The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  “That kissed the maiden all forlorn—”

  But the man in him halted suspiciously. Richard, Sam, Dorothy, pop-eyed Friedmann all seemed part of a grinning audience of parents watching him. . .

  However the American hurried him on, exuberantly chanting the next couple of phrases:

  “That milked the cow with the crumpled horn, That tossed the dog—”

  “That chased the cat,” said Sole tentatively.

  “That worried the rat!” responded Zwingler, quick as a flash.

  “That ate the malt,” smiled Sole.

  “That lay in the house that Jack built!”

  Zwingler ended in triumph. His rubies flashed a victory dance. He'd captured the rhyme. A game had been set up — and he'd won it.

  Damn, thought Sole, I ought to have counted ahead. Glancing at Jannis, he caught a hint of angry disgust. A trap had been set by a smart operator, and he'd fallen into it. It was that bloody memory getting in the way. A language trap too — he should have known better.

  “Any four-year-old can follow that nursery rhyme,” Sole fired back, his face flushed. “It's another story when you embed the same phrases. ‘This is the malt that the rat that the cat that the dog worried killed ate.’ How about that? Grammatically correct — but you can hardly understand it. Take the embedding a bit further and you end up with the situation in Roussel's poem. The Surrealists tried building machines for reading Roussel. But the most sensitive, flexible device we know of for processing language — our own brain — is stymied.”

  “Why's that, Chris?”

  Zwingler's face seemed to leer at him — but the American sounded genuinely interested. Uncomfortably Sole hurried through a brief explanation; noticing as he did so that Sam looked pleased.

  “Well, speech processing depends on the volume of information the brain can store short-term—”

  “This amount being limited by the time it takes short-term memory to become permanent and chemical, instead of electrical?”

  “Right. But a permanent form isn't practical for every single word — we only need remember the basic meaning. So you've got one level of information — that's the actual words we use, on the surface of the mind. The other permanent level, deep down, contains highly abstract concepts — idea associations linked together network-style. In between these two levels comes the mind's plan for making sentences out of ideas. This plan contains the rules of what we call Universal Grammar — we say it's universal, as this plan is part of the basic structure of mind and the same rules can translate ideas into any human language whatever—”

  “All languages being cousins beneath the skin, in other words?”

  “Right again. They resemble each other like faces in a family. But each cousin's face has its own individual outlook on reality. If we could simply stack all these ‘faces’ one on top of another to work out the rules of universal grammar that way — well, we'd have a map of the whole possible territory of human thought — everything we can ever hope to express, as a species.”

  “But you couldn't just stack all these languages, could you? Some have died out and disappeared—”

  “And a whole lot more might exist, but they haven't been invented.”

  “Which is why you're using artificial languages as frontier probes?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But Chris. You're using this PSF chemical, to teach them. What makes you think it's a natural situation? Surely our brains would have learnt at this higher rate if they were intended to, biologically—”

  “Aha — and God would have given us wings if he'd meant us to fly! Not that old argument, please. PSF is just an aid, as its name implies.”

  “Hmm. How long did you carry out animal tests first?”

  “It isn't the same thing!” Sole said exasperatedly. “You can't teach language to a monkey or a guinea pig.”

  “Okay, you're the expert,” shrugged Zwingler. “They're picking up this embedded speech at any rate—?”

  Sole darted a brief smile at Rosson.

  “I'd say it's promising, eh, Lionel?”

  “More than that,” nodded Rosson, with a grin of satisfaction. He too loved the children down below.

  Zwingler glanced at his watch.

  “May I see downstairs now, Sam? I think I get the picture.”

  There was a sudden minor explosion like a whip crack as Jannis slapped the side of his head with his fingers.

  “Listen Sam, if he's in a hurry, he can see the kids just as easy over the closed circuit from next door—”

  “Don't be tiresome, Richard,” sighed the Director. “We already agreed Tom's not going into any of the worlds.”

  “I should bloody well hope not!” snapped Jannis, his voice toughening.

  The Director touched Zwingler on the arm, in embarrassment.

  “If you went inside — well, it's like contaminating a cell culture with a foreign body: a word out of place could be pretty awkward, Tom.”

  “That sounds like the understatement of the afternoon,” glowered Jannis.

  But the American waved a ruby at him, blandly.

  “By no means, Mr Jannis. The understatement of the afternoon, if not of the whole damn decade, was Sam's crack earlier on. About emissaries—”

  The cufflink halted. Beat a hasty retreat. He's said too much, thought Sole. But too much — about what? Jannis wore a slight smile of contempt on his lips, as they rose from the table.

  • • •

  Vasilki had just gone into the maze — they saw her clearly through the tough thin plastic walls. Rama and Gulshen were chattering to each other outside the entry. Vidya lounged about, looking sullen.

  “Why, they're Indo-Paks! War refugees? Or disaster victims? Hell, but I guess it saved their lives!”

  “Precisely my sentiments, Mr Zwingler,” Dorothy chirped — a Victorian well-wisher visiting the workhouse. “What else was their future but deprivation and death? As I'm always saying to Chris.”

  As Vasilki moved deeper through the plastic pathways, the walls increasingly discoloured her limbs, jaundiced her body, till an alternative vision of the girl imposed itself on Sole's mind. She dragged herself through the maze on skeleton legs, with the pot belly and the dead empty eyes of so many million other children cast on the refuse heap of the twentieth century. And he thought: isn't the saving of four such children a valid enough reason for this under-world's existence, whatever the outcome? How would Pierre face up to that one? The taking away of four children speaking that language, Xemahoa, to a safe place like this? Supposing the chance was offered him. He'd come round. Wouldn't he?

  “Can I listen in on what they're saying, Chris?”

  “What? Oh — yes, just a minute.”

  Sole fiddled with the audio controls on the wall panel, passed Zwingler a pair of headphones.

  The American held them to one ear, pursing his lips. Meanwhile Richard Jannis stalked off along the corridor towards his own territory . . .

  “Yeah. It is different. Boy, you have messed up the syntax!”

  Vasilki had reached the maze centre. Now she was standing by the Oracle, talking to the tall cylinder.

  “Kid's saying something about . . . rain?”

  “It does rain in there, actually. Sprinkler system washes the place out and gives them a shower. You should see them enjoy it. They have a ball.”

  “Nice. Say, when you go in there, how does that speech-mask gizmo you were talking about operate?”

  “We go through the motions of speaking. But we only subvocalize the words. The mask picks the words up, runs them through the computer programme, then re-synthesizes the sentences out loud in an embedded form. The masks are hooked into the computer by radio.”

  “Neat — so long as the kids don't go in for lip reading.”

  “We thought of that too. That's why we call it a mask. Only place they see our lips moving is on the teaching screen — and that's mime.”

  Zwingler shifted the phones to his oth
er ear.

  “Wonder just how deep this embedding will reach? Will the kids try shifting your own ‘corrections’ back again to the norm?”

  “Then,” said Sole with conviction, “we really shall have found out something about the mind's idea of all possible languages.”

  “You mean all possible human languages, don't you Chris?”

  Sole laughed. It seemed such a pointless objection.

  “Put it another way then. All languages spoken by beings evolved on the same basis as ourselves. I can't vouch for languages that silicon salamanders elsewhere in the universe might have dreamt up!”

  “Could be such beings would use a kind of printed circuit, binary set-up, more like a computer?” mused Zwingler, apparently taking the joke seriously.

  Vidya trod a few paces away from the maze, to a large orange plastic doll, picked it up and set it on its feet. The doll stood as high as his shoulders.

  He fiddled with its side and the doll unhinged. He lifted out a smaller doll, a red one, stood it next to the first doll, then closed the first doll's body again. This second doll came as high as the first doll's shoulders . . .

  “Teaching aids,” Sole commented as he took the phones back from Zwingler and hung them up again. “The dolls' bodies carry memory circuits imprinted with a couple of dozen fairy tales. Opening the large doll triggers one of these stories at random. But the cute wrinkle is this: they have to disassemble and reassemble the whole set in the right sequence to get the full story — and the story itself is linguistically embedded, same way as the dolls are embedded physically. There's seven in all. See, he's unpacking number three—”

  However, Zwingler was still busy wondering aloud about computer-style languages.

  “It's just not on, linguistically,” said Rosson. “You see, the brain has its data associated together in multi-layered networks. Language reflects this. Whereas a computer has a separate ‘address tag’ for each bit of data. In point of fact, Chris's embeddings may be rejected simply because the mind isn't a computer. It won't know where to associate the incoming data because the clues are delayed too long — and it can't afford to store so much, even if we do use PSF. . .”

  As he spoke, Dorothy began urging the American away from Sole's world towards her own little empire by brisk rushes away from and back to his side, a hen marshalling a chick — plucking at his sleeve, finally, to shift him.

  “Idea associations. Yes, that's the trouble,” she clucked. “Illogical for words to have multi-value meanings. Of course, we could try teaching a form of Gruebleen, to test for logic values—”

  “That sounds like some kinda rotten cheese,” chuckled Zwingler.

  “Oh does it! Gruebleen is a form of English. With special words like ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’. For instance, ‘grue’ means something you've already examined which is green, or which you haven't examined and which is blue. But this kind of concept is much too complex for the young child, alas—”

  “So it is a moon made of green cheese after all?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “This Gruebleen is a fantasy, like a moon made of cheese.”

  “We weren't foolish enough to try teaching Gruebleen, Mr Zwingler. I'm trying to indicate the lines of research we ruled out in advance—”

  Dorothy shepherded Zwingler along the corridor in a series of precise, logical swoops; while Sole hung back a while, to watch Vidya. Something about the way the boy was behaving troubled him. Something jerky. Robotic.

  Vidya finished setting out the seven dolls in a row.

  Then his face froze into a mask, and he stared rigidly at the smallest of them.

  A minute passed. Abruptly a spasm twitched across the boy's face. Like a skater coming to grief on thin ice, the tight surface of sanity cracked and he fell through into chaos. His lips parted in a scream. His face distorted. Mercifully, the sound-proofing kept the sound from the corridor. Eyes wide, Vidya stared in Sole's direction — though he couldn't see anything but his own reflection in the one-way glass. With a blow of his fist he cannoned the dolls into each other, bowling them over as if they were skittles.

  Snatching up the smallest doll, he began wringing its neck. This was the only doll that didn't contain another doll inside it — yet he tore it this way and that, till tears of effort sprang to his eyes, as though it ought to contain something more.

  Sole stared, horrified.

  The fit lasted a couple of minutes at most, before Vidya ran out of energy. Slowed down like a clockwork toy. And stopped. Limply he began picking the dolls up and putting them inside each other again.

  Explanations churning in his head, Sole caught up with the rest of the group.

  • • •

  What sort of grim Dotheboys Hall would Dorothy's logic world have turned into, but for the warmth and kindliness of Lionel Rosson? Sole hated to think. Fortunately, Sam had delegated the room to the both of them, acknowledging in so doing that while he needed Dorothy's logical intellect, he could do without her brand of logical emotions.

  Still, Dorothy had put her foot down when it came to choosing names for the children. The two boys were called Aye and Bee; the two girls Owe and Zed — symbols in a logical equation.

  Although there was nothing glum about the children.

  “They're dancers,” Zwingler said, impressed.

  “Did you know,” remarked Rosson amiably, “that honeybees evolved their communication system away from the direction of sound to that of dance? Only primitive bees still use noises. Evolved bees developed the aerial dance to express themselves more logically. Let's hope these children dance! Would you like to see them standing still uttering formal propositions like a group of chessmen? Oh no, Tom. We teach by dance as well as words—”

  On the wall screen large abstract patterns pulsed — computer feedback from the dance; and words were spoken to the kids, whose syntax reflected these patterns.

  “The trouble with logical languages, Mr Zwingler,” said Dorothy, “is there's no redundancy in them—”

  “You mean you can't employ 'em?” grinned Zwingler.

  An awkward silence fell. Schoolma'am Dorothy was peeved.

  “Curiously, that is what she means,” murmured Rosson, coming to the rescue. “Redundancy may be a dirty word in industrial relations — too many people to do the job. That's why the brain works so well though — plenty of back-up systems.”

  “Sorry, Miss Summers, just teasing. You mean normal language has to carry more than is necessary — in case we miss part of the message. So you've got some kinda noise-reducing strategy in operation here?”

  Dorothy still sulked, so Rosson had to explain:

  “We've built the redundancies into the design of the room itself, and into the kids' activities, particularly the dance. This way we can do without redundancies in the design of the language—”

  Sole touched Rosson on the arm, strangely moved, as soon as Zwingler was heading down the corridor again.

  “Beautiful scene, Lionel. You've got something good going on in there. But listen, a nasty thing happened to my Vidya. Could we talk? Not now, though. Not with this fellow here—”

  “Sure, Chris.”

  As Zwingler approached the final room, Richard Jannis called out a warning to him, dryly.

  “Don't get giddy, friend—”

  But the American disregarded this piece of advice, as merely another example of Jannis's unhelpfulncss.

  Consequently he found himself staring into the third room, unprepared. Lost his balance. Fell forward.

  Instinctively his hand darted out to save himself and slapped against the glass. The psychologist snatched him back by the shoulders, roughly, like a child.

  “Don't hit the aquarium, fellow. You'll scare the fish—”

  “Sorry,” grunted Zwingler, as shocked by this sudden assault on his person, as by the way the room interfered with his sense of balance.

  The room had its usual effect of vertigo on Sole too; however, he was prepare
d for it. Rooting himself to the plane of the corridor, he let his mind drop away in free fall through the twisted depths beyond the window.

  It always reminded him of the illusion worlds of Maurits Escher — where towers rear up, only to turn in upon themselves like Moebius strips, and stairways lead up to platforms, located by some sleight of hand at the foot of those selfsame stairways; where figures prowl hallways which surely must rotate through a higher dimension, to enable the inhabitants thus to meet their own images heading across the ceilings towards them.

  The nearest child, a girl, sat hugely picking her nose, staring at remote distances. She looked like a great smooth sexless giantess — the boy who seemed to be standing right next to her, was only the size of one of her legs. As they watched, a second boy walked down a stairway. Half-way down he disappeared from view, apparently into thin air . . .

  “All done with mirrors, like they say?” laughed Zwingler nervously.

  “Not only mirrors,” retorted Jannis, keeping hold of the American while he spoke snappily about Necker Cube illusions, holographic projections, use of polarized light and variably sensitive interfaces . . .

  “You gotta train before you go in, like an astronaut for free fall?”

  “It could be a useful stamping ground for future astronauts,” Jannis granted. “The sort of concept world inhabited by the kids is perhaps more intriguing, though—” Sole chewed on his lower lip. He could visualize Rama and Vidya emerging from their world one day all right. He could see Aye and Bee dancing out of theirs. But Richard's kids? How could they ever emerge safely into the real world? These were true prisoners of illusion.

  Tom Zwingler swung away from the window as soon as Jannis released him, recovering his crisp confidence swiftly, “I thank you for giving up your afternoon, Miss Summers, gentlemen. I realize the nuisance. Could I take up just a little more of Chris's time, upstairs, Sam?”

  As they walked back towards the lift, Sole stared into the first room, annoyed and nervous, but Vidya seemed to be behaving himself.

  FOUR

  THOSE HOLY FATHERS did their damnedest to drag me back to their view of reality. I almost went out of my head. There are things of so much greater importance going on here in this shabby jungle village amongst these so-called ‘ignorant’ savages than in their bloody Bethlehem or at that miraculous dam of theirs.