by John Brunner
It was a well-balanced pattern. Given that the people here were dedicated volunteers totally committed to the work in hand, it would have been difficult to make them relax more frequently. The twenty-day periods of absolute unrelieved hard work typically generated just a fraction more mental activity than could be digested in the three-day conference period, and the “month-end” relaxation slot was just about long enough for them to unwind without losing sight of what they had been on the point of doing next.
Proof that the system was succeeding lay in the fact that even though thirty highly intelligent, highly individualistic experts were isolated here nineteen light-years from Earth with the most baffling possible problem, there had never been a feud, or any faction-forming, or any disagreement that came to blows. There were, inevitably, differences of opinion about precedence and priorities, because the available resources were so limited; these, though, fell into the category that might be called “schools of thought” rather than any real rift among the personnel.
Perhaps, Ian thought, living in the shadow of a thousand centuries of renewedly mindless evolution—as though the emergence of intelligent creatures here had been a mistake, a disturbance of the natural order, which now was restored—had made these people more careful about the use they made of their precious talent: reason.
Affable, stimulating, with a phenomenal grasp on the over-all pattern of what had been found here, Igor Andrevski took him on a tour of the major sites as a first move. At the site code-named Peat, Cathy was uncovering little by little the traces left by perhaps a couple of million natives: each a thinking being, each astonishingly imaginative… Well, it went without saying. Had they not been like that, they could never have made such progress in so short a time.
And at Ash, Olaf and Sue were shifting thousands of tons of volcanic debris, revealing a very similar city but differently coloured: grey-white, where Peat was yellow-brown. The problems were similar, though. At Peat, biological action had rotted many of the buried artefacts before they were flooded by water that became stagnant and oxygen-free, giving rise to conditions like those which, back on Earth, had preserved the famous corpse of Tollund Man. At Ash, the heat of the falling volcanic ejecta had dehydrated the relics, but that had not been until hundreds of years after they began to rot.
Moreover the design, the layout, of the city was also similar. It was similar at the site named Silt, too, where Ruggiero and his helper were probing what might have become a bed of sandstone had a crustal plate not tilted as well as slipping when it accommodated with its neighbour, so that what might have been expected to disappear below sea level arched back up again to compensate for a sudden nose dive a hundred kilometres away.
And there was Seabed, which they visited in aqualungs, where gorgeously coloured weed floated in the microclimate of the currents caused by the encrusted streets and roadways because they were transverse to the tides here, and weird purple animals bombarded them with stinging but harmless jets of a substance which could kill many native fish.
And again the pattern was similar at Snowfall One, bar some minor changes which could easily be due to climatic conditions. And…
Late one night, in the cosy comfort of the awning which they had extended from the side of their hovercraft, with a bitter wind outside and the savoury aroma of the food delivered by their portable processor rich within, Ian said suddenly to Igor, “One of each. And only one of each.”
Igor glanced at him, his expression serious. “Yes. I find it incredible, and I suspect you do, too. Amplify.”
“Well…” Ian hesitated. “Could any intelligent species be so easily bored that having done a thing once that would be its limit?”
“Tell me what you think. I’ve been here more than four years. I’d welcome your fresh approach.”
“I think not,” Ian said. “Unless—and this is crucial—unless they had such a perfect grasp of potential, unless they had such vivid imaginations, in other words, that they preferred insight to experiment.”
“But where in the universe can you start from that will permit you to do that?” Igor slapped his thigh. “There are phenomena on phenomena. You cannot extrapolate from the macro to the micro, and I don’t care what anybody says. If these creatures possessed a sense which detected electromagnetic fields (and we hold that they did because that’s the path evolution has followed in other cases), then I don’t see how that can have taken them any more directly to the concept of energy and mass as interchangeable than—than our sense of hearing led us to the barometer or the altimeter or the vacuum pump, even though those all relate to the same environmental medium which conveys sound. And yet the fact stands: They appear to have invented the city once, and at every site we’ve dug over we find precisely the same pattern, modified only insofar as we move farther and farther away from the centre. I wish our computers would tell us whether that centre is more likely to have been Ash than Peat! My money is on Ash—but what we take for simple and primitive utensils and tools may, on the contrary, have been sophisticated final versions of things that began as something far more complicated! Compare a vacuum-tube radio set with its modern counterpart, completely solid-state and grown rather than manufactured because in effect it consists of three crystal-diffusion units, very carefully doped and very carefully imprinted.”
Ian gave a thoughtful nod, mentally reviewing the pattern of cultural diffusion which was in its way analogous to the crystalline-diffusion process Igor had just mentioned.
“Every city,” he said at length, “has all the most advanced features: at the centre, a complex of some kind which includes what you’ve baptised a library, plus large halls, and open spaces which probably correspond to a square or marketplace in human terms. Good. But it isn’t a simple matter of this particular pattern suiting a particular kind of creature—more, it’s a matter of this creature having invented a pattern and got it right the first time, so that whenever a new city was created the former pattern was modified in only the most minor details.”
“And some cities, which by both geographical proximity and the associated relics we can term the oldest, have those modifications as indisputable later additions… Hmm!” Igor snapped his fingers. “I just thought of the Stellaris!”
Ian looked at him with respect. “I get the point,” he breathed. “After every trip, a change derived from recent experience… But—but damn it! I find it just as hard to believe in a creature which learned that quickly from experience, and thought it worth applying the knowledge straightaway, as I do to believe in a species that never bothered to experiment and always got everything right at once!”
“Yet that’s what we’ve run into!” Igor said savagely. “One aircraft, for example”—he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder towards the Snowfall One site where the craft had been discovered—“when it’s definite that they had fast long-distance communications for a long time. Why not dozens of them? Were they all broken up for scrap and salvage during a period of decline so brief we haven’t been able to tap into proof of it?”
“One oceangoing ship,” Ian concurred. “Which is even more extraordinary. Search the seabeds of Earth, and you’d come upon scores, hundreds of fairly well preserved wrecks. And in a period of decline—which I grant you is a strong possibility—how would they have been able to dredge the ocean floor for salvageable gear?”
“Exactly. That takes considerable technology.” Igor shook his head, his expression lugubrious. “And where did they launch their moonships from? We’ve never found even the counterpart of an airport, let alone a Cape Kennedy or a Baikonur or a Woomera!”
“I can see only one explanation,” Ian said after a pause during which he listened to the wind howling in the nearby mountains.
Igor brightened. “You see even one possibility? Share it with me!”
“That by our standards just about every member of the species was a genius and could undertake calculations as a matter of routine which we’d find so tiresome we’d have to
hand them over to computers.”
Igor thought about that for a while, and finally nodded.
“It’s a valid insight, that. At any rate I think so. I can sense a lot of implications fanning out from it, as I’m sure you can. It would lead at once to the success of virtually every new invention they came up with. Is that what you mean?”
“Mm-hm.” Ian rubbed his chin. “It would explain why only one ship can be found sunk; the second time, they got it so right that for as long as they used ocean transport they never had another wreck. It might even explain why there are no airports or moon-rocket launch bases.”
Igor blinked at him. “I’m not sure I see quite how—”
“Because they went for the maximum return on minimum effort every time,” Ian broke in. “Rather than waste time and energy on ancillary systems, they made everything self-contained and self-supporting. That flying machine: didn’t Ruggiero say point-blank that it was capable of vertical takeoff?”
“Yes, and I think he’s proved it. You know it was pretty badly crushed, as what wouldn’t be after millennia buried in a moving glacier? But all the computerised reconstructions he’s developed for it agree on exactly that point: it had landing gear adequate only for a direct descent onto flat level ground. It didn’t roll or taxi; it squatted.”
Ian gave a faint smile. “Yes, I’ve been spending a lot of my time since I arrived reviewing data of that kind. I was very struck by the points Ruggiero has made concerning the identifiable relics of advanced technology… not that there are very many, are there?”
“Maybe we’d be worse off if there were?”
“That’s a painful but significant argument.” Ian pantomimed an exaggerated wince, as though he had been stabbed in the heart.
“Yes, except… Never mind; I didn’t mean to interrupt. I think you were going to say something else.”
Ian hesitated. He said at length, “Yes, but a point has suddenly struck me which I think I was blind to overlook before. Igor!” He hunched forward, gazing at the older man. “Was it when you realised there really was only one of everything here that you decided it would be worth asking for the help of someone like me?”
“Of course. If it weren’t for that, a palaeolinguist would be no more help here than—than a blacksmith. So long as we imagined they were very like us indeed, we assumed there must have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different languages. There’s an excellent chance, based on our recent discoveries, that language too may have been invented once on this planet, and evolved but never developed into the range of separate families you find on Earth. My knowledge of linguistic evolution is sketchy, but I fancy something of the sort happened in China. Isn’t it true that over a period of a millennium or so the spoken language there changed radically, but the written language remained comprehensible?”
Ian nodded, focussing his eyes on nowhere. “And particularly in view of the fact that they very likely imprinted their ‘inscriptions’ directly, so that language consisted of shared patterns of nervous impulses common to all individuals—in other words, they probably didn’t use names because they identified themselves by simply being!” He sat upright with a jerk.
“Hey! Now, that’s a point! In a sense, maybe this species never stopped talking! Because so long as they were alive, they were interacting one with every other! Igor, I’m obliged. You just gave me a hell of a good takeoff run!”
X
Outside, as ever, the sun beat fiercely down, but in the relic shed it was cool and the light was filtered through tinted windows. Ian sat at the bench facing the computer remote, double-checking the catalogue numbers of a dozen objects ranged to his left: the palm-sized, finger-thick blocks of artificial crystal which the aliens had imprinted with microvolt currents, an eon ago, and which still betrayed at least a hint of the information-bearing pattern frozen into their molecular structure.
Before him was a modification of a device which was used at the digs to detect the presence of magnetised materials, a cradlelike frame connected to a series of meters and thence to the computers.
Behind him the door opened. He ignored it; today was the day after the end of the work period, and people were bound to be bringing in newly discovered artefacts, but he had particularly requested that any further “libraries” be left undisturbed so that in due course he could apply his embryo theories to them.
Then a light hand stroked his cheek and a voice murmured close to his ear, “Had a good month?”
He almost dropped the crystal whose number he was verifying.
“Cathy!” he exclaimed, and hugged her around the waist. “Yes—yes, I think I have had a good month.”
“What are you doing?”
“Making some extra calibrations of the patterns printed in these things. Looking for a time dimension, mainly—because if there isn’t a progression from beginning to end, an element of sequentiality, we shall almost certainly never understand their language.”
“Sort of like trying to figure out whether a human book was read this way up from left to right, or the other way up from right to left?”
“Absolutely the same sort of problem.”
She perched on the side of the bench at his right, long legs swinging, the zipper of her blouse drawn far down on her bosom for the heat.
“I think it’s a miracle you can conceive a way of reading their language at all,” she said after a pause.
“If we do, it will be,” Ian sighed. “But Igor gave me a fascinating insight which suggested a potential lead. Back on Earth, when I was first introduced to the idea that these blocks might be inscribed with a counterpart of writing, I immediately assumed pens, styli, typewriters, whatever the hell.”
“No tools?” Cathy said sharply.
“No tools. Because since it’s been shown that some of the surviving species can print rocks directly with a magnetic trace, we’ve been able to consider the most interesting possibility of all: that they didn’t have to invent writing—they evolved it. It was as natural to them as making mouth noises is to us. They merely refined and improved the materials. Instead of making do with chunks of rock, they manufactured an ideal variety of crystal. Here it is.” He waved at the array beside him on the bench.
“And that means their writing was more like the groove on a disc record or the pattern on a tape.” Cathy nodded. “With the bonus effect that they could read it back directly.”
“It goes even deeper. They didn’t have to invent a system of sound-to-symbol correspondence. Their symbols were a direct reflection of a real-time process going on in their nervous systems; in other words, they experienced the imprinted pattern as though it were being—ah—spoken to them. That is, assuming this electromagnetic sense was what they used where we’d use sound, and all the indications point that way. I asked Lucas to make sure that next time his people are studying a colony of animals, they should measure the changing electrical fields as well as merely observing.”
Cathy raised her eyebrows. “Ve-ery interesting! I can see another consequence you haven’t mentioned.”
“What?”
“Well… how could they tell lies?”
Ian whistled. “That’s a point, isn’t it? I hadn’t got that far. You’re probably right. I don’t see how they could be dishonest with each other… Hmm! Do you suppose that’s why they got from nowhere to the moon in such a hurry?”
And before she could answer, he snapped his fingers. “Yet they must have had some kind of nonreal mode of—of speech. If communication were limited to actual experience and present mental state, it couldn’t include hypotheses.”
“But couldn’t they be labelled?” Cathy suggested. “I mean… Well, under most normal circumstances a human being can distinguish between what’s remembered and what’s imagined. Maybe the same sort of overtones were involved in their communication.”
“M-m-mm…” Ian plucked at his chin; he had decided to let his beard grow out, but as yet it was sparse. “I think you’re on to somethin
g. I’ll check it out when I have the time. For the moment, if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish calibrating these; I meant to get them out of the way last night, but I ran into a snag.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” Cathy said. “Apart from the temporal sequence you mentioned. What starting point can there be in the case of a nonhuman language?”
Ian gave a humourless chuckle. “Now, that’s a good question, if you like! Basically, patterns that repeat in similar contexts. I’ll show you.”
He picked up the nearest crystal, laid it in his cradle and pushed a switch. At once, on the big screen above which was linked to the main computers, a complex stable pattern appeared somewhat resembling a transform of the sounds made by a full symphony orchestra, in seven colours.
“Those colours correspond to levels of impregnation,” he explained. “Not physical levels—degrees of intensity. Of course I can go to physical parameters, too.” He touched another switch, and the colour distribution altered instantly, though the basic form of the display remained the same.
“And I can go arbitrarily to various temporal parameters—read in sequence from left to right, up to down, this face to the farther one… Topologically speaking, though, reading all the crystals in the same orientation should produce a sufficient degree of invariance to determine whether any patterns which repeat are isolable as the equivalent of phonemic units.”
