Art by Klaus Wittman

We landed in what would come to be known as Dirge Valley on Saiph IV a few hours before the dawn. The ship, ablaze with the fire of atmospheric entry. We pierced a thick layers of clouds and the windows were illuminated by a cascade of lightning, then she set us down roughly in the rust red sand. Maria unbuckled a half dozen straps and swept over to a console. For half an hour, we listened to the soft beeps of the computer as we dressed to exit.

I scanned the landscape out of a tiny, indestructible window. Johnson did the same out of his, fingers thrumming gently on a large utility knife. Rodriguez dressed slowly and methodically, checking her suit and ours. Maria turned back with an excited smile, and the tension melted out of the room.

“35 percent oxygen, 35 degrees. Humid as hell, and windy to boot. Lot’s of atmospheric hydrogen and nitrogen oxides. She’s not perfect, but she’ll do. Masks on.”

“No flora, no fauna,” Johnson said.

I clapped my hands and stood. We cracked the door and heard the wind, and a low hum beneath it. I didn’t know then what it was. We exited the craft in a neat row, heads on swivels. Just as he said. Nothing but the patter of rain on the sand. A wide valley between two large grey stone ridges, a wide expanse dotted with wind smoothed boulders. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting some surprise. We began assembling the habitat some 400 yards from the craft, in the crescent shelter of a gargantuan rock.

A week later, we slumped around a large round table covered in papers. Electric lights on the low setting. The storm continued outside, though we couldn’t see it, all of the windows were shuttered. A map. Dozens of printouts and reports. Photographs. I put my finger on one. The image of a microscope slide.

“It’s an organism. Photosynthetic, airborne. Cell structure isn’t really like an earth cell, but let’s call it single celled.”

Johnson fiddled with another. The burnt out husk of the decontamination unit in the airlock.

I continued, “There’s no reason to think it can even interact with human biology. It doesn’t consume other cells, just air and sunlight..”

Rodriguez chimed in, “I agree. We’ll do vital checks every day, keep the habitat blocked from sunlight. We’re here to test if the local conditions are human viable, and that included interactions with extant life. This is a bit more direct than we wanted, but we’ll know soon enough”

Art by Steve Burg

We sent the beacon three weeks later after Rodriguez confirmed we had no microorganisms in our bodies, besides on cheek swabs. The storm clouds still roiled with thunder up above, but the wind had calmed. I walked a loop of the habitat, watching the rivulets or rain pour off of it. The rain was slightly acidic, due to the nitrogen oxide, but we’d planned for that in the materials and the suits. The water seemed to flow off the geometric dome in patterns, running over the shuttered windows.

Except one was unshuttered now. I ran inside. Johnson was cradling his hand with rodriguez over him. Maria put up a hand to stop me. The steel shutters hung open, casting the room in storm sunlight. There was a whistling noise, and the hum again, and a steady trickle of water coming through the glass.

“Acid. Don’t touch it”, Maria said

And there it was. A hole burned through the glass. The metal locks on the shutters melted until they came undone. Johnson’s burned hand. Not badly, Rodriguez assured us, he’d be fine.

I checked the perimiter cameras. It felt like sabotage. But since the dome had been assembled, no one had even touched that window from the outside. And certainly no aliens sneaking about breaking windows for no reason. Think like a detective. Who would gain?

“The acid was distilled. I’m positive”, Maria said, walking into the room behind me. Static electricity seemed to fill the pause between us.

She said, “We’re not informing earth about it”

“But-”

“The mission gets cancelled, we die out here. And tell them what? Our window broke? Leave us to die over a broken window.”’

“So we figure out how this happened?”

She nodded, “And how to stop it. We’re the founders of a new world, Xhao, we must act boldly”

Johnson had the electric kill perimeter set up before our expedition was ready. Maria and I stepped over it and gave the signal. The whir of energy lit up the anchors, and the hair stood up on my neck. In the direction of the wind, a crackling blue dome formed from tiny sparks, as the wind itself was cleansed. Even the rain boiled away as it hit the top of the dome.

“This rules out non-visible and remote attacks”, Johnson said, “I had to snip a few wires to prevent this from triggering an automatic message to mission control.”

Maria and I nodded.

“Good luck out there”, Johnson said

Art by Daniel Ljunggren

Our maps of the area showed a lake up in the surrounding bluffs. Perhaps an androcentric view, but if there are thinking beings here, we’ll find them near water. The ground transitions from red sand to grey rock, and still no sign of complex life. No plants or any equivalent. The saboteurs must consume the floating plankton, as I’ve taken to calling it.

We camped out under an outcropping to avoid the rain. The normal acidity had remained, but our suits were handling it fine.

We reached the lake under the cover of night. Maria and I hidden behind a spire of stone. With the dawn, the wind picked up. And up. And up. The spray off the lake quickly became a mist, like it was being sucked up into the sky, and soon we couldn’t see a thing. But I felt it. The sensation of being watched, of being known. There was something out there.

Art by Gene Raz von Edler

I ran into the mist. Maria’s shouting was swallowed by the wind. My feet splashed into the shallows, and I ran downwind. I don’t know why. I shouted for Maria. The wind died down, but the mist remained. I stumbled along the bank for a while, then lost that too.

I burst from the fog into darkness. A cave. The fog had stuffed up the entrance, and my suit’s light had come on. Fear of being lost in the mist and curiosity drove me in. The walls here were smooth, in huge curves. The wind blew in at my back, and then a minute later, blew back out again. The outgoing wind carried a fine yellow dust with it.

Beyond was a round cavern, filled with that dust. It swirled in a lazy wind. Once I saw the walls, I recognized it as sulfur, ground down by the wind. Mixed with the natural red that suffused the stone, it looked like a slow, swirling fire.

“God, that’s beautiful”, I said to myself.

The wind stopped for a moment. I breathed deep.

My radio crackled to break the silence.

“Mayday- I repea- Mayd-”

Johnson’s voice. I ran. Outside the fog had cleared and Maria was silhouetted against the morning sun, scanning the lakebed for me. I shouted. The wind was at our backs as we ran back towards the camp. The plume of smoke stood starkly, unblown by the winds, in the distance.

It was nearly dusk when we arrived, panting, at the site. A bomb had destroyed the habitat. I threw a rock, checking the electric perimeter. Gone. A charred corpse lay outside the remains, and we’d find the other soon after.

We salvaged what we could. My microscope survived. Our ship was still intact with a great deal of supplies in it. We’d need water, the condenser was blown. The cryopods were scrap now.

We had a burial, and then we studied, and we survived.

Art by Michal Kváč

13 years later, the colony ships arrived, landing in Dirge Valley. I went to greet them alone. I had not seen Maria in months. I suspected she was not ready to stop being alone. The commander of the ship was a gruff man, accustomed to giving orders. I chafed at that, and envied Maria’s absence. I gave him my report. He hit me in the face when he learned of the burning of Habitat One. As was his right, I suppose.

Despite their suspicions, they began building the first city. Ten thousand on the colony ship, and hundreds of thousands more yet to come. I stayed in the small habitat we’d built by the lake, with a few upgrades I’d borrowed from the colonists. As was my right, I suppose.

I was listening on the radio to the crews priming the first terraforming machine. It would deacidify the air, and normalize the carbon dioxide to earth levels. The air here was thought not to be breathable, and in the long term, it likely wasn’t. Maria and I were prepared to die young of lung damage, our air filtration had long since given up.

Art by Serg Souleiman

That’s when she walked back into our habitat.

“Tell them to shut off the machine.”, her voice was harsh and wispy. It seemed she’d had no clean air at all these last months. She’d be mute if she kept it up.

I turned, but she grabbed my radio before I could say “what”.

“This is Major Marie, identification Four Six Nine Bravo Hotel Eight.” She still remembered. I had forgotten mine ages ago. “Shut off the terraforming machine. That’s a direct order”

The voice of the commander returned, “Disregard that. I’m the commanding officer here.”

“You’ll die”, she said

“I don’t know how bad your brain has rotted out here without a cryo pod, but you lost the right to judge safe and unsafe when you didn’t call in a damn habitat explosion to control. Get off this channel, there’s work to be done”

She set the transceiver down and shrugged. “I’ve figured it out”, she said, “Your version of the Gaia hypothesis was correct. The electricity shed between the organisms, it’s communication. I managed to finally nail it down. Extremely rhythmic.”

“What does that have to do with the Terraformer?”

“The explosion wasn’t random. It was the electric field. Enough of its cells died against it, so it crushed the source of the pain”

“It?”

“The wind. The air. The planet. Gaia. Whatever you want to call it. I can hear it now. The intake of air into the terraformer. It’s tearing up cells by the millions”

“You can hear it?”

“I understand it now, a little. It’s smart. Very smart. But it has a hard time communicating, and I haven’t figured out how to talk back.”

The radio flared to life. “Terraformer is live. Outtake and intake normal as expected.”

“It’s going to retaliate. It thinks its being attacked. It is being attacked. Don’t you hear it?” The hum was growing. I had tuned it out for so long, it took an effort to tune it back in.

“Intake hydrogen levels are 10% higher than expected” the radio chimed in.

“Three”, Maria said

“Hydrogen levels rising on intake. Sir, they’re still climbing. Sir!”

“Two”

“Shut off the engines!”

“One”

The radio went dead. I heard the crack of lighting seven seconds later, one for each mile from here to the terraformer. I head the boom a second later.

Art by Adam Paquette

“It controls the entire atmosphere. The storms, the wind, everything. It could have suffocated us if it wanted to, and if it knew we needed oxygen to live.”

And that’s when my mind wandered back to that cave. And the wind. Like breath. Perhaps my mind should have laid with the thousand people who’d just died, but 13 years of solitude had dulled somewhat my love of mankind, and perhaps had touched us both with a bit of madness.

“You say you haven’t been able to talk back?”

“No. I tried… talking, but it doesn’t seem to understand that the sounds are… communication at all”

“I have an idea”

Photo by the Houston Chronicle

We sat cross legged in the yellow sand, facing each other.

I spoke softly. The place felt like a church. We’d come to call it the Chapel of Communion. It’s a bit overblown, but it felt right. “The organism needs minerals that are found in this cave. Or if what you’ve said is true, it likely created this cave to get to them. A thousand years of slow digging.”

“So what’s your idea?”

“This was as far as I got. It feels alive here. And quiet. If we want to talk, this is the place. What is it saying here?”

“It’s… eating the stone. So you’re correct.”

“If it lives in the air, sound should be the perfect way to communicate with it. The vibrations should move it around, and if it’s intelligent, it should understand that.”

“This thing must hear thousands of noises. Rocks fall, and some wind and thunder must happen on accident. How will it know we’re not… just rocks? Has this thing ever seen another life form?”

“How did you figure out it wasn’t just bacteria?”

“Too rhythmic. Too patterned. The global wind patterns are literally in time.”

We sat for another minute, listening to the breath of the earth. Each one was the same length, wasn’t it. I smiled. I took off my helmet. I tried to match my breathing to its pace. Too slow, so two breaths for one. I started snapping my fingers to the beat. Eight per breath. I felt something then, like a great invisible eye turning upon me. Maria picked it up, and started clapping in time.

I feel embarrassed, admitting it now. The first contact with another intellect, and the foundation for everything Maria and I would end up teaching, perhaps the most important moment on Saiph IV, was me belting out Take it Easy by the Eagles. It’s a good song, don’t get me wrong, but if I had any forethought I would have hauled a piano up there and played some Beethoven. It still likes that damn song.

I could feel the wind probing me. The air pressure must have quadrupled around the two of us. The song stuttered out. As soon as it did, the pressure stopped, then returned gentler. My long hair was picked up and moved about softly. I could feel it rush into my suit, into my underclothes, and even into my mouth. I felt very exposed.

Maria looked at me dead in the eyes. “Equivalent… same… self… Zhao! It’s trying to figure out if we’re like it. I’ll cue you for the end of the question”

She counted down from five slowly on her fingers. At the end, I hummed the first tune in my mind. The wind in the room became chaotic. I could feel the static electricity build. Tiny shocks passed through the air, thick like a swarm of fireflies. Then, the cave evacuated of air. We were thrown to the dust.

Everything was silent for a long moment. It may have been minutes, or maybe less. My mind was racing. It was intelligent. It recognized us. I’m going to suffocate. But nature abhors a vacuum, and the air rushed back in soon enough. With it came the crashing sounds of thunder. It blurred together there was so little gap between the booms. I heard later that a weather satellite cataloged a thunderstorm forming across the entire planet. I can’t blame it for needing to think, It had only ever communicated with itself before now.

Art by Alexey Kashpersky

Eventually the presence returned. It prodded us for responses to stimuli, we did the same. In this stillness, a loud clap could disrupt it. Certain notes caused certain behaviors. It’s wrong to say we talked to it. Maria’s way of speaking about it may have sounded like it was talking to her, but it was more like getting a constant brain scan of a person. We were only overhearing it talking to itself. But we reached an understanding, we knew what the other would do when we acted. We left only to get food for weeks.

In those long days, I grasped hold of the power that led me to fame. I thought long and hard on its ability to separate out gasses. I did much of the experiments with steam, which I could see. Having it pull water from the air, or vice versa. After a week of perfecting the technique, I did what I am still known for. I outstretched my hand, and whistling a melody I’d scratched out on a whiteboard, felt a swirl of air above my palm. I inserted the tongue clicks into the song, and a spark touched the swirl. Fire leapt alive in my hand. I dropped the tune in shock at my success, and the fire disappeared.

Maria had the much more impressive result, at the end. While I focused on control, she worked on communication. She worked out a complex melody, which I sang in place of her ailing voice. From that day forward, no human ever breathed the mild toxins of Saiph IV. All robotic probes told us it was there, but it never entered our presence. She said all she did was tell it what harmed us.

I’ll tell the same cautionary tale I tell my students. Saiph is far more intelligent than us. To think we learned to control it, and that it never learnt likewise, is foolish. It seems like magic, what we can do through it, but it does magic through us as well. And if it was a vindictive or evil thing, it could kill us all. But a creature born in absence of others has no morality, morals are the purview of groups. It will use you to protect it from harm, if it must. It will kill you to protect itself from harm if it must. Our theory is that it thinks of us as more cells in its great body, and there is a kind of benevolence in that. I feel a kind of kinship with it now, after all these years. Despite the danger, I mourn for those who have never stood on Saiph IV, and never felt its embrace.



From the Memoirs of Archmage Zhao of the Chapel of Communion

Cultural Depictions of the Saiph Intelligence

These images are how artists and religious movements on Saiph have depicted the intellect. Naturally, people personified the organism, despite its full lack of human traits.

Art by Aaron Nakahara

Art by Mike Lim

Art by Stephanie Chan