E-mail Matt Jarpe at m.jarpe@comcast.net
Web design & programming by David Louis Edelman.
By Matthew Jarpe
Originally published February 2004 by Asimov's Science Fiction. Copyright © 2004 by Matthew Jarpe.
All three of them struggled to get their cargo out of the airlock of Farchild. It wasn’t heavy in this gravity, but it was bulky and extremely fragile.
“I’m standing on a patch of ice,” Seymour whined.
“It’s all ice,” Dane said. “And it isn’t slippery at this temperature. You’ve been out here before.”
“Not carrying an AI,” Seymour answered. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to run some cable?”
“No way to get the signal through Farchild’s hull and the wall of the habitat,” Opey said. He had his corner perfectly steady. He needed the AI as much as it needed him.
Seymour continued to mumble as they maneuvered the bulky computer through the airlock of the habitat. Once inside they were met by two of the cult members. Once they saw it was humans and not Baccha, they turned and drifted back to the lounge.
Seymour watched them go as he set aside his helmet. “Last time I was here they couldn’t get enough of me. How soon they forget.”
“You two get this thing set up in the lounge,” Dane said. “I’ll go back for the power supply.”
The lounge was changed little from the last time Dane had visited. This time, there were four tanks of red liquid connected together in an intricate web by clear tubing. Cult members lolled around the room curled into silk hammocks or twisted around wood perches. They took a mild interest in the large gray box Seymour and Opey were carrying, but none of them got up for a closer look. Some of them watched the Baccha, others looked out into space. There was the usual amount of humming and babbling and gesturing from the humans, and sitting and gurgling from the Baccha.
“I never thought I’d ever see a room in such desperate need for canasta,” Seymour said, shaking his head. “Mah jong. Something.” He wandered around the room while Opey set up the AI. He found one of the Wernicke’s Children painting a landscape in watercolor and watched over her shoulder. With a start, he recognized the pink and tan art deco sweep of South Beach. A spectacular red sunset lit up a few clouds in the sky, and the neon was just starting to flicker to life. For a moment, he was back home, feeling the sand under his toes. “That’s remarkable,” he told the woman. “I used to live in that hotel, right there. Are you from Florida, too?” But of course the woman didn’t answer, didn’t even acknowledge his presence.
He looked closer at her face. He wasn’t even sure he’d seen this woman on his last visit. He called up the original colony charter on his wrist computer and scanned the list of faces. He matched the painter with her image, twelve years younger. She hadn’t aged much. Stress free life. And she wasn’t from Florida, she was born on the Moon. Had probably never even been to Earth.
Seymour took one more look at the half finished painting and shook his head. Not a coincidence, he decided. How in the hell had she known?
Opey inspected the casing of the AI for signs of damage. It was capable of enduring cold and vacuum, but the warm up in the habitat airlock had worried him. He was also concerned about humidity in a room with so many active tea cups and not enough gravity to keep things under control.
“Oh, stop fussing with it,” Seymour told him. “You’re like a mother hen.”
“If I lost this,” Opey said, “it would be like you losing one of your senses.” He glanced around the room. “Or like becoming one of them.”
Seymour shuddered in spite of himself. “Not being able to talk,” he said. “I can’t imagine.”
“Oh, I think I might get to like it,” Dane said, lugging the power supply. “I’ll plug this in on my end, and Opey, you take your end of the cable.”
“Make sure you give him the right one, Dane. I’d hate to send 800 raw amps into the kid’s skull.”
Dane ignored Seymour as she fired up the power supply. She checked the green lights all the way down the line, then gave Opey the thumbs up. Opey parted the hair on the side of his head, and socketed the cable into the opening there.
Seymour watched Opey drift into communion with the computer, his eyes getting that faraway look, his muscle tone softening. “Are you sure this is the only way we can talk to them?”
“We aren’t sure of anything,” Dane said. “This might be a total waste of time. It’s all we’ve got left. The visitors won’t come to visit us, so we’ve got to come here to try to talk to them. I think the radio broadcasts are a false lead. They’re not really trying to talk to us that way. Maybe they’ll be more forthcoming in person.”
Seymour pulled Dane over to the painting he had seen earlier. “I think the Wernicke’s Children may be on to something. Look, this woman’s painting my home town.” He looked down at the chair, but the painter was not the woman who was sitting there before. An elderly man had picked up the brush and taken up where she left off. “It was a woman before.”
“That’s great, Seymour.” Dane glanced at the painting then back at Opey. He wasn’t in the zone, yet, but he was getting there.
“They’ve got some kind of communication going on here,” Seymour told her. “They met me once, for a couple of hours, and now they’re painting my beach. How did they figure out where I lived? Right down to the hotel where I grew up.”
“I don’t know, Seymour, your accent? Did you happen to blab about it while you were trying to talk to them? You know how you are.”
“Right, so they figured out I was from Florida, but right down to the hotel where I lived? Dane, they’re not just mutes. They can’t understand a word we’re saying.”
“So they’re very sensitive to things like accent and mannerisms,” Dane said, still distracted by Opey. “It isn’t like they’re got much else to occupy their minds.”
“Maybe they did it for someone else, too. Opey, where did you grow up?”
“TeknoKlass Station, Mars orbit,” Opey said.
“I don’t know what that looks like, I’ve never been there,” Seymour said. He began scanning the other unfinished paintings in the room. Like before, they were mostly abstracts, with a lot of red. “They’re going to run out of red paint here before long. Nope, I don’t see anything that looks like a space station. How about you, Dane?”
“Seymour, drop it,” Dane said. “I didn’t grow up in a red blob. So they painted South Beach. Big deal. What is your point?”
“Not just South Beach, Dane. My South Beach.” Seymour pointed at the watercolor. “That painting says home to me. These people can’t understand a word we’re saying, and yet they picked this up. What do you think they might be picking up from the Baccha?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Dane said. “We’ve got Sol’s best linguists working on this problem without result. These people are the opposite of linguists.”
“Maybe that’s what we need. Thank you.” Seymour took a cup of steaming tea from one of their hosts. Dane and Opey got cups too. Dane set hers down untouched.
Opey sipped his and smiled. “Lemon grass? Did you put lemon grass in this tea?” Of course there was no answer. “My mother used to put lemon grass in the tea.” He took another sip and set the cup down carefully well away from the AI.
Seymour started to say something, but Dane pulled him out into the hallway. She held up one finger and he fell silent. “An interesting phenomenon, Seymour. Not a way to talk to an alien intelligence. Let Opey work and forget about the Wernicke’s Children.”
#
“They probably don’t even use language,” Seymour was saying. She had tuned him out, but this caught her attention.
“Who, the Baccha?”
Seymour grinned. “So you like my name after all? Yes, the Baccha might not even need language. Just think of it, how can a liquid be an individual? Back home on Bacchus there’s probably a whole sentient ocean. These tanks are just temporary extensions of the main mind. Take those tubes that hook them together…”
“We looked into that,” Dane said. “There’s no information flowing through those tubes between the Baccha. That was another dead end.”
“You’re missing my point. I’m not talking about tank-to-tank communication. I’m saying that the tubes link them together into one mind.”
“Then why separate into individual tanks in the first place?” Dane asked. “Why not just one big tank instead of three or four smaller ones?”
Seymour shrugged. “Get a wider perspective when you split them up, I guess.” He thought a minute and laughed.
“What now?”
“Kind of funny when you think about it. The Wernicke’s Children seem to be fusing together into one group mind. They even finish one another’s paintings. It was undoubtedly the operation that cut out their speech centers that catalyzed that. Without language to separate them, the Wernicke’s Children might be fusing together into one mind. The Baccha, on the other hand, don’t need language because they were one mind to begin with.”
“Conjecture and hand waving,” Dane said. She pushed off from the wall and stuck her head into the lounge. “What’s taking him so long?” Opey was still connected, but he didn’t act like he usually did when he was in deep conference with the AI. He mingled with the Wernicke’s Children, looking at their paintings, joining them in humming little tunes, and drinking their tea. He’d been in there over an hour and he showed no signs of finishing whatever he was doing.
“You know, Dane, language isn’t everything,” Seymour said.
Dane looked back at him but said nothing.
“You make a big deal out of being a Coordinator. Hell, it’s important to me, too.” Dane started to say something but he talked over her. “Yeah, I make jokes, but that doesn’t mean I hate the job. We help people get things done. Without us, the solar system is either a lawless frontier or a totalitarian nightmare. But we don’t do it all with language.”
“You’re an ombudsman,” Dane said. “How can you say that? Your whole job is communication.”
“Communication, yes, but it’s not all language. Dane, I speak a lot of languages. I probably even know your native language, if you’d ever loosen up and tell me what it is.” Dane snapped her head around to glare at him. He smiled at her reaction. “But you can learn a lot more about a person just by watching them. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to talk to the Baccha, the way we think about talking.”
“Seymour, there has to be a way to talk to them. We will figure this out. It will just take time.”
Seymour shrugged. “Maybe we will. If anyone can do it, you can. I’m just trying to prepare you for the possibility that it isn’t a language barrier at all.”
“Then what is it?”
“If they don’t use language,” Seymour said, “you’re trying to solve the wrong problem.”
#
Finally, Opey came out of his trance, pulled the connector out of the side of his head and gestured Dane and Seymour to come inside.
“So, what did you find?” Dane asked. “Were you able to communicate with them?”
Opey nodded. “Not very well. It’s slow going, and what I got is difficult to put into words.”
“Did you at least find out where they’re from and why they came here?”
Opey gave her a blank look, then shook his head. “Oh, no, I wasn’t able to talk to the Baccha. I was talking about the Wernicke’s Children. They’re the ones I … Well, I didn’t talk to them, exactly, but I … I guess I became one of them for a while.”
“One of them?” Seymour gestured around the room at the Wernicke’s Children. “You lost your Wernicke’s area?”
Opey nodded. “The AI took it offline. I can’t remember why we decided to do it, but it worked.”
“You were supposed to talk to the aliens, not the mutes.” Dane threw up her hands in disgust. “You’re going to have to go back in there and get it right this time.”
“I can’t talk to the Baccha,” Opey protested. “But they can.” He nodded at a woman who drifted between Dane and himself, singing a wordless tune. “Well, not talk. That’s the wrong word. They commune with the Baccha.”
“How do you know this?” Dane asked.
“I became one of them,” Opey answered. “I couldn’t commune with the aliens myself.” His eyes got a faraway look. “I feel like I just caught a glimpse of what they have with each other. And now the Baccha are somehow part of that group.”
“Language gets in the way,” Seymour said. “And Opey only lost his temporarily. The fact that he can tell us about it means his language center didn’t go completely offline.”
“This is stupid,” Dane snapped. “You feel that you communed with the mutes, and you feel that the mutes communed with the Baccha, but you can’t tell us about it using language because it all happens only if language isn’t possible. Convenient. Well, let’s get this equipment back to Farchild.” She began shutting down the AI and unplugging the power supply. “Fat lot of good it did us. We’re going to have to wait for more sophisticated computers.” She glanced up at Opey. “And more experienced operators. Will you idiots help me with this damned power supply?”
Seymour and Opey drifted over to her and began fumbling with the wires. One of the Baccha detached itself from the others and began trundling out into the hallway, the fluid in the jar sloshing against the sides in the low gravity. Dane lifted the power supply and began to follow the alien to the airlock, but she stopped in the doorway and the machinery drifted to the floor to land with a thud.
“Who is that singing?” she said.
Seymour glanced around the room. It seemed every one was humming some little tune. He shrugged. “Singing what?”
Dane sang a few lines of a song in a strange language. The tune was lilting and strange. Seymour’s language hypnotraining couldn’t place the dialect, but it sounded Eastern European. He quickly found the young man who was singing the same song. He pointed, and Dane jumped over to the man. They started singing in harmony, Dane using the words while the man just hummed.
“Where did you hear that song?” Dane asked him. Of course, he didn’t answer.
“So, he knows a song that you know,” Seymour said. “This is supposed to impress me?”
Dane turned on him. “Nobody knows this song, Seymour. What the hell did you tell these people about me?”
“I don’t know anything about you. You won’t talk. But they don’t need talk. I told you.”
“This isn’t like the painting,” Dane said. “Or the tea. This is personal. This is about me. How the hell did they know?” “It is like the picture,” Seymour said. “If you’d only listen.” He pointed at the watercolor, now finished. “That’s my South Beach. That’s Opey’s tea. And now we have your song. I don’t know how they know, but they do.”
Dane looked back at the man, but he wasn’t humming anymore. He was babbling incoherently and making odd gestures with his hands and feet. “They know,” Dane whispered. “They know us,” She looked over at Opey, “and they know the Baccha.”
“So it would appear,” Seymour agreed. He patted one of the tanks of red liquid. “We can’t talk to them, but we have our ambassadors.”
“Our brain damaged diplomats,” Dane shook her head. “Ugh, what a mess. You need one illegal brain surgery to talk to the aliens,” she gestured around the room, then patted Opey on the shoulder, “and another to talk to the ambassadors.” She slumped into a hammock, suddenly overwhelmed with the iceball’s feeble gravity. “It isn’t pretty, but it will have to do. So tell me Opey, where did they come from?”
Opey pointed at one of the abstract paintings. It was an acrylic of swirling reds with transparent drops suspended in it. “That’s supposed to represent their home.”
Seymour peered at the canvas. “Doesn’t look like much to me, but they did get my home right. Did they happen to mention why they came here?”
Opey shook his head. “That’s … not the sort of question you can ask about the Baccha. They don’t have reasons for doing things, or at least none that we could understand.”
“Do those radio transmissions they’ve been broadcasting have any significance?” Dane asked. “Or can we tell the translators to pack it in?”
“Radio tickles,” Opey told her. “We tickled them, and they’re just tickling us back.”
Seymour laughed. “We’d better stop before somebody wets themselves.”
Dane and Opey laughed too, breaking the tension, and then the whole room erupted in laughter. The reaction of the Wernicke’s Children surprised the Coordinators and that just set everyone off again.
“Wets themselves,” Dane said, wiping her eyes. “OK. What about how did they get here?” Dane asked.
“There’s a song about that,” Opey said. “No words of course. I’ll try and get one of them to sing it to you. It starts out slow, but it ends happy.”