· · · · ·
"What was your second assignment like?" you asked him.
He told you that it had been to a brutal and nasty place, with a smelly reptilian culture he had hated. Then you told him that it, also, would be changed as a result of his visit. It would be more congenial, by human standards, because of it. You then told him the full story of King Solomon's Ring—how it had been a divine gift to the Temple Builder, granting him the power to compel obedience from every demon in existence. Neither were all of the demons obnoxious, you assured him; some were useful and some were not. Those of particular malice were forced into bottles, to be stoppered with the ring's unbreakable seal, and cast into the seas to drift forever. The useful ones were put to work building the Temple. And you, Billy Scarle, wear the Ring of Solomon around your mind, and communication is not its only function. You are the Builder—you are enlisting every variety of aid for the construction of the interstellar Temple of Earth. It is the most godlike of all human responsibilities, and there are few of us, very few, capable of furthering this end. You have passed all your tests now, and you are an extremely gifted paralinguist. So gifted, in fact, that we wish to entrust you with the most difficult assignment in our files …
"He bought it, of course," I finished, with a sip of Danzel coffee. "She could sell igloos on Mercury if she wanted."
· · · · ·
The day was bright, the sky was yellow, and Scarle set down his hum-box.
"What is it?" I asked him.
"They won't talk today," he answered. "They just wanted to observe us. They'll be back in about forty hours. They're leaving now."
"Where are they?"
"Behind those bushes." He gestured toward a thicket of reddish, spiky-looking shrubs. "They'll go request permission to talk with us."
"From whom?"
"I don't know."
"How do you know that much? None of the equipment is operating."
"I got a partial impression a minute ago. They're telepathic themselves, and they were talking."
"What do they look like?"
"I don't know. Some sort of big insect, I think. I may be prejudiced by the reports from X1 and X2, though. I feel they're a slave-class creature."
"How come they've taken a week to make up their minds?" I asked him.
He shrugged negatively.
So we walked down to the river and went for a swim, because we had been ordered not to and the captain had no right to give such an order to S-personnel. The shaly ground had a pinholed complexion, the water was warmish, and a grudging breeze fanned us to near-comfort. It was easy to float in the waters of Mack the Knife, as we had nicknamed the Butcher, and there was nothing dangerous lurking below (nothing non-dangerous either—Mack had very little in the way of marine life).
"You scared?" I asked.
"No," he said.
"Why not?"
He did not answer.
"How sure are you of your stability?"
"Certain," he yawned. "Paralings are slightly prescient when it comes to organic actions. I'dknow in advance if that horsefly that's going to land on your nose were going to bite mine."
I heard a buzz.
I slapped my nose with the flat of my hand, but there was no horsefly. Just a horselaugh.
"Reflex betrayed you," he said. "There are no flies on the Butcher."
I rolled quickly, hoping to dunk him good, but he was not there. His laughter came from a spot about forty feet away on the bank, where he sat smoking.
" 'Certain,' " he repeated.
I rubbed my nose.
"Very funny. When you find a tarantula in your bunk tonight, you'll know who …"
"Come off it," he called. "I had a point to prove. You were relaxed—ears near water level—background splashes—I didn't say a word. Admit you thought I was beside you. Admit I'm deceptive, cunning, and nasty."
"You know what's on my mind."
"Yes," he said, "you're worried the same thing will happen as before."
"Twice," I added. "Why the devil those bureaucrats couldn't send more than one paraling I …"
"One had always been sufficient elsewhere. It will be the same way this time."
"This is a real challenge for you, isn't it?" I snapped. "Whoever talked to you must have put it in a very missionary way."
"So what? An X is an X. I can make it."
"You're just a personnel problem for me," I said, "but the last two paralings to X here are still in the bughouse, with EEG readings pretty as horizons."
"There is an old Ortho parable," he told me, "about a guy who asked a computer when he was going to die."
I waited.
"Well, what happened?"
"Nothing," he answered. "End of parable. It didn't know."
"Implication being—?"
"My chances of coming back have been calculated as pretty good. There are a lot fewer variables involved this time, because we have the reports of the first two expeditions. This problem could be programmed—so who are you to judge, off the cuff?"
I did not say anything. I just thought hard.
But he laughed again, because he had been born on Fenster and he knew the whole Dictionary of Galactic Profanity without having to look anything up.
When we reported back to the ship later, I felt he also knew I did not have any spare tarantulas along.
· · · · ·
It was two days before the creatures returned, and it was gray and raining when they appeared in the clearing. An open-sided field tent was quickly erected, and we donned slickers and sloughed off through the dark mud.
Scarle set the hum-box on a toweled-down table, and I studied our welcome committee …
Three of them … Antlike, with the greenish cast of venerable bronze to their steel-hard hides; about the size of German Shepherds—but, I daresay, many times stronger; and eyes blank as Dorn's pink moons, of which they reminded me—sightless seeming, but watching with a disconcerting fixity—and it might be they could see anything. (Do you remember Dorn?)
Scarle mouthed some words, turning on the recorder, and the reply came in a clock-click, th-th-th, bittle-bittle-bittle series of sounds. He pressed the INVESTIGATE button and took the black snap-case from his pocket. The red Insufficiency Light came on just as he finished assembling his hypodermic. He turned to the creatures and recited a sonnet by Shelley. It did not fit in with the day, but they responded with more noise, and he pressed RECORD again. He jabbed the hypo into an ampule containing a mild sedative and gave himself an injection while they continued ticking.
They seemed to understand what he wanted, because they kept it up for a full four minutes this time. He thumbed the INVESTIGATE button once more, and I looked out beyond the tent flaps and through the rain.
The Butcher could easily be a treasure trove. The preliminary Geo reports had indicated untapped mineral resources and possible climatological suitability for raising the staples that underspaced Mother Earth found dwindling within her cities; on her shore-to-shore plains of steel and concrete the dirt Agcities showed as acne rather than beautymarks. But amid the steel pores of Earth, wheat the interloper still meant bread. The Butcher might become a Baker.
The green light glowed—Tentative Inflectional Patterning Established. Patterns, not meanings. There ain't no box can take click-click, th-th, bittle-bittle in one end, cold, and give you "Good morning, it's raining like hell, isn't it?" out of the other. A completely unfamiliar body of significant sounds has no meaning to a stranger, man or machine, until a referent or two are picked up. Grammar and vocabulary take too long to obtain in times like these, and there were no telepaths good enough for total X then. But all languages have patterns of inflection. The hum-box separated and established these patterns. It did not know whether they were interrogative, argumentative, repetitive, or what have you, but it sifted them.
The rest was up to Scarle and the hum.
The speakers were placed in their magic circle about the bugs; then
another around us. Scarle, the peaceful-looking conductor, eyes at half mast and a drunken smile below, began to concert.
The two-channel inflectional humming began as he poked the unit to life. Marginal audibility was present on our side of things, and the INVESTIGATEhad guessed at the ants' auditory threshold on the basis of their recorded vocal range.
Transmission. Scarle spoke under his breath, staring at nothing. Each of the ninety-seven questions of the Omni, with its optional subsections, lurked, script-like, in his mind. The thing, as you know it, Lisa, is carefully planned. I here detail you that Known, because I have things to say about it which will bear directly upon my subject.
The scoffers first called it a sneaky way to dignify a seance, but all's quiet on that front these days. The dope, plus the occupation of the consciousness with the format of the Omni, is sufficient to conjure our ghosts—the thought-ghosts, which jump the gap between the consciousness of the Queried to that buried point in the mind of the Questioner from whence they hitch a ride upward on waves of post-query curiosity, pouring into the wordless sentences of the half-heard hum. With a good paraling like Scarle, the ghosts visit us too, if we keep our minds quiet. His steno was a ling-journeyman who had never made it in transmission.
WORD BODY ONE (FULL RANGE INFLECT CYCLES): Good morning/afternoon/evening. We greet you in the name of Earth and bid you good hunting/fishing/harvests/fertile cattle/victories. We are warm-blooded, omnivorous, patriarchal, highly intelligent creatures. We need many things. We have many things to offer others, whether the others are like or different. What are you? What do you/have you/need you?
And question for question, each completes an Omni on the other. Theoretically, that places each in an equal position of knowledge and appraises bargaining power on an above-the-board basis. Actually, since we designed it, along with the stock answers, and have refined the Staff Evaluation procedure from an art down to a science, we always come out on top. Equity is a pretty concept, but depth psychology, followed by military analysis and augmented by power on any level—from religious through economic—gives us our small advantages without disturbing the senates.
Like a bad connection on hyperphone came the ambisexual answers:
Good morning. We are servants. We serve. Our owners/rulers lay eggs. We are omnivorous. We are intelligent. We do not need anything. Our owners/rulers give us all. What do you want?
And on it rolled. To all our key questions: We do not do that/know that/need that. Our owners/rulers do that/know that/do not need that.
They told us all about themselves. A dedicated entomologist would have been in a Moslem paradise of the mind over the interview, as was our dedicated entomologist, Dave Bolton.
"Please," said he, "ask them if they see this polaroid flash—"
"Shh!" said I, who supervised. "Later."
Was I detecting a beartrap in the flowerbed of their cooperation?—We want to be helpful, but darn it! sir, we just do not know the answer to that one. Etc.
Do not suggest, I wrote on a slip of paper, that we speak with their masters. Wait and see if they offer.
I placed the note before Scarle, hoping that the act of reading it would keep him from transmitting the thought. I waited to see.
They offered.
Scarle turned to me.
"Tell them we must confer," I answered. "Ask where the masters are, what they are like, why they did not come themselves—and ask if they suggested we send you."
"Me?"
"You."
He asked, and they told us they would have to confer.
Yes, they finally acknowledged, as a matter of fact their rulers (who lived in eternal night) had mentioned that we could send them our only paraling if anything needed clarification. Did we care to?
"Tell them yes," I said, "but not today. We need to confer some more."
· · · · ·
That afternoon we Staff Evaluated a very sketchy Omni.
We decided, after an intrepid imaginative foray, that the rulers were similar to ant queens and did not like to leave the nest. Our mission was to get an Omni on the Butcher, evaluate it, and write a recommendation, so we had to go see them if they would not come to us. We wanted to set up safeguards, though, so Scarle spent the night learning the depressive neuroses Hale said he could retreat into to protect his sanity if the going got rough.
· · · · ·
"Quite against the rules, we also armed ourselves to the teeth," I said to Hale, "and then armed our teeth with the little glass capsules I almost got to taste. You didn't know about those."
"I had guessed, of course," he snorted. "There was nothing wrong with my neuroses, though. I gave him the best ones I had in stock."
"I'm sure he appreciated that," I answered, pouring him a drink. "Do you believe the legend of King Solomon's ring?"
"Well, archetypically—"
"Archetypes, hell! Do you believe the story?"
"Yes, it has many levels of non-conscious meaning."
"Well, step over to my level for a minute and answer the question. Forget the psych-structure stuff. Can one intelligence control another by non-physical means?"
"Charisma," he stated, "is a peculiar phenomenon. Many factors are generally operative."
"Have another drink and swallow your charisma along with it. I'm talking about parapsych stuff. If a paraling can send and receive thoughts and feelings, why not more than that?"
"Commands?" he asked. "Parahypnotics? Thatcan be accomplished, under special circumstances."
"I was thinking more along the lines of a lightning bolt fusing sand in its own image."
I started to pour again.
"No," he declined it, "psychologists just get drunk, but psychiatrists get drunk and break things. What are you driving at with all this?"
"The Ring works both ways."
· · · · ·
It does, Lisa. More than just translation. That first dim day in the caves Scarle ended a thirty-second exchange, and the steno threw down his transcriber.
"I cannot record," he said.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"The hum-box isn't working right. I'm not getting voices, or even concepts."
"What are you getting?"
"A very beautiful humming sound—it's like a piece of music—an emotional synopsis of something. Don't ask me what."
I didn't. I asked Scarle. Angry at having been lulled into a pleasant lethargy myself, I shook off the spell and called out.
"What's going on?"
"Shh!"
I groped for his shoulder in the murk, but his whisper had no direction, and he was nowhere near the machine.
"Lights!" I called. But before I called it, I thought it.
There was a sound like someone scrubbing concrete with a hard-bristled brush, and our beams exploded in all directions.
We humans were alone, and Scarle. He leaned against the wall of the tunnel about ten feet in advance of our party, and he was smiling. I repeated my question.
"Nothing," he answered. "Nothing's going on now. I wish you hadn't turned on the lights. You broke the agreement."
"I was not anxious to become anything's breakfast," I told him. "What were you doing?"
"I was telling her how I looted the Moonstone in mid-flight."
"You pulled that one."
"I did."
"Why were you telling them about it?"
"Because I was asked. It was in my memory, and a fuller explanation of the principle of illicit appropriation was desired."
I remember that I whistled then—in order to keep myself from doing anything else.
"That is not exactly Omni material," I said softly.
"No, but I was asked …"
"Why?"
"She was curious as to the pleasure linked with the thoughts."
"She?"
"Yes, a female. You were right about queens."
"An ant?"
"I guess so."
"Why won't she let us see her?"<
br />
"I believe the light bothers her eyes."
"The whole thing smells. I want a full report on this X after we get back to the ship, but let's get back fast. I don't like it here."
He smiled and shrugged, and I checked the ampule, but he had not taken an overdose.
· · · · ·
Later, I asked him again.
"They want to know how to loot a spaceship?"
"No." He leaned back in a recliner, blowing smoke rings. "She only wondered about the pleasure associations."
"So what did you tell her?"
"Nothing. I just let her look at my mind."
"Then what did she say?"
"Nothing, she seemed satisfied."
"Why were the pleasure associations there?"
He smiled slightly.
"I enjoy stealing. Especially when I can get away with it."
"Unfortunately," I replied, "that tells me more about you than it does about the ants."
"You asked me a question. I answered it."
"What came next?"
"That's all. You turned on the lights."
"That's not much."
"I didn't turn on the lights."
"Okay," I growled. "How come Brown couldn't record?"
"We were using a form of mental shorthand."
"Where did you learn it?"
"I just sort of fell into it today. They're natural paralings."
"That, in itself, is a valuable commodity. We'll have to investigate it, along with the Omni stuff."
"I agree. Next time don't turn on the lights, though."
"All right, mister. But no more professional advice on space piracy."
"No more," he promised.
· · · · ·
So we went back into the underground cities of the Butcher, guided by belt sonar and five-watt flicker buttons, to mine the minds of the ants.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One Page 449
