The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  “Let me carry the child.” Orlov removed the burden from the naval attaché and hefted the boy on to his shoulder. “This way, gentlemen. We have some cars waiting. Lead on, little one. You will ride with the boy. The feminine sisterly touch, I think.”

  “Take Nilin in the first car yourself,” she snapped back. “I trust you to deliver him. I must talk about whales to the Americans.”

  The argument was conducted loudly in English, as though the girl wanted to make as strong a point as possible, and didn’t care about the consequences.

  Winterburn confided:

  “I think Parr was right, in a sense. The boy was bait. Probably they wanted to scare us about the deep-sub—because the genuine marine pay-off from their Jonah Kit seemed too slow in coming. They’d decided to shut the project down as a drain on resources. Use the computer for something else, and Nilin as a cause célèbre: which, let’s be frank, he’s been damned effective as. Then up comes this Thought Complex and they’re really on to something… but they’ve blown their cover by now. Then this Hammond business erupts in the midst of it all and they see a way to recoup their original stakes, as well as rake in the winnings. And we’re genuinely grateful. We come cap in hand.”

  “We’d better make damn sure this Thought Complex isn’t just some clever computer sham.” Herb Flynn raked his welt-strewn face violently. “I shall insist they make their whale appear—solidly in the living blubber!”

  “If that big fellow is one of the ones who set the boy up as bait, then that girl’s a pretty courageous lady, it seems to me,” Richard said, as Katya Tarsky impatiently gestured them to come along.

  “You’ll have to find that one out for yourself, won’t you?” smiled Winterburn, patting the astronomer on the shoulder. “I can see you want to. You’re transparent.”

  • • •

  Richard shivered as they stepped out of the Moskvitch saloon at Ozerskiy. An hour’s drive had brought them through snow-pocked forests to the reeking, smoky port of Korsakov and on along the sparser shore. Scudding rain showers lashed the windows twice as they drove. The road was slippery with mud, and initially they shared it with timber lorries wearing tyres as high as the cars themselves.

  “You’re cold?” asked Katya, surprised, for the mild spell still hadn’t broken.

  “Just a bit, Miss Tarsky. Or is it Dr Tarsky? Or don’t you use titles much? I mean, personally I’d prefer it if you called me Richard—”

  “You may call me Katya. Best to ignore my familiya—though colleagues generally use it. But I have really forgotten about my father, so it’s silly adding his name to mine. Besides it’s an ugly name—Afanasyevna, don’t you think?”

  Richard grinned.

  “It’s… fat and flabby. Like a washerwoman with huge red arms. You’re not at all like that!”

  She giggled delightedly.

  “I’ve got a silly middle name too,” he confessed. “My folks came from Europe. They were so glad to join in the American way of life that they gave me Edison for a middle name.”

  “The inventor Thomas Alva Edison? There are worse names! At least it made a scientist out of you.”

  “It’s embarrassing. You get laughed at in school—asked to invent the electric light or something.”

  The black coastline, with its clusters of buildings, backed on to sparse pine groves and bamboo clumps thickening into denser leaf cover on hills beyond thin, sloping meadows…

  “Bamboo? In this temperature?”

  “A hardy strain. Besides it’s warm today, Richard. But I’m forgetting, you coming from Mexico—such a way!”

  She gazed meditatively out across the grey sea.

  He gambled a guess at the thin girl’s thoughts.

  “Your Jonah’s a long way off too, isn’t he, Katya? Will you tell me his real name?”

  She hesitated briefly.

  “Pavel Chirikov. But don’t ask me any more about him. Talk about Jonah only. Jonah is a mathematical model of a consciousness, as Comrade Orlov was kind enough to point out.”

  “If a model is accurate enough, how do you tell it from reality?” he asked gently.

  “Please!” she begged, catching hold of his hand briefly and pressing it, and him, into silence.

  • • •

  Nilin sat on Orlov’s knee in the Professor’s office, lost in withdrawn stupor, the Mongol cast of his features more pronounced than ever now. They hovered on the verge of imbecility. Crew-cut scrap of a pathetic stray, he’d given up the fight for intelligence along with his other struggle to escape. Orlov, holding him, was a fat unscrupulous Dickensian beadle.

  After drinking toasts to co-operation and a Soviet-American whale, out of conical glasses without bases that had to be drained before they could be set down, upside down, they sat listening while Kapelka talked about problems of mapping and imprinting, in a precise, chirrupy style of English. He had what Leonardo would have characterized as bird physiognomy, reflected Richard. Sharp, alert, worm-pecking features—swooping on facts and winkling them out of the mud—but with a humorous glint in his eye. If Dr Paul was a sun-tanned, shock-haired vulture, this man was a blackbird or thrush.

  “… So Kurt Gödel proved that a mathematical system cannot completely describe itself, yes? The same restriction necessarily applies to a complete account of consciousness considered as a mathematical system. We therefore abstract from the whole, a model which will be the most serviceable approximation. Incompleteness is an inescapable element. The model is a subsystem of a meta-system. It isn’t clear how much of the omission could be retrieved—by a higher-order approach.”

  Meanwhile, the last Vodka stains percolated from the inverted glasses down the worm holes in the Professor’s desk.

  “Consciousness is the dialectical product of Brain and World,” grumbled Orlov. “You seem to be hunting for a soul, almost. ‘Something that Science cannot describe’.”

  “Not at all! Please read Gödel’s Proof before you judge. I’m simply talking about restrictions inherent in the logic of mathematics.”

  “And if a different level of consciousness inspected the model?” pressed Katya anxiously. “That would be a meta-mathematical inspection, wouldn’t it? And consequently—” She darted a look of scorn at Orlov.

  “Yes, the Thought Complex may constitute such a higher-order system,” nodded Kapelka.

  “Comrade Professor,” chided Orlov, “we decided yesterday that this Thought Complex should be designated the Zvezdaja Mysl from now on, did we not?” He wagged a stubby pink finger at the visitors. “Which means ‘Thought Star’. Those are names of two of the great revolutionary newspapers which played such a major role in the evolution of political consciousness in this country.”

  “Thought Star, then,” Kapelka acquiesced. “Now, the second difficulty, my American friends, is this: we can only map our model on to a relatively blank framework. Which necessarily means an infant, whether human, or whale! The input has to be by way of immature pathways, still largely vacant.”

  Tom Winterburn leaned forward eagerly, sucking in his cheeks cadaverously.

  “We guessed as much. But doesn’t the infant brain develop irregularly? So you can record your model all at once in the computer, but only imprint it by stages?”

  “Indeed. Now, doing so may accelerate brain development in some areas. Then again, this may abort some aspects of natural growth. Witness Nilin here. Picturesquely you could say that the brain is too busy laying down new roads, under these circumstances, to build enough new houses along all of them. The boy is, on the map at least, a full-scale ‘adult’ town. Call it Nilingrad. Yet many of that town’s houses are only stage scenery. Their doors won’t open—”

  “And their windows have no views,” exclaimed Richard. In painful detail he recalled a certain conversation on a clifftop, not so long ago.

  “Exactly!” Kapelka clapped his hands gleefully. “But we learnt a lot from Nilin. And the whale brain develops faster than the human. Its ‘switching-o
n’ programme is quicker than ours, though no less sophisticated. Jonahgrad is inevitably a queer town, hardly designed for human beings to inhabit. Yet it isn’t necessarily uninhabitable, for that reason. Undoubtedly novel cognitive syntheses will take place, as our map and its territory fuse together. Remember too, we still have to communicate with our symbolic map, rather than with its territory. The actual wonderful buildings of this new City of Mind we can, alas, only guess at.”

  “Because we need those buildings to see their partner buildings from,” said Richard, excited. “They’re invisible from our own buildings. Our windows have the wrong sort of glass in them.”

  Taking his spectacles off, he blinked at them thoughtfully.

  “It’s as though Reality is a set of different cities all occupying the same site… as though Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul all coexist at once. Yet the citizens of any one of them can’t see the others. How wonderful to look through those other windows!”

  “Jonah has looked,” Katya affirmed.

  “It may be terrible to see through such windows,” Orlov suggested dourly. “Are you not trying to escape that fate right now, Americans? Your radio telescope is your window. The view is bleak and frightful to you. Yet you can’t stop yourselves adopting it. Anything is preferable to that view! Any price worth paying to substitute Jonah’s window!” Whether he was gloating, or genuinely moved, was hard to tell.

  When the Professor had clapped his hands in glee, just then—that pocking, burping smack of a sound… Richard remembered: it was the noise of windows popping out of a new skyscraper, plucked out by a wind generated in part by the shape of the building itself…

  Chicago. Five years earlier. The thin, winged pyramid of the new Pharaoh Insurance Building had suddenly become a death trap one day when the wind blew in from a particular direction over Lake Michigan, and people were sucked to their deaths from twenty floors below the cantilevered Asgard and Olympus Restaurants.

  Richard was in the windy city on the day the windows popped; saw them fluttering down on gusts of the building’s own sculpting—like sparkling bird feathers at first, then as they dived into the streets, no longer feathers of birds, but plunging transparent knives, lethal scalpels from the sky. And people fled, the cars collided in half-mile tailgates.

  Thirty or forty bodies fell from the sky in this static air disaster, yet it was the sight of the glass beaks he remembered most, pecking the streets… and the eerie wail.

  Afterwards, the new skyscraper had to be shuttered with steel all around its midriff, and no one would hire those offices again. They stayed empty.

  Impulsively, he described to them all that day when the windows rained from the Chicago sky, leaving a gap-eyed monolith: rack on rack of skull eyes supporting the twin-winged restaurants.

  “And the sound, afterwards! Till they could weld over the empty windows, the building played like a vile harmonica—a screech that set everyone’s teeth on edge. You could hear it howling for miles: the great void building whistling to itself across the city, worse than any nuclear siren.”

  The memory of those windows falling had been a recurrent nightmare of Richard’s for a year after the event. Sometimes he was on one side of the glass. Sometimes the other. Sometimes, worst of all, he was the glass itself, bending under intolerable suction, till it pocked, and flew down.

  What if the human mind itself, post-Hammond, was becoming such an untenable building—while the Mezapico Dish let out its silent howl around the world?

  Katya touched Richard on the arm.

  “Pavel was a musician, a sound-maker,” she whispered confidentially. “I shall tell you about him, later. I promise. You’ll understand, I can see now.”

  “But what if there are windows that can’t exist in certain buildings?” he asked sadly. “Are you certain you can reconcile our own ‘logic’ with the way the whale sees things?”

  Kapelka shook himself free of this vision of a windowless city of the mind, disinterring some more fat worms of fact.

  “The speech problem, yes, a good point,” he chirped. “All our higher mental functions take place on the basis of human speech. Why, we even learn to see with the aid of our brain’s language-processing equipment. But characteristically the human sentence manipulates objects and events—in the literal sense. Apprehension is prehension: the hand reaching out to grasp. Of course, whales have no hands, no artefacts, no manufactures. There need be no reaching out and grasping, to relate our whale to the world. Nor the distancing of his mind from the world, by a hand’s breadth, which makes us technologists and scientists, taking things apart and putting them together.”

  “Alienating us from reality in the process, I wonder?” queried Richard. “So that we end up in our turn by literally alienating reality itself?”

  “It may be,” nodded Kapelka. “Perhaps since the whale lacks hands, his mind may conceive a far greater identity of thought, with things. There may be no ‘things’ as such for him, but only ‘states of being’. Yet we can reconcile symbolic logic and cetacean logic. That is in fact the answer to the speech problem. Logic, of course, is a grid without specific content. A formalization of a mode of thought. But, for a start, if you are ingenious, you can say a lot with formal concepts in themselves. You can, in effect, create a type of meta-vocabulary out of formal signs: a topology of thought. Logic in fact is ideally designed to express the function-object relation prevailing between objects—far better than popular language—and this is what whales express: modalities, function relations. Admittedly we were forced to programme a minimal ‘vocabulary’, a conditioned reflex association of symbols with certain objects.” He glanced covertly at Orlov who was, however, lost in some private reverie of his own. “Such as submarines, you see? But not the word ‘submarine’. Rather, mental markers associated with certain arbitrarily chosen numbers: a mini-calculus, if you like, within the formal framework. It isn’t possible to have a totally formal language. It might be elegant, yet it would express nothing. But, from one axiom many axioms may grow. Likewise, our minimal vocabulary crystallizes out symbols across the interface of Whale and Human, as it were in a seeding operation—and refers back to this interface again, so that we can truly reach across the barrier into the whale mind, using largely formal tools.”

  “I take my hat off to you, sincerely, Professor Kapelka,” flushed Herb Flynn. “Without reservation. You have found the key!”

  “Thus, Dr Kimble,” beamed Kapelka, “we do believe we have sufficient glass of the right strength and refractive index in our scheme of mathematical logic to provide a two-way window between the symbols of the Whale and those of Man. A window that will not wrench loose in the storms of the sea!”

  Richard nodded, enthralled.

  Orlov, however, was starting to feel afraid. He scented a dangerous mental enzyme at work here, that could break down the whole metabolism of logical, dialectical thought. It was other than what he had thought, and recommended to the Supervisory Committee. It was an error feeding the blatantly negative, mystical Hammond Theorem into the Thought Star, he decided. He couldn’t exactly express why. A hunch. And it was too late to put a stop to it. The Americans were here. The deals had been made.

  As Orlov shifted uneasily in his seat, Georgi Nilin’s stubby head nodded slackly to one side, losing all tone. He shook the boy, revolted; but the head only rocked like driftwood at the tideline. The boy wasn’t dead, or even asleep; just disengaged. He had slipped across some interface, further into nowhere.

  The light burden of his body crushed Orlov now. Never before in his life had he felt himself so weighed down—so useless. The American madness was robbing him of purpose. He was responsible for the Nilin “defection”, yes! Mikhail had performed as instructed. Yet the world had shifted, under Orlov’s feet, in the midst of the dance of deceit. He had the horrible illusion now of having been relocated abruptly to one of those other houses the bespectacled American spoke about: suddenly mode-shifted from a Leningrad to a Petersbu
rg where all the views were different and the Revolution was reversed; where the dialectical process had spun backwards, against the flow of time and history, to raw absolute antithesis.

  Orlov’s great black coat froze around him, under the pressure of this little boy. Then the illusion faded. The boy grew light again—almost weightless.

  Twenty-Four

  Richard Kimble and Katya Tarsky walked through the wooded hills, a sense of delight at the existence of the Thought Star lacing their thoughts together. Richard wished it could as easily enlace their fingertips, but didn’t stretch his hand the necessary inches, sensing that it wasn’t what the skinny girl wanted, yet.

  She said of the Star of Thought, the Zvezdaja Mysl:

  “Sobornost is one Russian word for ‘togetherness’. A beautiful name. So rich and trusting. Yet it has dark colours in it too. The sharing of sorrow also.”

  She pointed out the different species of trees to him. The silver firs. Manchurian cedars with their blue cones. Many larch and spruce. Some birch. Some maples and cork oak. Deciduous types took over from conifers the further inland they walked. Between the trees, with their pocket handkerchiefs of snow, a few dog roses still bore flowers, chilled and preserved: slight blooms reminding him of the pink eye of albino rabbits, so close to the white fluffiness of snow. Thick thistle patches clumped here and there—glaucous northerly versions of the Mexican cacti.

  And Richard said:

  “I thought it would all be bare. Yet Mexico is the barren country, with all the life baked out of it. It’s beautiful here, Katya!”

  “Sakhalin’s a long island: thirteen hundred kilometres, Richard, and we’re right in the south. The northern half’s arctic enough. Mercury freezes in the thermometer. There’s tundra, sea ice… We’re on the same latitude as Milan in Europe, would you believe? Siberia’s an ice-box with an open door, just over there, so it isn’t like Italy. Not that I know Italy! Have you been to Italy? But the sea warms us. The kachalots swim further north than this. To Okhotsk and the Bering Sea.”