the Dark Light Years

by Brian W Aldiss

  Yes, that was about it....

  "... feel that we have made progress this week, despite several handicaps inherent in the situation, most of them stemming - as I think the Director was the first to point out - from the fact that we have no background to the lifeform to use as a point of reference." Mrs. Warhoon's voice was pleasantly staccato. It scattered Ainson's thoughts and made him concentrate on what she was saying; if Enid had been a bit more prompt with the break-fast, he might have got here in tune to hear the beginning of her speech. "My colleague, Mr. Borroughs, and I have now examined the space vehicle found on Clementina. While we are not qualified to give a technical report on it -you will be getting several technical reports on it from other sources in any case - we both were convinced that it was a vehicle developed for, if not by, the captive life-form. You will recall that eight of the lifeforms were discovered close to the vehicle; and the body of a dead one was disinterred within the vehicle itself; nine bunks, or niches that by their shape and size are intended to serve as bunks, are observable within the vehicle.

  Because these bunks run in the direction we think of as vertical rather than horizontally, and are separated by what we now know to be fuel lines, they have not previously been recognized as bunks.

  "Here it is appropriate to mention another trouble that we come up against continually. We do not know what is evidence and what is not.

  "For instance, we now have to ask ourselves, supposing we consider it established that the lifeform has developed space travel: can space travel be regarded as a priori proof of superior intelligence?”

  "That is the most penetrating question I have heard asked in the last decade," said Wittgenbacher, nodding his head six times with the frightening assurance of a clock-work doll. "If it were posed to the masses, they would give you but one answer, or should I rather say that their many answers would take but one form. They would render an affirmative. We who are here may reckon our-selves more enlightened and would perhaps choose as a more valid example of superior intelligence the works of the analytical philosophers, where logic flows unconfused with emotion. But the masses - and who perhaps amongst us in the final analysis is to gainsay them? - would, if I may employ a colloquialism, plump for a product in which the hands as well as the mind had been employed. I do not doubt that among such a category of products the space-ship would appear to them the most outstanding.”

  "I'd go along with them," said Lattimore. He sat next to Pasztor, sucking the frame of his spectacles and listening intently.

  "I might even accompany them myself," chuckled Wittgenbacher, with more mechanical nods. "But this does raise another question. Suppose that, having granted this lifeform, so unaesthetically unhygienic in many of its habits, superior intelligence; suppose we later discover its planet of origin, and then perceive that its - um, its space-going ability is as much governed by instinctual behavior as is the ocean-going ability of our northern fur-seals. Perhaps you will correct me if I am in error, Sir Mihaly, but I believe that the Arctocephalus ursinus, the bear seal, makes a winter migration of many thousands of miles from the Bering Sea down to the shores of Mexico, where I have seen them myself when swimming in the Gulf of California.

  "If we find this to be so, then not only shall we be in error in presuming superior intelligence in our friends, but we shall have to ask ourselves this: is it not possible that our own space travel is equally the outcome of instinctual behavior, and - much as the fur-seal may imagine on his swim south that his travel is prompted by his own will - may we not be pushed by an unglimpsed purpose beyond our own?”

  Three reporters at the back of the room scribed busily, ensuring that tomorrow's Times, recording the longueurs of the conference, would pinpoint this highlight in a head-line reading Space Travel: Man's Migratory Pattern ?

  Gerald Bone stood up. The novelist's face had lit at the new thought like a child's at sight of a new toy.

  "Do I understand you. Professor Wittgenbacher, to imply that we - that our much-vaunted intelligence, the one thing that most clearly distinguishes us from the animals, may really be no more than a blind compulsion driving us in its own directions rather than in ours?”

  "Why not? For all our pretensions to the arts and the humanities, our race ever since the Renaissance at least has directed its main efforts towards the twin goals of expanding its numbers and expanding outwards." Having got the bit between his teeth, the old philosopher was not going to stop there. "In fact you may liken our leaders to the queen bee who prepares her hive to swarm and does not know why she does it. We swarm into space and do not know why we do it. Something drives -”

  But he was not going to get away with it. Lattimore was the first to vent a hearty "Nonsense", and Dr.

  Bodley Temple and his assistants made unsavoury noises of dissent. All round the room, the professor was given the cultural catcall.

  "Preposterous theory -”

  "Economic possibilities inherent in -”

  "Even a techni audience would hardly -”

  "I suppose the colonization of other planets -”

  "One just cannot dismiss the disciplines of science -”

  "Order, please," called the Director.

  In the following lull, Gerald Bone called another question to Wittgenbacher, "Then where shall we find true intellect?”

  "Perhaps when we run up against our gods," Wittgen-bacher replied, not at all put out by the heated atmosphere about him.

  "We will have the linguistic report now," Pasztor said sharply, and Dr. Bodley Temple rose, rested his right leg on the chair in front of him, rested his right elbow on his knee, so that he leant forward with an appearance of eagerness, and did not budge from that position until he had finished talking. He was a small stocky man with a screw of grey hair rising from the middle of his forehead and a pugnacious expression. He had the reputation of being a sound and imaginative scholar, and offset it with some of the nattiest waistcoats in London University. His present one, negotiating a considerable stretch of abdomen, was of antique brocade with a pattern of Purple Emperor butterflies chasing themselves about the buttons.

  "You all know what the job of my team is," he said, in a voice that Arnold Bennett would have recognized a century back as having sprung from the Five Towns. "We're trying to learn the alien tongue without knowing if they have one, because that's the only way there is to find out. We have made some progress, as my colleague Wilfred Brebner here will demonstrate in a moment.

  "First, I'll make a few general remarks. Our visitors, these fat chaps from Clementina, don't understand what writing is. They have no script. That doesn't mean any-thing with regard to their language - many African negro languages were only reduced to writing by white missionaries. Efik and Yoruba were two such languages of the Sudanic language group; almost unused languages now, I'd say.

  " I tell you all this, my friends, because until I get a better idea, I'm treating these aliens as a couple of Africans. It may bring results. It's more positive than treating them as animals - you may recall that the first white explorers in Africa thought the negroes were gorillas - and it ensures that if we find they do have a language, then we won't make the mistake of expecting it to follow anything like a Romance pattern.

  "I am certain that our fat friends have a language - and you gents of the Press can quote me there, if you like. You've only got to listen to them snorting together. And it isn't all snorts. We've now analyzed it from tapes and have sorted out five hundred different sounds. Though it may be that many of these sounds are the same sound delivered at a different pitch. You may know that there are terrestrial linguistic systems such as - er. Siamese and Cantonese which employ six acoustic pitches. And we can expect many more pitches with these fellows, who obviously range very freely over the sound spectrum.

  "The human ear is deaf to vibrations of frequency greater than somewhere about 24,000 a second.

  We have found that these chaps can go twice that, just as a terrestrial bat or a Rungstedian cat
can. So one problem is that if we are to converse with them, we must get them to stay within our wavelength. For all we know, that may mean they would have to invent a sort of pidgin language that we could understand.”

  "I protest," said the statistician, who until now had been content to do little but run his tongue round his teeth. "You are now inferring, surely, that we are inferior to them.”

  "I'm saying nothing of the kind. I'm saying that their range of sound is very much greater than ours.

  Now, Mr. Brebner here is going to give us a few of the phonemes that we have provisionally identified.”

  Mr. Brebner rose and stood swaying beside the stocky figure of Bodley Temple. He was in his mid-twenties, a slight figure with pale yellow hair, wearing a light grey suit with the hood down. His face was suffused a delicate flame color with the embarrassment of confronting his audience, but he spoke up well. "The dissections on the dead aliens have told us quite a lot about their anatomy," he said. "If you have read the rather lengthy report, you will know that our friends have three distinct classes of apertures through which they pro-duce their characteristic noises. All these noises appear to contribute to their language, or we assume they do, just as we assume they have a language.

  "First, they have in one of their heads a mouth, to which is linked a scent organ. Although this mouth is used for breathing, its main function is feeding and making what we term the oral sounds.

  "Secondly, our friends have six breathing vents, three on either side of their body, and situated above their six limbs. At present we refer to these as the nostrils. They are labiate apertures and although unconnected to any vocal chords - as is the mouth - these nostrils produce a wide range of sounds.

  "Thirdly, our friends also produce a variety of con-trolled sound through the rectum situated in their second head.

  "Their form of speech consists of sound transmitted through all these apertures, either in turn, or any two together, or all three classes together, or all eight apertures together. You will see then that the few sounds I am now going to give you as examples are limited to the less complex ones. Tape recordings of the whole range are of course available, but are not in a very manageable form as yet. "The first word is nnnnorrrr- INK .”

  To pronounce this word, Wilfred Brebner ran a light snore over the front of his throat and chased it with the little squeak represented here as "ink". (All printed forms of the alien language used throughout this book are similarly to be treated as mere approximations.) Brebner continued with his exposition.

  "Nnnnorrrr- INK is the word we have obtained several times in various contexts. Dr. Bodley Temple recorded it first last Saturday, when he brought our friends a fresh cabbage. We obtained it a second time on Saturday when I took out a packet of chewing plastic and gave pieces to Dr. Temple and to Mike. We did not hear it again till Tuesday afternoon, when it was pronounced in a situation when food was not present. Chief Keeper Ross had entered the cage where we were to see if we needed any-thing, and both creatures made the sound at the same time. We then noted that the word might have a negative con-notation, since they had refused the cabbage, and had not been offered the chew - which they would presume to be food - and might be supposed not to like Ross, who disturbs them when he cleans out their cage. Yesterday, how-ever, Ross brought them a bucket of river mud. which they like, and then we recorded nnnnorrrr- INK again, several times in five minutes. So we think at present that it refers to some variety of human activity: appearing bearing something, shall we say. The meaning will be fined down considerably as we go along. From this example you can see the process of elimination we go through with every sound.

  "The bucket of river mud also brought forth another word we can recognize. This sounds like WHIP -bwut-bwip (a small whistle followed by two pouting labials). We have also heard it when grapefruit has been accepted, when porridge with sliced banana in - a dish over which they show some enthusiasm - has been accepted, and when Mike and I have been leaving in the evening. We take it therefore to be a sign of approval.

  "We also think we have a sign of disapproval, although we have only heard it twice. Once it was accompanied by a gesture of disapproval, when an under-keeper caught one of our friends on the snout with a jet of water from a hose. On the other occasion, we had offered them fish, some cooked, some raw. As you are aware, they seem to be vegetarians. The sound was -”

  Brebner glanced apologetically at Mrs. Warhoon as he blew a series of damp farts with his mouth, culminating with an open-mouthed groan.

  "Bbbp-bbbp-bbbp-bbbp-aaaah.”

  "It certainly sounds like disapproval," Temple said.

  Before the ripple of amusement died, one of the reporters said, "Dr. Temple, is this all you have to offer in the way of progress?”

  "You have been given a rough guide to what we are doing.”

  "But you don't seem to have a single one of their words definitely. Why couldn't you tackle what any lay-man would think would be the first steps, like getting them to count, and to name parts of their bodies and yours? Then at least you have something to begin on, rather than a few abstracts like 'Appearing carrying something'.”

  Temple looked down at the Purple Emperors on his waistcoat, munched his lips, and then said, "Young man, a layman might indeed think those were the first steps. But my answer to that layman and to you is that such a catalogue is only possible if the enemy - the alien is pre-pared to open up a conversation. These two buggers - I beg your pardon, madam - these two fellows have no interest in communicating with us.”

  "Why don't you get a computer on the job?”

  "Your questions grow more foolish. You need common-sense on a job like this. What damned good would a computer be? It can't think, nor can it differentiate between two almost identical phonemes for us. All we need is time. You can't imagine - nor can your hypothetical layman -the difficulties that beset us, mainly because we are having to think in a realm where man has not had to think before.

  Ask yourself this: what is language? And the answer is, human speech. Therefore we aren't just doing research, we "are inventing something new: non-human speech.”

  The reporter nodded glumly, Dr. Temple huffed and puffed and sat down, Lattimore rose. He perched his spectacles on the end of his nose and clasped his hands behind his back.

  "As you know, Doctor, I'm new around here, so I hope you'll appreciate I ask my questions in all innocence. My position is this. I'm a skeptic. I know that we have investigated only three hundred planets in this universe, and I know that leaves a tidy few million to go. but I still hold that three hundred is a fair sampling. None of them have yielded any form of life half as intelligent as my Siamese cat. This suggests to me that man is unique in the universe.”

  "It should be no stronger than a suggestion." Temple said.

  " Nor is it. Now, I don't give a row of pins if there is no other form of intelligent life in the universe; man has always been on his own, and that won't worry him. On the other hand, if some other intelligent form of human turns up elsewhere, then I'll welcome it as readily as the next man - provided it behaves itself.

  "What sticks in my gullet is when someone brings back this couple of overgrown hogs that wallow in their own filth in a way no self-respecting Earth pig would do. given the option, and insists that we try and prove that they are intelligent people! It's just crazy. You yourself said that these hogs show no interest in trying to communicate with us. Very well. then, isn't that a sign that they have no intelligence? Who in all this room can honestly say they would want these hogs in their own house?”

  Uproar broke out again. Everyone turned and argued, not merely with Lattimore, but with each other.

  Finally it was Mrs. Warhoonss voice that rode over the rumpus.

  "I have a great deal of sympathy with your position, Mr. Lattimore, and I am very glad you have consented to come down and sit in on our meeting. But the brief answer" to you is that, as life takes a multitude of different forms, so we should expect intelligence
to take differing forms.

  We cannot conceive a differing form of intelligence. We only know that it would widen the boundaries of our thought and understanding in a way that nothing else could. Therefore, when we think we have found such intelligence, we must make sure, even if the effort takes us years.”

  "That is part of my point, madam," Lattimore said. "If intelligence were there, it would not take us years to detect We should recognize it right away, even if it came disguised as a turnip.”

  "How do you account for the space ship on Clementina?'" Gerald Bone asked.

  "I don't have to account for it! These big hogs should be able to account for it If they built it, then why don't they draw pictures of it when they're given pencils and paper?”

  "Because they travel in it doesn't mean to say they built it."' "Can you imagine the lowest dumbest rating on an Earth cruiser getting captured by aliens and then being un-able to draw a picture of his ship when they brought him pencil and paper?”

  Brebner asked, "And their language, how do you account for that?”