What it took you a long time to figure out was something that Scarle was barely aware of himself. He just thought he had mastered galactic sign language and that the hybrid patois of Fenster, his home world, was sufficient to fill in the gaps. Bear in mind, Lisa, that while he was clever, he was only nominally educated in a Slumschule and was quite naïve in many matters. Still, it took the Circle of Solomon to tip off the Guard as to what they were dealing with.
After his apprehension on Martin VIII, it was his ratty luck to be shipped Earthward in the custody of an old Guardsman ready for retirement. As you know, the cop decided along the way that the arrest had been out of jurisdiction, and he also decided he did not want a black mark on his record at that stage in the game. So he changed a couple log entries and elected himself judge, jury, and executioner—as you may not know. He never said a word while he made the preparations, but of course Scarle knew.
I suppose it would be interesting to tell you the details of the cop's not being able to pull the trigger and Scarle's smashing him to pieces with his arm collars, but I'd rather not be that interesting. I've heard the story too many times.
When you picked him up in that bar on Kimberly, he was beginning to suspect what he was, but he was too busy vacationing to do much experimenting. He was lying low and feeling high, and shopping around for a new rig, that night you sat down across from his whisky-and-flent and offered to tell his fortune.
Naturally he said yes, because you are beautiful.
"The thirteenth card of the Major Arcana," you told him, "is the Bony Reaper. He signifies Death, often only on metaphysical levels, but a death, nevertheless. Your life is going to change."
And he smiled and agreed and asked if you wanted to help change it, and you smiled and agreed, sort of. It took about a week of his being puzzled (because he could not anticipate you the way he could other people), before you knew he was ready for The Bet. (Did you have that Tarot up your sleeve? He wondered that on several occasions, so I thought I would ask.) It was well managed, I gather, and of course the prediction turned out to be quite true.
For the wagered price of one cruiser, he agreed to be your quarry. You managed to convince him that you were rich (which was also true, now I think of it) and looking for kicks (which might have held an incidental truth, at that). He could not back down, not that he wanted to, because he had boasted too much beforehand. And he did have a high survival potential also, as it was only by accident that I managed to kill him when I finally had to.
Three days for him to hide himself in the jungles of Kimberly, and a week in which he had to stay hidden, despite your trackers, your mechanical spiders, and your electronic B.O. detectors, and he did it. I remember the night you told me about it. It was on Lilith, with a sky full of moons and a fine, tangy sea breeze assaulting the smells of roast Süssevogel and Lilith-mosel (that pagan Liebfraumilch!)—do you recall the name of the place? I seem to forget it now, but I remember the balcony quite vividly, and you were wearing something dark blue … Oh, well.
It took three days to find his trail, you said, and six hours to close in on him. Then he escaped when you approached his campsite. This happened a couple times, until you had flushed him onto the higher ground near the Gila Range. Remember now? The spiders stopped coming back, and you started finding them smashed to bits, until you were out of spiders. But then it became apparent that he was mounted, because he started moving very fast and the broken spiders showed hoof-marks. After the fifth day the trackers gave up, without admitting it, and the "dogs" grew interested in other matters.
At the end of the week he walked into your camp, all smiles, and aware of his power. He had won The Bet by destroying the mechanical hunters, circling around behind your party, and "eavesdropping" on your hunting beasts. Then he managed to "talk" them out of following him. He followed along behind you until the seven days were up, and then he walked in on you, clean-shaven, and thinking he had won. The poor sucker! He had been initiated into the most exclusive club in the galaxy and therewith reduced his life expectancy by ninety or a hundred years. Excuse me, dear, I'm not being bitter, but I liked the guy. If the Guard had gotten him to Earth alive, he would have been recruited anyhow.
King Solomon had a ring, you told him—while you were on that month's frolic about Earth and the Inworlds—a ring that enabled him to understand all the tongues of life. And you, Billy Scarle, you also have a ring. You wear it around your mind like an introverted chastity belt, and whenever anything is going to speak, you know what it is going to say before it says it, and whenever you want to say something, and want to strongly enough, others know what you are going to say before you say it. You are a fractional telepath and a potential paralinguist. You would probably flunk first semester French, which is an easy Orthotongue, but with the proper training you could be a two-way on-the-spot interpreter for any two languages without knowing either.
And he wanted to know if there was money in it! Do you remember him now? He was about five-ten, with that premature frost on his hair that comes of pushing poorly shielded cruisers too far; nervous fingers, light eyes, a preference for nondescript clothing; and when he talked, all his sentences seemed like one long word. At first glance, I guess he just did not give the impression of being much of a criminal. Rather, perhaps (and quite correctly), he seemed a person who would have had a hard time enjoying Mardi Gras time on Centuvo. Hale thinks this was the key to his talent, cast long ago on the streets of Fenster.
You offered him full Circleship, if he could pass the training, emphasizing its retroactive civil immunity as much as its high pay, so what else could he do? He realized you were his superior in nearly everything. He wanted to even things up, and his pride was always an amazing thing to behold—right up until the end it made him equal to almost any task. I remember how he sweated over Chomsky's book (which did not mean much in the long run, because the Thing Applied was all sedation and sound cycles), but it furnished him with broad concepts, and things like concepts help smooth down rough edges. And as for the law—well, he did want an out.
He joined, and you kept in touch: beautiful, witty, sophisticated, what shall I say?—polemics?—until he drew his first assignment and went incommunicado. What then, Lisa?
"I'll tell you, Doc," I said to Hale, " I was thinking of his first assignment. It was to that world called Malmson. You weren't along that trip, which is too bad. He felt we wrecked the whole society there, and it sort of got to him. I think he felt more responsible for it than one man has a right to feel."
"For what? What happened?"
"Oh, nothing out-and-out crushing. We didn't hook the population with narcotics or send their females to brothels, as we've often been accused of doing. We couldn't have done much physical exploitation if we'd wanted to—they were all about three feet tall and looked sort of like kiwis with arms. But Scarle really didn't know what he was doing yet. He thought it was all setting up the hum-box, taking a shot, and filling out the Omniform. Of course, it doesn't stop with that."
"And?"
"He found out, after the Omni was Staff Evaluated and Malmson's borox deposits were deemed significant. A report was submitted, and we left. A year later he went back for a visit—they should never let a paraling revisit one of his X-worlds … The industry we were imposing had already begun disrupting the culture's value systems—and because Scarle was a paraling, he translated feelings as well as words when he talked with the creatures that second time. The deposed grow bitter, the young lose their roots—you know the story. Scarle had already had a couple other X's by then, but he came away unsure after that visit. He claimed we had no right to make aliens over into our image. He said he wanted to quit."
"What did the Circle say?"
"Nothing, officially. But he was subsequently visited by the woman who had recruited him, and she persuaded him to accept another assignment."
"This last one?"
"Right. Mack 997-IV, the world they call the Butcher. His recruiter expl
ained to him that the first assignments were also in the nature of training, and she proceeded to reveal the rest of the significance of the Ring."
"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'd know 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 pla
ced 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 INVESTIGATE had 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?
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 3 Page 40
