The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  Charlie glanced at the empty brandy bottle.

  “Would you people like another drink? I'll get a new bottle.” However he made no move to fetch one.

  Heinz rose to his feet.

  “We must get along to the reception centre before it's dark. You've been kind, Mr Faith. But please don't ask us how many Indians we expect.” The priest shook his head in a fury of frustration. “That village where the Frenchman was, was the last straw! These Indians simply cannot comprehend. I think they will just sit still and drown! We tried getting through to them with the story of the Flood. Oh, they sat and heard! Then they merely laughed.”

  Pomar grasped the older man's arm sympathetically.

  “They will digest it their own way. Surely then they will come out of savagery to safety in their own good time, when the flood has risen some more. And remember, Father, not all the tribes were so awkward as that one.”

  “Which is why I didn't trust the Frenchman! I think he had been tampering with them — polluting them. Why else did they tolerate him, and mock us?”

  “Sounds like a rough trip,” Charlie sympathized, though he wasn't really very interested.

  “Oh, it's so often this way,” grumbled Heinz, pursuing the memory of failure, like a dog hunting a lost bone. “You think you're making progress. Then you're swept back to square one. You build somebody up. Then he betrays your trust. You discipline with just reward — and create only a mockery of morals. These Xemahoa Indians weren't worse than usual. They didn't use any violence against us. They were just maddeningly different. There was no real communication. This Frenchman could have helped us. But he got excited and refused. After a while he even refused to let his interpreter translate for us. When we tried to reason with him to make him see the need to move these people to the reception centre, he just stared through us, switched on his tape recorder and played some rigmarole in French. Some poetry, he said. But it was nonsense. I couldn't make head or tail of it. Maybe it was his own obsessive stupidity that appealed to these savages!”

  “At least we sowed the seed, Father. God will see to its germinating. Believe me, all the Indians will be trekking this way soon, needing our help.”

  “The dam will see to that,” laughed Charlie. “Never mind about God. Give them another couple of weeks, they'll see there's no choice. Even your oddball Indians, when they get wet enough.”

  • • •

  In the darkness, studded by sharp stars and sailed in by scudding whale-like clouds, Charlie and Jorge walked down to the cluster of shacks and hovels that straggled away from the tin-roofed homes of Jorge's staff. Each man carried a torch, flashing it ahead down the wet dirt track. Charlie also had a revolver with him.

  Paraffin lamps gleamed from tbe cafe and some of the tin homes. A few open fires burned outside the shacks and hovels.

  “They ougbta be hooked up to our electric supply. I mean our staff oughta be,” muttered Charlie, more sensitive to the darkness since the Captain's visit.

  “There's a hierarchy of light, Charlie. We see by the electric, those under us by paraffin, those under them by wood and starlight.”

  They headed for the cafe, a rambling structure with screen windows, a dozen tables inside, a kitchen out back and a staircase leading up to a bedroom perched on top of the main structure like a shoebox on top of a suitcase.

  A couple of Jorge's men sat silent over beers. The mulatta woman sat at another table looking dazed, with her Indian friend. Charlie wrinkled his nose as he smelt traces of Lanca Perfume on the hot wet air — the faint reek of scented ether. Jorge and he sat at a vacant table. The slim quiet Indian boy with the squint eye brought them cool beers from the paraffin icebox in back. They smoked.

  After a while, Jorge nodded to the two women, who stood up unsteadily, and walked over to their table. Jorge's workmen looked on impassively. Out in the jungle, something started to scream. Some animal or bird.

  The mulatta fumbled in her bag for the small gilt perfume spray with the compressed ether in it. She offered it doubtfully to Charlie. Charlie shook his head. Jorge also refused, swallowed his beer. The woman took a crumpled handkerchief out of her bag and sprayed some ether on it, pressed it tight to her nose and inhaled deeply.

  “Silly bitch will pass out,” snapped Jorge, leaning forward and jerking the handkerchief away from her glazed happy features. “She's high enough already.”

  Her Indian friend snatched the handkerchief out of Jorge's hand before the Lanca could evaporate and pressed it to her own nose.

  “Charlie, the last time you went with the mulatta—”

  “Okay, Jorge.”

  Jorge took hold of the mulatta's hand and raised her very delicately and gentleman-like, talking to her with surprising tenderness in Portuguese, at which she giggled dazedly. Then Jorge departed with her, leaving Charlie with the dazed Indian woman who only spoke a bastard form of Portuguese worse than his own.

  He smoked, and watched her across the table, while beads of moisture cut trails down the side of the misted beer bottle.

  Then she was a doe-eyed dark-skinned girl with long black pigtails and a snub nose who was staring up at him fearfully as he slid his bayonet past that boy waiter's flashing knife, into his guts, where he gave it a sharp twist to the right and the left. . . .

  THREE

  TOM ZWINGLER WORE a ruby tie-clip and a pair of shiny red crystal cufflinks. Everything else about him was in blacks and whites, including the precision of his remarks. Yet this triangle of red points shifted as he cocked his head and nodded and gestured, in a dandy geometry of camouflage and control. The psychologist Richard Jannis watched the performance with ill-concealed suspicion. It was really an exercise in the manipulation of people's attention — a sort of phoney traffic lights pattern — that let Tom Zwingler through people's guard while they were watching the dance of rubies.

  Jannis himself was in his shirt sleeves. The shirt was an optical design in green and scarlet stripes that rapidly became offensive to the eyes, as though he was trying to hide himself behind this visual trick.

  Relations were strained. Jannis resented the American's scrutiny. Dorothy Summers was still sniping at Sole. Sam Bax was trying to be father figure and adept technocrat at the same time.

  The high point of Zwingler's visit was supposed to be a viewing of the children in their basement ‘worlds’. Jannis had already protested to Sam Bax on that score, and a compromise was reached. The American wouldn't actually enter any of the environments — he'd just look into them through the one-way windows.

  The other two staff members at this meeting were the Bionics specialist, Ernest Friedmann, a fussy little man whose gently bulging eyes and rapid, anxious way of talking spoke of an overactive thyroid gland; and Lionel Rosson who ran the computer, baby-faced with long blond hair and blue eyes — his lank frame made even more loose and unofficial-seeming by the pair of old jeans and the baggy grey sweater he wore.

  Some explanations were in order before the visit downstairs and Zwingler played his cards coolly during these, appearing mainly interested in the work of the Unit, while really, Sole sensed, more interested in themselves, the staff. Sole had an uneasy sense of something else hovering in the background while they discussed the security angle, and the new drug they'd developed at Haddon; but couldn't pin it down.

  “Organization-wise,” the American was saying to Sam Bax, “the experimental part of Haddon is sealed off tight, but the kids out in the front wards are like in any normal hospital — you find this works out okay?”

  “It has to be run this way, Tom. You see, correcting the speech defects out front, and getting the kids downstairs to speak ‘defective’ languages are like the left and right legs of the same body. Therapy and experiment back each other up, via the computer. We owe a lot to Lionel for the programming — quite a triumph for our computer boy, this!”

  Rosson tossed his mane gracefully in acknowledgment. He alone of the staff never seemed bothered or bitchy. His presence ha
d an aura of innocent kindliness about it.

  “So you're busy making language right in the public sector, and wrong in the private? What's bad for one set of kids helps you work out what'll be okay for the other set?”

  “That's about it — though words like ‘bad’ create the wrong impression, Tom. I'd rather put it to you that the kids downstairs are learning special languages.”

  “How about the nurses — any ethical objections?”

  “No problem, Tom. They're all seconded from the Army Medical Corps.”

  “Hmm. Visitors? What about parents?”

  “No worries there, either. Regular visiting hours for the public wards. Of course, the ‘special’ kids don't receive any visitors.”

  “Orphans of the storm, eh?”

  “Couldn't put it better myself. You'll see when we go down there . . .”

  The American glanced round the room, assessing moods and personalities. Then he said casually:

  “You talked about operating on the brain-damaged kids out front, before. Cutting out injured tissue. You do the same with the kids downstairs?”

  “Christ no!” Sole exploded angrily. “That's a bloody immoral suggestion. Do you think we'd damage healthy tissue? — for an experiment? The children down below never had any sort of brain damage. They're fine. They're healthy!”

  “You have to realize they're his pets, Mr Zwingler,” Dorothy slipped in slyly. “You'd hardly believe our Chris had his own little boy at home—”

  “Hmm, this PSF drug,” nodded Zwingler. “It seems a dubious distinction to me — altering the brain by surgery, and altering it by a drug, if the drug's as long-acting as Sam supposes. What's the effect exactly?”

  He glanced about for another victim, fixed on Friedmann. The Bionics man's eyes bulged at the tug of his red moons, a rabbit hypnotized by a stoat. He bubbled out an eager string of explanations.

  “It's a way of hastening protein manufacture. A sort of anti-Puromycin — Puromycin blocks protein synthesis, you know, and PSF facilitates it. It works on the Messenger-RNA—”

  “So PSF stands for Protein Synthesis, er — Facilitator?”

  Friedmann nodded violently.

  “A unique lever for improving brain performance!”

  “You might say it's a sort of . . . superintelligencer?”

  “Oh, hardly that, no I don't think so. No magic increase in intelligence as such — just the learning process being speeded up—”

  “Ain't learning speed the surest indicator of intelligence, though?”

  “You have to appreciate the structure of nerve impulses in the brain,” Friedmann rattled on. “The way the short-term electrical signals get fixed as something long-term and chemical. That's what learning is — this electricity being transformed into something solid. We can't inject information as such into the brain, like slotting in some miracle memory tape. But what we can do is hurry up the manufacture of protein while the brain is busy learning. We use PSF to help dormant areas of the damaged brain to take over language work more rapidly—”

  Zwingler waved a hand, quieting Friedmann.

  “But what about the special kids? Chris — you said they don't have any brain damage. Yet they're receiving this drug. They must be learning a helluva lot faster than average kids. So what's the outcome?”

  The rubies sparkled sharply at Sole, amused and testing him.

  “Nothing harmful, I assure you,” Sole blushed.

  “Oh I'm sure. I'm just curious—”

  Impatiently, Richard Jannis rapped his knuckles on the table,

  “Sam — I don't wish to appear inhospitable but couldn't you brief Mr Zwingler yourself? Presumably he's more interested in the Unit's work than our personalities. Do we really need to leap through the hoops one by one?”

  The Director glanced at Jannis irritably. However, it was Zwingler who answered the psychologist directly, with a boyish grin of apology.

  “Guess I oughta apologize to you all — I'm afraid my role over here is a delicate one. Investigatory. Yes, it does have to do with personalities. Something pretty big has come up back home. We're hunting about for people to help us out.”

  “What kind of big thing?”

  The rubies blushed more apologies — but firm as steel, with a hard cutting edge to them.

  “That's just it. I'd like to get a broader view of the folks here before I go into any details—”

  Sam slapped a fist on the table.

  “I'll back that up. I want you to regard Tom as a kind of emissary. Emissaries are going to be quite the fashion, eh Tom?”

  Zwingler flashed an appreciative look at Sam, with just a hint of a caution in it.

  Sam Bax stared round the faces of his staff — pausing momentarily on Rosson, then moving on, having rejected him as in some way unsuitable (too hippy looking?) — or as too vital to the Unit's functioning. . .

  “Chris—” said the Director firmly, “do you mind filling in Tom on the three worlds before we head down there? The language angle—”

  Sole made an effort to concentrate on practical details. Zwingler's ruby chips signalled attention; their wearer waited quietly behind them, a soft predator in a dark suit.

  • • •

  “Well, ever since Chomsky's pioneer work, we all assume that the plan for language is programmed into the mind at birth. The basic plan of language reflects our biological awareness of the world that has evolved us, you see. So we're teaching three artificial languages as probes at the frontiers of mind. We want to find out what the raw, fresh mind of a child will accept as natural — or ‘real’. Dorothy teaches one language to test whether our idea of logic is ‘realistic’—”

  “Or whether reality is logical!” sniffed Dorothy — as though she wouldn't be at all surprised to find reality guilty of such dereliction and was ready to discipline it if she did.

  Zwingler looked bored. Only when Sole got on to the subject of the next world, did his attitude change.

  “Richard's interested in alternative reality states — what sort of tensions a language programmed to reflect them might set up in the raw human mind. He's built a kind of alien world down there, with its own rules—”

  “You mean the sorta environment an alien being might actually grow up in, on some other planet?” The American leaned forward eagerly.

  “Not exactly—” Sole glanced at Jannis; but the psychologist showed no particular desire to add anything. “It's more like another — dimension. Built out of a number of perceptual illusions. Richard's something of a connoisseur of illusions—”

  “Yeah, so I notice. Okay, I get the picture. Not a realistic alien planet. More like a kinda philosophical idea of alienness? How about the third world — I guess that's yours?”

  “Yes . . . Ever heard of a poem by a French writer, Raymond Roussel — New Impressions of Africa?”

  The American shook his head.

  “Queer poem. Fact is, it's practically unreadable. I mean, literally. It's not that it's bad — it's bloody ingenious. But it's the most crazy example of what we call ‘self-embedding’ in linguistics — and that's what my children learn—”

  “Self-embedding — how would you describe that?”

  Having only just finished reading Zwingler's paper on the language difficulties of astronauts a few hours before, Sole found it hard to credit the American with quite such innocence of the jargon of linguistics as he made out. Nevertheless, he explained.

  “Self-embedding is a special use of what we call ‘recursive rules’ — these are rules for doing the same thing more than once when you form a sentence, so that you can make your sentence any shape and size you like. Animals have to rely on a fixed set of signals for communication purposes — or else on varying the strength of the same signal. But we humans aren't limited like that. Every sentence we construct is a fresh creation. That's because of this recursive feature. ‘The dog and the cat and the bear ate.’ ‘They ate the bread and cheese and fruit, lustily and greedily.’ You'
ve never heard these particular sentences before — they're new — but you have no trouble understanding them. That's because we've got this flexible, creative programme for language in our minds. But self-embedding pushes the human mind pretty near its limits — which is why we can use it as a probe at the frontier—”

  “Better give us an example of this self-embedding, Chris,” interrupted Sam. “This is all getting a bit theoretical for my head.”

  Sole glanced at Sam curiously. Surely Sam knew perfectly well what he was talking about, too. Jannis sat back smugly, his expression implying that he was well out of this — how had he put it? — jumping through the hoops.

  Still, if that was how Sam wanted it . . .

  “Let's take a nursery rhyme then — this one's a beautiful recursive series, dead easy to follow . . .”

  As he started reciting it, however, a memory from boyhood triggered itself in his head — and he was seven years old again, standing up in Sunday School to pipe out the same nursery rhyme as part of a Harvest Festival. He'd fluffed his lines, half-way through. Had to be prompted. The experience stuck in his nervous system, a tiny thorn of shame. Now the thorn re-emerged, producing a sudden, silly anxiety to get through the recitation safely — which made him come unstuck again, and sit there open-mouthed, waiting to be prompted . . .

  “This is the farmer sowing his corn,

  That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,

  That wakened the priest all shaven and shorn,

  That—”

  • • •

  That what? WHAT WHAT WHAT? a childish voice yammered inside his head — while another area of him watched this idiotic repetition of events and wondered to what extent all his fascination with language, particularly ‘bad’ language, sprang from this original public shaming . . .

  A soft American voice came to his rescue . . .

  “That married the man all tattered and torn—

  “Come along, Chris,” grinned Zwingler.

  Gratefully the boy in Sole caught up the broken rhyme again.