by Tony Daniel
A sentence could have several different, even contradictory, meanings.
Usually, the “caboose,” the final “word-order code,” was all that was used by Extry translators to reconstruct the meaning of a beta transmission. This method served its purpose in ordinary circumstances. But it left out all nuance.
Which meant that building a sceeve speech-train using only the “caboose” could be misleading. One or more of the other instruction packets sent in the midst of a transmission might have a stronger construction “marker” on it. So any given “thought-block” could have two, three, four, or a hundred different means of assembly—and so different meanings. The listener was, in fact, expected to hold several of those meanings in mind at once. In this way, ambiguity and even a weird poetry was built into the language from the syntax up.
An algorithm would only take you so far. An intelligent translator had to figure out the context, apply judgment.
And if you really wanted to get it right, you had to print the thing out and sniff it. Breathe it in, like a fine wine.
In this very room was one of the three authentic sceeve “printers” on planet Earth. Another, a reproduction, sat in Leher’s underground apartment near White Rock Lake. Sceeve used a sort of polysaccharide “paper” that was similar to Braille in appearance, but instead of communicating through touch, each of the bumps released a trace odor. It had taken months of work to figure this out—no one had ever seen a sceeve actually reading—but it was now clear that the sceeve read this paper an entire “line” at a time, from the top to the bottom of a page. And they weren’t reading by sight. If they didn’t touch the page and release the odors for smelling, they couldn’t “read” it at all.
To add to the confusion, the sceeve didn’t share a single “emitted” language. Leher was still trying to piece together how the various language families—there were three main groups—were divided among the sceeve. It had mostly to do with the migration history of the various sceeve clans or “hypha.” Matters were made more confusing by the sceeve ability to understand the various dialects among themselves by making use of their gid, the collective-memory portion of their nervous system, as a translating mechanism. They also used, as did humans, the written word to achieve the same purpose, but of a smell-based variety.
What the sceeve did share was a common alphabet. In fact, the major branch of sceeve writing was a series of variations on a single family of smells.
Vanillin.
Sceeve paper smelled pretty much like a vanilla wafer to the ordinary human nose.
But oh the richness of that vanilla odor to the trained nose of a Xeno Division creep! Leher was an acknowledged master of the skill within the department itself. The “sniffer’s sniffer.” He’d been a sommelier when he was working his way through law school, and he’d found the task of sniffing sceeve paper similar to a wine tasting. Of course, he’d been a mediocre wine steward at best, but he liked to think he’d developed a much better nose for sceeve writing.
The documents on Leher’s desk were odiferous reproductions made of the Poet’s beta transmissions. They were transcripts “written out” in sceeve.
Leher tapped his Pocket Palace, which lay on the desk beside the sceeve documents, and his assistant LOVE’s geist appeared as a small heart-shaped icon to the left of his peripheral vision. Leher was wiied to the Palace, but his salt carried only the minimum charge necessary for him to lay a very basic chroma matte on top of his environment. He didn’t want LOVE to waste valuable computing space appearing in her full geist default mode as a human female, so he normally asked her to assume this minimized form. She’d always seemed happy enough to comply. Like Leher, LOVE was an obsessive when it came to her work. She did the exacting chemical analysis of the sceeve words. He handled the nuance. Leher thought they made a great team.
Leher took a drink of water, sat still for a moment to clear his palate and his mind, and then formed a “reading blade” with the side of his palm and his outstretched little finger. He ran his hand in this manner over the sceeve text. As he did so, the scratch-and-sniff smell rose to his nostrils and he breathed it in steadily with deep, regular breaths.
“All right, LOVE, let’s go over the transmission again,” he said.
As LOVE fed a train of transliteration to him, Leher disappeared into a reverie of smells. Vanilla wafer. Vanilla milk shake. Earth tones combined with vanilla, almost mushroom-like. Berries and vanilla. Chemical tang. Compared to most sceeve communication, the Poet’s transcripts were verbose and chatty. They were a veritable flower garden of scent, some of them pleasant, some of them oversweet, many uncomfortably sulfuric and carbolic—full of sceeve intensifiers often used to mean “very, very” or “pay attention” or “emergency!” It all depended on the context.
Whoever the tech was who recorded this had done an excellent job in riding the signal. The usual smell palate was expanded and tuned to particular sceeve idiomatic usage. As a result, the dynamic range of esters was much richer than most recordings of the sceeve. The tech had also, with the last transmission, come up with a way to definitely identify a single broadcaster. There had been a few multiple-origin theories floating around CRYPT, with the idea that there was some sort of cabal at work within the Sporata and all of them were the “Poet.” Leher had never really bought this theory—too many similarities in the Poet’s quirky diction among the broadcasts—and now the single-origin theory was confirmed by this frequency spike the alert tech had spotted. Leher made a mental note to put the tech up for a commendation.
Except he’d heard that she was likely dead.
Okay, he had good copy. What was he missing here? He’d read the transcript of the Poet’s last broadcast—nearly one hundred sceeve pages of it—several times since the messenger bottle had delivered it yesterday.
Our sun is dead. The stars blink broken code. He kept coming back to that line. It was repeated throughout the transcript as a kind of mantra.
The smells from the paper were telling their story, too. Leher wrote down their order with a pen and small notepad on his desk.
“Retranslate with grammar using the secondary-checkpoint hydroxyl,” he said to LOVE’s heart icon.
“Yes, LTC Leher.”
He’d wanted LOVE to call him Griff, but she’d refused and seemed a bit miffed at him for asking. Or what he took for miffed. He was no expert on servant emotional analogs. In any case, they’d settled on a shortening of “lieutenant commander” for use in their private communication channels.
Leher moved his reading hand over the text again. Breathed in.
The sun is dead. The stars blink broken—
“Code,” Leher said aloud.
Leher found himself considering the confirmation that the Poet was likely one individual. And that spike in the thirty-two kilohertz range. Like popping a p on a microphone, but in this case with a chemical signal.
The occurrences are so regular. What if—
What if the Poet was doing it on purpose? As a whispered marker.
Leher thumbed up a projection of the frequency analysis of this particular message on his desk. He laid the printed transcript next to it. Compared chemical trace to sceeve meaning ester.
Touched each spot on the page where the overmodulation occurred.
Smelled.
And he had it. A faint cinnamon accent to the vanillin. Sceeve esters usually occurred discreetly. Rider accents were a call to rearrange esters and restructure syntax in a sceeve paragraph.
The Poet was chemically popping his ps at certain sentences and not others. Random? A personal tic? Or was he doing it on purpose?
“LOVE, please make a catalog search for this ‘sun is dead’ cinnamon ester.”
LOVE’s quietly intense voice. “All right, LTC Leher.” Half a second later. “I’ve found something from Skyhook Non-Euclidean B, LTC Leher.”
Skyhook Non-Euclidean B. The notoriously untranslated portion of the haul from the Skyhook raid.
“Not much help there,” Leher said.
“Sorry, LTC Leher.”
“That’s all right, LOVE.” Griff sat back, lost in contemplation.
Had to mean something. Had to . . .
After a moment, he turned to the other messages he’d printed out. He read through them all once and then again, mostly sniffing for the cinnamon tang. Nothing.
He reread the final communication from the Poet.
And he found the cinnamon. Several times. Once again, the scent was barely detectable within the overwhelming vanilla of the straightforward text.
It can’t be that easy, he thought. Can’t.
He took a pen and physically circled each instance on the page.
“LOVE, translate the esters I’ve just circled. Top to bottom. Use the final grouping as a syntax constructor.”
But he was already doing it in his head and was smiling broadly before LOVE finished her more accurate and idiomatic version.
He had it.
Attention, begin primary information: Sporata war vessel Guardian of Night en route to defect to Sol C government. This vessel mounts newly gleaned Sporata weapon of unknown potential and possible strategic-level value. Say again: A.S.C. Guardian of Night with potential strategic weapon seeks political asylum with United States government. Begin secondary information: Mutualist vessel Efficacy of Symbiosis to rendezvous with defecting Sporata vessel Guardian of Night in vicininty of Sol system to effect transfer of refugee passengers to Efficacy of Symbiosis. Say again: vessel Efficacy of Symbiosis, non-Administration, successionist craft to rendezvous with defecting Guardian of Night to effect transfer of Mutualist Shiro refugees. Begin tertiary information: Sirius armada to recommence gleaning of Sol system within current variado. Repeat: Sirius armada to reinvade Sol C within five semanatos.
Objective: arrive before Administration invasion armada. Deliver weapon to Sol C. Discuss alliance with Mutualist enclaves. Engage Sirius armada.
Plan of action: request meeting highest levels with humans and their servant programs. Request aid, alliance, joint defensive agreement. A.S.C. Guardian of Night desires to trade advanced, recently gleaned weaponry for terms of political sanctuary. Mutualist vessel Efficacy of Symbiosis desires discussion of Sol C alliance with successionist enclaves.
Begin technical information: descriptive schematic of principal weapon on military vessel is as follows—
There was more, much more. It was a manual. Instructions for using some kind of sceeve superweapon. All the details were there, although Leher didn’t understand the science. Somebody would.
Then, after the weapon information, a final message.
Final rendezvous location to follow in separate transmission.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Leher thought.
“Do you see this, LOVE?”
“It’s quite clear, LTC Leher, now that you have pointed it out.”
“So I’m not dreaming?”
“You are producing alpha waves indicative of a conscious state,” said LOVE.
Strategic weapon. Terms of sanctuary.
The sceeve bastard, hiding all that in plain sight.
He wasn’t a mindless ranter masquerading as an artist.
He really had a way with words, after all.
FOUR
31 December 2075
Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.
Capitol Complex Perimeter
Extry Captain Jim Coalbridge buttoned his greatcoat against the Texas wind. A dusting of what looked like snow but what was actually “curd,” or neutralized sceeve military nanotech, was falling on the downtown streets, coating them with a fine gray-white powder. The day was mild for December in Dallas, but Coalbridge was used to the regulated temperatures of spacecraft, and he’d been shivering since stepping out of the downtown train platform.
Coalbridge turned up his coat’s collar. He had grown up in Oklahoma, and he knew that Southern prairie weather could be unpredictable. There were no nearby mountain ranges—practically no natural features whatsoever—to direct the huge pressure cells that roamed the plains. Any stray upper-level current might mean a thirty- or forty-degree shift in temperature within hours. North Texas summers were unbearably hot. Fall and spring were tolerable—but those seasons were filled with tornadoes and hurricanes. Now, with global weather patterns thrown into chaos by the sceeve planetary attacks, there were more killer storms than ever.
And winter? Winter was still mostly brown in these parts—with the occasional ice storm to provide a day or so of treacherous beauty.
He had to admit that walking under the sky, any planetary sky, made him uneasy now. After years spent mostly in space, it felt a bit dangerous and wrong to be under all those layers of atmosphere.
Space was better. Space would kill you, true. But the planetary atmosphere you had to expose yourself to because you had to breathe it. Space you could protect against in a reasonable way.
Coalbridge glanced upward reflexively at the empty blue sky, checking for a telltale approaching shadow. Stupid. Should have gotten over that behavior years ago. The drop-rods fell at hypersonic speeds. They said you had five seconds from hearing a raid alert until impact. They also said you never heard the one that hit you.
I’m a walking Extry cliché, Coalbridge thought. I’ve lost my landlubber instincts and spend half my time down here feeling that I’m stuck in permanent airlock-failure mode and that the sky is falling.
Of course, on Earth, the sky sometimes did fall. And the effects weren’t pretty.
Take Dallas, for instance. The place was more rubble than city. Much of downtown had been flattened by drop-rod titanium rainfalls and a sceeve silicon-eating churn during the first invasion. Although the churn was mostly turned to curd, it had infected and weakened the city’s infrastructure before being deactivated by ground defenses. What skyscrapers remained were brittle and useless. Business, and humanity along with it, had moved underground. Transportation was too expensive and difficult to bury, so it remained on the surface. Big sporting events and concerts still happened topside, as well (and fans took their lives into their hands to attend them).
Political protests also were a surface-based activity. The sceeve invasion, which had abruptly ended eight years before, was about to resume.
Everyone in the Extry knew it. The Xeno division had confirmed it with its startling communiqué from a sceeve source. Everyone in the government should be well aware by now. And anybody else was an idiot who didn’t suspect what was coming. Bad things had once again begun to fall from the sky.
Yet even before the recent precursors to reinvasion, planet Earth had been a wreck.
Stuck in half-ass gear. That was the way Coalbridge’s great-great-grandfather had once described the old European city of Prague to Coalbridge when Coalbridge was a kid. Half-ass gear was when you were going too fast for first or second but not fast enough to shift to the next higher gear.
Aging in humans—at least in the developed world—had been short-circuited starting in 2025 around the time Coalbridge’s great-great, whom Coalbridge called Paw Paw, was in his sixties. It was ironic that humans had solved the aging problem—well, forestalled it, at least, by a hundred or so years—only to have the unsolvable death problem hit them like a thunderbolt from space when the sceeve attacked.
Paw Paw had lived in Prague for a year in the early 1990s after the twentieth century’s Cold War ended, and he’d described his impressions of the city to young Jimmy on more than one occasion.
He always called it Praha, like the natives, Coalbridge thought, and always made it feminine, like a vessel. Well, Praha or Prague, the place no longer existed, so it was pretty much a worry for historians now.
“Praha got the shit kicked out of her during World War II but escaped the worst of the damage. She didn’t get flattened, like, say, Krakow in Poland. But she was busted up enough. And the commies just left her that way for fifty years. Damnedest thing. They didn’t abandon her. Everyone stilled lived there. But nobody f
ixed anything. There was nothing to fix anything with. No money. No materials. No tools.”
Coalbridge remembered his great-grandfather going on about the city while sitting at the battered kitchen table in Oklahoma City, the table’s plasticized wood-grain surface pockmarked with cigarette burns from the older man’s endless train of Marlboro Reds.
“I was having a little thing with this woman, Lenka Justinova—well, she was my Czech teacher at the intelligence station, to tell the truth—this was before your maw maw and me got married—and Lenka lived way up inside one of those gigantic concrete monsters the comms threw up all over Eastern Europe. Called ’em panelaks in Czech. Twenty thousand poor suckers in a cluster of ’em, if you can believe it. Made ’em out of this inferior concrete with too much sand that started to degrade the moment it set. It was nice having a little thing on the side with Lenka, but let me tell you, I’d always go see her with a set of tools and spend half my time fixing her toilet or working on her sink instead of, you know, having fun.”
Except for the mysterious Lenka, his great-grandfather could’ve been talking about modern-day Dallas, Coalbridge thought. All the old buildings were torn to bits and pieces, and all the new stuff was cheap-ass, thrown together with whatever could be easily manufactured or salvaged.
The centers of the downtown streets had become the only reliably clear thoroughfares, and were used by auto, bus, and foot traffic. Rubble lined the sidewalks and filled the gutters—rubble coated with the gray-white denuded sceeve curd, so that the entire city looked like it had received a thin shellacking with primer and was awaiting a paint job.
There was also sparkle. A fine glass—the grain-sized shards of shattered windows, Coalbridge figured—paved the center of the streets and remained exposed due to steady traffic. The stuff wasn’t sharp. It had long ago been ground to a sand-like fineness, and the roadway glittered like diamonds when the sun shone.