Return to Eden
Copyright© 2014 by Colin Barrett
Chapter 40
It was about three weeks later that Meiersdottir and Igwanda found themselves summoned once again to the Edenites' primary nest.
During that span there had been an incremental but cumulatively perceptible change in the nature of the daily interactions between the human scientists and their native counterparts. Previously the aliens' appetite to learn as much as they could of virtually all disciplines had been voracious; they asked endless questions, absorbed the answers with the full power of their collective intellect, and returned with yet more questions and more again.
But following Zo and Hill's wedding the flow of questions had bit by bit slowed. The natives remained as cooperative as ever about helping the humans with their own acquisition of knowledge about both themselves and their planet, but their reciprocal quest for knowledge of their own seemed to be dwindling. Several of the scientists had taken note of this and brought their concern to Meiersdottir, who was herself puzzled.
"Have they hit some sort of saturation point?" she wondered aloud to her husband one evening. "I mean, up to now their learning curve has been so steep it was almost a vertical line. Have we started to overload them?"
"I suppose even the collective, powerful though it may seem, could have its limits," Igwanda replied. "Or it may be that they are simply plateauing. In us humans I have found that learning tends to take place in bursts rather than a steady progression. When I first was training with a laser, I recall that for a very long time I could draw and fire with extraordinary speed but my accuracy was not better than average or even below. One day I had two tests in fairly quick succession. On the first my results were my usual; on the second my speed was unchanged but I hit almost everything I aimed at, and I never regressed. I was consciously unaware of any difference in my approach, but I had surmounted whatever had been holding me back. Perhaps they have reached such a point and are temporarily stalled."
Meiersdottir looked skeptical. "I know that theory, and I've had similar experiences myself," she said. "But if it's true here, they've taken longer than I've ever heard of to reach that first plateau. Over a year of our first trip and now we're nine months into the second. It just doesn't feel like that."
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