The day they found the nest was about four years after the discovery of Feathers herself – and about four years after two craft from the Earth-Moon system began their race to Saturn.
But it started for Salma pretty much as every day had since that discovery – or anyhow since the Shadow crew, and Feathers, had settled into a routine, of sorts.
Not long after finding Feathers, and with the crew of the Shadow evidently going nowhere soon, they had migrated en masse onto the transformed Planet Nine, with its vast, roomy but featureless surface – and, they confirmed, the safe lack of a radiation environment. Here they had set up an airtight habitat, improvised but well-lit and spacious, all powered by a small reactor scavenged from the ship.
Even in this extraordinary environment, they soon settled into a mundane cycle of chores, maintenance, science observations, and long-distance communications with Conserver bases and other human outposts – even Earth itself, given the interest in their adventure across all the factions of mankind. Elizabeth Vasta, science adviser to President Mason herself, was a frequent contact, despite the long time delays. All of this was punctuated by a routine of exercises and diet supplements devised by Meriel to get the crew used to Earthlike conditions after decades in microgravity.
As to the bigger picture, they still didn’t know who Feathers was, or where she came from, or the meaning of her existence in this universe – if universe was the right word any more. And they weren’t likely to learn much more of the wider picture, not yet. The governments of Earth had evidently unified enough to launch a joint mission to Nine, and had insisted the Shadow crew did no more meddling – such as poking Nine itself with any more fake Hawking radiation – until the Cronus, for now still en route to Saturn, finally got here to Planet Nine eleven years after the discovery.
It was an extraordinary location, an extraordinary situation – to live on Nine, on a strange relativistic artefact. But Nine, for all its ambiguous and baffling properties, just sat there, and you got used to it.
On the other hand, Feathers, just as ambiguous and baffling, did stuff, and the crew had to react, deal with that, cope with it. Soon Feathers wasn’t just an anomaly, a science study. She was part of their lives. Part of the family, Boyd said.
As for Feathers herself, Meriel took it as a good sign that she had generally become more active with time.
She liked to play.
That was the bottom line, and as far as Salma was concerned play could only be good for her – and, luckily, Captain Hild agreed, as did quasi-doctor Meriel. So the crew was mandated to play too, and play nice.
It had been immediately evident that Feathers was an intelligent, emotionally complex being. You could see that in the constructive nature of her play, and in her evident attempts to communicate in her very avian chirps and trills – sometimes long symphonies of such sounds – which the Shadow’s computer banks were doing their best to interpret, without success so far.
And her intelligence showed too in ways no machine could have detected. Especially in the way she responded to Salma, as she had from the moment she opened her very bird-like eyes. She soaked up empathy, and tried to return it too – by bringing Salma bits of food, for instance.
Even so, in the beginning she had been very quiet, still – shy perhaps, although Meriel had counselled against reading too much into the body language of such an alien creature. And sometimes she retreated into herself. She would be content to be with Salma for long hours – and only Salma – especially after sleeping. Or sometimes she would just sit, while Salma got on with other things – personal stuff, like sorting out her clothes, or changing round the furniture in her space in their improvised surface habs, even productive work. And when Salma slept, Feathers would crawl into a corner of Salma’s toom, sometimes sleeping herself, sometimes simply quietly waiting. This never troubled Salma.
At other times, though, Feathers would sit quietly with Meriel. She seemed to have a bond with the healer who had patiently worked out how to feed her and fix her minor injuries. Meriel said that she was second favourite and was happy with that.
Or Feathers would just wander around, usually with Salma at her side, watching the business of the other humans with her wide, black, enigmatic eyes.
The rest of the six-strong crew mostly tolerated this behaviour, though Salma thought that Boyd, the oldest and most stuck in his ways, found Feathers’ watchfulness a little creepy – especially as he couldn’t read her expressions. He would say, ‘What is she thinking?’
At the other extreme of engagement, Feathers liked to run races around the habitat with the youngsters, Salma, Zaimu – races which, super-fast on those skinny, very reptilian legs, she always won.
After the first couple of years the small hab dome they’d set up to live in, adapted from an inflatable module for use during the spaceflight, had clearly become much too small for her. Feathers just couldn’t run far enough away, find remote enough locations for her stashes.
Well, Feathers had become the mission’s priority, along with the ongoing monitoring of Planet Nine. And so, guided by lightspeed-delayed advice from specialist teams at the various Conserver stations, the crew had quickly constructed a much wider habitat around the old structure’s core technological suite, with its life-support systems. Improvised from more cannibalised components from the Shadow, the new hab evolved into a spacious multiple tent, essentially, but with inner panels and closed-off sections, so there were plenty of places for Feathers to explore and hide – and fall back shelters in case of leakage.
The development inspired some grumbling from some of the crew, especially old Boyd, and especially since chunks of their solar sail had been used, or misused, in the construction. But that didn’t matter any more; the Shadow was never going to leave Nine, Hild would say patiently. The Cronus would soon be on its way, and eventually they would all be taken home in style, Conserver conscience or not.
And in the meantime Feathers had evidently loved it all, using the new spaces to wander, explore – and hide still more stuff.
But by now, four years after her retrieval from the mysterious interior of Nine, Feathers was changing. Her behaviour now was often more like an older child, or a young adult – ‘that kind of awkward transition age’, as Meriel tentatively put it – and the games she wanted to play had become ever more elaborate, her runs and explorations more energetic, faster, longer, although she was never far from Salma for very long.
And, at some point, she had started to take stuff away with her.
Nobody noticed this at first. Eventually Salma and Meriel found what she was doing.
She was building evidently meaningful piles from discards – mostly old clothes and tools and empty food packs – sometimes out in the open, sometimes hidden in corners of the habitat. These trophies were carefully selected, but were generally just recycler-heap junk to the crew, a distinction she learned quickly once Hild had carefully instructed Salma to show Feathers what was vital and what wasn’t. Salma kept an eye out even so, just in case something important did get lost in the kipple heaps.
All these behaviours seemed natural, as far as Meriel could tell, so she said, given this was the only member of her species humankind had ever encountered.
Feathers was evidently growing into a healthy, fast-moving, roaming, exploring creature, putting her own stamp on the place in her own way. But she did change with time, it seemed to Salma.
Mostly, Feathers started to become a little more solitary.
More often now she would build her heaps of stuff alone, even more well hidden in some corner of the habitat. They were more orderly too, often circular in form, or arcs of circles. Sometimes she would show the results to Salma or Meriel, sometimes not, though she was not yet hostile to Salma coming to see what she was doing, or to accidental discoveries by the rest of the crew.
One day in that fourth year – a day when she had hardly seen Feathers at all – Salma talked this over, not for the first time, with Meriel.
And Meriel just shrugged, as usual. ‘All we can do for now is keep an eye on her, and let her develop at her own pace, her own direction. As we’ve done from the start. Just keep her safe; stop her from getting frustrated, if you can. We don’t know enough about her physical needs to be able to intervene safely, let alone her psychological needs …
‘Why, if you think about it, we don’t even know how old she is. Either in absolute time or relative to humans – or even relative to birds and bird-like creatures on Earth, which is what she most resembles. She has grown in the four years since we found her – I can measure that, at least, and I do every ship’s day – but that growth rate is slowing, it seems to me. So she might be like a human adolescent. Topping out. Or not. We have to be wary—’
‘Of making simplistic parallels,’ Salma trotted out. ‘Concerning a being from an entirely different biosphere.’ She held up a finger and spoke pompously. ‘Indeed, from an entirely different evolutionary trajectory.’
Meriel grinned, self-deprecating. ‘I do not speak like that. Well, at least it’s sinking in.’
This time Salma did have a new question. ‘You’ve measured her growth rate. Can you, umm, project that back? Can you guess how old she is, at least?’
Meriel pursed her lips. ‘Good question. Answer is, yes, we can guess. But you have to be aware it is just a guess. We have four years of observational data, and absolutely nothing on her development before, and no comparison specimens to learn from. I know you don’t like me using the word “specimen”. I can tell you her overall growth rate must be faster than a human’s. Maybe twice as fast. But, given she hasn’t grown twice as tall since we found her, or doubled her mass, most of her growing must have been done before we encountered her. I think I’d tentatively put her down as equivalent to a human eighteen-year-old. Just coming out of an adolescent growth spurt. But in calendar years I’d say she is no more than nine, ten.’
‘Does that mean she’s living twice as fast as we are? I mean—’
‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions,’ Meriel said cautiously. ‘If I was a real doctor, let alone a real biologist, I probably wouldn’t speculate away like this at all. But … we know that her anatomy is more like a bird’s than a human’s. Her physiology is fast, high-energy, compared to ours. But birds can live for many years in the wild, back on Earth. Albatrosses, ostriches, big birds like that, may live three or four decades.’
‘Humans live twice that long, if they get the chance.’
‘Yeah, but remember that birds do use up a lot of energy in flight, and there’s a lot of wear and tear on the muscles and so forth … I know even less about birds than I do about humans. And still less about Feathers, who is some kind of bird-analogue from someplace else, not really a bird at all.’
Salma tried to think that through. ‘But if she’s growing old twice as fast as I am,’ she said slowly, ‘maybe she was younger than me when we found her. Now she’s effectively older …’
‘Don’t think too hard about it. We don’t know; we only have this one specimen, who only just seems to have grown to adulthood herself, or near it.’ She reached over and touched Salma’s shoulder. ‘Don’t fret it. Just keep on doing what you’re doing, which has been the right thing from day one. Just be with her. Make the most of the moment …’
Because Earth is on the way. Because this moment may not last for long.
They sat thinking that over a while, in silence.
Salma knew that the rest of the crew – the more thoughtful of them at least – spent a lot of time thinking hard about Feathers too, and the mystery of her weird origin. They could hardly fail to do so, given they had been living out here on the edge of the Solar System, four light-days from home, with ‘possibly the most baffling conundrum since the dawn of the scientific age’, as adviser Vasta had once put it. ‘And it’s got us trapped out here,’ as Boyd had added.
That remark about a trap was valid, inasmuch as they had been pretty much mandated to stay on the spot and observe the various conundrums of Planet Nine until the much better equipped and staffed Cronus showed up.
But now the crew all seemed to have mixed feelings about that too. Nine was their prize, won after decades of travel. These were their discoveries. Salma herself felt dismay at the thought of ‘some vast gaudy liner turning up with a cargo of celebrity scientists’, as Boyd put it. While she wanted to understand more about what was going on here, she also didn’t much like the idea of a circus like that arriving at what had come to feel like home, for all its remoteness, all its strangeness.
Her home. And Feathers’. What would become of her when the Cronus arrived?
A soft bleep; she checked her wrist. ‘Hey, lunch time for Feathers.’
Meriel glanced around. ‘And she’s out of sight. As usual these days.’ She stood, stiffly. ‘You want to send out a drone?’
‘She doesn’t like drones. I’ll go find her.’
‘And I’ll help you search. You go clockwise …’
It turned out that Meriel found Feathers first this time, and brought her back to the heart of the hab, where the rest of the crew were gathering for their own lunch.
Captain Hild had always insisted that everybody show up, unless unavoidably detained, at meal times each working day. They had been effectively grounded for years and a strict ship’s schedule wasn’t necessary, but still Hild kept to a regular timetable, and she used meal times in particular as three opportunities a day for them all to gather. Good for the morale and team spirit of a good-natured but cynical crew, as Hild had quietly described it to Salma.
And from the beginning here on Nine, at Zaimu’s suggestion, Feathers had joined the group for their midday meals.
Today Meriel and Feathers were the last to show up, a little later than Salma. Salma sat on a chair improvised from a packing case, at the hub’s low table, scavenged from the ship.
Feathers settled willingly enough – on the floor. As usual she eschewed the crew’s chairs, though one was always brought out for her as a courtesy, as Salma had insisted from the earliest days of this strange arrangement, so Feathers wouldn’t be left out.
The crew’s food was briskly set out on the table, by Boyd and Joe today, their turn. It was the usual high-protein, low-fat meat and cheese substitutes from the recycling system, with authentic green vegetables laboriously grown in the hydroponics bays by Meriel – when she had time for her day job, as the supposedly part-time doctor insisted.
Meriel and Salma tucked in hungrily, having put in some exercise tracking down Feathers in the depths of the habitat. Joe the comms guy, sweating, had evidently been working out, probably as per the rota Hild had set up as soon as they had settled here for what was evidently going to be a long duration. Boyd filled his face, as he put it, in the way he always did, as Salma had long observed. Zaimu ate more slowly, picking at his food, as he always did.
The six of them. And Feathers.
She sat on the floor with her long, scaly legs up against her chest. And as usual, before she turned to her own food, she explored some of the human supplies, feeling stuff, taking it apart, even chewing a little of it.
Salma and Meriel had talked this over from the start. Evidently Feathers was an intensely social creature, even if in this setting the other social creatures around her were so strange, their food so unpalatable. Salma and Meriel had persuaded the rest to keep up this gentle imitation of the kind of feeding group Feathers seemed to need, instinctively, wordlessly. They had been supportive – welcoming to a stranger. Meriel assured everybody that she made sure the human food Feathers sampled would be no more than roughage for her, with little or no useful nutrient content, harmless. Water to drink was fine … They all took care not to eat the fragments Feathers had handled, though.
Her own food, researched and synthesised by Meriel, looked like seed, or like animal flesh, or some kind of pulpy vegetable, much of it softened with water – and the water was the only authentic, non-manufactured Earth like ingredient. Feathers would nibble and suck at this stuff, her beak working quickly, her head ducking down to take a mouthful of food and then rising up as she swallowed, all the time gazing at the crew as if they intended to steal it. She never seemed more bird-like than when she ate, people said – people who had seen birds for real.
To get this far, Meriel had thoroughly analysed Feathers’ organic chemistry. She had her own distinct suite of amino acids and proteins, different from any human, indeed any terrestrial bird – and Meriel had synthesised a range of food products on that basis. There had been a period of experimentation with what Meriel called her chemistry set, tweaking flavours and textures and above all nutrient value. The final food package was essentially based on a kind of reverse-engineering of Feathers’ own digestive system, and her waste. Meriel had tried to replicate what she thought that digestive system was designed to process as input, given her output waste as a clue.
It seemed to work. Feathers cautiously tried out each resulting foodstuff, accepting or rejecting. But her tastes seemed to vary; sometimes she would reject what Meriel had presented to her before.
But as she had grown the cuisine had had to evolve. Sometimes Feathers’ weight had dipped alarmingly for long periods, before beginning to recover as Meriel got her act together once again.
Even so, to be able to nurture such an alien creature at all, from scratch, seemed miraculous to Salma.
Meriel was modest about it. She said that Conserver life-support systems and their recycling capabilities were already the most advanced of any human society’s, even Earth’s. The systems depended on a principle called ‘molecular sustainability’, she told Salma. In a closed life-support system, by now a centuries-old spaceflight technology, human waste products – exhaled breath, liquid and solid wastes – were broken down at the molecular level into nutrients for crops and edible organisms such as yeast, along with oxygen and water extracted from the air.
So, once Feathers was eating regularly and producing waste regularly, a similar closed-loop recycling regime could be set up for Feathers’ benefit, with her own waste passing through a series of scratch-built bioreactors: mechanical, adapted from human analogues, impressive novel creations designed to mirror the biological systems and processes Meriel had defined in Feathers’ own body.
All these experiments and achievements were based on principles and technologies that had been given freely by the Conservers to the crowded nations of Earth, to help sustain what was still, after all these decades since the twenty-first-century crashes, a hungry planet. Now all this careful understanding was being adapted to support an isolated alien. For Feathers, these laborious experiments had evidently worked – eventually. And Salma, young and naive as she knew she was, had been amazed as she had come to understand to learn what the feat of feeding Feathers actually amounted to: Meriel was essentially synthesising the products of an entirely alien and unknown biosphere.
But the food produced for Feathers certainly did not look, smell or taste like human food. It was off-putting if you sat too close while you ate.
And, as the crew queasily discovered – though she did defecate in pretty much the same way as a human – Feathers did not eat as a human did. She used her wings.
Salma had discovered, by looking stuff up when she had needed to, that on Earth birds’ wings were a kind of degeneration, or remodelling, of the hands of four-footed land animals. One long, heavily evolved finger had become the spine of a wing. Feathers had something like that; she was like a flightless bird – though in her case the wing-hands were evolving back into hands.
So when she reached for her food, Feathers would fold her wings down over the plate, and the hand-like aspect took over, scraping at her plate with long, bony fingers evident beneath a sheen of feathers.
Even that wasn’t so odd for observers, compared to when she kicked off the boots Hild insisted she wore, to reveal feet with claws. The boots were intended to save damage to the habitat fabric, rather than to Feathers’ feet.
And with the foot-claws she would just grab food and lift it to her mouth. All this with a smooth, continuing rustle of feathers, over her wings, her back, her chest. But at meal times, this could be pretty distracting.
Salma found that if you thought of her as a bird when exhibiting bird-like behaviours, and human when showing human-like behaviours, it didn’t put you off so much. Mostly that worked OK. But eating with her was always a challenge.
Sometimes Feathers got through her meal quickly. Other times she would stay, as the slower humans ate and talked. Stayed to be one of the group.
And Salma, still the closest to her, would try to include her in the conversation, if she could. She used simple props, and pointing. Today for instance old Boyd asked if he could finish off a shared pot of rice, and the rest joshed him, and he went into his Feathers-friendly routine. Props and pointing: the food in the pot, Boyd’s mouth, he mimed chewing, patting his belly, while Zaimu mimed the growth of a big fat belly. Salma watched Feathers as they went through these pantomimes – those big black mirrors of eyes that she had – and she seemed, to Salma anyhow, to understand at least some of it.
Starting from Boyd’s clowning and other such situations, Salma had tried to work out a simple sign language for them to share, based on human analogues she looked up. Please and thank you: a touch of the wing-hand to the mouth. Hungry: pat the belly. Sore: shake wing-hand and rub the affected part. Sad and happy, folded-in wings versus wide shakes, natural enough gestures. More invented or improvised signs for food, cold, hot. Sign-names for the crew: Salma’s, worked out by Feathers, was like a cuddle, wing-hands wrapped around the body.
But today Feathers didn’t respond to Boyd’s clownish signing. As soon as she had finished her meal this time, she touched her mouth with one wing, flapped the other wing away from her body.
That meant, Can I go please?
Salma checked with Hild, who nodded.
Feathers knew what that meant now. Nimble, fast, she stood, jumped away from the table, and ran off into the distance of the tent, soon disappearing into its artful folds.
Hild sighed. ‘And then there were six. She does seem a little more restless than usual. And why run off, why always get as far away as she can?’
Meriel shrugged. ‘She’s collecting stuff again – bits of waste, wrappings, a few dishes from the meals.’ She glanced at Salma. ‘She’s just putting together more stashes of some kind. Sal and I have kept an eye on it, making sure she doesn’t take anything necessary. Or dangerous, to her or the mission. As ever.’
‘Right,’ Boyd said with a laugh. ‘Don’t want her tunnelling out into the Oort cloud! Ha!’
Not for the first time, Salma felt defensive about Feathers. ‘I doubt that she’s so dumb. Even if she hasn’t got inborn instincts about the presence of vacuum, of its dangers. Why should she …?’ But even as she defended Feathers she was aware that her behaviour lately had been more erratic than usual, more brusque. Restless. Maybe she’d come back to her old self. But Salma wasn’t sure.
She caught Boyd’s eye. For all his robust humour, he was a people-watcher, and knew her moods. Now he shrugged. ‘She needs watching, is all.’
Hild was fiddling with a water glass. ‘That’s for sure, but maybe we should be doing more than that. Something more analytical. We are coming under increasing pressure to start providing some kind of answers about our situation out here.’
Boyd snorted. ‘Before a bunch of space-sick groundhogs show up in their luxury boat – if the Cronus ever makes it out here at all.’
‘Oh, grow up,’ Hild said, sounding weary. ‘You know that the Conserver council has agreed to that as a joint scientific mission. But in any case they won’t be here for years more yet, even if their fancy fusion drive works to spec. For now they can consult all they like, but it’s us who are on the spot – and maybe we’ve still got the chance to shape the agenda. The science agenda at least. I’ve asked you all to put in some thinking on this, even if it’s not your speciality. Has anybody—’
‘I have something to say,’ said Joe Normand, raising one finger.
Salma found she was surprised to hear Joe speak. As Boyd had remarked more than once over the years, for a comms guy he was remarkably uncommunicative. Still, here and now, that finger.
If Hild was amused, she didn’t show it. ‘Go ahead, Joe.’
‘OK.’ He looked up at the hab roof, locked his fingers behind his shaven head. ‘So we’ve been studying what we can of Feathers’ nature. Her anatomy and so on. And I’ve been wondering what else we can figure out about her world, her background. Just from what we observe of her. I mean, her home is evidently Earthlike to some extent. She’s comfortable in the gravity here, she shares our biochemistry—’
‘Our type of biochemistry,’ said Meriel. ‘But, yes, hers must at least be a water world like Earth, carbon chemistry, amino acids—’
‘Sure. But how much like the Earth? How different? I checked out some of your results, Meriel. All those tests you’ve made over the years. She’s human-like, but not human, evidently. Consider her skin, for instance.’
Boyd snorted. ‘Her skin? What about it?’
‘Well, think about it. What’s the point of skin? Aside from holding in your insides, it’s a barrier, a suit of armour against the outside world. Right? Our skin has to exclude microorganisms, toxic chemicals, radiation from a nearby Sun – alpha rays, ultra-violet to some extent.
‘But, I can tell you, Feathers’ skin is sterner stuff. Meriel, you took scrapings for samples, put it through various tests. I took a look too. Feathers’ skin is a lot tougher than ours. It can’t entirely keep out the harder forms of radiation – gamma rays, X-rays – but it does a better job than ours. Also, if damaged, it repairs itself quickly and more effectively than our own skin. Again, something you proved, Meriel, by snipping out bits of it and watching the tiny wounds heal.’
Meriel nodded cautiously. ‘Hmm. Now you mention it, I did record that it healed up remarkably quickly. And actually seemed tougher over the old wound, I guess a response in case of some kind of repeated harm.’
Joe nodded. ‘And also, have you taken a look at the feathers themselves? They’re pretty robust. Not just there for flight, I think. Or rather, I think the flight feathers have evidently evolved from some kind of scaling – like in our birds – and they’ve retained some features of those scales. And, I’m extrapolating here, I think those scales were pretty tough too. An extra layer of protection, of shielding.’
Meriel nodded. ‘Shielding from radiation?’
‘That’s what I’m thinking. And maybe if you did get badly irradiated, maybe you could shed the feathers, or the scales, just walk away, leave it all behind like a contaminated hazard suit – or like a snake shedding its skin – and grow more.’
‘Well, that’s a stretch—’
‘OK. Here’s another one. I think those feathers might also be photosynthesising, just a bit. I’ve run a few tests on discarded feathers, under sun lamps. Hard to prove when detached from the body, and I’m guessing at the stellar spectrum they are adapted to. But I think the feathers continue to grow a little even after detachment. Maybe they’re actually some kind of symbiotic organism—’
‘Hmm.’ Meriel was pursing her lips. ‘Good observations. Seems like I missed a lot. But I am a food scientist by training, you know. Not a biologist, still less a xenobiologist—’
Hild grinned. ‘I want your resignation on my desk in the morning. For now let’s listen some more to the comms guy. What else, Joe?’
Joe shrugged. ‘So, our skin – in part – protects us against the hazards of living near our star, the Sun. That’s what it evolved for. So I thought it would be fun to figure out what kind of star Feathers might have evolved close to, given her natural suit of armour. And on what kind of planet.’
‘OK. I buy it. Your conclusions?’
‘Maybe a smaller star than ours. Or an older one. Even a red dwarf, like Proxima. So the origin world would have to be closer to the star, to be in its habitable zone – the right temperature for liquid water to exist on the surface – but, being that much closer to the star, you’re in a bath of more intense radiation, so there’s a need for more protection.’
Meriel said, ‘Well, that’s good thinking—’
‘For a comms guy?’ Joe said.
‘I never said that. Or implied it.’
‘But there’s more. I mean, this whole episode isn’t just about planets and biology and stuff. It’s just – maybe it’s because I am the comms guy that got me to thinking a different way about Feathers. I mean, not thinking of her as some exotic beast, like you, Meriel, or even as a person, as you have, Salma, to your credit. I mean I don’t not want to think of her as a person, a sentient being.’
‘But—’
‘But, I’m the comms guy. And I started to think of this whole situation in terms of communication.’
That created a pause.
A little more uncertainly, Joe went on, ‘Because that’s what all of this is about, isn’t it? The Planet Nine artefact, the beacon, that drew us here. We are summoned, we come.
‘And as soon as we get here, Feathers gets – shoved – into our universe. What can she represent but a message – or a whole bundle of messages? It’s not just that she’s got some similar-but-different biology from us, though I suspect we haven’t got to the bottom of that yet. She’s different – she’s bird-like, obviously – but why so close to the human form? That can’t be inevitable. Look at the range of body plans on Earth, from the insects to the cephalopods …’
Hild nodded. ‘I remember us discussing this kind of idea when we first found here. And it still makes sense. There must have been some deliberate choice, to – insert – something with a vaguely humanoid body plan, to find a world with vaguely humanoid inhabitants. A selection based, in turn, on some kind of observation. Of us.’
There was a long pause, Salma thought, as this strange idea sank in.
‘OK,’ Boyd said, ‘but so far as I know the only message we sent was that blast of Hawking radiation we bathed Nine with, that made it open up in the first place. And there was hardly any data in that, or none we supplied anyhow. It was essentially an echo—’
‘But they may have been watching us for ages,’ Hild said.
‘Yeah,’ said Joe. ‘And we do keep saying we’re looking at another universe here, somehow joined to ours by Nine – and maybe by the centre of the Galaxy. Who’s to say time runs at the same rate here as over there? Maybe in their time frame, once the bridge was made by Salma’s signal echo, they’ve had a thousand years to study us, and—’
‘And to manufacture Feathers,’ said Meriel. ‘Or maybe to breed her.’
‘More likely to find her,’ Hild said. ‘If this other universe is rich enough to breed such creatures … But how rich would that have to be? How extensive, to have come up with a bird-like creature that’s so close to our primate body pattern? Presumably by chance. Hmm. I’ll have to think about that.’
‘Anyhow,’ Joe pressed on, ‘however they got hold of Feathers, however they selected her, they evidently believed her existence, her characteristics, were enough to deliver to us the message they wanted. Without words, I guess.’
‘Yeah,’ Boyd growled. ‘And I think I know just what kind of message this is. I’m older than you guys; my grandparents lived through the Holy Wars that came after the climate collapse, and told me about it.
‘I think you’re on the right lines, Joe. And I think there’s an analogy with religion. You see, I don’t think this is a message as such. The meaning of it all. I think it’s a revelation.’
There was a startled silence.
Salma, frankly baffled, looked around the table at her crewmates. They all seemed to react to that word pretty strongly, Hild shaking her head, Meriel almost laughing – or sneering.
Joe Normand said, ‘You’re not serious, Boyd. We’re technologists. Scientists. Conservers. Our whole society is scientific. To use such language as that—’
‘I don’t even know what it means,’ Salma said, hoping to deflect an argument.
Hild eyed her. ‘Well, you have been brought up on this tub. We always tried to ensure you learned about the wider world, about humanity in the round. And that included religion. Revelation is a religious term, generally speaking, I’d say—’
‘OK, OK,’ Boyd said. ‘“Revelation” is a loaded word, but isn’t faith necessary even in scientific thinking? I mean, what you need if somebody shows you the double-slit experiment and tells you it’s the key to the multiverse? I’m older than all of you. I was born into a post-Catholic family. The Vatican was a smoking ruin not long before I was born. But some of the sects that came out of the ashes – almost literally – tried to preserve some of the Church’s relics. Its teaching. At least the historical stuff. So now it’s all reviving, for better or worse … Some of the other faiths suffered similar harm, might achieve similar recovery.’
He turned to Salma. ‘Look, kid – a “revelation” in these terms is when God intervenes in the world. It’s like a sudden injection of information into a human culture, from outside. Maybe you have a prophet with a head full of a new way of looking at the world we live in, and at the wider context of what comes before and after our lives here, and society is upended.
‘So in the Christian faith you had Jesus, a man, but bonded to God in some way, and able to deliver a new message – a new way of looking at the world. In that case the message did change the world, for better or worse, largely thanks to an empire that adopted it, and when it survived that empire’s fall—’
Joe snorted. ‘You’re not suggesting that God is inside Planet Nine, or on its other side in the multiverse, or whatnot? Or that Feathers is some kind of ornithological Jesus?’
‘Not at all. Although she came from a virgin birth, kind of—’
‘Not helping,’ Hild said. ‘Though others on Earth have observed the parallels.’
‘Sorry. OK. What I am saying is that right now a mass of new information is being injected into our world, into our minds, from outside. The proof we now have of the existence of a multiverse alone qualifies as that much. And, the arrival of some kind of being, from outside our universe altogether so far as we can see … Feathers isn’t Jesus, no. I mean, she’s just there; she seems to have no verbal message to impart.’
Meriel seemed to be trying to think that through. ‘So Feathers is some kind of – mute prophet? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Well, isn’t it possible? Is that why she was sent here? We guessed from the start that her very existence, her biology, is evidence of a universe beyond our own. Sitting here we’ve been able to figure out some aspects of where she came from – or we can guess, anyhow. One point you haven’t made yet, by the way, is that the laws of physics on her … side … must be more or less compatible with ours. Otherwise her very substance couldn’t survive here.’
Meriel nodded. ‘Damn good point. So maybe it’s all a kind of psychological softening-up – or part of a slow reveal.’
Hild said eagerly, ‘Yes. That actually makes sense. Even if you drop the religious connotations. I mean, the base idea that we’ve been given Feathers to prepare us. Prepare us for what, though? We’ve been here four years and we haven’t yet figured that out. Not a glimpse.’
Boyd snorted. ‘If only Feathers could tell us. Some prophet who can’t even speak our language.’
Hild snorted. ‘So, how easy do you want first contact to be, old man …?’
Salma made a quick time check. She realised that Feathers had been away, alone, for longer than usual. She had rushed her food too. She was often restless, but this was unusual.
Maybe something was wrong.
She stood up. ‘Sorry to go. I think I’d better check on Feathers. She’s probably just at one of her heaps of stuff, but—’
Meriel stood too, more stiffly. ‘I’ll come too. Especially if she’s suddenly a being of cosmic importance.’
‘She always was,’ Boyd said gently. ‘Even if she doesn’t have a beard and a halo. Go find her.’
They went.
They split up, Meriel going right, Salma left.
Feathers’ ‘heaps of stuff’ were mostly in the shadows, at the outer edges of the improvised dome. By now the entire perimeter was marked by evenly spaced collections. As she searched, Salma took a little more time at each one than usual, even sifting through the bigger piles to make sure Feathers wasn’t hiding somewhere. It really was rubbish, bits of habitat fabric, discarded clothing mostly ripped to shreds, some vegetable and plant material, mostly dried or rotting … The crew had no more stuff than they had brought with them in the Shadow into this place. Little was wasted, or thrown away. Still, with Salma’s silent endorsement, Feathers had managed to assemble of fair-sized heaps of the stuff.
Meriel found her first. Softly, she called across the hab to Salma.
When Salma got there, she saw that Meriel was down on her knees, with Feathers held in a firm embrace. They were sitting close to yet another heap of debris. Feathers had her face buried in Meriel’s chest, and her body was shuddering, the limbs jerking – her feathers ragged and rustling.
Salma stood helplessly. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Take a look.’ Meriel waved one hand at the heap.
Salma took another step forward, looked down. ‘I can’t see …’
‘They weren’t fertilised,’ Meriel said. ‘How could they have been?’ Meriel was visibly angry, though she cradled Feathers with her usual gentleness. She raised her head to the sky beyond the habitat roof. ‘This is a prophet, is it? Is this cruelty worth it, just to send a damn message to us? Show yourself, you coward, you bastard, whoever you are. Whoever is responsible for this … Ha!’
There was no reply. Still Salma didn’t understand.
Feathers stirred, still limp, and moved over to Salma, and – just as when she had first been discovered – she snuggled deep into Salma’s arms.
And now Salma saw them, in the nest. Still glistening with some kind of mucus on their shells. Each about the size of the baseballs Boyd used to throw for her as a child.
Three eggs.
Meriel seemed disgusted. ‘I wonder what the brains on Cronus will make of this …’