by John Brunner
“Uh…” She shook her head. “You just lost me.”
“Well, suppose when I’ve finished calibrating every crystal found at one particular site—which will take quite a while until I figure out an optimum configuration to automate the process with—suppose I find there’s a pattern which can be isolated in every single block… which actually is too much to hope for, so I’d set the machines to determine what patterns occur on the n-plus level, in other words what patterns have been found more often than once per crystal. Then I’d sift those, looking for the one which occurred literally the most often, and make an assumption about it.”
“Such as?”
“First of all, that it was a statement concerning an individual member of the species. The equivalent in human terms would be ‘he is,’ ‘she did,’ ‘they were’—that kind of thing. And then I’d look for associative correspondences, or rather I’d programme the computers to do that. I’d look for a phrase of the structure ‘he is XYZ’ which I could match up with another ‘they are XYZ.’ And then I’d cross-match all those with other phrases of the same general form. You see, I’m looking not for a translation, which would be ridiculous, but for a grammar. Once we have a grammar, the rest can be filled in by trial and error.”
Somewhat doubtfully she said, “Do you mean by ‘grammar’ what they taught me at school?”
“Oh, no. Not unless you were very lucky. Where were you educated?”
“Partly in Dublin and partly in Athens.”
“Ouch!” Ian threw up his hands. “In that case it’s a miracle you found your way here—if you asked me to name two really reactionary centres of linguistic teaching, stuck in the mud of the classical languages even after generations of fresh insight after fresh insight into what language is really doing… Excuse me; that’s a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine. But you weren’t selected to come here for your brilliance in linguistics, so…” He interrupted himself, falling over his tongue. “Oh, sometimes I think I’m the most tactless person alive! I mean, I know all about your work with Soper and Dupont at the Viking sites in Nova Scotia—”
“Actually what settled the matter was the colour of my eyes,” she snapped. “Idiot!” And blew him a kiss, and added, “Go on, will you?”
“Uh… Sure. A grammar is not what I suspect was taught to you: a set of rules which lays down that this is right and this is wrong and this is a solecism but permissible—hm?” He tousled his hair with distracted fingers. “No, it’s far more like a system of topological relationships, and in fact modern grammar borrows much of its terminology, like invariance, straight from topology. To give an example: It’s not a question of ‘if member-class-A then member-class-B’—nothing to do with ‘the adjective agrees with the noun in gender, number and case’—but much more like ‘if member-class-B then member-class-A already happened provided A and B are members of the same field.’ Kind of a feedback situation!”
“I think I follow.” Frowning. “But even assuming that this is true of human languages, what grounds do you have to imagine it may be true of the native languages?”
“Well, Igor’s insight suggested that they may not have had languages, plural, but at worst the equivalent of dialects… which would be a logical starting point anywhere in the universe, come to think of it. It’s been shown that all human languages have a fundamentally identical structure—”
“What?”
Ian looked faintly surprised. “What else would you expect, given that we all go on two legs, all make noises with a mouth in the front of the head, and so on? The fundamental structure is associative; juxtaposition and sequence in time are a perfect instance of invariance in the grammatical sense. You make a statement about event A and object B by composing an utterance that connects the agreed sound symbol of each with the other. If a language can be called a language, then it’s got to have at least that intrinsic feature, regardless of the decorations added later. You surely must have been told that baby talk in every known human language is grammatically consistent?”
She shook her head, seeming a little dazed.
“Well, it’s true. A Japanese mother and a German mother and a Russian mother and a Maori mother will all use the same kind of grammar when teaching their babies to talk: the very simple two-unit pattern which was what you and I and every other articulate person began with.”
Still apparently a trifle dubious, Cathy nonetheless nodded. “Even so, if you establish this kind of pattern, how far has that taken you? I mean, where do you start the actual translation, which is what it’s all about?”
Ian leaned back with a sigh. “Oh, once we’ve got past the initial stage of analysis, it’ll be a bit like what Ventris did with Linear B, except he did have some known languages to work from…”
“Details!”
“I’ll show you where to track them down in the computers. The story’s quite fascinating, a real piece of detective work. It turned out that what he had, even though everyone else said it couldn’t be, was archaic Greek, written in a script meant for a totally different kind of language. And you ought to look at the way the Spanish priests misread the writing of the Amerinds, too, because the only script they knew was phonetic—more or less—and they had no vaguest notion of what a hieroglyphic syllabary was like.” He sighed again, more heavily.
“Ian dear!” She leaned towards him. “I don’t want to be told about your problems. I can imagine them. I want to be told about your ways of solving them!”
“Sorry!” He pulled himself together and essayed a not too successful laugh.
“Well!” he resumed. “The next stage is to apply some a priori assumptions. Igor mentioned one of the most important when we were having that initial confrontation with Ordoñez-Vico. Most, though not all, human languages differentiate between masculine and feminine, in noun and pronoun structure particularly. Though of course a great many languages extend the concept of gender far beyond anything found in European languages. So a good point to start would be to look for structural differentiation that might conceivably correspond with the sex change of the natives. It may not work; we may not come up with anything as simple as ‘he does XYZ’ versus ‘she does XYZ’ because the—the word units may be absolutely different for the active male phase and the sedentary female stage. As it were, ‘he eats’ might turn into ‘she devours.’ But the principle is the only one we have, so if a hunt for sexual indicators fails, we’ll have to carry on eliminating all the possibilities in succession. It goes without saying that a creature like what we find here must breathe, eat, excrete, relate to its fellows, communicate, and so on. So we’ll have to sieve out any such word units and test them for consistency and invariance.”
He glanced at the crystal before him. “Oh, that’s been in there long enough!” he said, and removed it and reached for another. Craning forward to look at the screen as he did so, Cathy exclaimed, “Say, when you touched it, the pattern altered!”
“Well, of course.” Ian blinked at her. “I’m a conductor, and so are you.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” She slipped down from the bench. “It was more like… No, I’m sure those metres jumped. Have you checked the crystals for a piezo effect?”
Ian sat rock-still for a second. Then he grabbed her hand and bestowed a smacking kiss on the palm.
“Genius!”
“What?”
“There’s an old saying: The genius sees what happens, but the plodder sees what he expects to happen. Ay-ay-ay! Even if this does mean I have to recalibrate every single damn’ crystal, I think what you just did was tell me how to locate the time dimension. Hang on!”
He dropped the crystal back in the cradle, and this time, instead of letting it lie there, pressed on it, at first gently and then with increasing force until the pattern on the screen dissolved into a blur.
“That’s it!” he shouted. “Cathy, you’re wonderful!”
XI
“Director! May I talk to you for a moment?”
St
rolling around the perimeter of the base as twilight fell, Valentine Rorschach didn’t pause as Ian called from the window of the relic shed.
“Provided you quit addressing me so formally!” he answered. “Come out here and walk with me for a while. You spend too much time cooped up in there!”
A minute later, puffing from having come at a dead run, Ian fell into step beside him. He said anxiously, “I hope I didn’t interrupt, but—”
Rorschach did exactly that, with malice aforethought.
“You’re driving yourself too hard, Ian. I hate to say so, but I’ve seen it happen before and I don’t want to have to order Lucas to start issuing you with tranquilizers. You lack perspective, man! You’ve achieved more within a shorter time of your arrival than anyone since the base was established, at least in terms of generating new ideas for us to follow up. Why is that not enough for you? Is it because you’re afraid of losing Cathy if you don’t outstrip all possible competition?”
Ian was taken totally aback by the question. He stopped in his tracks, and Rorschach likewise halted, swinging to face him.
“Ian, Ian—Ian… You knew pretty much what I was going to be like before you came here, didn’t you?”
Ian nodded. Part of the preparation for his trip, and indeed part of the briefings for everybody due to replace the personnel rotated home, had consisted in face-to-face no-exit confrontations with clever actors taught to duplicate members of the staff here, so that the newcomers would be acquainted with their failings as well as their virtues, and any dangerous weaknesses on their own side would be revealed.
“Well, I imagine they covered everything except this new baldness of mine,” Rorschach went on, tapping his over-high forehead. “Equally, they took you to little bits, you know, and they warned me in the tapes that arrived with you that you were liable to overcommit yourself. So… Let me put it this way: I’m delighted you called out to me, and that we’re talking out of earshot of everybody else, because otherwise I’d have had to contrive some elaborate excuse to have a private chat.”
Ian blinked at him.
“Oh, not to issue any kind of—of reprimand!” Rorschach beat the air as though it had annoyed him. “Just to warn you that you’re overdoing it, and there’s no need.”
Licking his lips, Ian looked around, taking in the now distant shapes of the base buildings, the long shadows left on the glass foundation beneath by the sun as it sank below the horizon in a welter of thinly shredded cloud… and said at length, “You know, for a moment I was going to be angry at having my privacy invaded. But it wouldn’t make sense, would it, to prize privacy when we’re trying to peel away all the veils of history from the native race?”
“When you’re provoked into it,” Rorschach said in a judicious tone, “you’re capable of admirable insight. I don’t mean on the professional level; you’ve demonstrated that beyond a doubt, and in fact I’ve complimented Igor on his insight in nominating you for recruitment. No, I’m thinking rather of…” He turned and gazed towards the setting sun.
“I’m thinking of the point I touched on just now: having to run to keep up. Agreed, it would be marvelous if we could solve the mystery of the aliens before the ship comes back. But what can we do here that will decide whether or not it does return?”
The words struck a chill deep into Ian’s mind. After a pause for sober reflection, he said, “Do you honestly think they may not send her back?”
Rorschach spread his hands in an empty gesture. “It’s one of the possibilities I have to bear in mind as director of the base. That’s all. Oh—no, it isn’t quite all. I was going to make a point in connection with you and Cathy.”
“What?”
“Over the years since I was appointed, I’ve done my best to devalue all the things that got in the way of our thinking at home. High on the list is jealousy, of course. Did it ever strike you that it’s most corrosive when it occurs in what might otherwise have been a stable relationship, immune from outside interference? Don’t bother to answer; as I said, when you’re pushed to it, you possess admirable insight. But someone has to push, and I’m pushing, and what I mean is that Cathy had been here two years already when you arrived, and at the present moment nobody resents the fact that she decided it was with you she wanted to establish a permanent relationship—small wonder, since you’re so talented—but the situation is precarious and if the suspicion burgeons in one single mind that you’re driving yourself because you’re afraid Cathy can be seduced away from you, instead of because you want to solve the mystery that concerns us all… I believe there’s no need to labour the point.”
Ian remained silent for a long moment. He said eventually, “Valentine, now I know what made you such an ideal choice as director here. I never met anybody more tactful than you. I’ll postpone the request I was going to make.”
Rorschach chuckled. “Go ahead and make it anyway,” he said. “The answer will be no, but I’d like to have the data on file, as it were, so as not to be taken by surprise.”
“Okay,” Ian said. He drew up the zipper of his blouse because it was turning cool with the advent of evening, and absently began to walk again, Rorschach keeping pace. Gazing down at the ground, he went on, “I was thinking of something which, I suppose, tipped the balance between success and failure for me when I was working on the Zimbabwe ruins.”
“When you proved that what might have been simple decoration was actually a script,” Rorschach said.
“Mm-hm.” Ian nodded; it wasn’t worth pretending to be modest about that, because if he hadn’t done so he would not have come to Igor’s attention and would not have been invited here. “I decided that before I could assign any—any levels of priority to the various possible significances of the script, if it was one, I’d have to think myself into the skin of the man who made the inscription. So for a month I lived as he would have done: eating what I could trap or gather, sleeping rough every night, drinking from water holes shared by animals and hoping that I’d live through the infections I was bound to fall sick with… I stripped myself, little by little, of the ideas I’d brought with me, and climbed back towards the basics, hunger and thirst and heat and cold and dark and light. I got one hell of a bad case of sunburn. But I also got what I’d set out to look for: an insight into the man who inscribed those mysterious symbols.”
Rorschach uttered an unashamed whistle of astonishment. “You want to try that here? But how can any human possibly dream of establishing a sense of identity with the Draconians?”
Ian stroked his newly luxuriant beard with a lugubrious scowl.
“He can’t” was his answer. “On the other hand, he can struggle his way towards a sense of what for them was reality. We see colour, for instance; presumably, so did they because there are eyelike organs on all the large species here. But was colour important to them? I suspect not. I suspect that what we would think of as tone colour—in other words, the subjective response they had to the pitch of an electromagnetic field—must have been what counted for them. I don’t know, I can’t be sure, but I’d bet on it.”
“Even assuming that that’s so,” Rorschach said after a pause for reflection, “are you asking me—or rather, if I hadn’t declined in advance, would you be asking me—for permission to set up house in one of the native city-sites, and try to live off the land, as it were, until you achieved some kind of divine revelation?” He chuckled. “Hunger and thirst and subclinical infection, you know, generate the most surprising attitudes towards the universe, but I doubt whether many of them are valid!”
“Not exactly,” Ian said awkwardly. “What I was actually going to ask for was the resources to start constructing a simulacrum of one of the natives.”
They had been strolling along side by side. Now, without warning, Rorschach stopped as though he had struck a glass wall.
“Say that again slowly,” he requested. “And let me have the full details.”
“Well—ah…” Ian made vague waving movements. “
What I was thinking of was a sort of shell, about the right size for a man to fit into, with the necessary movements built in, based on the kind of principle they use for modern prosthetics. I imagine the data to design a gadget of that type must be in store here because the medical data banks are very comprehensive, aren’t they? In effect one would need to feel directly the actual bodily processes of the alien creature. Whether it could be carried as far as the crucial sexual switch, from active male to sedentary female, I don’t know, but there could be ways of faking that, I guess. And just so long as the—the world view was right… For example, suppose one devalued sight to plain black and white but upgraded sound, using a sonar unit, to the point where that combined with enhanced tactility was providing a majority of the user’s information about the environment… and assigned additional variety to suggest the range of electromagnetic perceptions we presume these creatures had, and…” He clawed the air, seeming to grope for the right words. “And as for the hormonal revolution—well, one doesn’t have to be a woman to find analogies to the process of pregnancy and labour, even though one does have to throw out a hell of a lot of in-built biases.”
He hesitated. “Would that be permissible?” he ventured.
“Not only would it be, it is!” Rorschach declared with an air of finality. “In fact, I think I can suggest a means of converting the tactile impulses into something more significant to the user. If one were to exploit the known sensitivity of the retina to changing magnetic fields, one might very well—but damn it!” He rounded on Ian. “This is absurd!”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“No, you wouldn’t. But I should have done. I could kick myself from here to—to the civil engineering block!” In lieu of which Rorschach stamped on the glassy ground. “Yes, yes, yes! The technology exists for us to get under the skin of another species, and so far as I’m aware it’s never been tried! Are we mad? Are we out of our minds?”