by Larry Niven
“Not that long,” I told him firmly. “You can get by in a language in only about fifty words. I mean you can’t understand much but you can interrogate people and machines with a pretty small vocabulary. And I think I can get to ask it questions.”
“Hmmm. That will be a clever trick. Alright, I’ll let ye play a little more, but I’m not one as cares for havin’ his time wasted, as many a spacer ha’ found to his cost. So be sure you aren’t going to join them.”
I had no certainty that what I planned would work, but it seemed likely to save time if it did, and I told him so. I think that like most kzin, he was inclined to respect people who stood up to him. Up to a point, anyway.
I sat down on the saddle again and Silver sat on the saddle next to mine, his tail hanging over the end. This time I lifted up the helmet myself and put it on. Again the blue light, all over from the beginning, but this time I knew something about what was coming. I sped up the process until I got to the speech or maybe music waveform on the end of a spoke of the wheel icon. I focused on it, and I got a waveform on the screen. I focused on that. There was a sound, something like someone crushing a harp, with twangs and thuds, and the waveform changed color briefly. This was a time sequence, and I sped everything up and did it again. Apart from the fact that time went from right to left, which was the opposite of what seemed natural to me, there was a sort of correlation between what I was hearing and the waveform; there was also a swift succession of scents and a feeling of warmth on my face. There had to be some sort of dictionary here. These things were something like words or phonemes; there had to be a way of making more complicated things of sequences of simpler things, and time had to look pretty much the same to any species that could handle technology, at least at the elementary level. I scanned the icons. Some of them had changed. There was a bar icon which was a uniform gold, and did nothing so far as I could tell. There was a shape which writhed as I looked at it, but again did nothing. And there was one which looked like a star. I focused on it.
The screen on the inside of the helmet oscillated slowly. It showed the sun, then this faded away to be replaced by the script and the sound that went with it, another clashing sound like someone rolling bottles down metal stairs. I repeated it and listened intently. The species which produced noises like that didn’t use anything like the human or kzin vocal tracts. The kzin were certainly different from us in that respect, but they could do a good approximation of human speech, and we could do a rather bad approximation of theirs and it hurt the throat after a very short time. But these sounds came out as if they were produced by an orchestra or an organ made to sound like broken glass. Still, it was consistent. I think I had just learned the word for sun, although I could neither pronounce it nor write it.
I reached into a pocket and pulled up my mobile phone, just able to insert it in the space before my eyes. I took two pictures of the script and the sun and recorded the sound of broken bottles.
“What are ye up to, lad?” Silver asked. He was genial enough but suspicious.
“I’m making a dictionary,” I told him. And I suppose I was, but so far I had only one word in it. Now to get another one.
One of the icons pictured what might be an animal of some sort—something more like an octopus crossed with an eagle than anything I was familiar with. I looked at it hard. I thought perhaps it could be altered, and I found I could make it bigger or smaller, so I made it smaller. All animals grow from eggs, sometimes inside the parent body, sometimes not. Even primitive things like the hydra bud off a parent and are smaller when they start, so growth from small to big might be almost universal. At least it was worth a try.
The picture changed, and the word also. I could make no sense of it, so I scrolled onto the next one. This also seemed to be a dictionary definition in pictures, but I couldn’t recognize any of the pictures. The next one was a picture of a bar, like the one I was reading, and the sound quite pleasant, just like a few strings of a guitar being plucked. Not exactly a chord one would hear from a musical instrument, but at least not as complex as the others. I scanned the icons, and again they had changed, but not in any useful way. I pushed the phone up and took some more pictures and recorded the sound. I couldn’t do anything about recording the scent, which again was simpler, more like plain soap than anything else. I dimly sensed some sort of correlation between the visual appearance of the “word” and the sound and the scent. I moved on.
After a few hits and a lot of misses, I had six more words in my dictionary. There was a certain amount of guesswork in it, but I think I had words for river, mountain, one, two, three, and planet. I thought hard. There seemed to be no particular pattern in the waveforms for the different words, except the ones I had got were all less complicated than those I hadn’t understood. This carried over to the sounds and scents as well. I tried to make the animal icon even smaller, and eventually I got it to an egg shape. After that, things went faster. I found out how to get into a sort of child’s primer, the equivalent of Peter and Mary and Spot the Dog, I suppose. It wasn’t a whole lot of help, because these creatures didn’t seem to have lives enough like human beings for me to be able to tell a pet from a threat, assuming they had pets anyway. But at least I had pictures of the aliens, or at least some aliens, not all the same species. Which were Peter and Mary and which was Spot? Impossible to say, and were they proper names or were they the names of the species? It was all a bit like the River Avon. The Englishman had asked a Welshman what the river was called by pointing at it, and the Welshman said Avon, which was the word for River, and the Englishman thought it was the name of that particular river. There was also Torpenow Hill in England. Successive waves of settlers had left it with a name that meant “Hill Hill Hill Hill.” We’d all thought that was very funny when the teacher had told us this in kindergarten, but now it wasn’t funny at all.
I went back to one, two and three. They were just dots, or so I thought at first, but then I realized there were things like brackets in violet around them and I guessed that I was looking at the thing they used to denote sets, much the same as mathematicians do. So I focused on the set symbols, and that led me into a whole lot of mathematics. This was good because the elementary bits had to have at least the same meaning even if the conventions were very different. I found out the symbol for dot-dot-dot, which was the way mathematicians indicated that you carried on in the same way; {0, 1, 2, 3,…} meant the whole lot of counting numbers. So I could read something meaning “And so on,” which was quite useful. Of course, what looked like a natural continuation to one person might not look the same to another, so it had a mental handle-with-care tag on it in my mind. I had also learned the symbol for zero, which was important, as everybody knows.
I found a sort of thing like a pad and I could select a pointer and write on it, although I had nothing to write. It was possible to draw pictures in three dimensions on this particular pad, but I can’t say that it was of use for anything.
I tried to move the and so on symbol around and in a blink, everything changed. I had run into some sort of block: the system wasn’t going to let me use it as I’d intended, to explore much larger categories of things. It seemed to be asking me to draw something. There was a line of five flashing yellow dots which I decided were question marks, and the drawing pad, if I can call it that. I looked at the first of the yellow dots, on the extreme right, and it stopped blinking; then the stylus moved on the pad all on its own. In three dimensions it started to draw something. It was going very slowly, but might have been the beginning of a tetrahedron. I felt my own tetrahedron in my pocket and gripped it. The drawing speeded up and finished making a regular tetrahedron, every face an equilateral triangle. Then the yellow light at the right-hand end stopped blinking and was replaced by a tiny gold tetrahedron. The one next to it started blinking faster.
I thought about it. It was pretty obviously an intelligence test. I imagined that the makers of the library and the book readers wanted to ensure that on
ly beings past a certain level of civilization could get access to their information. Maybe there’d be other tests later on; this was the one that let in the babies. I decided not to tell Silver about it. He could damn well figure it out himself if he ever had to. But I was awfully glad that Marthar had cracked it and led me to look up the platonic solids.
I took the stylus up with my eyes, and started to draw a cube. It was hard to get it looking right, but the program wasn’t going to let me fail for want of drawing skills; as long as I had the right general idea, it would help. So it straightened out my wavy lines and made my parallelogram for the square side seen at an angle much straighter. I drew nine line segments in roughly the right position for a cube seen sideways. When I finished, the yellow light stopped blinking, although it went more orange every half-second. Then the program showed me what I should have done: it drew a square, then it made six copies, then it assembled them in three dimensions, gluing them together. When it had done this, the second yellow light flashed brightly once, then turned into a little golden cube.
Then the middle light started blinking. I had to do an octahedron. I started off by making a square. Then I made a triangle with each side the same as the side of the square. Then I copied the triangle four times. Moving them around so they were attached to each side of the square went quickly. Then I had to move them out of the plane, rotating them about the edges joined to the square until they met to make a pyramid. I copied the pyramid, turned one upside down and fitted the square bases together. The resulting octahedron was moved to replace the middle yellow light, and I gave a sigh of relief.
“What are ye up to now, lad?” Silver’s voice echoed around inside the helmet.
“I’m learning how to use some tools which should help me get ahead much faster,” I told him. He grunted.
There were two more to do, and I had to recall the dodecahedron. It had twelve faces, and each was a regular pentagon. I made a pentagon, and copied it twelve times. I wasn’t at all sure of the angles, but I glued five to a sixth and then copied the whole lot. It was just a matter of assembling the things so the ends joined together, and the program helped me finish the fourth. Nearly finished!
An icosahedron has twenty faces, each a triangle. I made twenty equilateral triangles, and started to glue them and the program just finished the job for me. I think it had decided that I’d made it sufficiently clear I knew the answer, so it didn’t want to waste anymore time. I was quite grateful; it would have taken me a long time to get the fitting right because there were so many edges and I had only a vague recollection of the angles between adjacent faces.
Once the thing was finished, the test vanished and I was back on trying to use the and so on symbol. I had passed the test! I was a member of an intelligent species, just like the builders of the library, although there could well be more tests ahead, perhaps of other things besides intelligence.
As I had guessed, I found I could use it to get more information related to what I already knew, which meant that I went a lot quicker. If I concentrated, I could pick up an icon and move it, so I made the dot-dot-dot into an icon, copied it and moved it around. It meant I could focus on something and get more information about it. Then I found the periodic table of elements. It was amazing! It looked almost exactly like ours. Well, of course, it would have to; it was there in the universe. It was mirror-inverted, but easily recognizable. I took a lot more pictures and sound recordings. Then I discovered that if the dot-dot-dot icon was located near the thing I wanted to know about and put in different places, I could go off from a word I knew in different directions. In another hour, I had over fifty words learned, including the names of hydrogen and carbon and oxygen; I could have gotten every element in the universe, but didn’t bother. Who wants to know what the aliens called Molybdenum?
Every so often, I explained to Silver what I was doing and he grunted. I don’t think he was convinced this was going to pay off, but he could see I had a plan and was prepared to give me some rope.
What I was looking for was something like the Dewey decimal classification. The problem I had was that I needed to know how to recognize when I had it. At least I now had some words that had to do with science.
I iconified the sun and the planets, put the dot-dot-dot symbol to the left of them, and put the set brackets around them. Then I iconified the lot and focused on it. I got a word and a sound (and a faint scent) which I reasoned had to be the word for astronomy. Or perhaps planetary astronomy. It was a complicated set of chords, and didn’t sound so bad. I recorded it. Then I did the same with some of the elements and, with any luck, would get something like the word for chemistry. Then I did the same with the counting symbols and paused. Was I going to get the word for mathematics or the word for the natural numbers? I needed an operator. I entered the symbol for two and the symbol for one and made a copy of it together. Would it fill in the gaps? No. I put the dot-dot-dot in various places. Nothing. I looked at the icons. One was pulsing slowly. I focused on it and suddenly two other symbols I had never seen before came up in my line between the 2 and the first 1, and another between the two ones! I had learned three things: how to ask a question and the symbols for plus and equals. This was a triumph, and I told Silver very excitedly. I took a picture and showed him. He was unimpressed, but could see I thought it was progress. I hadn’t told him my plan yet, but he could see I had one, and I think it made him slightly worried that I was doing something he couldn’t wholly fathom. Silver liked being in control.
I made the symbols for the numbers with the dot-dot-dot and put them inside the set brackets, then I put the symbols for plus, equals and times (which last I got by something so obvious I leave it to you to work out) next to them, and put the whole lot in set brackets. Then I iconified the lot and looked at it. The resulting word probably meant something like arithmetic, or maybe number theory. I recorded it. Then I went back to some of the words I got previously and iconified them. They turned into little inscriptions on colored discs. I put them to one side and carried on. I was building up abstractions now, quite quickly. It was all done by sets, which made sense. To the aliens, unless I was horribly wrong and had gotten hopelessly confused, the word for cat would be the same as that for a couple of particular cats, together with the dot-dot-dot symbol and set brackets. The word for animal would be the word for cat, the word for dog, the word for tiger, all with the dot-dot-dot and more set brackets. Except I doubted they had cats and dogs. I suppose that would give me something rather smaller than the class for all animals, perhaps something like mammals, or maybe a smaller sub-grouping again. It was hardly a definite translation, but at least I knew, or thought I knew, how to get abstract names. And I could stack the whole business. Once I had names for astronomy and chemistry and physics and biology, I could stack them together and get the name for science. Or something in the same general area, at least.
I exited the system once more and took the helmet off. It had been exciting, but very tiring. It had taken me many hours to get this far, and Silver had gone exploring some of the time, as I could tell by his silences. He was outside, but came when I called him. I showed him the recordings I had made and explained what I had done. He was quite pleased, though not as impressed as I had hoped he’d be. I left out all reference to the intelligence test.
“Well, Peter,” he said after some thought, “ye ha’ done well enough; ’twould ha taken a lot longer t’ get this far had any o’ the crew tried, to be sure. Us kzin are mainly not so infected wi’ curiosity as you monkeys. And it has t’ be said that monkey curiosity pays off in some surprisin’ ways. I might ha’ done it faster meself, but I had rather not have me head buried in one o’ they helmets with the crew wandering around. I likes t’ know what’s happenin’ in my immediate environs, so I does. Has kept me alive before now, so it has, and may again. But ye ha’ done well, and what ye plan may well work out. So back wi’ yon hat and get back to it.”
“Silver, I am exhausted. I have worked for
eight hours at least, with only a short lunch break. I need to sleep,” I told him. He was an ungrateful swine, I decided. “I’ll work better after a good sleep. It will give my subconscious a chance to work at it; maybe throw up some ideas when I wake up again. It often happens that way with schoolwork, which is very much what this feels like.”
That was true in some ways, but this was a whole lot more interesting than any schoolwork I had ever done.
“Aye, mayhap. And then again, we need to get on. And then again, maybe a little extra time for my little trap to spring would be as well. So all right, ye may sleep, but ye’ll do it wi’ the noose around your head, and wi’ some o’ the crew within call, I’m thinkin’.”
He motioned me to lie down, and went to summon the crew with a roar. For some reason he wanted them all together in that room. It was certainly big enough. I heard the crew coming up the ramp, and then I fell asleep as if hit with a log. Learning is a strenuous business, and sure takes it out of you.
I awoke with no new ideas, but after a walk outside in the sunshine and a bite of the weird-tasting fruit for breakfast, I was looking forward to getting back to work. I felt like a proper scientist, studying an alien language and being able to translate some of it already. I suppose the aliens had made it as easy as possible, it wasn’t like finding a washing list in Babylonic cuneiform and not knowing if it was a short story, a poem, or random scratchings. At least I had pictures, and some of the things I could recognize. It meant that the aliens had eyes, and also that they expected other things to have eyes although not with the same window of sensitivity as mine. They also expected something like ears and a nose, although my own nose didn’t pass any great deal of information. I thought it odd that there was a scent for a word like sun or planet. But then, they must have had something like our brains, or at least expected them. I recall that at school, the definition of an organism was something that has sensors, effectors, and computing power to link them. This applied to complicated machines as well as plants and bacteria, although the computing power was pretty simple in those cases. I guess that the embodiment of the computing power need not be anything I’d recognize as a brain, but plants that grow towards the sky and send out branches have mechanisms that make sure the branches don’t grow so as to overbalance the plant. This involves a primitive sort of computing, realized by fluid flows of various nutriments. So brains needn’t look much like brains, and of course Valiant had a brain that was a string of quantum computers. So the aliens had made some reasonable guesses as to what might try to make sense of their libraries, although why those horrible snakes, I could not imagine. You’d have to be awfully keen to learn to take those things into your brain. Maybe some alien species would be grateful for the extra sensory power, but I wouldn’t. It made me sick even to think of those horrible things burrowing into my skull. When I said this to Marthar, much later, she laughed and said that was pretty much how the pirate crew looked at my using the helmet. All those horrible ideas crawling into my brain and contaminating it. A truly ghastly thought, for a pirate.