had figured out that they didn’t like to climb.

Tat greeted them warmly at the airlock. Vigo fought a momentary wave of resentment at the impression that she had been unconcerned with their safety. “We heard everything. They selectively jammed our replies. Incredible stuff out there-incredible.”

“What did you make of it?” Vigo pulled off his helmet and watched her help Kat with her suit. Momentarily, he was reminded of how strange the human form must appear to the Lemurian mind. African primates, balanced in a perpetually unstable equilibrium on two legs, breathing, eating, and speaking out of the same enigmatic hole on their faces.

“I dunno whether you can call it communication or not.” Tat replied, swabbing the glove Kat had used to touch the Lemurian for chemical residue, “But between the exchange of mathematics and that show out there, we’ve made meaningful contact.”