by Vernor Vinge
Vinh tried to read everything the translators produced. At first it was typical of raw field linguistics, where each sentence consisted of dozens of pointers to alternative meanings, alternative parsings. After a few Msecs, the translations were almost readable. There were living beings down there on Arachna, and these were their words.
Some of the Focused linguists never got beyond the annotated-style translations. They were caught in the lower levels of meaning and fought any attempt to capture the spirit of the aliens. Maybe that was enough. For one thing, they learned that the Spiders had no knowledge of any previous civilization:
“We’re seeing no mention of a golden age of technology.”
Nau looked at Reynolt skeptically. “That’s suspicious in itself. Even on Old Earth, there were at least myths of a lost past.” And if ever there were an origin world, it was Old Earth.
Reynolt shrugged. “I’m telling you that any mention of past technical civilizations is below the plausible background level. For instance, as far as we can tell, archeology is considered an insignificant academic pursuit”—not the world-creating frenzy of the typical fallen colony.
“Well, Plague take it,” said Ritser Brughel. “If there’s nothing for these guys to dig up, our payoff is just about crap.”
Pity you didn’t think of that before you came, thought Ezr.
Nau looked sour and surprised, but he disagreed with Brughel:
“We’ve still got Dr. Li’s results.” His glance flickered across the Qeng Ho at the foot of the table, and Ezr was sure that something else passed through the Emergent’s mind: We’ve still got a Qeng Ho fleet library, and Peddlers to explore it for us.
Trixia let Ezr touch her now, sometimes to comb her hair, sometimes just to pat her shoulder. Maybe he had spent so much time in her workroom that she thought of him as a piece of furniture, as safe as any other voice-activated machine. Trixia normally worked with a head-up display now; sometimes that gave the comforting illusion that she was actually looking at him. She would even answer his questions, as long as they stayed within the scope of her Focus and did not interrupt her conversations with her equipment and the other translators.
Much of the time, Trixia sat in the semidarkness, listening and speaking her translations at the same time. Several of the translators worked in that mode, scarcely more than automatons. Trixia was different, Vinh liked to think: like the others, she analyzed and reanalyzed, but not to insert a dozen extra interpretations beneath every syntactic structure. Trixia’s translations seemed to reach for the meaning as it was in the minds of the speakers, in minds for which the Spider world was a normal, familiar place. Trixia Bonsol’s translations were…art.
Art was not what Anne Reynolt was looking for. At first she had only little things to complain about. The translators chose an alternative orthography for their output; they represented the x and q glyphs with digraphs. It made their translations look very quaint. Fortunately, Trixia wasn’t the first to use the bizarre scheme. Unfortunately, she originated far too much of the questionable novelty.
One terrible day, Reynolt threatened to bar Ezr from Trixia’s workroom—that is, from Trixia’s life. “Whatever you’re doing, Vinh, it’s messing her up. She’s giving me figurative translations. Look at these names: ‘Sherkaner Underhill,’ ‘Jaybert Landers.’ She’s throwing away complications that all the translators agree on. In other places she’s making up nonsense syllables.”
“She’s doing just what she should be doing, Reynolt. You’ve been working with automatons too long.” One thing about Reynolt: Though she was crass even by Emergent standards, she never seemed vindictive. She could even be argued with. But if she barred him from seeing Trixia…
Reynolt stared at him for a moment. “You’re no linguist.”
“I’m Qeng Ho. To make our way, we’ve had to understand the heart of thousands of human cultures, and a couple of nonhuman ones. You people have mucked around this small end of Human Space, with languages based on our broadcasts. There are languages that are enormously different.”
“Yes. That’s why her grotesque simplifications are not acceptable.”
“No! You need people who truly understand the other side’s minds, who can show the rest of us what is important about the aliens’ differences. So Trixia’s Spider names look silly. But this ‘Accord’ group is a young culture. Their names are still mostly meaningful in their daily language.”
“Not all of them, and not the given names. In fact, real Spider talk merges given names and surnames, that inter-phonation trick.”
“I’m telling you; what Trixia is doing is fine. I’ll bet the given names are from older and related languages. Notice how they almost make sense, some of them.”
“Yes, and that’s the worst of all. Some of this looks like bits of Ladille or Aminese. These Ladille units—‘hours,’ ‘inches,’ ‘minutes’—they just make for awkward reading.”
Ezr had his own problems with the crazy Ladille units, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Reynolt. “I’m sure Trixia sees things that relate to her central translation the way Aminese and Ladille relate to the Nese you and I speak.”
Reynolt was silent for a long moment, vacantly staring. Sometimes that meant that the discussion was over, and she had just not bothered to dismiss him. Other times it meant that she was trying very hard to understand. “So you’re saying that she’s achieving a higher level of translation, giving us insight by trading on our own self-awareness.”
It was a typical Reynolt analysis, awkward and precise. “Yes! That’s it. You still want the translations with all the pointers and exceptions and caveats, since our understanding is still evolving. But the heart of good trading is having a gut feel for the other side’s needs and expectations.”
Reynolt had bought the explanation. In any case, Nau liked the simplifications, even the Ladille quaintness. As time passed, the other translators adopted more and more of Trixia’s conventions. Ezr doubted if any of the unFocused Emergents were really competent to judge the translations. And despite his own confident talk, Ezr wondered more and more: Trixia’s meta-trans of the Spiders was too much like the Dawn Age history he had pushed at her just before the ambush. That might seem alien to Nau and Brughel and Reynolt, but it was Ezr’s specialty and he saw too many suspicious coincidences.
Trixia consistently ignored the physical nature of the Spiders. Maybe this was just as well, considering the loathing that some humans felt for spiders. But the creatures were radically nonhuman in appearance, more alien in form and life cycle than any intelligence yet encountered by Humankind. Some of their limbs had the function of human jaws, and they had nothing exactly like hands and fingers, instead using their large number of legs to manipulate objects. These differences were all but invisible in Trixia’s translations. There was an occasional reference to “a pointed hand” (perhaps the stiletto shape that a foreleg could fold into) or to midhands and forehands—but that was all. In school, Ezr had seen translations that were this soft, but those had been done by experts with decades of face-to-face experience with the Customer culture.
Children’s radio programming—at least that’s what Trixia thought it was—had been invented on the Spider world. She translated the show’s title as “The Children’s Hour of Science,” and currently it was their best source of insight about the Spiders. The radio show was an ideal combination of science language—which the humans had made good progress on—and the colloquial language of everyday culture. No one knew if it was really aimed at schooling children or simply entertaining them. Conceivably, it was remedial education for military conscripts. Yet Trixia’s title caught on, and that colored everything that followed with innocence and cuteness. Trixia’s Arachna seemed like something from a Dawn Age fairy tale. Sometimes when Ezr had spent a long day with her, when she had not spoken a word to him, when her Focus was so narrow that it denied all humanity…sometimes he wondered if these translations might be the Trixia of old, trapped in the mos
t effective slavery of all time, and still reaching out for hope. The Spider world was the only place her Focus allowed her to gaze upon. Maybe she was distorting what she heard, creating a dream of happiness in the only way that was left to her.
NINETEEN
It was in the midphase of the sun, and Princeton had recovered much of its beauty. In the cooler times ahead, there would be much more construction, the open theaters, the Palace of the Waning Years, the University’s arboreta. But by 60//19, the street plan of generations past was fully in place, the central business section was complete, and the University held classes all the year round.
In other ways, the year 60//19 was different from 59//19, and very different from the tenth year of all generations before that. The world had entered the Age of Science. An airfield covered the river lowlands that had been farm paddies in past eras. Radio masts grew from the city’s highest hills; at night, their far-red marker lights could be seen for miles.
By 60//19 most of the Accord’s cities were similarly changed, as were the great cities of Tiefstadt and the Kindred, and to a lesser degree the cities of poorer nations. But even by the standards of the new age, Princeton was a very special place. There were things happening here that didn’t show on the visible landscape, yet were the seeds of greater revolution.
Hrunkner Unnerby flew in to Princeton one rainy spring morning. An airport taxi drove him from the riverfront up through the center of town. Unnerby had grown up in Princeton and his old construction company had been here. He arrived before most shops’ opening time; street cleaners scuttled this way and that around his taxi. A cool drizzle left the shops and the trees with glints of a thousand colors. Hrunkner liked the old downtown, where many of the stone foundations had survived more than three or four generations. Even the new concrete and the brick upper stories followed designs from before the time of any living person.
Out of the downtown, they climbed through new housing. This was a former Royal property that the government had sold to finance the Great War—the conflict the new generation was already calling simply the War with the Tiefers. Some parts of the new district were instant slums; others—the higher viewpoints—were elegant estates. The taxi trundled back and forth along the switchbacks, rising slowly toward the highest spot in the new tract. The top was obscured by dripping ferns, but here and there he glimpsed outbuildings. Gates opened silently and without apparent attendants. Hunh. There was a bloody palace up ahead.
Sherkaner Underhill stood by the parking circle at the end, looking quite out of place beside the grand entrance. The rain was just a comfortable mist, but Underhill popped open an umbrella as he walked out to greet Unnerby.
“Welcome, Sergeant! Welcome! All the years I’ve been after you to visit my little hillhouse, and finally you’re here.”
Hrunkner shrugged.
“I have so much to show you…starting with two small but important items.” He tipped back the umbrella. After a moment, two tiny heads peeked up from the fur on his back. The two were babies, holding tight to their father. They could be no older than normal children in the early Bright, just old enough to be cute. “The little girl is Rhapsa and the boy is Hrunkner.”
Unnerby stepped forward, trying to seem casual. They probably named the child Hrunkner out of friendship. God in deepest earth. “Very pleased to meet you.” In the best of times, Unnerby had no way with children—training new hires was the closest he’d ever come to raising them. Hopefully, that would excuse his unease.
The babies seemed to sense his distaste, and retreated shyly from sight.
“Never mind,” said Sherkaner, in that oblivious way of his. “They’ll come out and play once we’re indoors.”
Sherkaner led him inside, talking all the way about how much he had to show him, how good it was that Hrunkner was finally visiting. The years had changed Underhill, physically at least. Gone was the painful leanness; he had been through several molts. The fur on his back was deep and paternal, strange to see on anyone in this phase of the sun. The tremor in his head and forebody was a little worse than Unnerby remembered.
They walked through a foyer big enough for a hotel, and down a wide spiral of steps that looked out upon wing after wing of Sherkaner’s “little hillhouse.” There were plenty of other people here, servants perhaps, though they didn’t wear the livery that the super-rich usually demanded. In fact, the place had the utilitarian feel of corporate or government property. Unnerby interrupted the other’s nonstop chatter with, “This is all a front, isn’t it, Underhill? The King never sold this hill at all, just transferred it.” To the Intelligence Service.
“No, really. I do own the ground; I bought it myself. But, um, I do a lot of consulting, and Victory—I mean Accord Intelligence—decided that security was best served by setting up the labs right here. I have some things to show you.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s the point of my visit, Sherk. I don’t think you’re working on the right things. You’ve pushed the Crown into going all out for—I assume we can talk freely here?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
Ordinarily, Unnerby wouldn’t have accepted such a casual assertion, but he was beginning to realize how thoroughly secure the building was. There was plenty of Sherkaner design, the logarithmic spiral of the main rooms for instance, but there was also Victory’s touch, the—guards, he now realized—lurking everywhere, the crisply clean nature of the carpets and walls. This place was probably as safe as Unnerby’s labs inside Lands Command. “Okay. You’ve pushed the Crown into going all out for atomic power. I’m managing more men and equipment than a billionaire, including several people almost as smart as you are.” In fact, though Hrunkner Unnerby was still a sergeant, his job was about as far from that rank as one could get. His life these days was beyond his wildest contractor’s dream.
“Good, good. Victory has a lot of faith in you, you know.” He led his guest into a large and peculiar room. There were bookcases and a desk, all overflowing with reports, randomly piled books, and notepaper. But the bookcases were fastened to a cobblie jungle gym, and children’s books were mixed with the arcana. His two babies hopped from his back and scuttled up the gym. Now they peered down upon them from the ceiling. Sherkaner pushed books and magazines off a lower perch and waved for Unnerby to seat himself. Thank God he didn’t try to change the subject.
“Yeah, but you haven’t seen my reports.”
“Yes, I have. Victory sends them to me, though I haven’t had time to read them.”
“Well, maybe you should!” Deep Secret reports are sent to him and he doesn’t have time to read them—and he’s the cobber who started it all. “Look, Sherkaner, I’m telling you it’s not working out. In principle, atomic power can do everything we need. In practice—well, we’ve made some really deadly poisons. There are things like radium but a lot easier to produce in bulk. We’ve also got one isotope of uranium that’s very hard to isolate, but I think if we do, we can make a hell of a bomb: we can give you the energy to keep a city warm through the Dark, but all in less than a second!”
“Excellent! That’s a start.”
“That excellent start may be as far as it gets. I’ve had three labs taken over by the bomb cobbers. Trouble is, this is peacetime; this technology is going to leak out, first to mining interests, then to foreign states. Can you imagine what will happen once the Kindred and the Old Tiefers and God knows who else starts making these things?”
That seemed to penetrate Underhill’s durable armor of inattention. “…Yes, that will be very bad. I haven’t read your reports, but Victory is up here often. Technology gives us wonders and terrible dangers. We can’t have one without the other. But I’m convinced we won’t survive unless we play with these things. You’re seeing just one part of it all. Look, I know Victory can get you more money. Accord Intelligence has a good credit rating. They can go beyond the tithe for a decade without having to show a profit. We’ll get you more labs, whatever you want—”
“
Sherkaner, have you heard of ‘forcing the learning curve’?”
“Well, uh—” Clearly he had.
“Right now, if I had all the wealth in the world, I could give you a city heating unit, maybe. It would suffer catastrophic failure every few years, and even when it was working ‘properly,’ its transfer fluid—superheated steam, say—would be so radioactive that your city’s residents would all be dead before the Dark was even ten years old. Beyond a certain point, throwing more money and technicians at a problem just doesn’t help.”
Sherkaner didn’t answer immediately. Unnerby had the feeling that his attention was roaming around the top of the jungle gym, watching his two babies. This room was a truly bizarre combination of wealth, the old Underhill intellectual chaos and the new Underhill paternity. Where the floor wasn’t piled with books and knickknacks, he could see plush carpet. The wall covering was one of those superexpensive delusional patterns. The windows were quartz-paned, extending all the way to the high ceiling. They were cranked open now. The smell of ferns in the cool morning floated in past wrought-iron trellises. There were electric lamps by Underhill’s desks and by the legholds of the bookcases, but they were all turned off now.
The only light was the green and near-red that filtered through the ferns. That was more than enough to read the titles on the nearest books. There were psychology, math, electronics, an occasional astronomy text—and lots of children’s storybooks. The books were stacked in low piles, filling most of the space between toys and equipment. And it wasn’t always clear which were Underhill’s toys and which were the children’s. Some of the stuff looked like travel souvenirs, perhaps from Victory’s military postings: a Tiefer leg polisher, dried flowers that might have been an Islander garland. And over in the corner…it looked like a Mark 7 artillery rocket, for God’s sake. The warhead hatch had been removed, and there was a dollhouse installed in place of the customary high explosives.
