by Ted Chiang
I thought to myself, the ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in. I knew what that reminded me of. I looked up at Gary. “That’s what was bugging me.”
I remember when you’re fourteen. You’ll come out of your bedroom, a graffiti-covered notebook computer in hand, working on a report for school.
“Mom, what do you call it when both sides can win?”
I’ll look up from my computer and the paper I’ll be writing. “What, you mean a win-win situation?”
“There’s some technical name for it, some math word. Remember that time Dad was here, and he was talking about the stock market? He used it then.”
“Hmm, that sounds familiar, but I can’t remember what he called it.”
“I need to know. I want to use that phrase in my social studies report. I can’t even search for information on it unless I know what it’s called.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know it either. Why don’t you call your dad?”
Judging from your expression, that will be more effort than you want to make. At this point, you and your father won’t be getting along well. “Can you call Dad and ask him? But don’t tell him it’s for me.”
“I think you can call him yourself.”
You’ll fume, “Jesus, Mom, I can never get help with my homework since you and Dad split up.”
It’s amazing the diverse situations in which you can bring up the divorce. “I’ve helped you with your homework.”
“Like a million years ago, Mom.”
I’ll let that pass. “I’d help you with this if I could, but I don’t remember what it’s called.”
You’ll head back to your bedroom in a huff.
I practiced Heptapod B at every opportunity, both with the other linguists and by myself. The novelty of reading a semasiographic language made it compelling in a way that Heptapod A wasn’t, and my improvement in writing it excited me. Over time, the sentences I wrote grew shapelier, more cohesive. I had reached the point where it worked better when I didn’t think about it too much. Instead of carefully trying to design a sentence before writing, I could simply begin putting down strokes immediately; my initial strokes almost always turned out to be compatible with an elegant rendition of what I was trying to say. I was developing a faculty like that of the heptapods.
More interesting was the fact that Heptapod B was changing the way I thought. For me, thinking typically meant speaking in an internal voice; as we say in the trade, my thoughts were phonologically coded. My internal voice normally spoke in English, but that wasn’t a requirement. The summer after my senior year in high school, I attended a total immersion program for learning Russian; by the end of the summer, I was thinking and even dreaming in Russian. But it was always spoken Russian. Different language, same mode: a voice speaking silently aloud.
The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet non-phonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of Deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one’s thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice.
With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: My thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren’t expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane.
As I grew more fluent, semagraphic designs would appear fully formed, articulating even complex ideas all at once. My thought processes weren’t moving any faster as a result, though. Instead of racing forward, my mind hung balanced on the symmetry underlying the semagrams. The semagrams seemed to be something more than language; they were almost like mandalas. I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no “train of thought” moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedence.
A representative from the State Department named Hossner had the job of briefing the U.S. scientists on our agenda with the heptapods. We sat in the videoconference room, listening to him lecture. Our microphone was turned off, so Gary and I could exchange comments without interrupting Hossner. As we listened, I worried that Gary might harm his vision, rolling his eyes so often.
“They must have had some reason for coming all this way,” said the diplomat, his voice tinny through the speakers. “It does not look like their reason was conquest, thank God. But if that’s not the reason, what is? Are they prospectors? Anthropologists? Missionaries? Whatever their motives, there must be something we can offer them. Maybe it’s mineral rights to our solar system. Maybe it’s information about ourselves. Maybe it’s the right to deliver sermons to our populations. But we can be sure that there’s something.
“My point is this: their motive might not be to trade, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot conduct trade. We simply need to know why they’re here, and what we have that they want. Once we have that information, we can begin trade negotiations.
“I should emphasize that our relationship with the heptapods need not be adversarial. This is not a situation where every gain on their part is a loss on ours, or vice versa. If we handle ourselves correctly, both we and the heptapods can come out winners.”
“You mean it’s a non-zero-sum game?” Gary said in mock incredulity. “Oh my gosh.”
“A non-zero-sum game.”
“What?” You’ll reverse course, heading back from your bedroom.
“When both sides can win: I just remembered, it’s called a non-zero-sum game.”
“That’s it!” you’ll say, writing it down on your notebook. “Thanks, Mom!”
“I guess I knew it after all,” I’ll say. “All those years with your father, some of it must have rubbed off.”
“I knew you’d know it,” you’ll say. You’ll give me a sudden, brief hug, and your hair will smell of apples. “You’re the best.”
“Louise?”
“Hmm? Sorry, I was distracted. What did you say?”
“I said, what do you think about our Mr. Hossner here?”
“I prefer not to.”
“I’ve tried that myself: ignoring the government, seeing if it would go away. It hasn’t.”
As evidence of Gary’s assertion, Hossner kept blathering: “Your immediate task is to think back on what you’ve learned. Look for anything that might help us. Has there been any indication of what the heptapods want? Of what they value?”
“Gee, it never occurred to us to look for things like that,” I said. “We’ll get right on it, sir.”
“The sad thing is, that’s just what we’ll have to do,” said Gary.
“Are there any questions?” asked Hossner.
Burghart, the linguist at the Ft. Worth looking glass, spoke up. “We’ve been through this with the heptapods many times. They maintain that they’re here to observe, and they maintain that information is not tradable.”
“So they would have us believe,” said Hossner. “But consider: how could that be true? I know that the heptapods have occasionally stopped talking to us for brief periods. That may be a tactical maneuver on their part. If we were to stop talking to them tomorrow—”
“Wake me up if he says something interesting,” said Gary.
“I was just going to ask you to do the same for me.”
That day when Gary first explained Fermat’s principle to me, he had mentioned that almost every physical law could be stated as a variational principle. Yet when humans thought about physical laws, they preferred to work with them in their causal formulation. I could understand that: The physical attributes that humans found intuitive, like kinetic energy or acceleration, were all properties of an object at a given moment in time. And these were conduci
ve to a chronological, causal interpretation of events: one moment growing out of another, causes and effects creating a chain reaction that grew from past to future.
In contrast, the physical attributes that the heptapods found intuitive, like “action” or those other things defined by integrals, were meaningful only over a period of time. And these were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events: By viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated.
I was growing to understand that, too.
“Why?” you’ll ask again. You’ll be three.
“Because it’s your bedtime,” I’ll say again. We’ll have gotten as far as getting you bathed and into your jammies, but no further than that.
“But I’m not sleepy,” you’ll whine. You’ll be standing at the bookshelf, pulling down a video to watch: your latest diversionary tactic to keep away from your bedroom.
“It doesn’t matter: you still have to go to bed.”
“But why?”
“Because I’m the mom and I said so.”
I’m actually going to say that, aren’t I? God, somebody please shoot me.
I’ll pick you up and carry you under my arm to your bed, you wailing piteously all the while, but my sole concern will be my own distress. All those vows made in childhood that I would give reasonable answers when I became a parent, that I would treat my own child as an intelligent, thinking individual, all for naught: I’m going to turn into my mother. I can fight it as much as I want, but there’ll be no stopping my slide down that long, dreadful slope.
Was it actually possible to know the future? Not simply to guess at it; was it possible to know what was going to happen, with absolute certainty and in specific detail? Gary once told me that the fundamental laws of physics were time-symmetric, that there was no physical difference between past and future. Given that, some might say, “yes, theoretically.” But speaking more concretely, most would answer “no,” because of free will.
I liked to imagine the objection as a Borgesian fabulation: Consider a person standing before the Book of Ages, the chronicle that records every event, past and future. Even though the text has been photoreduced from the full-sized edition, the volume is enormous. With magnifier in hand, she flips through the tissue-thin leaves until she locates the story of her life. She finds the passage that describes her flipping through the Book of Ages, and she skips to the next column, where it details what she’ll be doing later in the day: Acting on information she’s read in the Book, she’ll bet $100 on the racehorse Devil May Care and win twenty times that much.
The thought of doing just that had crossed her mind, but being a contrary sort, she now resolves to refrain from betting on the ponies altogether.
There’s the rub. The Book of Ages cannot be wrong; this scenario is based on the premise that a person is given knowledge of the actual future, not of some possible future. If this were Greek myth, circumstances would conspire to make her enact her fate despite her best efforts, but prophecies in myth are notoriously vague; the Book of Ages is quite specific, and there’s no way she can be forced to bet on a racehorse in the manner specified. The result is a contradiction: The Book of Ages must be right, by definition; yet no matter what the Book says she’ll do, she can choose to do otherwise. How can these two facts be reconciled?
They can’t be, was the common answer. A volume like the Book of Ages is a logical impossibility, for the precise reason that its existence would result in the above contradiction. Or, to be generous, some might say that the Book of Ages could exist, as long as it wasn’t accessible to readers; that the volume is housed in a special collection, and no one has viewing privileges.
The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.
Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?
I stopped by Gary’s office before leaving for the day. “I’m calling it quits. Did you want to grab something to eat?”
“Sure, just wait a second,” he said. He shut down his computer and gathered some papers together. Then he looked up at me. “Hey, want to come to my place for dinner tonight? I’ll cook.”
I looked at him dubiously. “You can cook?”
“Just one dish,” he admitted. “But it’s a good one.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m game.”
“Great. We just need to go shopping for the ingredients.”
“Don’t go to any trouble—”
“There’s a market on the way to my house. It won’t take a minute.”
We took separate cars, me following him. I almost lost him when he abruptly turned into a parking lot. It was a gourmet market, not large, but fancy; tall glass jars stuffed with imported foods sat next to specialty utensils on the store’s stainless-steel shelves.
I accompanied Gary as he collected fresh basil, tomatoes, garlic, linguini. “There’s a fish market next door; we can get fresh clams there,” he said.
“Sounds good.” We walked past the section of kitchen utensils. My gaze wandered over the shelves—peppermills, garlic presses, salad tongs—and stopped on a wooden salad bowl.
When you are three, you’ll pull a dishtowel off the kitchen counter and bring that salad bowl down on top of you. I’ll make a grab for it, but I’ll miss. The edge of the bowl will leave you with a cut, on the upper edge of your forehead, that will require a single stitch. Your father and I will hold you, sobbing and stained with Caesar dressing, as we wait in the emergency room for hours.
I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn’t feel like something I was forced to do. Instead it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt right in following.
“I could use a salad bowl like this.”
Gary looked at the bowl and nodded approvingly. “See, wasn’t it a good thing that I had to stop at the market?”
“Yes, it was.” We got in line to pay for our purchases.
Consider the sentence “The rabbit is ready to eat.” Interpret “rabbit” to be the object of “eat,” and the sentence was an announcement that dinner would be served shortly. Interpret “rabbit” to be the subject of “eat,” and it was a hint, such as a young girl might give her mother so she’ll open a bag of Purina Bunny Chow. Two very different utterances; in fact, they were probably mutually exclusive within a single household. Yet either was a valid interpretation; only context could determine what the sentence meant.
Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle. Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations.
The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.
When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently; the worldviews that ultimately arose were the end result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a p
urpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.
I have a recurring dream about your death. In the dream, I’m the one who’s rock climbing—me, can you imagine it?—and you’re three years old, riding in some kind of backpack I’m wearing. We’re just a few feet below a ledge where we can rest, and you won’t wait until I’ve climbed up to it. You start pulling yourself out of the pack; I order you to stop, but of course you ignore me. I feel your weight alternating from one side of the pack to the other as you climb out; then I feel your left foot on my shoulder, and then your right. I’m screaming at you, but I can’t get a hand free to grab you. I can see the wavy design on the soles of your sneakers as you climb, and then I see a flake of stone give way beneath one of them. You slide right past me, and I can’t move a muscle. I look down and see you shrink into the distance below me.
Then, all of a sudden, I’m at the morgue. An orderly lifts the sheet from your face, and I see that you’re twenty-five.
“You okay?”
I was sitting upright in bed; I’d woken Gary with my movements. “I’m fine. I was just startled; I didn’t recognize where I was for a moment.”
Sleepily, he said, “We can stay at your place next time.”
I kissed him. “Don’t worry; your place is fine.” We curled up, my back against his chest, and went back to sleep.
When you’re three and we’re climbing a steep, spiral flight of stairs, I’ll hold your hand extra tightly. You’ll pull your hand away from me. “I can do it by myself,” you’ll insist, and then move away from me to prove it, and I’ll remember that dream. We’ll repeat that scene countless times during your childhood. I can almost believe that, given your contrary nature, my attempts to protect you will be what create your love of climbing: first the jungle gym at the playground, then trees out in the green belt around our neighborhood, the rock walls at the climbing club, and ultimately cliff faces in national parks.