Read Online Convergent Series by Charles Sheffield - Free Book Online Page B

behind. A figure from a nightmare flew through the air and landed right in front of her, its six jointed legs fully extended.
     
    If Darya did not cry out, it was only because her throat refused to function.
    The creature standing in front of her lifted two of its dark-brown legs off the ground and reared up to tower over her. She saw a dark-red, segmented underside, and a short neck surrounded by bands of bright scarlet-and-white ruffles. That was topped by a white, eyeless head, twice the size of her own. There was no mouth, but a thin proboscis grew from the middle of the face and curled down to tuck into a pouch on the bottom of the pleated chin.
    Darya heard a high-pitched series of chittering squeaks. Yellow open horns in the middle of the broad head turned to scan her body. Above them a pair of light-brown antennas, disproportionately long even for that great head, unfurled to form two meter-long fans that quivered delicately in the moist air.
    She screamed and jumped backward, stumbling over the grassy tussock that she had been sitting on. As she did so a second figure came in a long, gliding leap to crouch down before the carapace of the first. It was another arthropod, almost as tall but with a sticklike body no thicker than Darya's arm. The creature's thin head was dominated by lemon-colored compound eyes, without eyelids. They swiveled on short eyestalks to examine her.
    Darya became aware of a musky smell, complex and unfamiliar but not unpleasant, and a moment later the second being's small mouth opened. "Atvar H'sial gives greetings," a soft voice said in distorted but recognizable human speech.
    The other creature said nothing. As the first shock faded Darya was able to think rationally again.
    She had seen pictures. Nothing in them had suggested such a size and menacing presence, but the first arrival was a Cecropian, a member of the dominant species of the eight-hundred-world Cecropia Federation. The second animal must be an interpreter, the lower species that every Cecropian was said to need for interaction with humankind.
    "I am Darya Lang," she said slowly. The other two were so alien that her facial expressions probably had little meaning to them. She smiled anyway.
    There was a pause, and again she was aware of the unfamiliar odor. The Cecropian's twin yellow horns turned toward her. She could see that their insides were a delicate array of slender spiral tubes.
    "Atvar H'sial offers apologies through the other." One of the jointed arms of the silent Cecropian waved down to indicate the smaller beast by its feet. "We think perhaps we startled you."
    Which had to be the understatement of the year. It was disconcerting to hear words that had originated in the mind of one being issuing from the mouth of another. But Darya knew that the seed world for the Cecropian clade, their mother planet as Earth had been the mother-planet for all humans, was a cloudy globe circling the glimmer of a red dwarf star. In that stygian environment the Cecropians had never developed sight. Instead they "saw" through echolocation, using high-frequency sonic pulses emitted from the pleated resonator in the chin. The return signal was sensed by the yellow open horns. As one side benefit, a Cecropian knew not only the size, shape, and distance of each object in the field of view, it could also use Doppler shift of the sonic return to tell the speed with which targets were moving.
    But there were disadvantages. With hearing usurped for vision, communication between Cecropians had to be performed in some other way. They did it chemically, "speaking" to each other via the transmission of pheromones, chemical messengers whose varying composition permitted them a full and rich language. A Cecropian not only knew what her fellows were saying; the pheromones also allowed her to feel it, to know their emotions directly. The unfurled antennas could detect and identify a single molecule of many thousands of different airborne odors.
    And