Communication

Communication on the world of Hesper was a complicated affair.

This was a subject never far from the mind of the dusty brown-colored myrtik currently making his way up a mountain trail alongside a scarlet songbird-like cha’ari and a pale young woman with her dark hair bound up against the nape of her neck. The differences between the three of them often featured as a factor of the myrtik’s musings on the subject.

Those differences could make an interaction as simple as introducing oneself a multi-layered enterprise. For instance, if the myrtik wanted to introduce himself, the manner in which he would do so would vary wildly by the individual. To many beings, he would simply tell them his name was Magnet. With his own kind--other myrtiks--he would accomplish this through an exchange of chemicals, and the name they would know him by would not be anything like “Magnet.”

If he were to do the same with one of his traveling companions, a red-feathered cha’ari named Tiikri, he would do so verbally, in low Atlantean. Technically, Tiikri had the capacity to speak the clicking verbal analogue tongue that many myrtik used when they had to speak aloud, but he didn’t know the language--another fascinatingly complex layer to the simple act of sharing a name.

His other traveling companion, however, spoke with her hands. Nimia was human, but could neither speak nor hear, and wove her words into the air with a series of gestures and signed letters. She’d shown Magnet how to say his verbal name in that way: one hand held upright, like a flat wall, while the second was drawn towards it in a gesture of converging fingers.

So many names, for just one being! Yes, Magnet never tired of pondering the many ways in which beings shared ideas, thoughts, names and cultures. It was partially why he was here, making his slow, winding way up the side of a mountain with a human and a cha’ari, carrying one-third of the radio equipment the group was delivering.

The three of them could see the lights of the village they were headed to from their viewpoint down near the bottom of a long series of switchbacks. The region they were traveling through was neither properly Hel-side or sky-side, but somewhere in between, shrouding the land around them in dusk. Despite the fact that they could see the village, it would be many more hours of vertical hiking before they reached it properly.

“You could fly there, if you wanted,” Magnet said, shaping the words with his hands for Nimia’s benefit even as he spoke aloud to Tiikri. “I’m pretty sure that’s the village we’re headed for.”

“I don’t see any other lights, so I’m guessing it has to be,” Tiikri replied. He was walking alongside his companions, and so Magnet was obliged to translate his words through hands and fingers as well. Tiikri could only speak Nimia’s silent language with his feet. “They don’t seem to have a guidestone--can’t feel one. But I’m not going to just ditch you guys. I’m part of the Guild, so I travel with the Guild.”

Nimia offered him a smile from where she was off to Magnet’s right, a silent communication all of its own.

“Besides,” Tiikri’s eyes squinted slightly in his own version of the gesture, “it would be so awkward just to stand there for half a day while I was waiting for you two to catch up. Especially if it’s the wrong village.”

“Fair,” Nymia replied with her hands. Magnet made a low, ineloquent whistle of amused agreement.

Their goal was to set up a radio station in the village in question on behalf of the Cartographer’s Guild. All three of them had come from different places and different walks of life, but they were united in their purpose under the Guild.

Magnet had been fascinated with radio equipment ever since he was a larva, growing up in a small mining town. He hadn’t been born into the Guild, a fact made obvious by his coloration. Magnet's colony had collapsed before he’d hatched. From what he understood, neither Nimia nor Tiikri had any blood family left to speak of, either.

Their shared interest in radio technology had been what had made them a team, but their common ground had been what had made them friends. Magnet had already spent three years--half of his life--with Nimia and Tiikri.

The twilight sky over them never shifted towards night or day, but the fatigue of travel and the rise in elevation eventually obliged the trio to stop to make a campfire and rest awhile. After clearing out a space and digging into their rations, they settled down around the fire, enjoying their respective meals and chatting lightly as they waited.

“One of the guys back at the Main Office is saying they’re going to start drafting up plans for the big arc transmitter soon,” Tiikri said. Comfortably reclined, he was able to mirror his spoken words with the gestures of his talons for Nimia’s benefit. “You think it’ll actually work?”

“I think they stand a good chance of building it and powering it, at least,” Nimia signed in reply. “Not sure Cherut Das is going to be the best place for it,” Tikrii added, “position-wise, at least. It’s so low, down by the sea level.”

“True.” Nimia nodded as her hands moved. “But with the amount of electricity an arc transmitter big enough to broadcast to the planet would need… your best place of getting access to that is Cherut Das.”

Tikrii cocked his head, a sharp, avian gesture.”How do you figure?”

This turned into a small digression about the potential of hydroelectric power and the Guild’s access to it, facilitated by the Lower Offices. Magnet chimed in every now and then, offering his opinions on harnessing the power of the winds the Floating City used to travel, or perhaps both. he fire flickered on as the trio excitedly weighed the merits and drawbacks of the newer vacuum-tube technologies being employed in the field as well.

“That still doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of elevation,” Tikrii mused.

“You’d have to use VLF,” Magnet chimed in, “very low frequencies. Mountains don’t block those. You’d want to bounce them off the ionosphere, too, so you can broadcast farther than the horizon. In theory, with a strong enough transmitter and the right receivers, you could broadcast to anywhere on Hesper using that method.”

Nimia and Tiikri nodded, though it was clear they only understood part of what he was saying. Nimia knew all things electricity, Tiikri was their mechanic, and Magnet was the team’s radio expert. “It wouldn’t be able to do AM for very long distances,” he went on, “but stil, imagine it--you could communicate with someone, anywhere on the planet, almost instantaneously. It’ll be amazing if they pull it off.”

Nimia smiled. “Like sending your pheromones through the sky.”

Magnet’s attention strayed down to the gently-glowing miniature lantern clipped to Nimia’s belt, her symbol as an official member of the Cartographer’s Guild. Every now and then he could catch the scent of the Guildmaster’s pheromones in the oil that surrounded the luster shard inside. He hadn’t yet met her, himself, but he supposed in a way they were all part of the same hive. “A lot like that, yes.”

The companionable conversation was shattered by a scream.

Or, at least, that was what Magnet’s knee-jerk assessment of the sound was, carried through his mind with a jolt of shock. The shriek went on, a shattering cacophony that sent a deep, primal fear boiling inside of him. It was an almighty sound, unlike anything he’d ever heard before. It was vaster than the roaring of the sea in a storm, even louder than the horizon cracking under the sudden emergence of one of the desert’s great wyrms, a thought-obliterating wave of noise that dwarfed even the explosions the miners had used to shatter the vast trunks of the fossilized trees in the Dead Groves.

A single thought shot wildly through him. A dragon? Like the legends of old? Magnet realized he’d dropped to the ground, flattening himself defensively. He saw that Tiikri and Nimia had done the same, the singular response of their wildly different biologies uniting them in fear. As he shuffled closer to them, and they drew closer to him in turn, an incongruity cut through the panic that was swamping Magnet’s mind: Nimia shouldn’t be able to hear it.

That was the moment he understood.

The three Cartographers had drawn close by the time the screaming faded into dim echoes. There were no words, or gestures, no exchange of pheromones as they drew away. They simply moved in wary unison, rising back to their feet. Here, too, was another form of communication: a silent sharing of an emotion too big for any of them to hold in their hearts alone.

The silence persisted as they waited. Rest did not come easily, and neither did the decision of what to do next. None of them spoke aloud, at first, deferring to Nimia’s sign language to communicate. They had half a mind to retreat back down the mountain, knowing, of course, what danger might lie ahead.

“They never last long,” Tiikri signed, “it will have disappeared by now. Long gone by the time we get up there.”

They put out their fire and made the rest of the trip in somber silence, dread anticipation rising in Magnet with each step. Tiikri continued to walk alongside them, unwilling to leave their side. They all knew what they would find when they arrived in the village.

The quaint little mountainside settlement was in shambles. They stood in the center of a shattered field of broken buildings, and worse, broken bodies. Magnet was struck by the sheer amount of feathers everywhere, an absurd multitude of them, like the remains of a songbird struck by a predator. In a way, he supposed the reality wasn’t so different. The gentle fluttering movements all around them, like the mockery of a mountain meadow, set the Cartographers on edge as they went about their grim search.

They found weapons as well, most of them destroyed, signs of a futile attempt to fight back. One of the spears still had an eagle-shaped talon locked in a death-grip around it, though the former owner of the talon was impossible to identify in the shredded mass of the fighters’ remains.

Some of the bodies were sprawled behind the remains of walls, or huddled around each other. Magnet pried a fallen beam off a nest, and despaired at the shattered shells and cold half-formed things that had once been growing inside them. These precious eggs had been carried all the way from the ancestral forests to the place that should have been their home, and instead had become their grave.

The Cartographers convened at the shattered town square, confirming that none of them had found any survivors. Then, in quiet unison, they went about recording what little they knew of the village that had once stood in their destination. It was too late to do anything but remember the people who had lived there, but the Cartographers were chroniclers as well as explorers, and these people would not lie forgotten.

Their fate would be a warning, one last communication to the world from the voiceless dead.