He saw nothing he could recognize as books, paper files, or writing instruments. How did Cygnans store data? A triangular cage with one of the little chittering creatures was balanced precariously on what Jameson took to be a Cygnan desk: a sort of oversize shoetree with a multitude of flat oval surfaces.
But Jameson had no eyes for any of it after he saw what was stacked against the far wall: a careless plunder of human artifacts from the Jupiter ship. He saw clothing, cooking utensils, upended chairs, a broken mirror, books and music cards, even an uprooted vacuum toilet. The Cygnans must have been all through the individual cabins and the recreation lounge. The lectern that doubled as a pulpit was lying on its side, and next to it was the portable Moog, its twin keyboards grinning with ivory teeth at the mess around it.
The two Cygnans had draped themselves across a pair of perches that sat in the middle of all the confusion. The perches were curving, polished hobbyhorses leaning outward from trumpet-bell pedestals. Each was equipped with three sets of crossbars and a chin rest. For a Cygnan, he supposed, it was as comfortable a way of distributing weight as a chair. Another perch faced the two. Jameson gave it a dubious glance, then sat cross-legged on the floor beside it, his blanket draped Indian-fashion around him.
The Cygnans twitched on their perches. The chin rest snaked around sideways so as not to obstruct the third eyestalk mounted beneath the Cygnan approximation of a jaw. But the thick shaft of the perch concealed the revolting thing on their lower bellies, and he was grateful that he wouldn't have to look at it.
“Ja-me-son,” the larger Cygnan said.
It wasn't exactly “Ja-me-son.” The Cygnans couldn't manage consonants—unless one wanted to call those assorted hisses and pops consonants. Furthermore, they seemed unable to grasp the idea that an arrangement of phonemes could always have the same meaning regardless of pitch. Their first attempt to repeat Jameson's name had simply mimicked his timbre and tone—a falling fourth—and they seemed puzzled when he repeated it with a different inflection. In the end they had given up and assigned him a name—the original falling fourth, with the added fillip of a rising fifth preceded by a grace note.
Jameson didn't mind. He thought of them privately as. “Tetrachord” and “Triad.” He had a speech defect too. He couldn't form chords.
Finally they all got down to work. At the end of an hour, he'd figured out how the Cygnan language was formed and could manage a few words of it in a sort of babytalk.
By then, the Cygnans had accepted the convention that a hummed or whistled arpeggio was equivalent to sounding all the notes of a chord simultaneously. But Jameson could see that the concept was difficult for them. They would have to stop and think about the separate notes of the arpeggio and put them together in their heads. Then they'd try them out on each other until triumphantly, they had it—like a pair of illiterates spelling out words letter by letter—except that one letter might consist of half a dozen chords and connecting single notes, laboriously worked out one tone at a time.
It was just as difficult for Jameson. He needed constant repetition to pin down the more complex sequences, and he knew that there were subtleties—beyond the troublesome quarter-tones—that he was missing. It made for slow going.
The number of possible phonemes in the Cygnan language was staggering. They were based on the absolute pitch of a tone—not relative pitch, like the rising and falling tones of Chinese. The Cygnans had a useful range of two and a half octaves, and they could divide each twelve-tone octave into quarter-tones.
That made 120 phonemes to start with.
Just the single notes!
But a phoneme might be a single note, any combination of two notes, or any combination of three notes.
How many different two-note combinations were there? Jameson worked it out in his head. More than seven thousand of them.
Jameson became discouraged at that point. He didn't bother to figure out how many different three-note combinations there were. Or what happened when you figured in all the extra little slides and turns that Cygnans seemed to use the way humans used double consonants. It was depressingly clear that the number was astronomical. Compared with the paltry few dozen phonemes available in human languages, the richness of the Cygnan language must be beyond belief!
Perhaps, Jameson speculated with a sudden rush of awe, the Cygnans could even convey visual information with their language directly, in the same way dolphins could show one another the shape and depth of a bay by sonar imitation.
Actual pictures, built up of digital bits formed of sound, transmitted as naturally as breathing from Cygnan to Cygnan! Not descriptions, such as: “I see a creature with only four limbs and no tail, about so big.” But: “I see a creature that looks like this.”
In human terms, Jameson thought, how many thousands of words would it take to teach someone, say, a tune by Beethoven? How much simpler just to hum it. And a tune, compared with visual material, was a straightforward linear piece of information containing relatively few bits.
He tried not to worry about it. The most rudimentary sort of pidgin Cygnan would have to do. After all, he consoled himself, South Sea islanders had managed to trade with the first British mariners using a few dozen basic nouns and modifiers. It hadn't been necessary for them to learn the language of Shakespeare.
Slowly, painfully, tone by tone, hoping the two Cygnans’ patience would last, Jameson acquired the first dozen words of a vocabulary that consisted mostly of parts of the body and a few objects in the room. Next he tried an abstraction. What did the Cygnans call their race? What class of creatures, he asked them, included both Tetrachord and Triad?
He made the sounds of their names, followed by the Cygnan-style inclusive gesture, and ending with the little trill he had come to recognize as a Cygnan interrogative. He was rewarded with a burst of harmony. In five minutes he learned to repeat this as arpeggios, and the Cygnans warbled their approval.
An aproned assistant arrived at that point to put another of the pyramidal cages on the desk. The Cygnan apron, worn lengthwise, was anchored by a loop over head and tail, with a scalloped leathery flap hung down either side.
Jameson thought he'd clinch it. Before the assistant could leave, he made the inclusive gesture for all three of the Cygnans and repeated his question.
There was a lot of agitated chirping. Then Tetrachord and Triad both turned to him and gave him an entirely different word.
Jameson wiped the sweat off his forehead with a forearm. What was going wrong? He decided to attack it from a different angle. What did the Cygnans call humans?
“Ja-me-son,” he said in the three-note figure that signified his name. Then he made the inclusive gesture and whistled, “Ja-me-son, Ja-me-son,” followed by the interrogative trill.
What are many Jamesons called? He waited.
He got his own name back firmly, once, There is no such thing as a class of Jamesons. He tried again, and got his name back with the cascade of dropping thirds that they always used to correct him with. A mistake. Evidently such a thing as many Jamesons was a conceptual impossibility.
Doggedly he tried again. Numbers, then. Numbers were basic. He held up a finger. “One.” He extended another. “Two.” He added a third. “Three.” Then he trilled the Cygnan interrogative.
He waited. Nothing.
He tried again. “One...”
The smaller Cygnan, Triad, was showing signs of becoming restless. She—why did he think of this one as she?—turned to Tetrachord and tootled at him. Tetrachord tootled back. Then he slithered off his perch and picked up the electric prod. He gestured toward the door with it.
It was time for Jameson to go back to his cage.
He rose to his feet reluctantly. He hadn't made much progress. Would he get another chance? Cygnans didn't seem to be long on patience. Or curiosity.
If only he could speed up the process of communication.
He allowed them to herd him halfway to the door before he stopped. Then he beca
me stubborn, earning himself a mild tingle from the prod.
Moving slowly so as not to alarm them, he started toward the untidy stack of human goods over at the far wall. They did nothing to stop him. He was able to reach the Moog.
He turned it on. The little red light glowed. There were still a couple of dozen hours left in the batteries. Quickly he pulled out stops, trying for an approximation of the Cygnan voice. A touch of oboe. A flute. A bassoon with its wave frequency moved up to the treble range. A synthetic soprano voice saying “ah.”
The preparation took him a few seconds. He glanced over his shoulder. How much time would they allow him? Not enough time to reprogram the little computer that was the heart of the Moog; that would take hours. But he didn't have to do anything very complicated to start with. He altered the tuning of the A to shift it slightly from concert pitch, and the Moog obligingly shifted the rest of the scale to go with it. Then he lowered all the C sharps a trifle and retuned a couple of the notes he wouldn't be using for the demonstration, to provide the quarter-tone notes he would need.
He turned. Triad was coming toward him, hissing. Her rasplike tongue flickered in and out. His time was up.
Jameson put his hands on the keyboard and said her name in perfect Cygnanese. With, he hoped, hardly a trace of an accent.
He worked on the Moog while the assistant brought in their lunch. He didn't care to think about the Cygnans’ lunch except to note that it didn't seem to enjoy being eaten. His own lunch was another half-thawed block of food from his own ship's freezer—this time a pie-sized portion of mincemeat stuffing intended for Christmas dinner.
The Moog had two five-octave keyboards. He compressed them into a single compass of two and one half octaves composed of quarter-tones. It fit the Cygnan vocal range perfectly.
He fiddled individually with what seemed to be some of the more important tones in the Cygnan vocabulary—the off-key B flat in Tetrachord's name and the wrong-note bagpipe tone that finished off the octave, among others. But for most of it he simply had the computer chop up the normal equal-temperament octave into forty-eight pieces instead of twelve. He could retune other crucial notes one at a time as they came up while he was learning to talk Cygnan.
It took him another hour to alter the Moog's memory so that it would replay some of the standard Cygnan sequences at the touch of a button—the interrogative trill and the cascade of minor thirds, and some of the turns and arabesques he'd been able to pin down so far. He had only to play them once through and tell the Moog to remember them. They were plugged into the bank of cheater buttons that were meant for slipbeat rhythms and computer-generated contrapuntal voices.
When he'd finished, not even Johann Sebastian Bach could have played recognizable human music on the Moog. It was a Cygnan speech synthesizer now, with lots of unused learning capacity.
His accomplishment earned him a reprieve. It made Conversing a lot easier for the Cygnans, for one thing, and that rekindled their interest. They didn't have to stop to figure out what Jameson meant when he interpolated a broken chord, and they didn't have to repeat things for him endlessly; the Moog's play-along attachment taped them the first time, and the Cygnans could go about their business while Jameson devoted himself to memorizing word lists.
They didn't even make him return to his cage. Instead, they let him sleep in a small storage room adjacent to their office or workshop, or whatever it was, and work on his vocabulary while they were busy. During their frequent absences, he was allowed to wander through the workshop, as if he were a trusted pet. Among the looted human artifacts he found clothing and toilet articles, and soon he was able to get warm again and clean himself up. The aproned assistant brought him his meals at regular intervals: more frozen food from the freezer and, as time went on, unfamiliar stuff that the Cygnans evidently had learned to synthesize. Most of it was an unappetizing mush, but it didn't make him sick. At least he wouldn't starve when human supplies ran out.
To Jameson's immense relief, learning the Cygnan language turned out to be easy. The structure, such as it was, was positional. He was able to get along fairly well simply by piling words on top of one another, as you could do in Chinese.
He remembered something one of his language teachers on Earth had told him: Sophisticated languages tend to dispense with grammar. Languages of primitive cultures, like Eskimo or Hottentot, have far more complex a structure than highly evolved languages like English or Chinese. The Cygnans, who had been wandering through space for untold millennia, must have a far older civilization than man.
Their language had been simplified. Given time, Jameson could have taught Mike Berry or any other competent amateur musician to play back Cygnan “words” by rote on the Moog's modified keyboard, or punch in his programmed phrases. But Mike didn't have absolute pitch, so he could never have understood the Cygnan's replies.
The Cygnan language was simple, all right. But nobody in the crew except Jameson could possibly have understood it.
Chapter 18
“Is this a little Jameson?”
At least Jameson assumed the word was “little” or something close to it. It fit the context and contained, within a cloud of embellishments, the set of phonemes that denoted something that was small in size or a model for something larger.
“No,” Jameson said, his fingers flashing over the keyboards of the Moog. “It is an animal.”
He had gotten to that point of fluency where his fingers thought for him in Cygnanese. It must be the same, he imagined, for people who habitually communicated in deaf-and-dumb signals: language without vocalization, but language nevertheless.
“Yes, but is this the animal that (tootle-tootle-peep-peep-peep) Jamesons?”
His mind had automatically translated the piping sounds into idiomatic English—all but the (tootle-tootle-peep-peep-peep). It sounded a little like the word for “produce” and a little like the word for “consume” and a little like the ideogram for putting together the parts of something. It was another of those Cygnan ambiguities that Jameson could never seem to get the hang of.
The animal in question was a small bedraggled kitten that crouched on one of the oval pads of Triad's desk, almost too weak to move and certainly too frightened to jump down. It was tiny and feather-light, with matted gray fur, and its ribs showed pitifully. It had spunk, though. It hissed at Jameson or the Cygnans when they got too close, showing a pink tongue and little needle teeth. Where the animal had come from was a mystery. Tetrachord and Triad had disappeared for about twelve hours and had returned in a state of high excitement, lugging triangular containers. The kitten came out of one of the containers.
“I do not understand,” Jameson said cautiously. His fingers hammered away at the keys. “What is (tootle-tootle-peep-peep-peep)?”
He hoped he'd got that right. Sometimes the tiniest transposition of a tone led to wild misunderstandings, which had caused his problem with the concept of many Jamesons. The Cygnans still vehemently denied that there was a class of Jamesons, but they freely used the idea of a Jameson to refer to humans. Jameson couldn't understand the distinction.
He received no reply. The Cygnans acted displeased with him. But all he'd done was repeat the word that Triad had used. Or had he? He felt like a small boy who has unwittingly used a dirty word.
He thought furiously. He didn't dare risk having the Cygnans break off the conversation, as they frequently did when things got difficult. What had Triad asked him? One component of the ideogram was “to consume.” Was she asking him if kittens were parasitic on man? They were obviously too small to be predators.
He risked it. He pointed at the swollen parasite that swung between Triad's hind legs.
“Is this the animal that (tootle-tootle-peep-peep-peep) Triads?” he asked.
The reaction was swift and startling. Tetrachord untwined himself from his perch and made a savage rush at Jameson. Jameson shrank back, alarmed. These mock rushes seemed to be a Cygnan reflex to anything threatening—eit
her physical or intellectual—but they were scary nevertheless. Tetrachord darted a long neck at Jameson, making hissing sounds. The spiked tongue flicked in his direction.
Triad's reaction was different. The smaller Cygnan shielded the parasite from view with two hands. The orange orifice at the end of the tail, which often revealed itself partially when the Cygnans were relaxed or doing something pleasurable like eating, closed itself up purse-tight. Triad assumed the posture which seemed to signify self-protection or embarrassment.
Desperately Jameson assumed the submissive posture. It was the Cygnan form of apology. He turned his back to Tetrachord and crouched, holding himself perfectly still.
Mollified, Tetrachord returned to his perch. When Jameson thought it was safe he stood up again and went to the desk. He picked up the gray kitten. It vibrated against his chest, all skin and bones.
He walked over to the locker containing the supplies of human food that he'd scrounged from the Cygnans’ loot. He rationed it out to himself whenever he needed a change from the synthetic mush the aproned assistant dished out to him.
He found a can of condensed milk and poured some of it in a bowl. He set the kitten down on the floor in front of it. The kitten began avidly to lap it up.
The two Cygnans watched with mounting interest. “The animal would not eat the human food we gave it,” Triad reported. “It would only drink the water.”
A few circumspect questions got Jameson the information that the kitten had refused offerings of rice and wingbean paste from the ship's stores. They hadn't tried giving it meat.
“How long,” he asked carefully, “has it been since this animal has eaten?”
The Jupiter Theft Page 19