Tones now shifted higher, into shrees, kinnnes, awiiihs, and oooeeeiiinneees. The pressing power in it seemed to hammer the air around them. Cliff felt these as warring long-wavelength notes that made his muscles dance, his body arch and flex and stretch in resonance with the powerful sounds rolling through the dry air around them.
“It’s … it’s playing us,” he managed to get out. “This sound…”
“It tells of its great death,” Quert said. “Takes far time.”
The Sil had formed a crescent facing outward against the solemn threatening silence of the humanoids. Together with Quert, the Sil flexed their arms, turning their inner elbows up to the sun. Cliff saw slender black fibers extend in the pits of their elbows. Their tips gleamed in the hard sunlight. He had never been able to tell males from females in the Sil, but it did not matter. They all had done some physiological magic and made these black lances poke out of their inner elbows. One of them abruptly jerked an arm down and the lance arced fast and sure out in a long parabola. The elegance of it struck Cliff as it watched it skewer a small wood emblem atop a hunkering stone sculpture of a big-chested humanoid. It hit the dry dark wood exactly in its center, and the black arrow flapped with energy not yet dissipated. As sure a challenge as he could imagine.
The humanoids did not respond. Their feet shuffled, their heads waggled a bit, but no sounds came. The big notes had fallen silent, and Cliff thought the song or whatever it was had come to an end. Dead silence. The Sil glowered at the humanoids and flexed their black arrows. He wondered how that had evolved. Gene tampering? An onboard defense, obviously. You didn’t have to carry anything, and the black rods with their gleaming pointed tips waited for the downward yank of the arm. Their hands could be free, so they could have other weapons there, too. But … the Sil held no other weapons in their hands. No pistols or guns of any sort. Unlike the humanoids, who now sent forth barking calls, high and shrill.
A taunt? A rebuke? It was impossible to tell. The calls stopped and Cliff felt himself tensing, pulse fast and hard. The two bands of aliens glared at each other in what seemed another universal signal—narrowed eyes. Grunts and hisses and heavy panting. Feet stirred in the dust. Arms and chests bunched and flexed. A fevered bristly aroma came drifting on the still air, the heat of bodies exuding aromas that, he supposed, carried signals evolved long ago on planets far from this stark scene. Time stood crisp and still. Eyes darted and judged.
But then came long drawing notes from the stone tower. Echoing tones of kinnnes awrrrragh yoouuiunggg arrrafff …
He panted and watched the aliens move into position around them. Shuffling in the dust. Huffing with energy.
“We haven’t got a chance, do we?” he said in a casual way.
Irma said wryly, “Looks like.”
Boonnnug wrappppennnu faaaaliiiooong …
The humanoids lifted their heads. Their shuffling ceased. As the long solemn notes washed over them, they slowly buckled. Sat. Folded their armaments and their arms, down and low.
The long, loud notes rolled on. Cliff did not know this speech. Neither did the Sil, he gathered. But the humanoids did and they wilted before the slow steady sway of the music that poured over them. The words became a soothing song that washed over the entire stonework, itself laid out some vast time long ago, an era beyond knowing.
The warmth lulled Cliff as well. “Take a break,” he said to the others. “Sit. Wait them out.”
He felt the flowing wall of sound as it called, yoouuiunggg kinnnes awrrrragh yoouuiunggg.… He felt his knees go weak.
Quert was having none of this. It said, “Let them sit. You do not.”
“Huh? Why?” Cliff straightened up.
“The slow song will reach them. Resist it.”
“Resist? I don’t—”
Quert gave him an eye-goggle he could not read.
“Let it go,” Irma said. “There’s more going on here than we know.”
Terry and Aybe agreed, heads nodding, eyes drifting, going drowsy and vague. Greee habbbiiitaaa loohgeree …
Strange fat pauses drifted by in the warm air. Hums and echoes. Like corpses on an ocean, Cliff thought, and jerked awake. What an odd repellent metaphor of the vaguely meaningful. His unconscious was seeping through as he got drowsy. Or was it something the words called forth? The low booming voice called … biiitha ablorgh quartehor biiilannaa …
To keep himself awake and not weaken and sit down, Cliff asked Quert, “This is a sculpture? With a recording? Why is it so important?”
Quert looked at him with an expression Cliff had learned to read as puzzlement. “It is alive. It awakes to speak.”
Cliff glanced up at the huge eye, which was still staring down at them. Gradually Quert’s indirect way of saying things unfurled the story of this place. What Cliff saw as a sculpture was actually a living thing. Alien to the Bowl, rugged and slow, it had come long ago from a world that died. “It lives to tell. It awakes when audience approaches.”
Irma said, “This is a smart rock?”
Quert said, “Sunlight powered. From world very hot.”
“It can’t move, right?” Aybe asked. “How’d it get here?”
Quert found all this unremarkable. “Bowl passing by. Explored that hot world. These Kahalla asked the Bowl to take one of them to keep themselves. To speak for them.”
Terry asked, “To carry their culture?”
Quert turned to them and made a gesture they now knew meant “stay steady” among the Sil. “It sings. The Kahalla decide to send one of them. Their sun swelled. They would soon melt.”
Terry said, “I thought those humanoids—” He gestured at the ring surrounding them. “—were the Kahalla.”
“They take name of living stone.” Quert seemed to find this completely natural.
“We triggered the monument? The Kahalla stone?” Aybe asked, his eyes wandering over the landscape.
Cliff understood; it was so ordinary in a dry fashion, but there were plenty of ways to get everything wrong here. Stones and primitives, all beneath a luminous sky, elements of ancient human history and still so easy to see as simple, a tailoring of Earth history. It was nothing like that. The strange kept trying not to be strange.
Quert’s eyes meant “yes.” “I-us took here. Knew song was only way.” The alien’s eyes told more than its words, but then words were tight little symbol lines. They could easily deceive the mind.
Only way? To not get caught? Cliff studied the stern stonework that soared over a hundred meters above them. A single creature, something he would have bet plenty could never evolve: smart rock. On a hot dry world, there must have been some sort of competition. Among rocks? He could not grasp how they contended. Against weathering? To gain mass and so defend themselves against abrasive winds and tides? How could information flow in a stone? How could it gain intelligence, to control its fate?
This went beyond biology into geology—and yet evolution had to explain such a thing. He recalled how dumbfounded he had been when he first saw the Bowl from SunSeeker. This made him feel the same way.
It was harder to remain standing, but Quert insisted. The resonant voice boomed on and the Sil listened intently. Long droning notes rode the hot dry air.
“Each time, different information,” Quert said.
Long song pealing on. In the next hour, Quert gave Cliff, in halting detail, some of the Kahalla’s slow evolution. Planets that condensed out early near their stars necessarily must seethe and surge. Liquid metals and decaying radioactives spit energy into crystalline lattices. Order came from oblique condensations. The essentials geological were much like essentials biological: Life began from metabolism wedded with reproduction.