Everything looked fine. Short of rebooting the entire system they were the best checks he could do. And yet the fish still stood there singing.
Peter was slower to action, more careful about examining all the options. But for something as unusual as this he missed Michelle’s quick-witted insight. He looked wistfully at the image of her that was displayed in the corner of his desktop.
He wasn’t far from the singing fish. The flitter could be there within minutes if he pushed it supersonic, but doing that would break protocol. He should head out immediately, in case the piscine operatic performance ended soon. Protocol, in principle, required him to obtain permission before mounting any direct interaction with the planetary environment.
Contamination—of planet or surveyor—carried danger. This had been drilled into Peter during training. The years of survey work since then had shown him that many breakthroughs had come from breaking protocol. The secret of the self-motile seedpods had only been revealed when a frustrated surveyor trod on one by accident.
He had met Michelle during training for the survey corps. She was French, one of the European Union’s recruits, while he was from the US. All of them had been eager to explore the frontier, but she and Peter had bonded because they were also fascinated by alien biology. The survey corps’ main job was locating targets for colonisation, but it was just as important to catalogue the infinite variety of life in the galaxy, and that’s what really motivated Peter and Michelle—finding those planets that should be avoided, those that should be protected, and identifying the few biospheres that could peacefully coexist with Earthly biology.
That was why Peter was out here, on his own because of cuts. He had protested against them the last time he had been home, but to no avail. The cuts, combined with undiminished ambition, meant the survey corps was spread thin across the myriad planets beyond the frontier.
A message to headquarters about the fish, and a request to make direct intervention, would take days to traverse the galaxy’s wormhole network, and longer to make its way through review panels and risk assessment groups.
Peter could make his own decisions in emergencies, or in exceptional circumstances. He’d got to know the biology of this world pretty well. He was currently in the tropics, not that they lived up to that name. He had spent three months in the frigid arctic wastes, which got far colder than the Antarctic but still managed to support some life. The tropics were teeming in comparison.
He’d found that the basic building blocks of life on this planet were similar to a thousand others. Long chain molecules—not DNA but similar—stored genetics, while amino acids, in various configurations, were the building blocks of protein-analogues. The planet was comfortable enough for colonisation—especially, thought Peter, in the tropics—and compatible enough biologically that it would work. You couldn’t get much food value from local species, except as indigestible roughage, but nothing was actively poisonous to Earthly biology. Human food crops could be grown and much more besides. On that basis the planet might be slated for a more detailed and a more intrusive examination.
If there was intelligent life here, or something unusual that Peter had yet to spot, then things could be very different. Unusual biology could earn the planet protected status, and if he found any signs of intelligence he’d have to pull out immediately and wait for the first contact team. The singing fish was definitely odd, and might even be a sign of intelligence, and that would certainly make these circumstances exceptional.
If Michelle were in his place she would head out immediately. She kept telling him he was too cautious.
He reviewed the incoming data, sinking into the virtual reality his implants built from the remotes’ signals. The fish was still there. It was singing what he thought was an aria.
He had to see it, and hear it, for himself.
Decision made, he rapidly stuffed himself into one of the suits needed for protection from the local biosphere. The suit would also protect the local ecology from the Earthly biosphere Peter carried around and inside himself. Then he walked the short distance from the main monitoring centre of his small habitat to the hanger and the tiny atmospheric flitter that it contained.
The flight took less time than it took to get ready. The autopilot landed the flitter in a clearing conveniently close to the singing fish. A few moments later he looked out onto an alien environment.
At first sight, the forest wasn’t unlike those at home. Tall tree-analogues, ground-covering plants, and decaying leaves spread all around. After a few moments the differences began to become apparent. The colours were wrong. The sun in the sky was too blue. The leaves on the trees were a bluey shade of green, their chlorophyll-analogue better adapted to working with the light from their star. The shape of the leaves was different too, not matching any of the basic leaf-forms you would find on Earth or the colonised planets, with leaf-substems spiralling upwards towards the light. All of this, and much more, was the result of a separate evolution that derived nothing from the basic assumptions of Earthly biology that were hard wired in every species on Earth for the last three and a half billion years.
Peter paused as he made his way out of the airlock, glancing at the array of self-defence equipment stored there.
The biology of this planet was not without its hazards. There were apex predators in all the environments he had studied. The largest he was aware of were the ursinoids that roamed these equatorial forests. His remotes had found no trace of ursinoid activity anywhere near the singing fish so he was probably safe from them, but it was the potential unknown aspects of this biosphere that gave him pause for thought. Predators didn’t always work in obvious ways. He remembered a planet where the females of the dominant herbivore species were lured to their deaths by a predator that almost perfectly mimicked the mating displays of the males. The unfortunate females would be seduced into a cave they thought had been prepared as a nesting site by the male only to be devoured by the much larger sedentary predator that lurked there.
It might be that the singing fish was the mating display of an unknown large animal, or the lure of an even larger predator. Caution was called for, but he couldn’t blithely mow down members of potentially unique species using some of the more destructive devices that lay before him.
After a few moments thought he selected one of the non-lethal weapons—a combined net and adhesive spray gun that was capable of immobilising any creature smaller than a mammoth. Then, after a few moments further thought, he also selected a diamond-edged machete. He wasn’t planning to use this as a weapon, though. It would be an excellent escape device if he stuck himself in his own netting since gluing yourself to a tree on an alien planet, light years from the nearest assistance could be fatal as well as embarrassing.
With the weapons strapped to his belt Peter stepped out of the airlock. He took a few moments to get his bearings, then headed to where he hoped the fish was still singing.
He heard it before he saw it. The fish’s voice ranged from a deep, profound bass to the clear crystal tones of the best soprano. He paused to listen before he stepped into the clearing to see the fish for himself. There were hints of polyphony to the singing and, despite his usual attitude to opera, he was beginning to find its tones fascinating, almost enjoyable.
He didn’t rush in. The fish continued to sing with no sign that it was going to stop any time soon. He circled the clearing, using the scanners in his suit linked to those in the remotes that watched from above. Terahertz radar in the remotes probed the ground around the fish, looking for any evidence that it was a part of some larger, nastier predator. Seismometers embedded in the boots of his suit used his footsteps to probe the ground in search of burrowing or pre-existing tunnels, while vents in his helmet sifted the atmosphere for any chemicals that might act as pheromones or poisons for local species.
They all found nothing. Peter reviewed the results on the headup display in his helmet and came to a conclusion. It was safe.
He moved into the clearing, seeing the fish clearly with his own eyes for the first time.
Its voice rose to a crescendo, the song reaching a dramatic climax just as he arrived, a conclusion worthy, as far as Peter could tell, of the best operas and best opera singers in the world.
The song stopped. The fish turned towards Peter, bowed, and disappeared.
He smiled, feeling a fool. He should have guessed it at once. The signals from the remotes were secure, but Michelle had checked his implants six months ago, the day he had left for this survey, and must have installed code that would put on this show for him.
She loved opera almost as much as she loved him—maybe more. But most of all she loved a good joke.
A window appeared in his field of view, showing her smiling face.
“I hope you don’t mind too much! I had so much fun planning this and I think you might have enjoyed the music. Now it’s only three more months until we are together again!”
His smile broadened. “Why a fish?” he asked as the recorded message paused, almost as if Michelle had expected him to ask a question.
“I really couldn’t resist the idea when I worked out where you would be today. Happy poisson d’Avril mon chére!”
David L Clements is an astrophysicist at Imperial College London, where he mostly works on extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. His science fiction has been published in Analog, Clarkesworld and Nature (as have some of his scientific results) as well as numerous anthologies. His first story collection, Disturbed Universes, was published by NewCon Press in 2016. He has also written a non-fiction book, Infrared Astronomy: Seeing the Heat, published by CRC Press. Despite a developing interest in bioastronomy, he has yet to find life on any worlds other then Earth, but he’s working on it!
The Beachcomber
Mark Toner
