Unbounded

Chapter Seven: Teal Grip

Mission Time: +445.2 Earth-years

Tai walked purposefully along the circumferential corridor. His head was tilted slightly forward, his arms and legs tense as they swung. Ihaia walked close behind. After passing into Stasis Sector, Tekoha and Ariki marched down into view from the opposite direction, and the four of them converged on a single door labeled "Recovery: Pods 2863-2873". They nodded to each other, and Tai opened the door, then led them in.

The recovery room was illuminated with red light. Ryder was alone, sitting on the edge of a steel slab, head in hands. He looked up at the four men and squinted. "What ..."

"We think it may be time to attempt a shut-down of Fai-tsiri," Tai said.

"Now hold on, we didn't agree to that yet," Ariki said. "It could be too dangerous. We really need to consider replacing Mbali first."

Ryder was staring at them, slouched in an awkward posture, mouth slightly open. "Guys, I'm still a little dizzy right now .... Wait, is this because of the photograph?"

Tekoha nodded. "The menhirs were bad enough. But a vessel following us for three hundred years whilst we're kept in the dark?"

"Yes. Unacceptable," Ihaia said. "Nikau and Hemi are dead because of this, and we don't know why."

"That's something I can't understand--how the photograph of the shuriken ship is connected with what Hemi did. What do we know about the shuriken so far?" Ryder asked.

"Not much," Ariki said. "We can't penetrate its hull with our scans. It has not responded to repeated hailing attempts from across the EM spectrum. During interstellar flight, it accelerates and decelerates with a type of fusion rocket--which is hard to believe considering the ship is only about thirty meters in diameter. Mbali will brief us more thoroughly in the staff meeting. She seems to think it might be powered by matter-antimatter annihilation, but I have my doubts."

"Hm. I was hoping for some clue about their biology. I'm wondering how similar they are to us," Ryder said.

"At this point, we have no way of knowing, and it doesn't really matter right now," Tekoha said.

"But shouldn't they be approximately similar to us in form?" Ryder asked. "Since our two species are both intelligent tool-users, presumably, they should have evolved similarly to us, and we might find a basis for commonality."

"Well, it depends on specifically how you mean that," Tekoha said. "If you just mean they have manipulatory organs, sensory organs, locomotive organs, and so on, then the answer is yes. But if you mean they have two legs, two arms, a head with a nose and mouth--humanoid, in other words--then no, that's extremely unlikely. There are so many other possible design solutions, and so much of our morphology is based on evolutionary happenstance rather than functional necessity, it would be quite fantastically coincidental if we both turned out to be humanoid."

"But Tekoha," Tai interjected, "are you perhaps deemphasizing convergent evolution too much? I mean, just look at dolphins and ichthyosaurs. The classical example is the eye: there are about seven different physical principles on which you could design an eye, but eyes have evolved over sixty times on Earth, completely independently. That means many branches of animal life have eyes which are kind of the same."

"Yes, and if the aliens have eyes, I'm sure they'll appear similar to eyes in one of those Earth branches. But we're not talking just about eyes--we're talking about the overall morphology of an entire organism. Your dolphin-ichthyosaur example is more apt, but then you have to remember they both ultimately derive from reptiles."

"Dolphins are from wolf-like land mammals."

"Which ultimately derive from reptiles, as I just said. And even further back, from the same type of fish--as are we--so there are many jointly inherited characteristics."