Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Cluny glared at her, then wordlessly went to the living room. Pretending, pretending, he muttered. Still pretending, but deep within he did not believe there was any pretense in her, and that was even more disquieting. The first big flare had settled down to a steady fire when she came from the kitchen and arranged herself in one of the cushioned oak chairs. He sat opposite her; before he could speak, she started.

  “I don’t know how much you understand about what Arkins was doing,” Jean said. “He was a leader in the field of psycholinguistics, the most respected linguist in the field for a long time. Then he got the idea that any message can be translated, without the Rosetta Stone key. He was obsessed with the idea. When I went to work with him he had been trying for years to prove his theory, without any success, but he hadn’t yielded a bit. He argued that with modern high-speed computers it was just a matter of time until he found the proper method. Where the code is a simple transposition of letters, by whatever method you choose—displacing the alphabet by a random number, or scrambling letters and putting them in the numerical places, anything like that— the computer can break the code without any difficulty. But so can any schoolboy.”

  Cluny held up his hand. “You mean where a t is used instead of an a?”

  She nodded. “There must be dozens of ways you can transpose letters, run them together, even break up words and signal where by inserting a random letter. All this was pretty basic stuff. Anytime you have a variation of the alphabet, the code is fairly simple to break. You go from A to B, back to A. Your language to the unknown, back to your language. But the problem with translating a language is different; the hieroglyphs, for example, or petrographs, or pictographs, stand for a word, or even a phrase, that goes from A to B to C, not back to your language but to the thing or concept itself. Those are the ones you need a key for. Those were the ones he was determined to decipher.”

  Cluny thought of the lines on the golden scroll and wondered if they were letters or symbols of words. He was afraid of what was coming now.

  “When hieroglyphs were first used,” Jean went on, as if lecturing to a beginning linguistics class, “they were all little pictures. You can almost Jell what they mean by studying them. But they became more and more stylized until most of them lost all visual cues for meaning. It was necessary to have a key, or to have memorized each one in order to translate them. Statistically the problem is clearly impossible. If you call the unit of uncertainty a bit, where there are two equally likely alternatives, then there are four and a half bits of uncertainty about the first letter of the first word in any string of unknown words. Twenty-six equally likely first letters. Statisticians wouldn’t even try to work with such uncertainty. And that’s dealing with a known quantity of allowable units, the English alphabet. When you come down to symbols representing words, the quantity is infinite, if you allow that words are infinite in number.”

  “I don’t get any of this,” Cluny said impatiently. “The important thing is you got results.”

  “Yes, by fudging. I suggested that if we taped the normal conversations of ten-year-old boys and fed their dialogues into the computer, that would put a finite number of probable words in the program to start with. And we did that. We had pairs of boys in the waiting room; we introduced them to each other, and asked them to wait for an experimenter to explain what we wanted them to do. We left them and taped everything they said. Eventually the assistant instructed them in the use of codes and secret messages and asked each one to send a message to the other. We called it code, but they were really inventing a language. By bracketing the allowable words even in this crude way, we reduced the statistical odds against translation by some astronomical figure. And finally we did begin to translate messages. But it was guesswork. It required the phony setup to limit the probable words. And it needed someone to read the sentences and sentence fragments the computer spat out and choose which ones to select. When we got a phrase that might have worked, we put it back in as a possible key to the rest of the message, using the Markov process, which says the probability of a certain event changes depending on the preceding events. It was guesswork all the way.”

  “Your guesswork.”

  She nodded. “And I told Arkins I was guessing, there was no reason to select one sentence or phrase over another. I closed my eyes and stuck a pin in, so to speak.”

  “Tell me about the last experiment.”

  “Okay. Remember we always used people who were strangers to each other. That was so they couldn’t send a message dealing with things they both knew very well. Nothing like Susan took Mark to Grandma’s for lunch. Again, it was a limiting factor, phony. The last message was sent by one foreign-language speaker to another. We did specify that the language must be one of the five major European ones, but no more than that. And also, the men could not know each other. We began by putting headline news in the computer— strikes, airline crashes, threats of war, all the usual stuff. That was our limiting factor. Strangers would be unlikely to use personal material, and they would probably use newsworthy events they both would be familiar with. Again we drew our own parameters, and of course with real messages that would not do. Real messages might deal with material we would never dream of including. That’s why it was worthless, a waste of time.”

  “We wouldn’t expect you to be able to decipher it, not without help. But you could discover if it’s a fake. If it turns out to be something you can decipher, we’ll assume it’s a hoax. Is that it?”

  She shrugged. “I just don’t know. What are the parameters? How to limit the possible languages? It could be Japanese, or Chinese, or Swahili, or one of several thousand languages spoken by fewer than a thousand people each.” He was scowling at her and she added, “If there’s a repeating word, it’s nice to be able to rule out articles, if possible. Many languages don’t use them, and if it’s a code in one of those languages, they won’t be there. And the grammars are different,” she went on. “Syntax is different in different languages, combinations of words. Unless we can limit the possible languages, there is really no way to start.”

  “Limit them to Russian, English and French for openers,” he said harshly. “I would have thought that much was apparent.”

  She nodded. “The original builders. That’s as good a starting place as any.” She stood up. “I’m going to bed. I’m not used to staying up past sundown.”

  “When will you start?”

  “As soon as the dictionary is finished.”

  “Damn the dictionary! Haven’t you understood a thing I’ve said? It doesn’t make any difference to the world beyond this goddamn desert if your precious Indians live or die. They’ve chosen to die. Okay. Let them. I won’t have any more delay with this message, because it does matter! It’s the only important thing there is right now.”

  Jean went to the staircase. She looked back at him and said slowly, “I don’t know how long you’ve had your message, but it seems you’ve actually missed its significance. If it’s real, then it will matter very much what happens to these Indians, and it will matter more and more as time goes by. Good night, Cluny. Sleep well. Or do you sleep much these nights?”

  He listened to her footsteps, up the stairs, very faintly in the hallway, then fading out entirely as she entered her room. No, he wanted to call back to her. He didn’t sleep well, or much; his sleep was chaotic with dreams that left him muscle-sore and headachy. He should not have threatened her, he thought glumly. Someone else should have come out here, someone who knew how to persuade a woman to do something she did not want to do. There wasn’t enough time for diplomacy, to sweet talk his way into her confidence. They needed results immediately, not six months in the future. . . . He heard the hollowness of his excuses, and stopped. His threat had not changed her mind, he realized. She had not asked anything at all about her father; she had rejected the threat entirely and that was why she was not afraid. She had changed her mind for reasons of her own, reasons he could not fathom. He felt baffled by
her, angered at her self-containment, her assurance. Worst of all, he felt excluded.

  All he had accomplished was to turn her into a stranger. There would be no more shared reminiscences about their childhood; no more shared memories of swimming together, the picnics their families had had, the fears they had confided to each other when their fathers were in space. . . . Maybe that’s why he had done it, he thought suddenly, to close a door on that past, to continue the sealing-off process he had started with Lina’s death. He shut his eyes, but her image did not come this time; in his mind’s eye there was only the void he had been glimpsing more and more frequently as the weeks and months passed. When it was there every time he shut his eyes, he would have achieved his goal, the complete obliteration of the past.

  Upstairs, Jean felt herself drifting already. She was very tired and her room was quite cold; the warmth of the blankets soothed her. She made herself resist sleep long enough to pursue a thought that had flittered through her mind earlier when she and Cluny had been talking. Now she had it again. It would prove nothing, she realized, if she, or someone else, did manage to translate his message. A hoax that could not be read would be pointless, self-defeating. It could say something like: Destroy your weapons before summer when we shall arrive, or We come in peace, or almost anything else. But it would be understandable. Even if it was real, it would have to be decipherable, or again it would be pointless. Presumably it had been left where it would be found without too much trouble, meant for Earth people, to be read by them. Why code then? Perhaps the aliens had been watching for a long time and knew of the schisms, the many jealous factions, nationalities, religions, and had found a way to bypass them all, to code a message that would not seem to favor any one group. The language might be Esperanto, or a dead language, or in symbols from mathematics or music or art.

  She heard a coyote’s laughing bark close by, and she smiled to herself and turned over and let sleep take her.

  Cluny listened to the coyote that seemed to be just outside the door; a shiver passed through him. It was the most lonesome wail he had ever heard. How did the creatures manage to live out there? No water, nothing but sand and stones and lava, dead and dying’ trees and bushes. Finally he slept also, and he dreamed of Lina. She was out of reach, dressed in a filmy gown that hid nothing. When he reached for her, she was always slightly too far away; he advanced again and again, reaching, grasping nothing. She was opening and closing her mouth, speaking rapidly, and he could hear nothing that she said.

  Jean and Doris worked together the next morning, their soft voices rising and falling, the sound of pencils on paper like whispers. Then Doris and Ward vanished into the van, parked now in the shed behind the house, and Jean joined Cluny in the living room. “I’d like to see the message,” she said.

  He took his sunglasses from his pocket and, using a tiny screwdriver, took off one of the temples. A tightly rolled piece of plastic dropped into his hand when he held the temple upright. He opened his suitcase, which he had brought in the first day, and removed a box of stationery and from the bottom of the stack of paper he drew out a piece of cardboard. He unrolled the plastic and smoothed it down on the cardboard, where it clung as if bonded. “Wait a minute,” he said. As they watched, the plastic began to show faint marks that gradually grew darker until they could be seen easily, black against the white cardboard.

  The markings were all curved lines, nine groups across, nine groups down, equally spaced in both directions on the cardboard. At first glance Jean could not see any repeating characters, but she knew she could not trust her eyes alone for this. Many of the curves were so nearly alike that there might have been no difference between them at all.

  Some characters were made up of two or more of the curved lines, not touching, but very close; some were like quotation marks, others curved off in two directions, another had a short curve above a longer curve, with a third curved line at the side, as if enclosing them both; another was like two sides of an apple, with a stem sticking out the top. . . .

  “Can you tell me anything about the original?” she asked, examining each character now.

  He described the scroll and its container. “None of the tests have proven anything one way or the other.”

  “Where was it found?”

  “There’s a lot of junk in orbit around Earth,” he said. “Meteorites that have been captured by Earth, held in orbit. Sometimes they are close enough together to be considered a mine, a possible source of minerals, heavy metals, whatever. We’ve been making a study of them, classifying them, cataloguing, all that. The gold can was found parked in the center of such a group.”

  “Hidden?”

  “No way. A group is not packed together. It just means a bunch of them in a close vicinity to each other. Anyone approaching this particular group would have spotted it shining in the sunlight.”

  “Why wasn’t it found before, then?” Jean had turned from the message to watch Cluny.

  “I don’t know. Because of the numbers, I guess. There are thousands of them, millions. Here on Earth there are a million visible meteors per hour by naked-eye observation as they enter the atmosphere and burn up. There are up to a thousand times that many visible to telescopic observation. Forty thousand tons of meteoritic dust lands on Earth every day of the year. It was chance that let this be found at all. It could have gone undetected for years, or centuries. It might never have been found.”

  She was frowning at him, puzzled by the implications of his words. “Why leave a message without making certain someone will find it?”

  “We found it, so maybe it wasn’t that tough.”

  She turned again to the message, still frowning, bothered by something she could not identify.

  “What do you think?” he asked several minutes later. She looked at him absently, with no sign of recognition or interest. Without replying, she returned to the message. Cluny stood up, presently walked outside. The wind moaned in the junipers, and he stood shivering on the porch.

  CHAPTER

  16

  “YOU’RE crazy!” Cluny snapped.

  “It’s the only thing to do,” Jean said. “I can take time to bind the book in Grandpa’s shop downtown, or you can take it to Portland and have it set in type and printed professionally. I’ll have to learn as I go, so it’ll take a long time. I don’t care which it is. I have plenty of time.”

  The dictionary was finished. Two thick stacks of printout were on the table. One stack would be bound as it was, the other would be printed on fine paper. It was too simple, Jean knew, too scant, but it could be added to, it was a start. “Let Ward take it.”

  “He’s going to teach me to operate his magic box,” Jean said. “And he should be on hand in case I need help. It’s only a week, Cluny. You’re just in the way here.”

  Cluny scowled, but could think of no good reason to refuse. Ward was certain no one had followed them into Oregon, and there had been no strangers in town, according to the national guardsmen. Cluny had talked to them, had told them a story about Russian agents, deepening the suspicions of both men that the Russians were intent on doing away with the Americans on the satellite and keeping it for themselves. If anyone showed up, he would be stopped and the guardsmen would hold him for further orders. And God, he thought, he was bored with this goddamned desert! Doris and Ward were busy; Jean was a cool polite stranger; and he had never been so bored and lonesome in his life.

  He would catch the bus the next morning and return in one week. He began to look forward to the city, restaurants, life. Any sort of life. “Okay. But I want the message in the computer before I leave.”’

  The van was about twenty feet long; on the outside it looked like another pleasure camper, something that very few people could afford to operate any longer. But inside it was a miniature computer laboratory. The computer took up most of the space, floor to ceiling, fifteen feet long, nearly the width of the van, with a narrow aisle and fold-down seats before the input keyboard and
screens. Storage cabinets, a tiny stove, hooks for hammocks, a toilet and shower filled the rest of the available space. Not a square inch had been wasted.

  Ward turned pink with pleasure when Jean exclaimed over the arrangement. “Had it made to my specifications,” he said. “When they shut down the power plants, it left a lot of people hanging. They’d got used to letting the computer do part of the work. This way I can go to them up and down the valley.” He patted the console, then pulled down two seats and motioned Jean to take one.

  “Nothing is stored in the computer itself,” he said. He pressed a button; a panel opened, revealing a row of narrow black boxes. He pulled one out. “Everything goes into the cassette here. You put it in at the start, take it out when you’re through. And you select a key word to access the cassette so no one else can transfer the material back to the computer. Say you choose your name, Jean. And you have several days’ work stored. If I try to learn what you’re doing, or even if I accidentally insert it and try to access, unless I use the proper identifying word, Jean, everything in the cassette is automatically scrubbed. Keep it in mind. You’ll erase it yourself if you forget.”

  She inserted the cassette into a slot near her screen. The computer printed: Number? She typed in the number of the cassette: 127. The computer printed: Identify please. She typed in her name and was told to proceed. She nodded. It was simple, and it appeared fail-safe. She scrubbed the cassette, ready to start in earnest.

  “You keep the cassettes,” Ward said. “I don’t want anything to do with them. It wouldn’t matter actually, since no one but you will be able to use them, but it might be reassuring. If you run out of space—not likely to happen, but possible—the computer will inform you. Start with the same identifying code on the next cassette, and number it two, and so on. For example, you would say, Jean two. ” He glanced around, as if checking to see if he should instruct her about anything else. “I’ll tell Cluny to bring the stuff now. Okay?”