I’ve handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail!
—CASSIUS CLAY
Beth eyed this strange slice of a shadowy spherical shell. She realized it had secrets in its rolling hills and slab walls. Her team had traveled with the odd, lumbering Triangler, ushered along by their Twister companion and Anarok, until a sheer cliff wall rose to their left and flickered with glowing lights. The team stood and watched a huge realm beyond a stony shelf that flickered and went transparent.
“We felt this was the best way to reveal who truly lives below,” Twister said with arm waves that conveyed solemn importance. They approached a huge wall that suddenly went opaque, then clear again. Beyond was a cloudy place. Twister said, “This is the realm of the methane breathers. They are our ancient allies.”
In this big dark space, constellations of lights scattered in smears across the volume. Strange lumpy things moved within it.
Beth peered with the rest of them, trying to take in the meaning. She recalled an exercise in perceptions she had once endured.
Suppose you have an artificially intelligent infrared camera. One night it issues an alert: Something’s going on in the bushes of your garden. The AI tells you the best fit to the observation is a three-hundred-pound hamster, the second-best fit is a pair of humans in what seems a peculiar kind of close combat. They were lunging at each other in a way the AI had not seen in its training videos. So, the exercise asked … Which option do you think is more likely? She had decided to go out on a limb and guess the second. And why was that? Because you probably know that three-hundred-pound hamsters are somewhat of a rare occurrence, whereas pairs of humans are not. In other words, you have a different prior than your camera.
Here she had no priors.
Bemor came forward and boomed, “We of the Bowl had heard of such history. These Methaners are a truly ancient life-form. We heard fragments of stories, all from far ago.”
Beth said, “Breathing a reducing atmosphere? Seems pretty damn inefficient.”
Twister said, “Evolution does not present each species with a broad menu. Life-forms are a kludge.”
“A patched-up solution?” Cliff asked.
Twister said, “So, indeed! These methane breathers arrived in a ragtag fleet, fleeing from something that they feared. We still do not know what they feared. They had an advanced organic technology—superb! Materials that impressed our oxygen breathers, our holy exalted Originals. Such miracles we used to build the Cobweb and unite our two worlds. We gained much! The Methaners wanted a place to hide, a place that their pursuers would not think to look.”
“Under your world? This one? That we call Glory?”
“Such was the bargain. Their organic machines bored into the soil. They lofted soil to the sky and built this ominous—I admit it—underground shell. Built their farms, as it were. Then the living shell begin to release methane—warm and under high pressure.” Twister turned and gestured into the slumbering dark. “There are forty or fifty times your accustomed pressure in there.”
“That many atmospheres?” Cliff frowned. “Why?”
Twisto shrugged. “To support the living surface above, our great park.”
“You bargained away your crust?” Beth asked, head shaking in disbelief.
“We had to renounce our high mountains, crowned in glorious snowcapped grandeur, indeed. Plus our deep oceans. Ours is a somewhat older world, so our plate tectonics was waning. Our crust was already, thanks to locking to our twin world, a lid. Beneath that roiled volcanic energies, much beloved by our arriving refugees. The Methaners knew how to stop even that gravid lower dance. They shaped our oceans into shallow seas and lakes and ponds. We only use the tops of those, for our boats and fish—so where is the loss?”
This was getting weird for Beth. Of course, Earthside had resorted to geoengineering to counter the fossil fuel burning overshot, more than centuries ago now—but this …
“All that, while you built the Cobweb?” she asked.
“It was a pact of great benefit. A grand deal, far back now in our history. The methane breathers are now happy in their hidden methane environment. They love to cower here.”
Cliff said, “Seems to me they’re basically cowards. Happy to have a place to hide.”
Twister shook his head in dismissal. “They continue to amuse and interest us—regard the Möbius strip you just enjoyed!”
“What were they running from?” Beth asked.
“And why?” Cliff added.
“Such secrets they never reveal. Whoever—or rather, whatever—sought them has not come here. Though for a while, our culture thought the Bowl was their dark enemy.”
Bemor Prime said, “We were merely interested. I gather from historical records that we passed by and your society sent lances of virulence at us.”
Twister made a grimace and poked his arms out in defiant fists. “We feared you. We still do!”
“Needlessly,” Bemor Prime said. “But what think the Methaners?”
Twister said, “They have no interest in leaving or venturing outside their dark primordial habitat. They are remarkable scientists and philosophers, I must admit. Their realm we would find dull. They prefer it because they value safety above all—and we believe their home world was volcanic, dire. They prefer to think, not to voyage—only their extremity and enemies drove them to shelter with us. They require only that we oxygen breathers commit to keeping their existence secret to any and all outsiders.”
“And then we came,” Cliff said.
“You we could not dissuade from venturing in, landing upon our Cobweb.”
“Why?” Beth asked. “You could’ve killed us all.”
“We are not so cautious as the Methaners. You and the Bowl are at the verge of joining the Great Conversing.”
“What’s that?” Cliff frowned with suspicion.
“The discussion carried out solely with gravitational waves. Among those truly advanced minds and technospheres. To speak in such august company requires high technical ability, thus eliminating the mere passing riffraff of the electromagnetic societies.” Twister drew himself up, spine rigid, sniffing with disdain. “We have no time for such.”
Beth knew from various feeds, gotten when moving through the Cobweb, that life had evolved on this world first, well before it did Earthside. It then spread to the other world, first via asteroid and comet impact, throwing material up and raining down on its satellite. The same DNA system, same set of amino acids as seemed inevitable—although both evolved very differently on the twinned worlds. The culture of these oxygen breathers grew under a giant moon beckoning in their sky. The Glorians at first thought that world, which clearly had clouds and seas and lands, was perhaps the land of the gods, or the place where their honored dead went to spend eternity. So, of course, as Glory evolved intelligences, they fixated on their fascinating sky.
Being tidally locked with each other from the beginning meant that they evolved culturally with a blithe assumption that life was common. Only astronomy taught them that it was rare. No life in the rest of their solar system. Little on planets around nearby stars. But then the Methaners arrived, apparently, with news implying a far more hostile galaxy. Maybe, Beth thought, it was the new guys in the neighborhood, the humans, who had to learn more hard truths here.
“Look,” Cliff said, “why the snazzy quantum gravity exhibition you just put us through?”
Twister lifted his shoulder as though releasing a burden. “It was a lesson. Methaners wished it. A test, perhaps.”
“Test of what?”
“How much we, and the Methaners, can rely upon your judgment.”
“About grav quantum mechanics?” Cliff asked, his voice irked. “Why the hell does that matter?”
“It is the grand issue. But as well, the Methaners doubt that you can be entrusted with knowledge of their lair. Or even that they are. They hope to be forgotten by their ancient enemies. To be assumed extinct. This refuge”—Twister swept it in with an all-hands gesture—“is their final redoubt. And now they are compromised, by your knowing this.”
This was going too fast for Beth. She knew vaguely that life could exist in the liquid methane and ethane that form rivers and lakes on Titan’s surface, sure. Slow, dumb forms lurked there, rovers had found, just as organisms on Earth lived in water. Those creatures would take in hydrogen in place of oxygen, then react it with a simple carbon gas—a dim memory from high school recalled a faint odor like garlic, yes. Instead of burning sugar with oxygen, Methaners would fart out methane, carbon plus four hydrogens, instead of carbon dioxide. Her school lab had been disgusting. No doubt the Methaners would find humans venting carbon dioxide just as ripe.
Triangler gestured into the gloomy vault beyond the transparent wall. Twister translated for it, “This is their realm. They ferment our world’s rock and lava, for it is their biosphere.”
More Triangler talk, which Twister rendered as, “They make their odd air and farm the very strata for their informing foods.”
Beth peered into the festering dark. So here was where soil got born—by Glorian design. Throats roared as limestone-white slime belched forth, drawn aloft by vacuum. Pools of it congealed into sulfurous stench and bubble-popping babble. Turd-brown floods gushed into the air and sucked at the yellow lava rivulets, livid streamers. Atop thick stony levels, these cauldrons steamed livid rust. Lakes gathered skirts of fresh bubbling dirt about them. A vision of a shrouded hell.
In mere minutes, rocks stuck out, growing, building on self-extruded ladders. Ripples in the mire stiffened. These dried and turned to rugged ridges, topped with ash-white ornaments that still twisted as they were born. Slimy life crawled onto pillars just congealing. Here was forced formation, driven by some microscopic imperatives. And among them, Trianglers strode and worked. They were Methaners, too, it would seem.
A sudden flash of electric blue arced across the enormous volume. It played along a boggish parchmentlike crust. Vapors like an angry whirlwind whipped up where the lightning struck. More sheet lightning ran along the ground. Fevered spikes of luminescence shot yellow sparks. The rock beneath their boots rumbled.
Cliff said, “What’s this stuff?”
Twister said, “You are aware that a planet rotating with a magnetic field generates currents, yes? Your own world. I gather from your copious library gift, is such. You evolved, as did we, between the plates of a planet-sized electrical capacitor. Your ionosphere atop your air is one spherical plate, your ground another.”
“Sure,” Cliff said. “So we get lightning, always adjusting the charges across our whole atmosphere.”
“The Methaners have engineered this planet to make better use of all the electrical energy—drawn, essentially, from the spin of the world.”
“So they run it underground?” Cliff asked.
Twister spread arms to suggest the entire space. “Usefully, yes. To fuel their enterprises, mysterious and chemical.”
“And it arcs in … here?” Beth asked.
“Guess so,” Cliff said uneasily. Wary, he stepped away from the wall.
Twister said abruptly, “The Methaner nearby just remarked to his colleagues—whom we see working in there. I have overheard them electromagnetically. It remarks that their authorities have reached a final conclusion. After inspecting you, judging your cadences and responses. They always require a meeting or witnessing of incoming aliens, such as you. Especially you.”
“There have been other, uh, visiting aliens?” Beth looked with wary glances at the Methaners in the space beyond. All of them had turned and now looked through the transparent wall. She felt that they were all focused on her. Intently.
Twister said sharply, “Here is a portion of how they evaluate you humans >>These primates hold firmly these beliefs, which come from their remarkable fast evolution: My child is more important than yours. My tribe is more important than yours. My bloodline is the most important thing in the universe. So emerge these ingrained traits. They make such primitive, recent primates—and those olders we know from the grav waves—not reliable. They cannot be allowed to know our place, our ways, our redoubt eternal.<<
“What the hell—!” Cliff barked.
A fizzing yellow fire spread over the wall between them and the Methaners. It hissed and sparked. Little blue-white jets arced from it into the sullen, moist air.
Twister backed away from the wall. “They are amassing great charge in that vault of theirs.” Its short hairs at neck and arms were standing out straight.
Beth called to her team, “Spread out!”
She felt an adrenaline jolt, a bronco charging through her veins. Here came something strange and dangerous, and she had no idea what the hell it was.