The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  “And Hammond’s powerful friends will curse themselves for fools and Benedict Arnolds…”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised, Professor! Oh it’s harvest time for concessions, whichever way,” guffawed Orlov. “My point is, this Hammond business couldn’t have come along at a better time—disturbing their sense of judgement, with Nilin on the loose. Nilin has scared them about their whole undersea security. Now Hammond forces them to beg favours. Incidentally, our sources in Japan say they’re very worried about Nilin. It’s a big fish they believe they’ve caught on their hook, this Jonah of yours! We shall have the boy back in no time at all, never fear. What’s more, we shall force the Americans to collaborate technologically undersea, now, as a quid-pro-quo for Hammond.”

  “But—” How sickeningly irrelevant! Kapelka felt heartsick. Katya’s news thrilled him as much as it did herself, poor girl. The Thought Complex meant something totally unsuspected on this planet. Something wonderful. But alas… He was older than she was.

  “Maybe our Jonah is good for more than scaring people,” he told Orlov icily.

  “It has potential of course, I’m not denying that.”

  “But Jonah swims, Jonah is!”

  “To be sure. But listen to me, there are political priorities right now. The Japanese are growing extremely tense and xenophobic about the oceans. It was inevitable. The likelihood of Japanese technology and Chinese manpower combining is higher now than at any time. A Co-Prosperity Sphere of the sea-bed…”

  “Our own special bogey, this one, surely Comrade,” shrugged Kapelka. “Japan plus China. The Americans have never really believed it.”

  “They are beginning to see it now! The strains on the false friendship between Japan and America are telling. I admit we help this along a little. Item, the sperm whale ban. That was a good touch. Now Nilin and the Fisheries Conference. But we’re only really nudging inevitable historical processes. It’s in this light that we’ve got to force American co-operation. A somewhat adjusted ideology on their part will help wonderfully, besides making us appear to the world as the dominant partner… Well, we shall see, what our telescopes see.”

  Kapelka quit listening to the rumblings of this big black waterfall, with the vinegary eyes. So Georgi Nilin had indeed been used as a pawn. And the whole whale project was regarded as similarly expendable? And had been all along? Yet Orlov hadn’t actually said so outright. Kapelka still couldn’t tell for the life of him whether Nilin’s departure had been deliberately engineered, or only brilliantly exploited afterwards. Two games could presumably be played side by side, and both for the winning.

  He smiled at Katya and reached for the bundle of perforated sheets, which she had been opening and collapsing like a silent accordion all this time, bewildered by this high-level briefing she was so privileged to listen in on. Orlov perhaps wished to impress her. Or compromise her…

  “I must look at these a moment, Comrade Orlov—”

  • • •

  “How strange, Katya,” mused Kapelka aloud, as he scanned the pages. “He does seem to know more of himself… The effect of the Thought Complex? I wonder whether its computational power is large enough to retrieve more than we were able to put into him? That would be incredible. Yet it looks that way. To think of this machine for thought, in the seas, all this time!”

  “What’s this, Professor?” demanded Orlov, alerted. “A computer in the ocean? Whose computer? Who is it acting for?”

  Kapelka smiled dryly.

  “Perhaps I should have told you before. This is our greatest discovery—more important than anything we achieved with Nilin. Far more important even than the whole technique of modelling and imprinting consciousness, though we should hardly have made the discovery otherwise… But I thought you came here mainly about Nilin and to wind the Project down. Well?” he accused.

  “You leap to conclusions, Professor,” Orlov said amiably. “Wide political questions are involved. I thought I made that plain. What is more vital than mastering the resources of the ocean? By whatever means! So, what is this ‘Thought Complex’? Your trump card, perhaps? You must tell me this, exactly. Very rapid decisions may have to be made.”

  Kapelka brightened, then, seeing how the Project could, and must, be salvaged.

  “Ah yes indeed. Kachalots have this strange custom of nosing together in a star formation on the surface of the sea. Sailors have noticed it periodically—but no one knew why they did it. Now we know. These whales are forming themselves into a biological computer of enormous power!”

  And he explained what they knew so far. And what they guessed. Confusing the two a little in the process, perhaps, deliberately…

  • • •

  “So you see, the Complexes can compose sound patterns to store these mental insights!” Kapelka ended, on a ringing note. “Think of them as resembling Indian Yantra meditation diagrams—that’s the nearest human equivalent that comes to mind. Only, these yantra are written out purely in sound. The Complexes have been evolving ever more complex yantra diagrams over tens of thousands of years—far longer than Man has been seriously investigating the world. Not only that, but the whales’ melons have been evolving physically in the process, to cope with these insight diagrams. And since the melon effectively operates as an adjunct to the brain, in other words they’re undergoing a very rapid, consciously directed mental evolution!”

  “Your enthusiasm’s laudable, Professor,” drawled Orlov. “And this would be magnificently useful. But does your tame whale actually report all these things? Or is there an element of educated guesswork? Which could even stretch to, say, wishful thinking? I thought your radio messages were all in a strict mathematical code.”

  “Yes indeed. Here—”

  Kapelka spread the printout on his desk. A string of numbers was followed by the arithmetical breakdown of primes and products stretching out for a paragraph, then by several paragraphs of symbols.

  Katya stared out of the window at the house where Pavel was.

  Symbols to some. Realities, to others…

  And yet… Was Professor Kapelka simply being kind? No! He had meant what he said about what the Thought Complex might achieve with Jonah. Therefore Pavel was saved.

  If only that husk weren’t still alive, to haunt her!

  Yet should she wish his body dead?

  “The Jonah consciousness is a mathematical model, you see,” Kapelka was telling the sprawling, boorish Orlov who kept on eyeing Katya. “It’s produced by detailed scanning of the neural circuitry of the live brain of a volunteer. Now, human brain and kachalot brain are fortunately topologically similar, so we are able to imprint our ‘circuit diagram’ on to the symbolization centres of the immature baby whale. Both brains are what we call bilaterally asymmetrical. Toothed whales are the only animals apart from man to show this feature, and this all comes about because of language specialization in Man, and ‘sound symbolism’ specialization in the whale.”

  “Whales use languages too? I thought—”

  “Ah, not languages as we understand them. Theirs is much more mimetic in character than human words and sentences. A certain wavelength X indicates ‘Appearance Y’. Their click-music imitates the shape of the world in sound, whereas we attach labels to things. We’re obsessed with objects. The whale is interested in flow and vector and relation. That’s a radically different programme from the speech programme built into us humans. Yet it’s still symbolic thought, articulated in organized sound! There’s the point of connection. We’re distant biological cousins, the whale and us.”

  “At so many removes, Professor!”

  “Yet—still cousins. So we can attack the problem of ‘language’ initially on the purely symbolic level.”

  Katya stared at the smoking building with its deserted verandah, while Kapelka talked about thought, logic and mathematics…

  The empty verandah… The empty mind of the man inside the building… horrifying! Yet it drew her like a magnet!

  “
… so the solid geometry of the sea shows itself to the whale’s mind in a symbolic form which we may treat algebraically, as abstract neural equations in the brain. A shifting mesh of equations. The great Austrian logician Kurt Gödel devised a way of expressing complex algebraic formulae in simple numbers.” Kapelka gestured at the printout. “Those are strings of Gödel numbers at the beginning. They can code algebraic statements about the ‘geometrical’ map Jonah is swimming through, observing, recording in his memory. They can also code the algebra for more abstract thought structures. It’s on this level that we communicate with him. In plain Russian? Ah, no. Perhaps latent memories of Russian speech linger in the interstices of the personality model. I shouldn’t wonder. Words, memories, any form of thought is simply a product of multidimensional matrices of cues and connections—a product of neural pathways, interacting. But human speech represents an alien transformation of symbolic thought, from the viewpoint of the whale. So we have to work with symbol structures, not the words that mediate these symbols for us.”

  How much of his true self carried over into the model? fretted Katya. If a man is only the sum of his neural pathways; and these are wrecked, in mapping them, then printed out elsewhere… how much of him is left? How much memory of her?

  “So difficult!” Kapelka was saying, “To make a whale ‘not a whale’, yet not a human being, either. For a human cannot be a whale. To make sure that he functions efficiently, as what he is; yet to guarantee a sense of duty to humanity! Of course, the whale body has to be conditioned behaviourally. That happens before the mind is superimposed, to avoid trauma. The host has to be taught to surface on certain cues… Yet conditioned reflexes alone would never serve us. To truly master the seas, there must be a genuine fusion of Humanity and Marine Intelligence, on the deep symbolic level. The whale will act for us, then, because he will be one with us!”

  “How far is your Jonah still ‘human’?” taunted Orlov. “And how far can we trust ‘him’ then?”

  Katya spun round from the window.

  “Oh a lot. Such a lot. So human,” she cried, and burst into tears. Orlov regarded her with amusement.

  “Will you kindly leave us, Katerina Afanasyevna?” Kapelka asked her gently. “Take the printout away and produce a plain language version! I want our guest to read it, for Jonah’s sake. So work well, Katya.”

  Twenty-One

  As soon as she’d shut the door behind her, Kapelka apologized.

  “I must explain about the human volunteer. I didn’t like to in her presence. You see, our scanning process disrupts the neural pathways irrevocably. It’s like running a tape through the record head of a tape deck and demagnetizing it. Only, not just one tape! Several hundred million of them. What it amounts to is personality erasure. That’s why the volunteer has to be someone close to death, so that this is his only chance of any sort of survival. It takes courage, even so!”

  Orlov stroked his amputated finger across his palm speculatively.

  “And the Jonah volunteer happened to be the girl’s… husband? No, let’s see, her father?”

  “Neither,” sighed Kapelka. “Actually he was her lover. But only after he came here! That’s the sorry part. You see, he wasn’t smashed up like Cosmonaut Nilin. He had a cancer.”

  “Ah—”

  “His name was Pavel Chirikov. A man blind from birth. Can you guess why we chose a blind man?”

  “A keener appreciation of sounds,” Orlov responded in a bored tone. “A musician, wasn’t he?”

  “So you already know all about him, do you!”

  “Well, something obviously,” laughed Orlov. “But not about what went on here between him and the Tar sky girl. That part interests me… It’s understandable, the girl’s reaction. This Chirikov is physically dead—yet something of his mind lingers on in the Jonah whale… But I wonder, doesn’t this severely prejudice her scientific objectivity? This Thought Complex matter—so wonderful if it were true. Maybe it has to be true, for her? I wonder whether she is the best prime control? I shall have to have a word with her. To assess her,” he smiled.

  “Obviously you don’t know everything, Comrade!” snapped Kapelka, in a fury. “The scanning took place eighteen months ago. The man is still alive. Eating, sleeping, shitting, thumb-sucking like a baby! His body’s still with us—it won’t die! The shock of the scanning operation on his whole nervous system apparently retarded the cancer…” Kapelka stared out of the window, too, at that nearby house.

  “But cancer isn’t a nervous disorder, Professor,” rebuked Orlov. “Even I know that. It’s organic.”

  “The psychic shock must have pepped up his immune system, nevertheless. Look at it this way, Comrade. Nowadays we regard a disease like muscular dystrophy as representing a massive rejection of its own nervous system, by the body. The immune system going haywire. In Chirikov’s case, from the immune system’s point of view the scanning must have seemed like a huge alienation of all the higher nervous functions—which triggered a countermeasure… which only had the physical cancer as a target. That’s the only feasible explanation. Anyhow, as a result the body called Pavel Chirikov is still dragging out a sort of vegetable existence. Which is very painful for Katya Tarsky. She sees the body, to all appearances alive. Yet the mind is far away, imprinted in an alien beast. But is it his mind? Or only a partial model of his mind? Which is the real Pavel? Or are both unreal? What a dilemma. His body needs pain killers now. It’s beginning to show intense distress without them. So it’ll still die. But so long as it lives… well, he was a hero, wasn’t he, volunteering for the Project?”

  Orlov shrugged; and directed the subject back to whales.

  And Kapelka told him something else he had been saving—told him somewhat hopelessly, yet with defiance: their Jonah had signalled to them that the sperm whales knew how to use the baleen whales as long-range, transocean transmitters…

  The black waterfall boomed:

  “You mean to say you have a system for sending messages all the way across the Pacific underwater? In a virtually unbreakable, non-language code? Why haven’t you reported this earlier, Professor?”

  “First you accuse me of reading too much into the Thought Complex reports. Now you want to know why we haven’t rushed out a report.”

  “It is relevant,” muttered Orlov, thumping his chin with his finger stub. “If only the Americans weren’t alerted, damn it! And yet, and yet—it could serve our purpose well. Supposing—” But he didn’t continue the sentence. For the first time since his arrival, he seemed somewhat overtaken by events, and Kapelka felt the spark of hope rekindle in himself.

  “Unfortunately, Comrade Orlov, you can’t disconnect the long-range transmitter aspect from the Thought Complex. Since it seems to be mainly these yantra—these mental insights, the Whale Philosophy—that the baleen whales broadcast for the kachalots…”

  “Is that true? And this Thought Complex is really a kind of super-computer, linked in to an ocean-wide communications network?” Tap, tap, on his chin.

  “The human brain is far more complex than any computer. The whale brain is equally complex. What mightn’t a union of seven such brains be! Thought to the Seventh Power? Isn’t it wonderful, Comrade?”

  “Yes… Tell me, would this Thought Complex be able to compute other kinds of problems? If your Jonah joins it, and we feed him the data?”

  Kapelka nodded, afraid not to agree.

  “But what problems? The original plan was to use the Jonah whale and his successors for intelligence work. Undersea surveillance.”

  “Well, this would be intelligence work in the literal sense,” laughed Orlov. “If this brain-complex is so superior to a computer—and we have the best American computer available here… then we have the best means of processing all this Hammond astrophysics data. I said the implacable forces of history are on our side, didn’t I, Professor! But will your whale really accept input that has nothing to do with the sea or ships or submarines? That’s what I’m asking.�
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  “If the information can be coded mathematically, then I don’t see why not. Mathematics is a universal language of structures, rather than contents. So if this data can be presented as an abstract structure…”

  “It’ll be a new ‘yantra’ for them,” Orlov said simply.

  Perhaps, thought Kapelka; but he didn’t wish to argue.

  “One thing that’s germane to that, Professor. How exactly docs your Jonah handle his Gödel Code? Numbers like two hundred and forty-three million. I saw that on the computer sheet. It would take me half an hour to work it out!”

  “It’s just the product of certain prime numbers, raised to a certain power. That one’s 26 times 35 times 56… I happen to know that particular one, but an idiot savant could compute it in half a second without conscious effort on his part. There are such people, you know! Possibly you’ve heard of my case study of the ‘Uzbek Boy’? The brain is a magnificent computer, but we don’t know how to run it, really. It runs us most of the time. So we’ve programmed an ‘idiot savant’ capacity into our Jonah model. It’s perfectly compatible with his own thought processes. After all, they’re simply a mathematical model too. It’s as natural a reaction for him to turn data into Gödel numbers as for us opening our mouths for food. You’re not aware of the act of eating, are you? Only of the food itself…” Kapelka’s eyes pecked away at Orlov’s sprawling girth. “In point of fact, we diverted some of the Purkinje learning cells in the cerebellum for this. Periodically the implanted radio sets up a certain level of excitation. To him, it’ll feel like muscle cramps in the very small area of his neck that these particular cells would otherwise be operating.”