by John Brunner
“If you really want an answer, and that question isn’t simply rhetorical…?”
“What? Yes indeed, I do want an answer!” Rorschach’s voice had peaked to a near shout; now it abruptly dropped to normal. “Quite seriously, Ian, a project like yours has been feasible since long before we arrived. The techniques exist, or can be developed from the kind of gadgetry we use to help the blind, the maimed, the deaf… Lord, that lie detector of Ordoñez-Vico’s has a sense that most human beings don’t possess, because it can analyse our body secretions and compare them with a norm and then compare the norm with the profile of the speaker’s voice. If we do have that gift, it’s a long way below the conscious level.”
Ian was shaking his head over and over. “No, you’re jumping to conclusions, I’m afraid. The real point is this. Not until we had a clear grasp of how different the natives were from us, rather than how much alike we were, could anybody—me, or Igor, or you, anybody—have suggested this plan. Because if it works, what will count is not how much of the aliens we can afterwards understand; it’s what they might have understood of us if they’d survived to meet us face to face.”
Face strained and anxious in the gathering dusk, he leaned close to Rorschach as though half afraid he wasn’t making himself clear.
“You’re absolutely correct,” the director said. “And so was Igor when he suggested that we ask for you. You’ve just put into words—more, into the shape of a practicable plan—something which I’ve sensed, just as I’m sure Igor must have… and done nothing about. Because we couldn’t see any way of implementing it.”
He slapped Ian on the shoulder.
“I think this month I may break one of my own rules. I think we may talk shop on the day when it’s forbidden. At any rate, if I know my staff, I can foresee this proposition of yours sparking their imaginations like a light being set to a blasting fuse!”
XII
Sitting informally around in the refectory, some of them sipping wine or beer or excellent imitations of fruit juice, the staff listened to the regular bald summary reports with which the monthly conferences always commenced. After hearing the others out and making his own brief report, Rorschach called on Ian to describe his new idea.
Igor and Cathy had already been told about it and made prompt, excited suggestions, but the impact on everybody else was stunning. When he finished speaking, there was a long thoughtful silence; then, one after another, people started to nod, gazing into nowhere.
“I think it has something for all of us,” Rorschach said at length. “I can see dozens of ways in which it can be expected to generate spin-off in the form of brand-new insights. Let’s sort out one urgent question first, though. Karen, can it be done?”
The plump civil engineer was leaning back in her chair with a dreamy, speculative expression. At mention of her name she roused herself.
“Hm? Oh, sorry, Valentine… Yes, I can’t think of any reason why not. Though it does depend on how elaborate you want to make the—ah—the sensory illusions.”
Lucas Wong leaned forward. The short, heavy-set medical biologist, half American and half Chinese, took more after his father’s than his mother’s traditions, and seldom spoke without long reflection on any weighty matter. Now he was uncharacteristically enthusiastic.
“Oh, there may be ways we can get around the sensory problem! Ian, do you know whether you’re a suitable subject for hypnosis?”
Ian snapped his fingers. “No, I’ve never been tested for that, but aren’t there drugs which can be employed to make one more susceptible?”
“I’ll check that out,” Lucas promised, and rubbed his hands in obvious glee. “Oh, this is a marvelous idea, it really is!”
“We’ll have to build the simulacrum oversize,” Nadine Shah warned. “Fitting a man inside it—hmm! But as to the actual construction, I think that will be quite easy. I’m certain we have sufficient data in store about the physical properties of native tissue, the articulation of joints and the characteristics of their nervous system. Achmed, what about the interface between the machine and Ian himself?”
“No problem there,” Achmed answered. “Particularly if he can be hypnotised. We can use microminiaturised sensors with some kind of direct nervous input, the same as they use on mechanical arms and legs nowadays. I’m sure details of those must be in store in the medical banks.”
Ruggiero Bono caught Rorschach’s eye. “Valentine, can I ask a question? It may seem trivial, but… Ian, what exactly are you expecting to get out of this gadget? I agree it’s a fascinating project and certainly will jar us into thinking about problems that might not otherwise occur to us—but let’s face it, a man isn’t a Draconian and never can be!”
“You heard in Igor’s report that, thanks to Cathy, I discovered how the natives most probably read their printed crystals, manually deforming them to amplify the otherwise very faint patterns. The trouble is this.” Ian looked rueful. “Precisely because of the piezo effect structured into them, the simple weight of the overlay at the various sites where we’ve found libraries has dreadfully distorted what trace patterns remain. It is in fact amazing that we’ve managed to find so many well-preserved crystals.”
He spread his hands.
“The consequence, of course, is that instead of immediately becoming easier, as I hoped, my job has suddenly proved to be more difficult than it seemed before. And it won’t ever stand a hope of getting done unless I can grope my way to an educated guess about the reason why Draconians used these crystals. Cathy has correctly pointed out that it’s unlikely they were able to lie to one another—”
“Why not?” Sue Tennant demanded. He gave a summary of the thinking that lay behind the assumption, and she rounded her mouth into an O and leaned back in her chair, convinced.
He went on, “So it’s improbable that we have to deal with fiction, isn’t it? On the other hand: they had advanced science, so there may be the equivalent of textbooks in the libraries. And they had a keen sense of aesthetics, symmetry, proportion and natural rhythms; a glance at the map of one of their cities will confirm that. So the crystals may well be works of art, counterparts of music or poetry. If that’s the case, we shall never be able to do more than we can with them already: amplify and display the patterns stored in them.
“There’s one ray of hope, though. Stop and think for a moment about the communication pattern of a creature that’s constantly aware of a changing, pulsing, vibrating aura, to which every other member of the species contributes simply by existing. Would their language not depend on referents to real-time events rather than arbitrary symbols like human words? Let me give an example of what I mean. Individual A wants to inquire whether Individual B is hungry. Does he generate a completely unrelated pattern of signals? I say to someone, ‘Would you like something to eat?’ There is nothing of the nature of food or hunger in the question, is there? But a Draconian would—at least I suspect he would—ask by imitating the pattern associated with lack of food, and modulate it by imposing other patterns defining ‘ask’ and direct what he was saying to the correct hearer by reflecting that other person’s pattern… as it were.”
“They spoke in ideograms,” Lucas Wong said, and snapped his fingers.
“Right! Right!” Growing more and more excited, Ian leapt from his chair and began to pace back and forth, frowning terribly. “I haven’t managed to work it all out in my mind yet, but the outlines are starting to appear. Just as Chinese writing originally consisted of stylised pictograms, so the Draconian language would have evolved from a number of relatively simple root concepts most probably associated with bodily states. Naturally, over the centuries it would have grown to be tremendously sophisticated, and the same difficulty that a modern person finds in dissecting the original shape for ‘man’ or ‘house’ or ‘sun’ from a contemporary Chinese symbol will no doubt be found as we try to analyse these imprinted patterns. But we take it for granted that they did get hungry, feel tired, experience the sexual ur
ge, and so on.”
Ruggiero was nodding repeatedly. Now he said, “You’ve answered my question splendidly, only here’s another. Even assuming you do manage to make your educated guess, and it turns out that we actually have—oh, let’s be optimistic and say textbooks—how in the world are you going to extract any meaning from them? Trial and error could take from now until doomsday!”
“Not to mention,” Achmed put in, “the fact that we now have thousands and thousands of these crystals, but the ones we most want may be the spoiled ones. If the Draconians did leave a message about their fate, in the faint hope that one day someone might come here and read it, they’d have made it conspicuous. Put it on their moon, for example. But we know that up there no crystals were found at all.”
“I think they may have been more special than just books,” Igor said musingly. He cupped his chin in his upturned hand, staring at the floor.
“How do you mean?” Rorschach said.
“Oh…” Igor waved in exasperation. “More like experience stores. Think how useful it would be to us if we could go somewhere and hear—perceive directly—read the thoughts of a long-dead genius. That would condense the time needed to climb from a primitive village to a moonship, wouldn’t it?”
For an instant they sat dumbfounded at the grandiosity of the concept; then Achmed pulled a calculator from his pocket, passed his fingers rapidly over its input side and shook his head.
“Sorry, Igor. The idea’s ingenious, but it won’t work. The capacity is inadequate by a factor of several thousand. You’d just about manage to store two total personalities in a library of the size we’ve so far discovered.”
“I think you’d be lucky to pack in two,” Ian said.
Igor shrugged and sat back. “Pity!” he said with his usual engaging grin. “I thought I’d had a brilliant inspiration.”
“In a way you have,” Ian admitted. “Given direct experiential communication with other people, and total honesty, plus what we assume to have been extremely high intelligence by our standards… Nadine!”
The comparative biologist glanced at him. “Yes?”
“Those black shreds associated with the telescope, the bioelectronic system as we’ve decided to call it: are there any similar objects here on the planet itself?”
“Nothing we’ve been able to identify for sure,” Nadine answered. “Which is hardly surprising. The stuff would have rotted or maybe been eaten!”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Ian sighed.
Igor erupted again. “Eaten! Say, you don’t suppose that any of the quasi-RNA has been transmitted down to the present, do you? Wasn’t there something I once read about printed memory molecules…?”
“For all we can tell,” Nadine said, “we may already have seen direct descendants of the Draconians, never mind descendants of the creatures that ate their organic circuitry. Had that never struck you?”
Igor nodded. “Yes, I remember discussing that idea when I first arrived, on the trip before yours. You’re thinking in terms of a harmful dominant mutation which deprived them of the power to reason and communicate?”
“If that were the explanation for their downfall,” Lucas said, “after a hundred thousand years of mindless reproduction you’d have to regard the present-day offspring as a different species, surely.”
“Agreed,” Nadine said. “Still, the fact does stand that there are literally hundreds of surviving animals like enough to the Draconians to be their cousins. That is, assuming the scanty nature of the actual physical remains we’ve found is a reliable guide, and we haven’t inadvertently filled out our picture of them by drawing too many comparisons with the contemporary fauna.”
“In any case,” Ian said flatly, “I don’t see how such a mutation could have spread so rapidly through a species with such command of applied biology.”
“Good point,” Olaf Mukerji said. “It couldn’t have, not unless it was spread deliberately, and that brings us clear back to the idea of warfare, or a decision to commit racial suicide. And when we get back to something we’ve talked about ad nauseam, it’s high time to stop waffling and reach a decision. I formally move that Ian be given all the facilities he requires. I think the idea is admirable and I can imagine the results being sensational.”
It was not, however, Ian who generated the next sensation.
Ten days into the next monthly work period, he was talking with Lucas Wong and Nadine Shah about some snags that had developed in the first design for the mock Draconian. Grouped around a computer display screen, they were testing the various analogies derived from surviving species which best promised to allow the occupant to inhabit the device in comfort. At the far end of the computer and communications hall Achmed Hossein was engaged in a routine series of checks of their satellite relay equipment.
The conversation was becoming heated; none of them noticed when Achmed broke off his work with an exclamation and bent to listen intently to one of the links connecting the base with the archeological digs.
But a few seconds later he called out and interrupted them.
“Hey! That was Cathy! She and Igor have found something incredible at the peat site!”
“What?” the other three demanded in unison.
“She says it’s indescribable, but so tremendous we all ought to drop whatever we’re doing and go there at once.”
“Can’t she send us a picture?” Ian asked.
“She says Igor is too excited to bother rigging the cameras, and anyway they want to strip off as much cover as they can before nightfall.” Achmed reached for a switch and sent out a signal for Rorschach, who shortly answered over his personal communicator.
He made his mind up the moment he heard the news.
“If Igor says it’s that remarkable, we pay attention. Pass the word. Is Lucas there? Ask if he’d mind being left alone here for a short while.”
“I mind very much” was the reply. “But go ahead, and bring me some souvenirs when you come home.”
They reached the peat site well before sunset, and the moment they breasted the adjacent hill over which the conveyors were carrying spoil, they realised just how accurate Igor’s claim had been.
Now the huge pit was about ten metres deeper than when Ian had seen it for the first time; the digging machines were all concentrating on one small area near the centre.
Small by comparison with the full extent of the site, but not with a human being. Cathy and Igor were both dwarfed by the walls of the pit, and at its bottom…
Cathy caught sight of the new arrivals as they left their hovercraft and came hurrying down a slanting walkway from the pit’s rim. She rushed to greet them, though Igor offered no more than a cheerful wave and a shout. Both were muddy to the knees with the mess caused by the high-pressure hoses used to undercut the cover.
“It’s fantastic!” she shouted exuberantly as she flung her arms around Ian. “Isn’t it fantastic?”
The others were too astonished to do more than nod.
What was being revealed was a low building, consisting of a hexagonal base some twenty metres on a side, of indeterminate height because as yet the digging machines were a long way from the base of its walls. But its height was unimportant. What did matter was that on its roof, glistening in the sunshine and not simply from wet but from the vividness of its colours—blue, red, green, yellow, in alternating hexagons that were large and regular on the back, small and regular around the midsection, much smaller and less distinct but still very regular below…
A statue. Unmistakably, a statue of a Draconian. But at least eight times life-size.
“Marvelous!” Rorschach whispered.
“And amazingly close to our reconstructions, too!” Nadine said in high delight. “Apart from size, I mean. Though I never dared guess that they had such beautiful patterns on their skin!”
Proudly leading Ian by the arm, urging him towards the platform level with the statue from which Igor was directing the machines, Cathy said, “We spotted
the regular shape of the building, of course, which is why we chose this spot to make a deep trench, but at first we thought the thing on the roof was just a pile of rubble. Goodness knows what it’s finished with, but that surface has some very weird electrical properties and gave back the most misleading reflections. But you haven’t heard the half of it.”
“Very exact,” Igor rumbled, wiping sweat from his face with one hand as he carefully re-aimed a water hose by remote control. “You, and we, have seen a quarter. Buried under all this muck, there and there and there”—he pointed at the stratified, sectioned walls of the pit—“there are three other buildings apparently identical with this one, and each would appear to have another similar statue on the roof.”
“I can almost imagine,” Ian said soberly, “the ghosts of the Draconians chuckling at the way they keep springing surprises on us.”
XIII
Mystery piled upon enigma now in a manner unprecedented even on this world full of insoluble riddles. Straightaway Rorschach summed up the situation and gave orders that accorded with Igor’s recommendation: for the time being, their full resources must be concentrated on this particular site, while the others could be left to automatic machines and supervised remotely from the base.
He also instructed Karen to prepare the makings of temporary accommodation and ship them here by heavy-duty hovercraft, and rig extra line-of-sight relays to cope with the enormous mass of data bound to be flooding the computers.
Within five days, the base had effectively been transferred to the peat site; only a skeleton staff would henceforth remain at the original location.
And even with all their personnel on hand, they found themselves dazed, baffled, confused, at the plethora of new discoveries.
It was clear that Ian’s brilliant notion of making a simulated Draconian was going to have to be postponed indefinitely. But he didn’t regret that fact. It had been intended as a way out of a temporary dead end. Now there was the chance that some other, brand-new avenue of attack might offer itself.