Moon Flower (13 page)

What he had to ask himself was if Wade could be among those who had vanished, which would explain why Shearer hadn’t heard from him for a while. He wasn’t especially concerned about finding Wade when he got there himself. Wade would be aware of his predicament, and Shearer was confident that he would be contacted in due course somehow. More to the point, the powers that be would obviously know about Wade’s disappearance too — hence, no doubt, the evasiveness that Shearer had encountered back in Redwood City when he tried to get information. And that led to the question, Why had they not only accepted Shearer’s application to go out and join Wade, but apparently pulled out all the stops to rush it through before the
Tacoma
’s departure?

After considering all the angles that he could think of, Shearer was left with only one answer that made any sense: because they wanted to find Wade too, and they thought Shearer would lead them to him. And that, perhaps, accounted for the undue interest that Callen from Milicorp had shown in Wade when he interviewed Shearer as part of the screening process. It implied that there had been more to the circumstances of Wade’s departure than he had talked about. Just when Shearer had thought he was about to begin a new life light-years away from Earth and finally be free from the world of predatory greed and militarized corporate politics that he abhorred, it seemed as if he was about to be engulfed by it again, from the moment they arrived.

He was still preoccupied a half hour later, when he reappeared back in the midships section and headed for the Study Center, which extended through parts of C and D Decks. Course schedules had been provided by the Interworld mission planners as a way of putting the time of the voyage to good use. That morning had Shearer listed for Yocalan Language Basics — the tongue spoken in the region where the Terran base on Cyrene was situated. Jerri would be in the class too. On his way to the classrooms, he spotted Jeff in one of the study cubicles, pondering among screens and papers, and veered across to say hi.

“Some rudiments of Cyrenean history,” Jeff said, sitting back in the chair and gesturing. He seemed to welcome the excuse to take a break. Luckily, the Cyreneans seem to be helpfully inclined by nature and pretty free with whatever information anyone asks for. They’re a few centuries behind where we are — just about breaking into steam. But they got there faster. The guy who wrote this estimates that from about where the Greeks were in the equivalent of something like two hundred years. And yet the squabbles that they’ve had from time to time never seem to have gotten out of hand and turned into all-out wars. So pressure to advance military technology doesn’t seem to have played much of a part. Interesting, eh?”

Shearer ran his eye absently over the assortment of maps and charts. “Maybe the climatic extremes had something to do with it,” he offered.

“Yes, that’s been suggested already. Some people even think the two could be connected — that there might be more incentive for working together and burying differences, instead of for greater competition the way you’d think.” Jeff shrugged. “Anything’s possible, I guess.”

In fact, Shearer didn’t think that greater competition was the inevitable result of every stress. The received wisdom of the times simply assumed it. But he didn’t say anything.

Jeff touched a key to save the notes he had been making. “So what’s new with you, Marc?”

“Out of curiosity, have you heard anything about there being some kind of trouble at Revo?” Shearer asked.

The grin that had started to form on Jeff’s faced changed abruptly. “What kind of trouble?”

“People disappearing from the base. Our people.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Just some talking around the table at breakfast this morning.”

“Who was it that said it?”

“Karen got it from one of the Milicorp people in the gym.”

“Do you know his name?” Jeff was always poking for more detail, even when it seemed unimportant. But Shearer was used to it by now. He shook his head.

“She didn’t say.”

Jeff thought for a few seconds. “Do you figure this scientist that you’re supposed to be meeting up with out there... what was his name? Wade?”

“Right. Evan Wade.”

“Do you figure he might have gone missing too? If it turns out he has, how are you gonna find him?”

“Oh, I guess he’d still be around the base somewhere. In any case, it’s no big deal. I’m sure I’d hear from him somehow.”

Jeff watched Shearer’s face for a moment longer, then dismissed the matter with a shrug. “Well, I’ll be talking to some of the admin people this afternoon,” he said. “I’ll ask around. If anything comes up I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks. I’d appreciate it,” Shearer said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Around about 1960, dazzled by the ease with which the new computers were able to convert between the artificial, precisely structured programming languages devised specifically to communicate with them, experts had predicted that fluent automatic translation of natural languages — the messy, ambiguity-ridden stews of metaphors, homophones, homonyms, double meanings, irregularities, and exceptions in which humans speak — would become a reality within five years.

But formal artificial languages and natural human languages work in totally opposite ways. In formal languages, nothing is assumed. Everything that is to be conveyed has to be stated explicitly. The meaning is carried fully in the message. Humans, on the other hand, tend to communicate only that which they consider it likely the listener does not already know. They assume a huge amount of pre-existing world-knowledge in order to be understood. The message constitutes merely an agreed convention of codes for triggering concepts that life, experience, and learning have already created in the head of the listener.

The result was that after many fruitless years and much costly effort expended on ever more elaborate attempts to extract meaning from where it didn’t exist, the general agreement had emerged that a different approach was called for.

A possible solution that had been receiving a lot of attention was known as neural cognitive and associative access. The idea behind it was that, irrespective of the particular streams of syllables that different speakers might employ as an intermediary, the meanings they were trying to communicate all started out as — and would hopefully end up as — the same kind of concept existing somewhere inside the same kind of mind. The last half-century had seen major advances in various brain imaging techniques, along with sophisticated methods of recovering coherent patterns of meaning from scattered data in particle physics and other fields. So instead of grappling with all the capricious usages, figures of speech, colloquial shorthand, and other devices that plagued every language, seemingly contrived specifically to facilitate literal constructions expressing anything other than what was actually meant, would it be possible to get at the underlying concepts directly?

Early attempts had sought to use the outputs from such a process to drive discrete language synthesizers that would create a rendition in French, Spanish, German, or whatever, depending on the synthesizer selected. But the complexities involved in composing a construction that accurately captured the original turned out to be as irreducible to formal code as deciphering it in the first place, and the results obtained were indifferent at best. Ironically, the best performances were achieved with experiments at translating into Chinese and other Asian languages, where the phonetics were based on symbols more directly related to the concepts involved rather than alphabetical syllabic constructions, and thus eliminated a whole level of abstraction.

The next step, then, was to ask, Why bother going from neural concept to impossible human lingual mishmash, and then back again, at all? If the aim at the end of it all was to recreate a similar — ideally identical — pattern of neural stimulations in the brain of the recipient, mightn’t it be simpler to go directly from one to the other?

One implementation of this principle was the Neural Imaging Decoder and Activator, or NIDA, known otherwise as the Babel Box. A still largely unknown factor was how applicable the decoding procedures worked out on Earth would be to interpreting the neural activity of aliens. That was a question that some of the linguists and cryptanalysts aboard the
Tacoma
hoped to be shedding a little more light on. But if it could be made to work, it promised the tremendous benefit of not having to understand and encode all the intricacies for every one of what was already a bewilderingly high number of sometimes very strange, alien languages.

Earlier versions of NIDA had required a bulky headpiece with an elaborate array of sensors and a rear neck surround like an ancient Roman helmet, which was fine for experimental purposes but didn’t permit the mobility necessary for practical use. The newer pickup was in the form of an elastic mesh cap that was pulled over the head, with lobes projecting downward in front of the ears. It was light enough to carry comfortably, and its settings could be adjusted via a regular phone or from the general-purpose compad that most people carried, often as a wrist unit.

The system had not been used on Cyrene before. It was being taken there as part of a wider program of field trials to gather alien experience and performance data. Those who had decided to study Cyrenean languages seriously still had to work at it the old-fashioned way, using what information the earlier missions had been able to send back on the subject. Fortunately, Cyreneans were naturally curious and valued learning highly. Mastering Terran was already a challenge being taken up by many, and a source of social approval among them.

Jerri sat at one of the tables in the classroom, each seating four people, tapping the studs on her phone intermittently while she concentrated on the “echo” voice that she was hearing in her head. She was trying to adjust her NIDA unit to see if she could lose something of the macho-belligerent quality of the original, which she found overpowering. The original was the voice of Don Olsen, the class instructor, who was wearing a similar device. He was large and burly, with a tanned balding head and a booming voice that years of former military background had left in permanent command mode.

“The mark saw that the boot was on the other foot,” Olsen recited slowly and deliberately.

Jerri heard him, but in a subdued kind of way as if in the background. What seemed to be a stronger voice said with a delay short enough to be imperceptible,
The victim realized he now had the advantage
. It was like being at one of those conferences with people from many countries in the audience, where multichannel headphones were issued carrying a selection of live translators.

The NIDA was picking up the patterns of neural activity that occurred in certain parts of Olsen’s brain as he spoke, and trying to induce the same patterns in the brains of the students. The neat thing about the way it worked was that the concepts evoked in response were coupled to the speech and auditory centers, producing the effect of a ghost voice that used the listener’s own vocabulary and preferred terms and phrases. So the system would convert somebody else’s style of English into one’s own English.

Olsen turned off his unit and waited until they had all done the same and written their versions down. “Okay, let’s see what we got.” He stabbed a finger to single out someone at the back. “West.” That was Zoe, the logistics administrator. Olsen never used first names.

“The dupe thought he could turn the tables,” she read from her pad.

“Simmons.”

“Er... There was a way the victim could get his own back.”

“Demaro.”

“The one who was calling the shots now was the intended target.”

Olsen looked around. “That’s good. We’re getting those settings to converge. What we’ve been doing is a useful preliminary step before trying it between different languages. When you hear the original in a form you can understand, it provides a lot of clues that help the decoding routines. Now before we break, I’m going to hit you with something else. Ready again....” He turned his NIDA back on and waited while the class followed. “Die Kinder sind in der Schule.” The ghost in Jerri’s head echoed, with markedly less parade-ground volume,
The children are in school
. She smiled to herself and wrote it down. After a short pause there followed, “Könnten Sie es mir aufschreiben?” accompanied by
Write it down
. And finally, “Wie war das noch ‘mal, bitte?” with
Repeat please
. Olsen disconnected again. “Okay, I’ll leave those for you to compare among yourselves. We’ll get into it more when we pick up again. Fifteen minutes.” He peeled off his NIDA cap and set it down, then headed for the door. A couple of people got up and pursued him into the corridor, evidently with questions.

Jerri leaned across to see what Marc, who was sitting next to her, had written. His first sentence was the same as hers. For the second he had
Can you write it down for me
? and for the third,
Can you say that again, please
?

“The second two were questions,” he said, inspecting her pad in turn. He turned his head to Al Forrest, who was sitting on the other side of him. “Did two and three come out as questions for you?”

“Yes, right. They did.”

Marc looked back at Jerri. “You’ve made them orders.”

“Maybe his manner affects me more and overrode that part,” she said.

“You think it could work that way?... I guess it might. That’s interesting. But you did put ‘please’ on the last one.”

“Yes, well, everyone knows that bitte means please.”

“Hey, that’s cheating,” Marc accused. “You’re not supposed to use things like that. You won’t be able to when it comes to Cyrenean.” He sat back, took off the NIDA headpiece, and looked around the room as he picked up his water glass.

Jerri watched his face, with its clear, olive skin, tanned permanently by a Florida upbringing, lean-lined, vaguely Gallic profile, dark, curly hair, and brown, intensely deep eyes. It was the eyes that had first led her to the person who dwelt inside. By now, she had let down the guard that she had long learned wise to maintain against newcomers into her life. She felt comfortable with Marc because in the ways that mattered most to her she found that both of them felt alike. He enabled her to be herself. And in a world where she had grown accustomed to being an exception who was looked upon by most that she met as eccentric at best, that was no small consideration.