Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Now it was her turn to look confused. “What?”

  “By your reaction, you must be in that picture. That would make you Sally. Or... Diane.”

  “Diane McKenna Templeton.” She squinted at the photo, then looked up at Edward. “Oh my god. You’re my father.”

  They looked at one another for a few seconds. “Well,” said Edward, “this certainly is awkward.”

  They went into the kitchen, where Edward made tea and put out a plate of cookies. He struggled to remember anything about Diane—McKenna—but time had worn away all but the most generic memories. They had drifted apart when he was in his one-twenties or so, and despite his occasional intention to look her up someday, he had never gotten around to doing it. Out of sight, out of mind, quite literally.

  They caught up on each other’s history now, but it was like listening to a co-worker describe her life. He felt no connection, other than the normal curiosity about someone he was interested in as a person.

  Nor, apparently, did she. “It’s like a book I read a long time ago,” she admitted. “I don’t even remember how it went anymore.”

  They shared a wry grin. “Now what?” she asked.

  “Well, I’d suggest we not go to bed together,” he replied.

  She nodded, then tilted her head sideways, obviously puzzled by a new thought. “Why not?”

  “Er... because it’s incest?”

  “And why is that bad?” Before he could answer, she said, “The incest taboo exists because genetic reinforcement of recessive traits is generally a bad thing, and also to prevent parents from exploiting their children. We’re not talking about having babies together, and we’re both old enough to be our own parents. Hell, we’re old enough to be our own grandparents. Why should we care about the incest taboo?”

  “Because.”

  She laughed, and he said, “Okay, that was an instinctive Dad response, wasn’t it? Let’s try again. Because it’s instilled pretty deeply in my psyche that it’s wrong. I’m feeling uncomfortable just talking about it, to be honest.”

  “I’m not. And you’re a good kisser,” she said. “You didn’t put your tongue anywhere near my tonsils, the way so many guys do.”

  He put his hands to his ears. “La, la, la.”

  She took a cookie from the plate and ate it slowly, lasciviously, leaving crumbs on her lips. Edward wanted to look away, wanted to tell her to stop, wanted... hell, he wanted her. He wanted her to be someone, anyone, other than his daughter, but his body knew what his brain was only now admitting.

  “You’re incorrigible,” he said.

  “That’s possible, I suppose. But I could be right, too.”

  She could. One of Edward’s clear early memories was of the turmoil he’d felt when he realized that he no longer believed in God. He’d had to rethink practically everything that went with the assumption of a higher power. Had to decide on his own moral principles, rather than those imposed on him from some distant authority. He’d thought he’d covered all his bases long ago, but obviously not.

  “Let’s sleep on it,” he said. “Separately. We need time to think.”

  “Can I at least stay the night here?” she asked.

  “If you promise not to sneak into my bedroom in the middle of the night.”

  She laughed. “If I come to your bedroom, I won’t be sneaking.” She held up her hands to forestall his reaction. “Okay, okay, I promise.”

  They sent for her things from the hotel, and he gave her the tour of the rest of the house while they waited for the courier to arrive. When it did, there were at least a dozen addies circling around the air taxi. The driver looked at Edward when he came out to pick up the bags and said, “I don’t know what you’ve got in there, but if it’s contra, I’m guessin’ you’re in some deep squank.”

  Edward looked at the addies. They knew. “Must be a case of mistaken identity,” he told the driver. “They’ll go away when they figure it out.” He slipped him an extra fifty with his tip and added quietly, “But if you could have a little trouble on takeoff, that would be okay with me.”

  The courier’s spiral liftoff scattered the adbots like leaves, but it did no real damage. Back inside the house, Edward found McKenna kneeling on the couch, looking over its back out the window while the addies regrouped and clustered around to look back at her. They were undoubtedly getting a cleavage shot. He was glad they couldn’t see her from his perspective, with her pants stretched tight around the curve of her butt.

  “We’re apparently news now,” he said, looking away. He went to the side of the window and polarized it to block the addies’ view inward. He and McKenna could still see out, and they watched the addies swoop for different windows. “Somebody must have run an ID on us from the video of us kissing in front of the Exploratorium and figured out the family connection,” Edward said. “Getting kicked out for sexual advances in public was probably enough to qualify us as deviants, so now they can invade our privacy all they want so long as they don’t trespass. Do you want to deal with all that?”

  She looked at him. “Will what we do change anything they do?”

  “Only for the worse.”

  “You mean like blanking the window?”

  She had a point. He said, “You think we should open it up again and just sit in the living room reading books all night?”

  She shook her head. “Have you seen some of the programs on the net lately? If we so much as look at one another, that would be the top download for the next three weeks.”

  “So we leave the window closed.”

  “And fuel speculation.”

  That seemed like the lesser of two evils, so they blanked the windows throughout the house. That didn’t discourage the addies. They would hang out until there was no chance of anything newsworthy happening.

  Edward and McKenna settled into the living room and made plans. “Come watch the redwood removal with me tomorrow,” she said. “That’ll completely outweigh our little drama.”

  “What if I carry a ‘Save the Trees’ sign?”

  She considered it. “That would probably divert the father-daughter incest thing into a father-daughter ideological thing.”

  “Thus killing two birds with one stone. Good.” He took his pod from his pocket and ordered a sign to be delivered by morning. While he was at it he sent an environmental alert to Sierra First.

  She watched him with a bemused expression. “You’re really going to protest my job site?”

  “If you’re really going to cut down ten redwoods, I am.”

  “Not me personally.”

  “Then I’m not protesting you personally. But I’ll be there with a sign.”

  “You’re not going to scare me away that easily,” she said.

  “It’s not you I want to scare away,” he replied. “It’s the logging company.”

  They stared at each other, each waiting for the other to blink. After half a minute, Edward said, “I bet you were a problem child.”

  “And I’ll bet you were a domineering father.”

  “You want to call your mother and find out?”

  “Like she’d remember any better than we do.”

  They left it at that. When it came time for bed, Edward showed her to the guest room. He thought about propping a chair in front of his own door in case she got ideas in the night, but decided that would be a violation of trust. And she stayed in her own room all night, so far as he knew. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, and he stayed awake most of the night trying to decide how he felt about that.

  Cutting trees down was a misnomer, it turned out. The sky-crane slid into place overhead, lowered cables that attached to a couple of dozen branches in the top two-thirds of the redwood, then a truck at the base sliced the trunk with a particle beam and the entire tree lifted upward, shedding bugs and bark and rotted heartwood from its hollow center like rain as it accelerated into the sky. The whole procedure was eerily silent, just as the entire redwood grove had been since t
hey got there.

  Edward felt ridiculous with his sign. It was a meter across with “Save the Trees” in bold black letters, but against the immensity of the forest it might as well have been a postage stamp stuck to his forehead. Besides, the tree was so hollowed out in the middle, it was clearly not being cut for its timber. The mediabots gave his sign a cursory scan, then focused on his face as he watched the tree rise.

  They weren’t displaying ads now. They weren’t asking questions, either. You knew you were news when they shut up and turned off their projectors and concentrated on getting unobstructed shots of you in your surroundings. Those surroundings included maybe twenty protesters and twice as many foresters, agrav techs, and merely curious bystanders.

  McKenna stood next to him, defiantly scowling at the ’bots and at his sign, while just as defiantly holding his free hand in hers. A particularly large chunk of bark fluttered down right toward them and Edward shielded her with his sign, only to have the bark bounce off and clip him on the side of the head.

  “Ow,” he said, and she turned to examine his wound.

  “You’re bleeding,” she announced after a few seconds.

  “Oh, great.” He fished in his pockets for something to stanch the flow, but she beat him to it with a napkin from her own pocket. As she dabbed at him, he realized most of the mediabots were focusing on them rather than the tree receding into the sky. Wonderful. At least she wasn’t kissing him.

  She must have been reading his mind, because he had barely had the thought before she stood on tiptoe and smooched him noisily on the temple. “There, that’ll make it better,” she said.

  “McKenna,” he said sternly. “This is—”

  “They don’t know we know,” she whispered into his ear. “Let’s have some fun with this.”

  “Let’s not.”

  But she put her arm around him and leaned her head against his chest as she tilted her face upward to watch the tree clear the tops of its neighbors and drift off to the east.

  He lowered his sign. The tree was rotten and full of bugs. It was a danger to the other trees, as undoubtedly were the other nine scheduled to be cut.

  “I’m sorry about the protest,” he said. “I was wrong.”

  She turned her head sideways so she could look into his eyes. “Kiss and make up?” she asked.

  Her impish grin was infectious. He was pretty sure he loved this woman, loved her like he hadn’t loved anyone in years. She’d been a total stranger a day ago, but now she was a delight wrapped in a conundrum inside a taboo. She pursed her lips, waiting for him to decide.

  The forest was silent. So were the people all around them. So were the mediabots.

  “I’d love to,” he said, and he bent down to meet her kiss.

  Copyright © 2010 Jerry Oltion

  Previous Article SCIENCE FACT

  SCIENCE FACT

  Say What? Ruminations About Language, Communications, and Science Fiction

  by Edward M. Lerner

  Vanguard’s bridge was a lonely and boring place, but as a matter of tradition, watch-officer Joan Miller served her shift without complaint. To come upon more than a mote of dust or fleck of ice here in the depths of interstellar space would make the shift eventful indeed. Only suddenly something...

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  SHORT STORIES PROBABILITY ZERO

  SCIENCE FACT

  Say What? Ruminations About Language, Communications, and Science Fiction

  by Edward M. Lerner

  Vanguard’s bridge was a lonely and boring place, but as a matter of tradition, watch-officer Joan Miller served her shift without complaint. To come upon more than a mote of dust or fleck of ice here in the depths of interstellar space would make the shift eventful indeed.

  Only suddenly something was out here, and it was no mere fleck of ice.

  Eyes wide, Joan studied her sensor array. Gravity waves had drawn her attention. Something was making those waves. Something massive, moving fast, exploiting technology far beyond that of Earth. Something heading straight at her.

  A ship?

  Her heart pounded. At long last, humanity might have found a companion intelligence.

  Before Joan could decide how to share the monumental discovery with her shipmates, an LED flickered on the comm console. With a trembling hand, she accepted the hail. Her holo-tank filled with what brought to Joan’s mind the crossing of a walrus with a lobster. It wore an ornate garment of some sort, replete with sash, braid, buttons, medals, and gold epaulets upon its (four) shoulders.

  “I say,” the creature began, its chitinous mandibles sliding over one another, its brushlike mustache wriggling. “Jolly good show meeting here, eh wot?”

  Threw you right out of the story, didn’t I?

  Why does the walrus/lobster know English, let alone speak English like a refugee from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta? With chitinous mandibles, how does it even make sounds reminiscent of human speech?

  We’ll chalk up that dreadful story snippet to making a point. To wit: in science fiction, language and communication details matter. In this essay we’ll look at how language and communications can enrich an SF story—and at ways to bypass the related complications when communications details are less than central to the tale. (Our topic goes beyond human-alien encounters. As we’ll see, languages can change over time. Stories set in any era besides our own [including, but not limited to time-travel stories] should consider language issues too. Ditto alternate-universe stories, even those set on a parallel “Earth.”)

  Let’s begin by considering how different from English even human languages can get.

  Variability in human languages:

  The view from low Earth orbit

  This article can’t begin to do justice to the range of differences among human languages.1 If you’ve studied any second language (or English is your second language), you already have a window into the ways that humans differ over the nature of languages. Without exhausting the range of variations from English among human languages, consider:

  • How many tenses should there be? Spanish has two past tenses, one for events that definitely occurred once and another for events that repeat or continue.

  • What’s the domain of gender? French and German assign genders to inanimate objects.2

  • How many pronouns are needed? English, since it (mostly) eliminated thee and thou, has nearly eliminated the distinction between familiar and formal pronouns. The exception—most evident, one supposes, in the UK—is the royal we.

  • What building-block sounds comprise a language? English lacks the guttural “ch” of Scot-tish, German, and Hebrew. Western languages lack the clicks of southern African languages like Xhosa and Zulu.

  • How should languages be symbolized? Humans haven’t agreed, with billions of us embracing alphabetic systems and billions more using ideographs and syllabaries.

  With such variability among human languages, how likely is our walrus/lobster friend to speak English?

  Let’s get physical

  Humans evolved to communicate via modulated sound waves. Fair enough: The noises we make can cross moderately long distances through the atmosphere, are reasonably non-directional, and can encode complex messages. But what other methods might have worked?

  It requires no great stretch of imagination to suppose communication by modulating emitted (or reflected) light. Terrestrial life offers early steps in that direction. Pit vipers have infrared sensors apart from their eyes.3 Octopi and squids camouflage themselves and signal emotion through changes in skin color.4

  And why limit ourselves to visible and near-visible light when the electromagnetic spectrum is so broad? Aquatic life as varied as sharks, lungfish, and catfish have rudimentary electric-field sensors. 5, 6 Many migratory birds orient themselves with magnetic sensors.7

  Other terrestrial species communicate by gesture (the dance of bees8) and chemically (ants leaving pheromone trails to guide foraging expeditions9). Human sign l
anguages demonstrate that a gesture-based language can convey information in as nuanced a manner as voice.10 And while chemicals released into wind or water seem an unreliable means of communication, chemical packets physically delivered to a receptor—no different, in principle, than handing someone a written note—could be quite reliable.

  It’s far from certain that language-capable aliens will use sound waves for their communications.

  Picture this

  Humans evolved to communicate with sounds, but (mostly) we perceive the world visually. “I see” is synonymous with “I understand.” How different would languages be if communication and primary perception shared a medium?

  Consider dolphins and their sonar-based navigation. Their sonic pings return a 3-D representation of the nearby ocean. Can dolphins imitate those echoes? If so, they can directly communicate 3-D images to their pod mates.11 And if dolphins can emit sonic images of real scenes, why not also sonic images of imagined items?

  It’s not a big step from imagining sonar-imaging dolphins in Earth’s oceans to radar-imaging aliens on another planet.

  A familiar adage has it that a picture is worth a thousand words. Certainly human languages require many words to describe a visual scene. Our languages would be quite different if we could directly “paint” pictures.

  Where am I?

  Languages encapsulate, among other things, our understanding of the world and our relationship to it. How might languages differ if our sense of the physical world differed?

  Proprioception is the sense by which we relate the position of our body parts to each other and to the external world.12 Humans are bilaterally symmetric, with sensors that favor a particular direction (i.e., define “forward”).13 Reflective of our physiology and proprioception, our speech is rife with references to that which is in front of, next to, and behind us. We place quite different values on what transpires to our faces and behind our backs.

  Creatures with body plans other than ours might perceive—and describe—the world quite differently than humans do. Imagine a trilaterally symmetric alien, with limbs and sensory clusters spaced every 120o around its body. It walks, reaches, and senses equally well in any direction. Front/back and left/right distinctions do not apply. No reference solely to its body suffices to locate an object—or a fellow alien—relative to itself.