Sunborn Read Online Free Page A

speak to us?” Bandicut crouched close to it. “Hello! Can you understand us?” The fried egg was near enough now that he could see faint pulsations along its “white,” while the “yolk” appeared to be rotating in changing directions.
        “Trryyy-ng-ng-ng...”
        The quarx spoke softly.
        /// Perhaps if you touch it with your hand,
        the stones could help with the translation. ///
        Bandicut shuddered.
        /// I sense no danger. ///
        He looked up. “You think it would be safe to touch that thing?” he asked Ik.
        “Safe? Hrrm—”
        “John Bandicut, please do not do anything foolish,” Antares said. “You may be only a human—” and she whistled, a Thespi approximation of a chuckle “—but I would hate to lose you.”
        Bandicut rubbed the back of his neck. “I’d hate to lose me, too. But Charlie thinks the stones might be able to...” He paused and glanced at his wrists, where the two tiny, embedded translator-stones pulsed. The stones had been given to him by an alien device back on Triton. Without them, he would not be able to communicate with his companions here, and he might have died a hundred different ways by now. He looked up at his robots. “Napoleon, how’s it look? Any sign of dangerous radiation or reactive chemicals?”
        “Multispectrum EM radiation, Cap’n. Nothing harmful that I can see. Spectrographic scanning shows...no clear chemical signatures at all.”
        “Huh?”
        “I cannot explain. It does not seem to occupy physical space. But neither does it look like a hologram or other image. I must await further information.”
        Bandicut blinked. “Yah. Let’s see if we can get some.” The thing had stopped moving. Still crouching, he edged close enough to touch it. He felt Antares’s hand on his shoulder, reassuring him. Or perhaps using him as an empathic conduit.
        The egg-surface quivered as his hand approached. Its purple skin looked slick, with oily, iridescent ripples spreading outward from the point directly beneath his hand. Would it dissolve his skin?
        /// You’ve seen too many movies...///
        “Maybe.” His hand touched the surface. It felt cool and slippery...
        A muffled gasp from Antares startled him. “Are you—?” he began, and then a wave of voices hit the inside of his skull, layer after layer. Or maybe...a single  voice, full of harmonics and dissonance.
        His translator-stones spoke softly. *Attempting to filter and translate.*
        He felt a shuddering sensation—not his shudder, but the sounds being squeezed through translation routines, like fruit through a juicer. Suddenly he was surrounded by fractured images of light and dark, as though he had been dropped into a space full of broken mirrors. Mountains: there were jagged mountains of ochre and maroon. The image shattered and came together again, changed. Canyons now, shifting and re-forming. Images of this creature’s world, deciphered by the translator-stones? The images continued breaking and reassembling, tumbling over one another—dizzying cliffs, broken plains, and layers of harsh, blazing light.
        The translator-stones did something else, and Bandicut’s attention shifted to a new sound, welling up like a choir. He could almost make out...not words, exactly...but sounds distantly suggestive of a human voice. He strained to hear.
        *Best translation: the entity describes its species as ‘Those whose appearance is to the real self as the tip of a cone is to the wide, round base.’*
        /Huh?/
        *The precise meaning is still emerging.*
        /It looks like a fried egg. What does that description have to do with a fried egg?/
        Charlene explained.
        /// The egg is the tip of the cone.
        Its real self, its real being if you could see it,
        is much fuller, more complexly dimensioned.
        The base of the cone. ///
        /It