They Call The Wind Blarga
by Matthew Castleman
“Blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga.”
“That can’t be what it said.”
“That’s what it said. That’s an exact quote.”
“Blarga.”
“Twelve times.”
Leclerc, the team lead, tilted her head in thought.
“It must’ve changed intonation, pitch, intensity, emphasis, rhythm.”
“It didn’t,” said Bao, the team biologist. They tapped the main console like it was a fond pet. Waveform diagrams bloomed into green-on-white life. “I’ve analyzed the recording three times on two systems. It took work to clear the background mud, but I’m confident I have a clean rendition. Nothing changes outside the human-level threshold of random variance, and this is the closest species to human we’ve found.”
Leclerc and Bao huddled around their analytic equipment in a module clinging to the dark side of a tidally locked former asteroid and current moon.
“It was talking to one other?”
“Briefly.”
“Did the second one speak?”
There was a silence.
“…no,” said Leclerc.
“Yes.”
“Seriously.”
“Blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga. Then they went their separate ways.”
The console interjected an unrelated status beep.
“Okay, that’s something. The two met, said the same thing, then departed. It could be a simple greeting. ‘Hi.’ There are elaborate greeting phrases in human language. Or their language could have threshold plurals. Up to a number, you repeat the singular that many times, and the plural form kicks in above that number. Maybe this was ‘Are there twelve fish?’ ‘Yes, there are twelve fish.’ Something like that.”
“Drone 3 picked up a significantly longer conversation.” Bao called it up with a few sweeps of the touchboard.
The conversation filled the room in pristine audio quality. Leclerc’s face fell. Bao’s face had braced itself and held on like a coal miner propping up a slipping support beam with his back.
“Twenty years of field xenolinguistics,” Leclerc said. “Watching silicate fuzz colonies converse with electrostatic spasms. Flying through clouds of vapor-speech gusted across a thousand kilometers by gas giant whales. Seeing the scales of Enceledan megaicthyoids flip to make infrared patterns flutter across their bodies like ripples on a lake… and the first life we find that has actual lungs and vocal cords and ears sounds like a four year old improvising a fairy tale monster.”
They retired to their cabins in the inner segment of the tiny capsule stuck to the little moon, and slept on it.
Leclerc didn’t recall her dreams the next day, but the dull echo of a haunting sound followed her into wakeful hours.
Del Toro, the mission second, and Jarvinen, the anthropologist, returned from their aerial scouting trip mid-shift. Their high altitude survey of the planet’s landmasses brought nothing that might’ve unlocked the puzzle. They stood as blank and blinking as the other two when they heard the recordings.
The haunting sound was a little louder the next time Leclerc slept.
More probes reported back from other settlements the following day. The inhabitants hadn’t spread to that much of their planet yet, so the area of study was relatively limited.
With some variation, most lived in dug-out houses, covered with a woven branch roof only slightly above ground level. There was little water on the continent, just enough to meet their minimal needs. What mattered more was temperature regulation. They were cold blooded, evidence suggested. Between the depth of the groundwater and the need for insulation, digging their homes into the earth made good practical sense.
Leclerc sat in front of three displays, playing conversation clips over and over again. There was one breakthrough the probes had found – a dialect. The people in the north said “byarga” twelve times.
Del Toro joined Leclerc, watching hypnotically for a few hours. Longer exchanges had been recorded, with the ‘blarga’ rounds going back and forth and back again, the listener nodding and pointing and making all the reactions of someone hearing a complex statement.
“What if they know we’re here?”
Leclerc looked up. Checked the clock. They’d been sitting in front of a paused video file for thirty seven minutes. She leaned back into the almost threateningly ergonomic chair, letting her arms hang to her sides.
“I guess that’s possible. We’ve taken all the precautions, but there could be something we overlooked. You think they’re putting on a show for us?”
Del Toro shrugged. “You always have to consider whether you’re influencing the subject. I don’t think it’s likely, but I’m running low on ideas.”
Leclerc scrubbed forward and backward through the most recent exchange. Painstaking journeys across a few seconds, questing for unknown ends.
”Look how intent the listener is,” Del Toro said. “Subtle reactions with the head and the eyes. This is a detailed thought.”
They slowed the audio down and ran it through a few different filters. When they delved deep enough into the waveform, there were changes. Pitch and intensity and timbre fluctuated. The level of analysis required to pick those things out was deep. Far past what any human ear could reliably, consistently detect.
“It is there, though,” Del Toro said. “We need more data on how sensitive their ears are.”
“Agreed,” Leclerc said. They listened again. “If they’re not messing with us, then maybe this is the most grammatically strict language we’ve ever found. Every idea has to fit on the exact same syllabic framework. If their ears really are this good, they could insert infinite meanings in one ‘sentence’ with subtleties we couldn’t ever perceive.”
Research paused for several days as additional safety and anti-interference measures were put in place, in case there was any credence to the theory that the researchers had been detected. The probes then went about their subtler way, studying the inhabitants in their daily routines, attempting to ascertain more about their hearing ability.
Leclerc made significant use of the REM inducer installed in her bunk. Studies on the long term use of the thing were cautionary if inconclusive, but in the short term it was all that stood between Leclerc and wandering the two halls of the module in a semi-comatose haze. Del Toro had gotten engrossed in a long-running historical drama. When he wasn’t analyzing probe data, the entangling political and romantic travails of the parliamentary firebrand main character did a decent enough job as a proxy for a life.
Bao and Jarvinen sequestered themselves away for most of their downtime, and the others suspected a sexual liaison, but they were actually just playing a lot of Go.
“We’ve had a mishap,” Bao said, coming into the control room at the end of the next week.
“I saw the blip,” Leclerc said. “What happened?”
“A probe had a short. Its active camo disengaged briefly, but it was under thick scrub cover at the time. The error overheated some components, though. Two of them burst.”
“Explosions?” Leclerc said, glancing back at the chart and the glowing blip where the incident had happened, which wasn’t far from a population center.
“Technically explosions, but in effect only loud pops. There were several subjects close to the probe at the time. Forty or fifty meters.”
“Did they find it?”
“Well, that’s the good and bad news.” Bao held their pad out, transferring the report and several supporting pages to the main console. “This accidentally helped confirm what the past week’s data has indicated. Not only did they not find the probe, they didn’t seem to hear the noise at all. Their hearing is, to put it in biological terms, shit.”
More days passed. Leclerc slept thanks to the REM inducer, but her dreams bent into an ever more enclosed loop, changing only in their scope and grandeur. Where her mind reached out for the sights and scents of home, it found long shadows and weak flashes. She hadn’t lived on Earth for more than a month at a time in decades. Her childhood retreated away, dodging the probing spotlight of her dreamstate. Other missions, other modules just like this one, crept in and slunk out. The wild, utterly unhuman subjects of her career blinked across her recollections, but none of it stuck. Only the music stuck. And grew.
What began as a single operatic baritone perched on a grassy hill, singing in a deep drone, became a barbershop quartet resplendent in red stripes on a floating stage. Slowly this grew into a choir, ranks on ranks of singers in tiered rows on both sides reaching up and up like the walls of a canyon, all thundering in multi-part harmony, the same word, again and again and again, with no meaning in sight. It hammered her unconscious with its bombastic incomprehensibility. The louder it grew, the less sense it made. All words, all language, all thought, seemed to unfurl and fall apart in the pitiless onslaught of that massive, monolexical choir.
“Where’s Leclerc?” Del Toro said to Bao, walking into the control room.
“Not sure,” Bao replied. “We were going over some results late into the last shift. Might be catching some extra sleep.”
Del Toro scrolled through a series of short clips showing interactions. There were an increasing number of instances of subjects speaking in unison, three or four at a time, to another who seemed to be gleaning something from it.
They both sat, staring.
“Hello…” Bao said, noticing a small alert blinking on the module systems console off to the side.
“The hopper,” Del Toro said. “Is somebody in the hopper? We’re not scheduled to do another overflight.”
They looked at each other.
Leclerc shut off the tiny craft’s comm system and disengaged its docking clamps. So as not to waste space or stretch a tiny budget, the module wasn’t big enough for a bay. The hopper clung to its side like a baby whale. Its clawed landing feet doubled as docking arms, and they released from their mounts on the module’s hull one by one.
They’d know by now. Would be trying to message the hopper by now. Hence shutting the comms. Leclerc was hurling a respected career into the burning friction of the atmosphere along with her, but it didn’t matter anymore.
The descent was smooth enough, the landing broke no bones. Leclerc donned a sealed environment suit and sat in the hopper’s decontamination chamber as any residual microorganisms were chemically and atomically scoured away.
The airlock cycled, and Leclerc stepped into the air of a new world. The sky was a deep, purplish blue, like a few drops of red and black ink spilled into Earth’s sky. The underbrush was thick and spongy, more fungal than plantlike. Bushes and trees sprouted up from it, or at least what Leclerc would call bushes and trees. The greyish fungi made a calm backdrop to the vibrant reds of their leaves.
Leclerc stepped slowly, avoiding any unnecessary physical contact with anything. The suit’s helmet display chattered in bright green lettering. It noted breathable oxygen levels, toxic methane levels, the proliferation of unidentified microbes and particulates. It was also very hot, almost 35C. Leclerc’s suit would keep her alive and reasonably cool for about three hours before returning to the hopper became necessary.
Each step was measured in order not to be too light and bouncy in the half-Earth gravity. Even though the moon the module was stuck to had much less, a human body naturally wanted to act like a g was pulling on it when a sky was overhead. The hopper’s comm was still off, and the suit’s comm was part of the hopper’s system, so it was sweetly quiet even with the exterior mics on. The low hum in the air, Leclerc presumed from insect-like life, was calming.
It arose from the fungal undergrowth, uncoiling silently like a slowed-down video of a spring being released. Its full height was some way over Leclerc’s head. Oily, iridescent skin flashed in moving jewel tone patterns. At the top of the coil, it split along three lines as a trilaterally symmetrical mouth yawned, glinting with translucent white, inward-pointing teeth.
Leclerc took a single step back as it lunged, its top half twisting sharply and striking out like a bullwhip. The impact knocked Leclerc to the ground. Leclerc scrambled back, but the snake-thing moved faster, draping a coil around her upper body. It tried to trap her arms against her sides, but couldn’t. Owing to being raised on a far more massive planet—and a steady astromedical drug regimen to keep her Earthborn body from wilting—Leclerc fought back with a strength the predator hadn’t felt from such small prey.
Interplanetary strength or no, Leclerc was a xenolinguist, not a fighter, and a single ruptured seal would kill her just as dead as being devoured whole. As the mesmerically-colored serpent brought more of its body into play, Leclerc had fewer and fewer movements to make.
Its head snapped in, triple jaw peeled wide, teeth shining and dripping with slaver that would poison Leclerc even if it wasn’t venom. That human tissue would poison the serpent just as well, it had no capacity to understand nor Leclerc to explain. It would simply be a tragedy. For all Leclerc knew, the team might’ve found something that cracked the language in another few days, or weeks. If they weren’t still frantically trying to reach the hopper by radio, they could be figuring it out right now.
Leclerc’s thick-gloved hands grabbed the thing’s head and held it at bay, both parties straining and pushing. Leclerc clutched on, holding its teeth just short, staring into the orange and green and white striations of its gullet.
Maybe it was the REM inducer. Maybe something was off in the module’s air mix, or the rations. Leclerc’s brain scrabbled for any excuse that posterity might hear besides I snapped because I couldn’t solve a puzzle and the word ‘Blarga’ haunted my dreams. When this thing finally ripped her suit, and her, apart, there was no telling what effect her microbiome would have on this world. She took some satisfaction in knowing she’d be the serpent’s last meal, but for all she knew, something in her could be the Black Death of the species they were studying, or a blight that killed off their main food source.
Leclerc had wondered occasionally what she’d think about when she died. It turned out she was thinking about pretty much everything all at once. Guilt and shame at her actions, memories of her parents, her earlier linguistic successes, old lovers and friends given up for a career in the void. And underneath it all, thrumming along, a maddening, mocking chorus crooning the soundtrack to her death, “blarga.“
The madness of that impenetrable sound stoked her instincts. Leclerc pushed with renewed force, twisted her body and brought a heavy-booted foot down onto the end of the serpent’s tail. Something cracked, and it bucked and reared away from her, making a sudden re-edit of the calculation all predators make—how bad can this thing hurt me, and will the meal I get be worth it?
Leclerc wasn’t sure what the next move was, and her reprieve was ebbing. Then something thumped into the ground next to her foot. She risked a glance down. It was a big stick. No, not just a stick. The end had been whittled into a point and fire-hardened. It was a spear.
Gripping the serpent so tight she felt her knuckles pop, she dragged it down towards the ground. Its sinuous movements turned thrashy as it lost position in the fight. She risked leaving her left hand alone on its throat and snatched up the spear with her right. Feeling her resistance lessen, the serpent made a sharp lunge just as she braced the weapon under her arm. It drove itself right through the spear’s point. It thrashed twice more, and fell like an unspooling cable drum.
Leclerc collapsed to her knees, shuddering and shivering. She took a deep breath and read the suit’s status. It had held. Other than expressing concern at why its oxygen use rate had taken a sudden spike, it was fine.
She looked through the clear faceplate of her suit at the reptilloid biped whose broad, filmy eyes gazed at her in what could be any number of emotions, and was probably more than one. She got to her feet and removed the spear from the dead serpent.
They looked at each other for a moment. She took a slow step, carefully turned the spear so the blunt end faced the being, took a second step, and set it down between them. Only a few paces separated them now.
She took a deep breath, turning on the suit’s external speaker.
“Blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga.”
She watched its face move and its hands twitch as she recited the baffling passage. She caught expressions in its eyes, precise twists of its head, coordinated motions of the hands down at its sides, even shifts in its ankles that seemed significant. At the end, a subtle motion of its head in a high arc, a rolling of its eyes that their uniform color would have concealed if she’d been too far away to see how the sheen on them changed.
It took a low, gulping breath.
“Blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga blarga.”
Even a few steps away, through a space suit, she felt the heat emanating from its mouth. Every syllable was like a little burst from a forced air heater. A shocked gasp escaped her as pieces clicked into place. She composed herself, and at the end of its speech, she rotated her head and eyes as it had.
“I think we understand each other,” she murmured. She risked a very small bow and walked slowly back to the hopper.
“Get in here right now, Leclerc!” Del Toro said.
“In a minute, I’m going through decon procedures,” Leclerc’s voice came through the speaker, curiously serene.
“Oh, now you’re all about following procedures, huh?” Del Toro said, thumping his fist on the inner airlock door. Bao and Jarvinen sat back in the control room listening, giving each other tense looks. “By the book, straight down the line, rogue self-appointed first contact and everything.”
With a quick hiss and a snap of steel latches, the door opened. Leclerc spilled into the module a frayed disheveled mess. Smiling.
“Right,” Del Toro said, “so let’s—” the tirade skidded and died as Leclerc breezed past him into the control room. Bao and Jarvinen hopped anxiously to their feet. Leclerc started calling up footage and data on the main console and Del Toro stalked in, trying to recover his momentum.
“We made one base assumption,” Leclerc said, playing back clips with no sound. “A completely understandable one, but still. That assumption skewed everything we saw from that point on.”
Silence ticked by.
“Go on,” Del Toro growled.
“They’re not talking when they say ‘blarga.'” Leclerc looked up wildly. “They’re listening.”
The other three gazed up at the open video windows, taking in the conversations.
“We’d already realized they were ectothermic. Their body temperature’s at the whim of their environment. They’re an active, large species in the hot zone of their planet. Staying warm isn’t a problem, staying cool is. Our probes didn’t have the gear or proximity to detect it, but when they ‘talk,’ they expel huge amounts of heat. That it makes a complex sound, a sound that seems like a word to us, is a byproduct. A coincidence.”
“Social species fold biological necessities into social customs,” Jarvinen piped up, stepping closer to the screen. “The ritual of serving a meal. Conversation around the village well. If they have to vent heat regularly, it could become a time for conversation. The venter is occupied and not focused on other things. It’s an ideal moment to get their attention and tell them something.”
“Over time,” Del Toro said, still grumbling but with a smiling edge on his voice, “it might develop a purely social variant. They might imitate the heat belching even when they don’t need to do it, as an established way to signal listening.”
Bao watched the gestures carefully. “Their hearing is well below ours, but their eyes might be able to focus on a much broader area at once. They could gesture with their head, their hands, their feet, all at once. One of us would have a hard time following such spread out gestures, but their vision could make it much easier. This could be a deeply complex sign language.”
They stood and watched for a long time.
“This is remarkable,” Del Toro said, looking down, “but you know we can’t ignore this. Especially not from the team leader. Not a move that reckless to get a breakthrough I’m sure we would have made eventually.”
“I know,” said Leclerc. “I won’t pretend I did it for the cause of knowledge and the scientific frontier. I did it because I was losing my mind.” She turned. “Tell you what. If this showed me anything, it was that I’m tired of spending months on end in a pressurized hut on the dark side of nowhere like a less cool Baba Yaga in space. It’s time to be back on the ground again. In a city, with lots of people and things to do. If you let me do it with dignity—keep this between us, alter the log slightly—I’ll hand over team lead to Del Toro effective immediately, and at the end of this mission, I’ll retire. Maybe find a nice university to teach at. This is a fine coda to my field career.”
The other three looked at each other. Little movements in their eyes and mouths told a story between them, a curiously familiar looking conversation.
“Done,” Del Toro said. They shook on it.
That night, Leclerc slept like a baby.
_______________
Matthew Castleman is a Washington, DC-based writer, stage actor and teaching artist. His short fiction publications include stories in Andromeda Spaceways, several in Daily Science Fiction, Fireside Quarterly, and Old Moon Quarterly. He also authored the novella Privateers of Mars. You can find him at https://www.castlemantransmissions.net ”