The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  Sciavoni cleared his throat and made a speech of welcome.

  “Gentlemen. Ladies too, I'm pleased to see. First off, let me say how delighted I am to welcome you to the State of Nevada. And to the USA, for those of you whose first visit this is—” He smiled engagingly at the Russians in their heavy tweed suits.

  Tomaso Sciavoni, who'd been put in charge of the reception team, worked for NASA. Sole's attention wandered as ‘the conductor’ talked on about the communication and data-processing facilities available at the airstrip — facilities of no-place they seemed, servomechanisms of the void in Man. He found Sciavoni's slightly theatrical gestures and occasional gleams of the eyes as meaningless, after a while, as this whole house of cards erected in the desert. Apparently the place had something to do with the Atomic Energy Commission — but all trace of alternative function had been carefully erased. A quiet fantasy developed in his mind of white-helmeted soldiers walking round the desert with giant gum erasers, rubbing out a face here, and a building there, and a jet plane somewhere else — and pencilling in alibi men and alibi machinery. When the alien spacecraft landed, did they hope a giant eraser would descend from the sky and remove it conveniently too?

  • • •

  Sciavoni broke off talking about protocol and personalities and cocked his head, as news came through the plug in his ear.

  “Tracking reports a separation,” he announced. “Right now the Globe is heading up over the East Siberian Sea. A smaller vehicle is veering away, swinging sharply towards North America. Altitude is falling rapidly. It's at eight hundred nautical miles now. Velocity is down from an initial ten thousand to nine thousand five and falling—”

  Sciavoni carried on a running commentary as the smaller vehicle dropped swiftly across the roof of the world. Above the Arctic ice. Over the Beaufort Sea. Mackenzie Bay. The Yukon. Then along the chain of the Rocky Mountains, till over Western Montana it began sharply decelerating and losing height,

  “We've got visual acquisition now. The vehicle's a blunt cylinder shape about a hundred metres long by thirty. There's no indication of the means of propulsion. It's crossing the Idaho stateline now at an altitude of eighty nautical miles. Velocity down to three thousand—”

  “I'll tell you one thing, Chris,” hissed Zwingler. “We'd give our eyeteeth to be able to handle re-entry the way they're doing now. I hate to think of the energy wastage—”

  “They're across the Nevada stateline now. Altitude ten nautical miles. Velocity one thousand. Commencing rapid descent—”

  “What are we all standing about inside for anyway?”

  Sole turned away from the throng that were now pressing closer to the window, hesitated only briefly before heading downstairs.

  The soldier stepped in his way to scrutinize his identity tab, then pushed the glass door open and followed him outside.

  Sole gazed north.

  Already a shape was visible. A rushing blob of darkness against the stars.

  “Can't hear a sound. How's that thing keepin' in the air?” The soldier shivered.

  “I hate to think. Antigravity? That's only a word. It doesn't mean anything.”

  “If there's a word, Mister, must mean somethin'—”

  “No, there are a lot of words for things that don't exist. Imaginary things.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Oh I dunno. God, maybe. Telepathy. The soul.”

  “I don't much care for that notion, Doctor What's-your-name. Place I come from, words mean things.”

  The squat dark cigar shape, without portholes or fins, hung briefly over the airstrip. No lights or jetglow visible. No engine noise audible.

  Slowly and silently it slid down on to the concrete, a couple of hundred yards from where they stood. At the last moment before it grounded, Sole glanced up at the mass of faces pressed to the long window upstairs. They looked like kids staring into a sweetshop.

  Then came the sound of people fighting their way downstairs, pushing and elbowing.

  “How about some traffic duty, soldier?” said a familiar voice.

  Zwingler darted a curious glance at Sole, while he dusted off his own suit and smoothed the creases out of it.

  “Gentlemen! Ladies!” cried Sciavoni. “Let's not trip each other up. May I suggest we stick to protocol? The alien vehicle will be met by the agreed delegation of five, consisting of Dr Stepanov, Major Zaitsev, Mr Zwingler, myself and Dr Sole—”

  Sole reacted with surprise.

  “I didn't know about that, Tom, honest. When was that arranged? I can't have been concentrating.”

  Zwingler laughed eerily.

  “Your subconscious must have propelled you downstairs, in that case. You know, there was a time when I wondered why you, with your dubious attitudes, were involved in that speech project at Haddon. Not any more. You must have a helluva inbuilt pragmatism. Things just arrange themselves for you, without you paying attention.”

  “Bullshit, Tom.”

  Zwingler dealt him a mock blow in the back, pushing him forward.

  “Do the Dr Livingstone bit for us. We didn't perform any too well in the opinion of the Russians. What was that Paulus Sherman said? Balls in their court? Balls to you, Doctor Sole—”

  As the five men approached the dark cylinder, a circular doorway opened up in the side and a ramp slid down to ground level. A cone of yellow light flooded the concrete.

  “Will you go up first, Dr Sole,” requested Stepanov, the burly Russian scientist whose name Sole remembered reading in the Leapfrog Transcripts. “Both great powers need somebody to hate cordially—”

  Yet, in the event, precedence was decided for them.

  An eerily tall figure moved into the shining cone of light and came down casually to meet them.

  It was half as tall again as a six foot man. Skinny and flat-nosed with great sad eyes set far apart and with ears like crinkly paper bags and a dark orange slash of a mouth — as the Leapfrog astronauts had reported. A simple transparent mask covered its mouth and nose. Thin scarlet wires ran from ears and mouth to a pack strapped on to its long thin chest. The figure wore a grey silky coverall and grey forked boots, like a Japanese workman's.

  No air tanks. The face-mask would have to be a permeable filter membrane . . .

  The being drifted down the ramp towards them, casual and faintly sad, looking a little like an El Greco saint, and a little like a starved Giacometti sculpture.

  Sole couldn't think of anything momentous — or even unmomentous — to say.

  So their visitor said it for them. He spoke neutral east coast American — a perfect copy of the accent of the speech tapes flown up by Leapfrog.

  “Nice planet you have here. How many languages are spoken?”

  Zwingler jabbed Sole in the back a second time, more viciously, near his kidneys.

  “Why, thousands I suppose,” stammered Sole. “If you count all of them. Dozens of major languages at least! We sent you tapes of English, that's the main international language. You've learnt remarkably fast! How did you do it?”

  “By recording your television transmissions on the way in. But we needed a key. Which your astronauts gave us. So we saved time.”

  “Well . . . shall we come on board your ship? Or go inside the building?”

  (And the incredible thought drummed through Sole's skull, as insufficient as it was all-embracing: that this nine-foot-tall being is from the stars! — that those specks of white and blue and yellow up there have swollen up huge and filled the sky with alien light for it. . .)

  “I prefer the building.”

  If this visitor could learn perfect English in three days from recorded TV and a hastily cobbled together teaching programme, what techniques they must have. And — the more devastating thought — what minds.

  “You can imprint a language directly into the brain, then?” Sole hazarded.

  “Good guess — provided it conforms to . . .”

  “. . . the rules of Universal Grammar! That's i
t, isn't it?”

  “A very good guess. You are saving yourself information repayment. We shall not waste much time here—”

  “You worry about wasting time?”

  “True.”

  “Let's get on trading information then. We're all geared up.”

  “Trade it, yes — you have the correct formula.”

  “Good man,” whispered Stepanov gruffly. “You have my confidence.”

  The people outside the terminal broke into a spontaneous round of applause as Sole led the tall visitor through them — almost as though it was some grand sporting achievement to be nine feet tall. Sole wondered whether the alien would recognize this banging together of hands for the primitive courtesy it was — look, our hands are otherwise occupied, no weapons in them.

  “Careful of your head—”

  The alien stooped to negotiate the door.

  “Upstairs?” he enquired. And people gasped to hear him speak.

  “Upstairs,” Sole confirmed.

  People seemed like a flock of tiny bridesmaids flooding upstairs behind them, tripping over the alien bride's train. But if Sole was a bridegroom, with all the anxieties of a virgin on the first night, how many marriages of species had this being already been involved in across the light years — and how many divorces, as quickly over and done with as the State of Nevada's own quickie divorces? That was the disconcerting question.

  “He learnt English in the time since Leapfrog delivered the speech tapes,” Sole warned Sciavoni as they re-entered the momentarily deserted reception room. “Direct neural programming.”

  “Christ. I guess that's to our advantage though, communication-wise.”

  “Seems he's anxious not to waste time. Wants to trade information—”

  “Fine. Stick with this thing, Chris.” Sciavoni smelt strongly of some pine-scented shave lotion or deodorant, Sole noticed — and this smell got mixed up with the alien being in his mind for a while, creating a picture of a chemical forest of hydroponic tanks in that Globe in the sky.

  Sciavoni turned to address the tall grey visitor, but hadn't a chance to say anything before the being spoke himself.

  “I shall make a statement — for brevity's sake?”

  “Why surely,” smiled Sciavoni lavishly, staring up at that face a yard above him with its broad orange mouth — hunting for definable expressions.

  Blunt teeth with no incisors, noted Sole. No meat tearing or ripping in their recent past — long evolved past their animal origins? Or eating a different kind of diet in any case — the long butterfly tongue? In some respects they were primitive teeth, simply modified cartilage. Or else, devolved teeth — which suggested ages of evolution.

  And the blunt flat nose — it was said that Man's nose would have flattened back into his features in another hundred thousand or million years, as the animal urgency of scent messages receded further and further . . .

  Those flexible, sac-like ears, that might pick up far slighter signals than the human ear, yet adjust faster than a cat's eye to sudden alterations — a wide acoustic spectrum and considerable sophistication in processing sounds evident there.

  As the alien talked, the maroon butterfly tongue flickered over the blunt teeth.

  “We call ourselves collectively the Sp'thra. You do not hear the ultra and infrasonic components of the word so I drop them. It means Signal Traders. Which is what we are — a people of linguists, sound mimics and communicators. We have individual names too — mine is Ph'theri. How did I learn your language so quickly? Besides being expert communicators in many modes, we use language machines. You use these here?” He addressed Sole.

  “No . . . though we're developing concepts—”

  “Information may be traded about language machines, then. You wish to know where we come from? Two planets of an orange sun a little larger than your own, further along this same spiral arm inward towards the galaxy heart, but below the main mass of suns—”

  “But you didn't come from that direction,” a heavy Russian voice like dumplings in a greasy soup protested.

  “True, we have been further out — we return inwards now. But our home star is in the direction I say — One One Zero Three away, using your light year units—”

  Eleven hundred and three light years.

  A moment of disbelief; then shock waves rippled through the room.

  “Tell us how you travel so far! — how is it possible?” demanded the same oil and suet voice.

  The reply flicked back across their heads like a full stop on a typesheet, a tight blackball.

  “No—”

  Sole scrutinized those alien features. What expressions did another of the Sp'thra read in them? What did those soundless flickerings of the tongue signify? The narrowing and subsequent bulging of the eyes? The faint colour shifts of the otherwise grey skin? Ph'theri's eyes possessed a double nictitating membrane that flickered across the bulge of the eyes from either side. Every time he blinked, the twin membranes met each other — a brief, transparent window that lagged an instant behind the reopening of the eyelids, giving the eyes a kind of cloudy afterglow. Ph'theri blinked maybe once a minute to begin with, later more rapidly.

  Sole also wondered how easy the visitor found it to read the ape signals of Homo Sapiens.

  The refusal had triggered a spate of minor arguments in the room — about faster than light particles, and hibernation travel, holes in the fabric of space, and relativity — that grew noisier and more chaotic till abruptly Ph'theri held up his hands.

  Bright orange patches the size of a large coin spotted each of his palms. The long thumb sprouting from the centre of his wrist bone and normally resting on the middle finger of three, was now twisted aside to display this orange patch.

  A Russian woman physiologist fiddled with her own hand, manipulating it, trying to work out what sort of dexterity that isosceles arrangement of the hand might make possible.

  The central thumb seemed exceptionally mobile. It arced across the orange blush on the palm and back again, in a pendulum or metronome action. Demonstrating impatience? Giving warning? As Ph'theri swung his thumbs to and fro, covering and uncovering the orange patches, Sole heard Zwingler gasp and saw him swing his own twin ruby moons into action, defensively.

  Ph'theri's abrupt, absurd gestures had their effect: people stopped chattering and gaped at him.

  “I must make one thing clear,” the alien said loftily. “There are answerable questions, and non-answerable questions, at this stage. The formula for discussion is trading information. We owe you some free data, for the trading language you supplied us. Since we took the trouble to come to this planet, naturally we shall assess the trade value. Is this acceptable? If not, we mean to leave—”

  Another babble, of astonished protests, began to grow.

  But Sciavoni quickly nailed it dead.

  “Careful,” he cried. “What if he means it?”

  “I quite agree,” Stepanov thundered at his team. “We have to accept, of necessity—

  “—at least, as a tactic,” he growled sidelong at Sciavoni.

  “Go ahead, Ph'theri,” begged Sciavoni, signalling his orchestra to soft-pedal it. “Tell us any way you want to—”

  “We Sp'thra are in a hurry,” said the alien. “Because of our mode of travel. The technique is non-negotiable, understand. But I may say as courtesy information that, in general terms, it involves sailing the tides of space. There is a balance of energies as the spiral arms of the galaxy rub against one another. As their energy fields tense, slip and leap. Let me make a comparison. A planet has a hard surface over a soft core. The surface slides this way and that in sections. Consequently it has earthquakes. Likewise the arms of the galaxy rub against each other till they bleed energy. Till stars must explode. Or till they are forced to swallow themselves — to disappear to a point—”

  “Collapsars,” an American voice murmured, enthralled.

  “We Sp'thra sail near the fault lines where the tension is g
reatest — the cracks in the dish of curved space. Space is a bowl that perpetually cracks and remakes itself like the planetary crust. We can measure the course of the tides that flow underneath space and beneath light — through the sub-core of the universe, on which matter floats and light flies — and sail these—”

  “So you can travel faster than light!” boomed a golden crew-cut astronomer from California.

  “No! We sail below light — using the points where the tide is about to change, to throw us quickly on our way. But only some tides are fast and powerful, others are slow and weak. And tides periodically reverse. The fastest tide to the Sp'thra twin worlds is available at present. Soon it will switch and flow back out again, diminishing. Either we hurry — or go the long way round, sailing slowly on lesser tides to reach a major tide-race. We came slowly into your solar system for the reason that tides are too ‘choppy’ to sail where much large matter is irregularly dispersed. We have to revert to orthodox planetary drive. The tide effect only becomes feasible beyond your outermost gasgiant's orbit in deep space—”

  A remark that would have produced some consternation up till the year before, when the trans-Plutonian planet Janus had been found at last and named after the two-faced Roman god of doorways — doorway to the Solar System and doorway to the Stars.

  As it was, the Californian grinned at a colleague and said:

  “Like surfboard riders! Seems there's truth in my kids' comics — these guys'd be Silver Surfers, I guess, only they're a bit tarnished lookin', and ride a beachball 'stead of a surfboard—!”

  “This tide business could explain the whole damn setup of collapsars, quasars, gravity waves — right down to the organization of stellar populations!” his older, grizzled colleague flung back excitedly.

  “What is this orthodox planetary drive, please?” interrupted the Russian, who had earlier asked about the star drive.

  Ph'theri raised one hand, set that thumb of his to playing tick-tack across the orange mark on his palm. Caution, Stop, thought Sole. A universal traffic signal?

  “That question is technical, in the ‘trading’ category—”