Alien Tongues (18 page)

Séamus gritted his teeth, grasped Allsop's wrist, rotated it firmly then swung the forearm downwards.  Three very rapid steps as he passed the forearm between his hands, bringing it up behind Allsop's back.  No cracking feeling or sound, thank God!  Now the rest was quite easy and, he had to admit despite trying hard to remain professional, very welcome on his nerves.  There was no longer a danger of bone breakage, but he could inflict a wide range of pain without exerting himself.  He delivered enough through Allsop's twisted arm to convince him not to struggle or try fighting back.

"I really don't wish to hurt you," Séamus told him quietly in one ear.  "But if you force me to, I will detach this arm in such a way no surgeon is ever going to sew it back like before.  When I let go, I want you to walk directly out of this pub and go home.  Do we have a deal?"

A little more, gradual pain which he knew Allsop was having difficulty tolerating in silence.  The man nodded and Séamus released him, standing back.  Allsop stood for a moment or two, unnecessarily brushing himself down as if to at least show he was not under a tight time constraint.  Not looking at Séamus or anyone else, he walked unhurriedly to the door and left.  Séamus breathed a sigh of relief.  He wanted to drink from one of the beer glasses but knew his hand would shake too badly.  Instead he just waited, looking down to avoid anyone's gaze, trying to calm his mind.  He knew Alice would soon be at his side.

"Séamus, are you hurt?" he heard her ask him.  He turned and gave her a grin.

"Only my feelings.  Need that drink now?" He slid the mug across to her.  She downed a mouthful. 

"Let's get you out of here.  "I know you didn't break his glass on purpose, but I'm not certain others in this pub will look at it that way."

"Of course it was an accident," came a voice on his other side.  Séamus turned to see Kevin Grant standing beside him.  The man held out a hand and introduced himself.

"I'm glad it was that clear," Séamus replied.

"Oh, it's not that," Grant said.  "It's just that someone in your position would never do such a thing deliberately."  He drank from his thin glass.  "And by position, I don't mean auditor, do I, Mr FitzGerald?"

"Alice, I think it would be useful to have a few words with Mr Grant here before I leave," Séamus said.  "Would you excuse us for maybe ten minutes?"  So, he thought, I have screwed up yet one more time.  I let this half-witted thug unmask me for good.  Probably Grant had engineered the whole thing. 

"Let me get to the point," Grant said when the two men were alone.  "As a local businessman, I need to know why they sent you up here.  What I've seen and heard hasn't given me enough comfort yet."

Séamus knew better than to suggest his job was none of Grant's business.  Grant had made it his business.  "I can tell you two things, which I hope are enough for you.  First, I am up here on a matter of vital national interest, the finer details of which are not even known to me.  Second, I can assure you that those national interests are in no way connected with any business of yours, no matter what it is."  Séamus wanted to add that he had sacrificed his relationship with Sheryl to prove the absence of connection, but referencing specific business interests would have been impolite.

"Those are reassuring sentiments," Grant replied, resting casually against the bar, "But you will appreciate the element of contradiction.  It's difficult to accept assurance from a man who does not know the finer details.  So I will ask for a further reassurance from you and, if I get it, then we can continue in peace for the time being.  When you learn those finer details, I want you to come back to me and confirm what you just said."

It was somewhat galling to be asked to reassure a known criminal, but Séamus did so.  There seemed little price to pay.

"Good," said Grant with a smile that was not unpleasant. "I'm sure you are a man of your word.  Ryan McMahon has told me you come from the right kind of stock.  But just to be sure, I take it you are aware of how seriously I take an assurance?"

The detective had indeed warned him, and Séamus readily understood the implications.  Crossing the likes of Grant was dangerous enough; double-crossing him did not bear thinking about.  "Over the Irish Sea," he replied, "They're very familiar with the honor principle."

Grant patted Séamus on the arm.  "Then please, enjoy your time here in Yorkshire.  I won't take up more of your time but, remember, if there's anything you need that I can help with, just let either Ryan or me know."

"You'll handle Allsop?"

"Rest assured of it."  Grant lowered his voice.  "I suspect it was Dave Orwood's doing.  I'll have a word with him, though I can't guarantee his behavior."  He sighed.  "Those two men have decent hearts but they tend to let their emotions run away with them.  You will, I trust, treat Alice thoughtfully.  She's a rare type, and one of the finest minds to come from this area.  You know, you really should get back in touch with Petra.  She'd really like to see more of you, and I don't mean as a customer.  She's also a smart lady – she's going to do well in either business or politics."  With a grin and a wave, Grant walked back to his group.

Séamus turned to look at Alice.  They exchanged nods, she rose from her seat and they left together.

In the car, Alice said, "Séamus FitzGerald, you are a dark horse.  What you did there – I've never seen anything like it outside of a movie."

"It was dumb, Alice," he told her.  "If I'd been good at my job I would have simply taken the blow, riding it to limit the damage.  That would have confirmed to everyone that I was just an auditor.  But I lost my cool and said, 'Look at me, I'm a government agent!'"

"Does that matter at this stage?"

"Well, the only way I could get out of there without a major bone fracture was to promise Grant I would let him know when we know the reason for the project."

"But you don't have to tell him what it is, right?"

Séamus grunted.  "Alice, imagine that I've just told him that I know.  Then he can get anything he wants out of me with a blow-torch."

"But he wouldn't, would he?"

"Absolutely not." Séamus laughed.  "I'd be spilling my guts before he lit the torch."

Alice added, "Want to hear something else funny?  While waiting for you I texted Wilkie our keypad idea.  You know what the old bastard said?  'Fine.'"

Séamus shook his head.  "As my father use to say, 'Séamus, don't worry, these people are not making you look stupid.  You're doing an excellent job of it all by yourself.'"

"You make your Dad sound like a hard man."

"At times – yes, very.  But not the Allsop type.  He preferred to always show the opposite.  He was always happy to give ground until he got stuck on a point of principle.  Then he was immovable."

"Talking of Allsop, why was he getting so aggressive with you?  Just over you reporting him for trespassing?"

"Seems like I wasn't respecting his ancient right of way," Séamus replied, "And you know how they hate snitches."  He decided not to mention the threat from Dave Orwood.  Allsop might be tamed, but Orwood could be an ongoing problem, especially when he heard about events that night. 

When they cleared the last hill and could see the facility down in the valley, he was surprised that the sight felt welcoming to him.  Logically, he thought, he should now be at his most depressed: his relationship was surely gone, he had been both humiliated and exposed publicly, and there was only the thinnest speculation that the project was no longer hopeless and might yet save his career.  Yet he felt hope, and he knew that the girls had hope in him.  Bizarrely, that was enough to feel pretty good.

The next morning, Séamus and Alice visited Tina in her room around 9 am, telling the others that the normal start would be postponed an hour.

"We want you to suggest a change to the keypad," Alice told her.  "We can't promise you what you want, but we'll do our best to persuade the good Professor."

Tina did not hesitate.  "Give us three letters.  You can take away three numbers if you like."

Séamus's and Alice's eyes opened wider.  "Any suggestions?" Séamus asked.

Tina spent two seconds considering.  "Give us MPS, take out 4, 5 and 9."

"I don't think we'll have any problems with that," Alice said, typing it into her phone.  "While we wait for Wilkie's reply, can you explain why?"

Tina climbed on her bed with a bounce.  "We simply need more sound in there, at least to get started.  In most languages there are basic sounds that come from certain mouth positions.  M is a closed mouth sound, like N; P is a sound made by parting your lips, like B, but isn't so different from D, J and T.  S is a soft sound and covers a soft C, Z, X and, at a stretch, CH, SH and TH.  We could cover F, G, J, K, Q and V from combinations.  Then the six numbers become our vowel sounds, together with H, L, R and Y."

"So isn't this just another alphabet?" Séamus asked.  "Why would it be different from taking ten letters from the Roman alphabet?"

"Oh, it's different," Tina told him.  "Remember, each of us girls speaks at least six languages fluently, and knows parts of up to a dozen more.  If we had ten letters, we would just get tugged towards one language that comes easiest to the four of us.  But the keypad we have now is not going to permit that.  In order to build a decent language from it we're going to have to draw from all our other languages with ideas we can push on each other.  For example, Jenny may be able to use two letters and two numbers to make something looking like a Japanese word, and persuade the rest of us to use it.  But we are going to find similar examples from many languages.  The one that's most attractive for each word is going to vary a lot, coming from each of the ten-or-so languages that the four of us share the most."

"So it becomes like a mixture of all those languages?" Alice asked.

"Maybe initially," Tina told her, "But then the vowels will start taking on a life of their own.  I mean, they'll start playing too many conflicting roles in multiple languages.  If our brains work the way modern theory suggests, we'll need to start eliminating certain options in order to fix rules and avoid ambiguity."

"Have you been reading up about this?" Séamus asked.  He sat beside her on the bed and poked her stomach with his finger.  She poked him back.

"We've had quite a lot of spare time, don't you think?  I was getting a bit impatient."

"OK, Ms Einstein, then why didn't you raise this before?"

"Ha!"  Tina punched him.  "Why didn't you people raise it?"

Séamus laughed.  "Because we're not the geniuses."  He turned to Alice.  "What's our excuse?"

"Being dumb enough to follow Wilkie's plan perfectly," she replied, reading her phone. "He's just said this was not an unexpected outcome, and he was leaving it up to the girls to raise it.  By Tina figuring it out by herself, she's going to know exactly how to steer the thing.  If it hadn't struck me last night, Wilkie said he was going to have me ask the girls for suggestions in the next couple of weeks."

Tiny jumped into Séamus's lap.  "Wow, my idea must really work!  I never did anything like that before!"

"Well, you're the first out of the pair of us," he told her, then to Alice, "Did he explain why it was useful for us to get to the point of despair?"

"He does send his apologies to all of us.  But he decided it was vital for one of the girls to think through what was actually happening.  He only wanted to abandon the all-number keypad if it was truly unworkable, and even now he can't be certain our modified version will do the trick , but clearly it's time to move on there.  So, Tina, congratulations on being the girl who's keeping our hopes and dreams alive!"

Tina turned to hug Séamus, placing her face against his shoulder.  Instinctively he stroked her back.  Her breathing started to feel heavy, then he felt the same dampness as last time she cried on his shoulder.  He looked at Alice who pointed to the door and mouthed something like 'cafeteria,' then left.  When Tina finally pulled her face back and looked at him, it was reddish and tear-stained.

"Sorry, Honey," she said.  "I'm not normally a cry-baby.  It's just that I have never been given so much credit before.  I can't believe my ideas have been accepted.  So maybe I'm not such a freak now, after all!"

Séamus laughed. "Then please try and persuade Jenny.  She was the one who first described herself as a freak."

"Wow, really? You think that's the way all of us have been made to feel?"  She lifted a leg with extraordinary suppleness and swung herself from sitting across his lap to sitting astride him.

"Probably, but you all reacted differently.  Jenny cut herself off in her bedroom and just watched TV and movies.  Chrissy would seek out strangers and constantly want to move on before getting close.  Phyllis was determined to have her normality of two kids to love, but was not at all surprised when her man left her.  After your experience with your family, you just wanted to be important to someone."

Tina laughed through her tears, grabbed his shirt and pretended to shake him. "What are you?  Our analyst?  You're not so normal yourself, Séamus FitzGerald.  You have this obsession with trying to make girls fall in love with you.  It's pathetic!"  She continued to pull his shirt and put her face against his, noses touching.  He had an overwhelming desire to sink his mouth into her large lips and then simply wait to see what happened.  Tina was like a coiled cobra on his lap; all long, thin muscle.

Then just as quickly she slipped off his lap.  "Why don't we get started now, Séimi?  Put three little stickers on those keypads?"

Stickers were duly found in the lab, and the girls escorted down to start their revised version of the experiment.  As always Séamus returned to his room, on this occasion his mind flooded with thoughts of Sheryl.  Last night he had felt he had permanently lost her when reading the article, yet the sensation had not been as devastating as he might have imagined it.  He knew that partly it had been offset by the realization of his true importance in this project, raising his self-esteem up from a fresh all-time low. 

But something else must have happened in his mind.  Perhaps it was the fact that such a public revelation
could
end the relationship which made him see more clearly Sheryl's role in his life.  It was a bit like a dual career.  It provided him with all kinds of promises for the future and, if he stuck with the right formula, he could make it to retirement with a high degree of security.  But a really stupid mistake combined with sheer bad luck would mean termination.  Did he really need two such careers in his life? Especially two that were always headed for collision.

When he had been faced with a failing government career, the threat to his Sheryl career had made him promise her anything.  Now the government career felt like it had returned, he couldn't bring back that panic feeling over Sheryl even if he wanted to.  God!  To borrow Tina's word, pathetic!  As long as he had been able to juggle both, he had patiently suffered D grades on both.  When his boss had thrown him a lifeline at the Agency, he had abandoned Sheryl.  When Sheryl had given him an ultimatum, he had abandoned both the Agency and the girls.  Maybe it didn't matter what dream he clung to, provided it was some kind of dream.

Now his one surviving dream, almost by default, was under the control of a woman who would cheerfully break him if he got in the way of her plans.  But wasn't this the quality he had admired in Barbara Coates?  Her certainty, her iron will, her take-no-prisoners mentality?  How could he object to it, just because he had chosen to put himself on the receiving end?  If she was the devil then it was he who had freely chosen to follow the devil.  And now he had a message asking him to call her.

As always, she looked so attractive on the screen.  She was wearing a shimmering blue dress and her jewelry was silver.  Could he read into her smile a genuine pleasure in the success of her minion?

"Séamus, I heard from Wilkie today that you made the significant breakthrough he was hoping for.  I always knew you would.  Congratulations."

"Thank you, Principal, but it wasn't me.  It was Alice Turner and the Thai girl, Tina."

His boss gave one of her indulgent smiles at his excessive modesty, then continued, "I'm driving up to Edinburgh next Monday.  I will stop for the night at a hotel near the facility, and pick you up for dinner.  Please be ready at seven.  Now would you excuse me?  Ministry's on the line."

It was curious how the only question was about whether or not he would excuse her, something she did not wait to find out about.  The dinner was a statement of future fact, not even an order.  He recalled Tina asking him if he felt like the girls' toy.  If he was, it didn't feel bad.  More strangely, he didn't feel bad about his boss's treatment, either.  He felt sure that he should do, but he couldn't make himself.

That day's session in the lab continued until 6 pm, when the girls finally quit through exhaustion and hunger.  Alice and Séamus went to the cafeteria for dinner.

"It feels like they're trying to make up for lost time," Alice said.  "They seem determined to give it everything they've got now."

"And their progress today?" Séamus couldn't wait to know, despite feeling a little crass.

"Not bad, but remember it's early.  They're working on a vocabulary they can all agree with.  It will take them a couple of weeks, just like the signing.  Once they've done that, we'll have the real acid test – whether it continues to develop into a fully-fledged language, or gets stuck in some kind of pidgin backwater."

"But won't there be maybe earlier signs – like the grammar developing along with the vocabulary?"

"Maybe," Alice said elusively, then added, "Remember that we have no idea how these things work, really."

Séamus reminded himself to remain patient.  It was vital he passed on that attitude to the girls.  He continued to eat his dinner before adding, "I suppose Tina was driving things today?"

Alice shook her head.  "Only right at the start.  Then it was Chrissy."

"That sounds like good news."

"I agree.  It turned out she was kind of the technical master today.  The others were starting to back into some version of Mandarin sounds, as they all share fluency in the language and it seems best adapted to the letter constraints, but Chrissy stopped them.  She told them that would be useless.  She allowed a few Chinese words but blocked most of them.  She didn't want this thing adopting a Chinese verbal grammar.  She said that was certain to fail to meet the standards needed.  This new language can't remind them of any other language."

"Good for Chrissy!  Who would have thought it!  But then, she has just the right kind of bloody-minded independence to not care if the others like it or not."

Alice nodded, smiling. "She reminded everyone that the three letters are just a temporary prop and they shouldn't try to connect sounds.  This is a visual language.  It shouldn't sound like Chinese or anything else."

That evening, Chrissy was the last girl he visited.  He congratulated her on her work that day.  She shrugged.  "You know I will do what it takes to make this thing work.  I think we all have ideas which can help at the right time."  She fell silent and then appeared to have an idea.  "But perhaps I can name my own reward for today?"

"Go ahead," Séamus said, though suspecting he was going to regret giving unconditional consent.

"Great.  Let's put on running gear and go downstairs."

It was an unusually cold night for early March and especially damp, but there was a clear sky and enough moon to see by.  Chrissy led them to the back of the facility where there was a large expanse of lawn.  "The perimeter of the lawn is our track," she told him.  Let's jog round it twelve times.  You keep just behind me, okay?"

As he ran behind her, Séamus enjoyed the view of her graceful movement.  The twelve laps were almost three miles, which was longer than any continuous run they had done before.  At the end, Chrissy looked red-cheeked and flushed, her breath creating continuous vapor clouds.  "Now for the crazy bit," she told him.  "We take off all out clothes and run another two laps.  Don't argue!  I'm stripping right now so don't leave me standing here naked or I'll get a chill.  Anyway, you promised."

Chrissy disrobed in the part-darkness.  Knowing there was no purpose in arguing, Séamus hurriedly did the same.  She stood there for a moment, grinning, the sweat rising off her like steam, her skin almost a ghostly white. Then she turned and began jogging again, Séamus keeping behind her as before.  The sight of her bare back view, intensely athletic and fluid, mesmerized him.  On the second lap she broke into a sprint.  He was worried about the safety of their footing, but realized the experience would have been the poorer had they retained their running shoes.  When they finished the final lap, Chrissy dropped to the ground, trying to get her breath back.  He decided the best thing was to sit down beside her.  No sooner did he do so but she rolled on top of him.