The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

“Yes. General Charban and Emissary Rione and all of the rest of us keep trying to talk in terms of specific things. It took me a while to understand that the aliens were always talking about connections between things. You and I are seeing a forest made up of individual trees. They are seeing the forest as the primary thing.” She paused, grimacing unhappily. “Maybe that is not the right analogy because they use terms that seem to refer to balancing of forces. Like spiderwebs. That’s what made me think of this. Our academic bias is to assume that something that looks like a spider can’t actually be a spider. It needs to be deconstructed and broken down to learn what it really is. But what if the spider-wolves are indeed descended from the thing they resemble to us? Something spiderlike. Something that makes webs, in which everything is tied together, all the tensions and forces in equilibrium, a picture of beauty and stability. Imagine a race of beings that sees everything in those terms.”

Geary frowned in thought, leaning back. “Like their ship formations. Not just functional, but also beautiful to our eyes. And if they come from something that could build webs like spiders, that would imply natural instincts for the sort of engineering that humans look at in awe.”

“Yes! Something that thinks differently from us but in a way we can still touch, still grasp in our way.”

“Humans can see patterns,” Geary objected. “That’s not alien to us.”

“We can,” Dr. Setin broke in, “but that’s not our bias. This was what led me to consider Dr. Shwartz’s ideas to be intriguing because humans don’t instinctively think in terms of patterns. We think in terms of opposites. Black and white, good and bad, yin and yang, thesis and antithesis, yes and no, right and left, friend and enemy. What matters to us are opposites, and everything that isn’t a clear opposite is evaluated on a scale of where it lies between opposites. Lukewarm. Maybe. Gray. When we stretch our minds, we can see patterns, but that’s not our natural way of seeing things.”

He had to think about that some more, the implications gradually growing apparent, while the doctors waited. “Then to these aliens, we’re neither allies nor enemies. We’re part of some pattern.”

“We think so,” Dr. Shwartz said. “There was one sentence they sent that I kept puzzling over. It seemed to say, ‘The picture is changed but remains.’ And then I thought, what if they mean not picture, but pattern? Our arrival changed the pattern, but the pattern isn’t gone, it has just altered. And then the spider-wolves said, ‘Together we hold the picture.’ Well, if that really means ‘together we hold the pattern,’ then that explains what they expect from us. Our part in this pattern, I think we can speculate, is in their eyes to provide another anchor so that the pattern through which they view the universe can retain stability.”

“You think these creatures see humanity as a force for stability?” Geary asked.

The two doctors both hesitated, then exchanged glances. “That does sound odd, doesn’t it?” Dr. Shwartz said. “We don’t see ourselves that way. But then how many outside observers have ever evaluated humanity? Perhaps, compared to the likes of the paranoid enigmas and the rapacious bear-cows, we look pretty good to the spider-wolves.”

“There’s a term, a pictogram,” Dr. Setin added, “that they keep using. The software they gave us interprets it in various ways. Anchor or foundation or bond or keel or buttress. Those are all things that lend stability to something. It keeps coming up when they talk to us. This concept of having firm anchors appears to be critically important to them.”

He understood then. “Because without anchors, any pattern is going to unravel, come apart.”

“Exactly.”

“I think,” Dr. Shwartz continued in a cautious voice, “that their idea of an anchor may include intangibles as well as physical objects. Ideas. Theories. Philosophies. Mathematics. All of these things contribute to the pattern, all of these things help keep it in place.”

If only they weren’t so ugly . . . “It sounds like the spider-wolves and we can understand each other. Or at least understand enough to coexist in peace and maybe exchange ideas.”

“I think so, Admiral, yes.” She made an uncomfortable gesture. “Of course, this remains a theory. It’s not always clear at all how they react to something we try to say. Reading emotion on them is . . . challenging.”

“There are subtle color shifts,” Dr. Setin explained. “We’ve spotted those on the spider-wolf people, changes in hue on the head and body, but we don’t know which color means what. It is possible there are other cues to feelings, like scents or hormonal emissions, but since we’re carrying on all of this by remote communications and are not physically in the same room with them, we can’t know that.”

“I . . . understand.” What did the spider-wolves smell like? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Have they said anything about the ship we captured?”