by Ian Watson
He passed the fir tree, still standing there at the foot of the Great Staircase. Though Christmas was past, it still lacked a few days till Twelfth Night — and the full ritual was being observed. The tree looked more like a skeleton than ever. An X-ray of a tree skirted about by thick green dandruff.
They should take it away sooner. It had become depressing.
Should he trace a message in the scurf for the nursing staff to read? ‘Bury me, I'm dead’. No point. They had military minds, and stuck to regulations. Regulation 217 subsection (a) — ‘Christmas trees shall remain in situ till the Twelfth Day of Christmas’. Something like that.
He passed through the security airlock into the rear wing, knocked on Sam Bax's door and walked in.
“What is it, Lionel?”
Sam Bax didn't seem overjoyed to see him. He hadn't, lately.
“Sam, I must know when Chris is coming back. The situation's getting more touchy every day. There could he some real damage done before long.”
“Why can't you hold the fort yourself, Lionel? I'll ask Richard to take turns with you if you want. But you were Chris's choice.”
“You haven't told me when Chris is coming hack. Or what he's doing.”
“Lionel, I frankly don't know when he'll be back. Tom Zwingler telephoned from America yesterday. It seems Chris has some significant contribution to make.”
“What to?”
Sam Bax spread his hands on the desk top. The gesture was one of showing all his cards, but the cards were all face down.
“Ah — there you have me. But I promise you, so far as this Unit is concerned, Chris's visit to the States can only bring profitable feedback.”
“Great, Sam! Just great. And what the hell's the virtue in finance if there's nothing left worth financing!”
“It can't be as sticky as that. Surely you're exaggerating. Everything went perfectly smoothly up till now. I wouldn't have let Chris go otherwise.”
“Have you monitored the embedding world lately?”
The Director glanced down at his hands, then shiftily at the telephone.
“Well you know, Lionel, there was this seminar in Bruges. Then the business about the army wanting to withdraw their nurses for active service. And all the boring financial nonsense — which I must admit Chris's trip might alleviate indirectly, if not directly. Frankly, I'd like to hire a few more high-calibre staff. But the way things are—” His vague excuses tapered off.
Rosson tossed his mane fretfully.
“‘More high-calibre’? And how do you intend that diplomatic phrase to be punctuated? Ah, never mind! Sam — I asked you, have you monitored Chris's world lately?”
Sam shook his head — preoccupied with other thoughts. With Chris? With America? But why? Presumably that Zwingler man had told Sam the real reason. Whatever mental disaster it was that had happened up there in Skylab. This talk about finance was all eyewash. A put-off.
“Give me half an hour, Sam. I'll play the relevant bits of tape for you. You'll see why I want Chris back here — whatever's going on over there. And I don't need Richard to back me up, as you know very well. Hell, Sam — it's Chris that the kids know best, and need. Same as Aye and Bee and the others know me and need me. I'm talking about contact. Touch. Play! I'm not bragging, Sam. Nor am I bloody well defending my own status. I'm stating psychological facts that you could probably even get Richard to agree to. These kids have established rapport with Chris just as mine have with me, Dorothy or Richard won't do as substitutes — if I can't handle it myself — and you know damn well why!”
“Calm down will you, Lionel? Now listen to me. I'm not calling Chris back from the States whatever goes wrong here. Not if the whole Unit burns down. And I mean that. You'll have to handle it by yourself. Naturally I'm willing to see the tapes.”
“You seem to have forgotten about the Project, Sam! Six months ago and you'd have rushed to the screen to see those tapes. Now it's all this finance and organization caper — and what Chris is doing in the States. Why? Sam, what the hell is going on over there? Has there been some mental breakdown up in space? That's what it looks like to me. What's so interesting that it makes you unconcerned about a mental disaster on your own doorstep?”
“A mental disaster — among Chris's kids? You'd go so far as that?” For the first time Sam looked concerned, briefly.
“That's what I've been trying to tell you!”
• • •
The screen lit and snowed with static, cleared to show Vidya opening up the largest of the talking dolls, taking the smaller doll from inside it, and shutting the larger doll neatly before moving on to the opening of the smaller.
“This is incident number one. The same day as that man Zwingler visited us.”
“No connection, I trust,” grunted Sam.
“Of course there's no connection!” snapped Rosson. “I'm just telling you when it happened.”
“All right, Lionel. You just seemed to have it in for Tom Zwingler—”
Rosson gestured at the screen.
“It was the story of the Princess and the Pea, Sam. I checked. How the real princess with the fairest skin in all the land — the least blunted nerve endings to you, Sam! — is the only girl that can feel the pea hidden under a pile of feather mattresses.”
“Yes yes,” said Sam impatiently.
They reviewed the first ‘fit’, the one to which Sole had drawn Rosson's attention before leaving.
“I wondered whether it might have had anything to do with the story itself — that business of mattress upon mattress upon mattress. Then the hard pea — the nub of the matter — at the very bottom of the pile. It's a sort of mocking comment on the embedded speech, isn't it Sam?”
Rosson blanked the screen and punched a new set of figures from memory.
The screen snowed once more and cleared.
“This is the second episode, Sam — this happened about forty-eight hours later, after Chris had left.”
Three children surrounded the Oracle in the centre of the maze. But Vidya was resisting the room's whisperings and hypnotic programming of events.
He was shouting and screaming, raging round the outside of the maze walls, whipping them with a piece of plastic pipe — and howling at the children inside.
Rosson switched the loudspeaker on and incoherent cries rang out.
“I couldn't make head or tail of it, Sam. The computer claimed it was a genuinely random string of syllables. But I'm beginning to suspect it represents a reversion to babbling, only on a much higher level.”
“Or a childish tantrum.”
“Yes, it expresses itself as a tantrum — I can see that. But is that all there is to it, for Christ's sake! What sort of situation does this kind of reversion to babbling normally occur in? Only when a much younger child has suffered a brain injury then goes right back to the beginning of the language learning process again. Vidya's far too old.”
“Unless the PSF has changed things?”
“Precisely, Sam! That's what I'm thinking. The brain's programme for acquiring speech must have been disrupted somehow.”
“Or speeded up?”
“One of the two. Wish I knew which. If you want my candid opinion, what we're seeing here is some kind of clash between the brain's own programme for generating language, and the programme we've imposed on it — the embedding programme. But the embedding programme isn't simply being tossed out by the brain. The PSF allows a much greater tolerance of data. So his brain must be trying to weave the embedding into the brain's ‘natural’ design for language. And the two designs just won't and can't match. The boy's brain has jammed — on account of its sheer versatility. And that jamming has thrown him right back to a random babbling stage. The set of rules has failed him — so he's reverting to Trial and Error methods. God knows what'll come out of this present babble, though!”
Sam Bax saw Vidya race round the maze. He whipped the walls. He howled. He babbled incomprehensibly.
“The la
d looks well enough co-ordinated,” he remarked. “Nothing much wrong there. Agile lad.”
“Watch, Sam.”
After several more circuits of the maze, Vidya cried out like an epileptic and collapsed beside the maze entrance. His slim body writhed about. His fingers flexed. He clawed at the floor as if to tug it up in strips. Finally he lay still.
“Dizzy! I'm not surprised. Running round and round like that.”
“Dizzy my arse! The boy had a fit. He was working himself up to it. He's giving himself his own shock therapy. Discharging the contradictions in his mind.”
Rosson tapped out a fresh code on the console.
The screen cleared to the scene of Vidya's recovery. The boy got up calmly and trotted into the maze.
“Now the next episode—”
“Lionel, I hate to break this off. But I'm expecting another call from the States.”
“Will that be Chris calling?”
“Sorry, Lionel. I simply won't have Chris distracted.”
“I can imagine what he'll have to say about that when he gets back here to find Vidya babbling his brains out and throwing fits!”
“Which is precisely why I won't have Chris told now. But I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll set a nurse on permanent stand-by. He can go in there and trank the child if there are any more incidents. We'll keep him that way till Chris gets back. Keep him on ice. Will that suit you?”
Far from it.
However Sam Bax was already heading out of Sole's room, leaving Rosson staring at a blank screen.
ELEVEN
“WOULD YOU PEOPLE do the same, Ph'theri?” Sole asked. “Would you trade us a living brain from one of the Sp'thra?”
“That depends on how we assessed the trade gain. Yes, if it was adequate.”
“So you wouldn't personally refuse to trade your own brain, even? If you were chosen?”
“The Sp'thra are Signal Traders. Surely the trading of a live brain is the ultimate form of signal trading. The brain contains all the signals of a species.”
“How long will these brains be kept alive?” Sole was asking; but the astronaut who had earlier staked his claim so vociferously cried out:
“I'd want a ticket to the goddam stars in exchange for six human brains put in a tin box. Star travel, no less, sir!”
Ph'theri raised a hand, exposing the orange palm flash.
“You cannot hope to trade starship technology for six brains from a world such as this. You reject the trade deal, then?”
“We're not necessarily rejecting anything,” Sciavoni protested quickly. “But you know exactly what you want. What are we getting out of it? It's too vague. How far is this habitable world? We could probably detect it ourselves long before we had the means to go there. How far's this intelligent race? Maybe so far communicating would be a waste of time! And these technological improvements—”
Sole's query about how long the brains would stay alive was shelved for the moment, by tacit consent. The prospect, after all, was no more terrible — far less terrible indeed — than X or Y or Z happening elsewhere in the world, in Asia, Africa, or South America.
“To give the other side all the information,” argued Ph'theri in a finicky way, “is the whole content of the trade—”
“To be sure! But you really must let us know less approximately. We can't buy a pig in a poke—”
Sciavoni mopped his brow, though the sun had barely risen on the building and the air within was merely warm. Sole realized how rigid his own stance had been for so many minutes past and made an effort to relax. The incoming sunlight woke other people up too, physically. A nose blew honkingly. Glasses were taken off and polished. Feet shuffled. Hands plunged into pockets. One man lit a cigarette, with a tiny stab of flame.
Ph'theri stared at the smoke and the smoker. “You meet the sun with burning? Is that customary here?”
“More like habitual,” grunted Sciavoni sardonically. Outside the window the ship Ph'theri had come in lay with the ramp jutting out of its side like the tongue of a man hanged at dawn.
“The technology we offer will enable you to reach the inner gasgiant of your system in twenty of your days. With good energy conservation. Or else reach the outermost gasgiant in one hundred days, retaining fifty per cent energy. You want other destinations listed?” Sciavoni shook his head.
“We can work it out from that. How about the method?”
“The method will be adequate, you have the word of the Sp'thra for that. Signal Trading demands truth, otherwise there is only disorder and entropy, and reality will never be articulated—”
“Okay, damn it. How about those stars then? How far?”
Ph'theri's ears crinkled, cubed and inflated, as he concentrated on the whispering of the wires.
“In your light years, the closest habitable planet known to the Sp'thra is approximately Two One units away—”
A Russian scientist calculated swiftly and looked crestfallen.
“Which means 82 Eridani, Beta Hydri, or HR 8832. Nothing closer. So Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti and all those other promising stars are useless.”
“Not at all,” the younger of the Californian astronomers contradicted him. “The operative concept is ‘known to the Sp'thra’. Don't forget that. We've no guarantee they know all the local stars.”
“The message distance is Nine Eight light years,” Ph'theri said flatly.
“One way?”
“True.”
“But that means — let's see, ninety eight times two . . . one hundred and ninety six years to send a message and get an answer! Did I hear someone mention a pig in a poke, Sciavoni?”
“You did indeed.”
The astronomers began to squabble about tachyons — particles supposed to travel faster than light implied a shorter transit time — but Sole felt impatient.
“We need to find out some more about these peoples' motives,” he snapped. “Ph'theri — why are you so anxious to escape from ‘This-Reality’?”
“To solve the Sp'thra problem,” Ph'theri replied shortly.
“Maybe we can trade some help in solving it?”
“Very unlikely,” said Ph'theri coldly. “I would say it is species-specific to the Sp'thra.”
The Englishman shook his head.
“No. The problem has to involve all the species in the universe — if you're approaching it by comparing all their languages. That stands to reason. Unless . . . is it a sexual problem? I suppose that would be intimately specific to the species. Obsessional, too, into the bargain!”
“A breeding problem? The Sp'thra have no breeding problem on the twin worlds.”
“An emotional problem — a problem of feeling?”
Ph'theri hesitated, though his ears did not modify themselves to listen to any words whispered into them. He considered the question, himself, for what seemed minutes on end.
“There is an emotional area beyond sex, true. You have a word ‘Love’. Perhaps that is the name of the problem. But it is not a problem of love for the Sp'thra mate — that sort of love is a form of solipsism, which we detest. ‘He’ loves himself in the mirror of ‘Herself’. ‘She’ loves herself in the mirror of ‘Himself’. That is to love the signal of the Self. The transmission of the genetic code, the ritual greetings, the embrace gestures are part of this same solipsism. But there is an area of emotion we feel, which involves Bereft Love — that is our problem.” The alien faltered. “The Bereft Love we feel for the Change Speakers—”
Sole waited patiently, but nothing more was forthcoming. The alien had clammed up.
Sciavoni was whispering angrily to the astronomers, “We've got to know what makes these creatures tick, before we can judge their honesty. If that involves defining their concepts of Love and Morals, that's okay by me!”
“Who are these Change Speakers, Ph'theri?” Sole demanded. “Is that another species?”
The alien stared down at the man, disparagingly. Nothing of the missionary about this bastard, th
ought Sole, wincing under that aged, grey gaze. Slowly — spelling it out to a child — the alien explained his faith . . . or science . . . or delusion: a queer fusion of the three that Man would maybe need to hypnotize himself with the like of, if he was ever to drive himself to the Stars.
“They are variable entities. They manipulate what we know as reality by means of their shifting-value signals. Using signals that lack constants — which have variable referents. This universe-here embeds us in it. But not them. They escape. They are free. They shift across realities. Yet when we have successfully superimposed the reality-programmes of all languages, in the moon between the twin worlds, we too shall be free. It has to be soon. The time span to date is One Two Nine Zero Nine, your years—”
“Sweet Christ, this all started thirteen thousand years ago?”
“True. The primitive startings. The first quarrying of the Language Moon. That happened soon after the first dawn of Bereft Love for the Change Speakers. At first exploration went slowly, jumping from star to star. The subsequent discovery of gasgiant Wave Readers approximately Seven Zero Zero Zero years later, saved much time—”
Sole felt horrified at this span of time. What was Homo Sapiens doing then? Painting the cave walls at Lascaux?
“A physical search for the Change Speakers in this Three-Space would be useless,” said the alien meditatively — in a measured, weary way, as though he'd explained all this before across the universe till he was sick of it. “A speech-changing search is the only hope. Only at the places where the languages of different species grate together, presenting an interface of paradox, do we guess the nature of true reality and draw strength to escape. Our language moon will finally reveal reality as a direct experience. Then we shall state the Totality. We shall stand outside of This-Reality and pursue our Bereft Love—”
“Is it Beings you're searching for, Ph'theri? Or a Being? Or the nature of Being? What?”
“There are races that have many more inflections of the concept ‘Being’ than yourselves,” Ph'theri replied witheringly. “The Change Speakers are para-beings. We Sp'thra feel a deep bereft ‘love’ for them, since they phased with the twin worlds so many years ago. And went away. They change-spoke away from Sp'thra — by modulating their embedding in reality — and left us . . .