The Caterpillars Question

Chapter 7

For a moment, he was dizzy. At the same time, he was numb. His heart thudded against an icy shield as if it were a whale trapped beneath arctic ice and trying to break through.

Though he had lived through events much more outré and terrifying than this, he had expected them to be strange and dangerous. This one was completely unanticipated. It caught him as off guard as if his body's electrons had suddenly reversed polarity. Instead of a rug, a world had been yanked from under him.

When his numbness thawed out, he thought, The AI! They must have some kind of telepathy! I wished for the garden to be replaced with a desert. And the AI, like Aladdin's genie, granted my wish. But they did it while I was asleep.

His question now: Had he and Tappy been transported elsewhere or had two worlds been exchanged? Or was all this an illusion? Or a dream?

Next thought: What difference did that make? It was then that the AI, a female, came around the corner of the tent. He jumped, and his nerves clanged like the bells in his awakening dream.

"For God's sake!" he said. "Next time, give me some warning before you do that!"

"I will," the AI said. Apparently, it knew what he meant. It walked up to Jack and stopped with its nose less than an inch from Jack's. Its breath smelled like machine oil. That, of course, was his imagination. But it stepped back, saying, "You are uncomfortable because I am so close to you. Does this distance make you more at ease?"

"You can read my mind?" Jack said after he had nodded. Despite the double jolt, he was breathing easier, and his heart was slowing down.

"Not your thoughts. My ability isn't like reading words on a screen. I sensed that you wanted help just as I sensed your discomfort at my near proximity."

"What about replacing the garden with this?"

Jack waved his hand to indicate the desert.

"I'd think that'd take a pretty concrete image."

"Images, yes," the AI said. "Not words. I can receive images, though they're distorted. But I can unscramble them. Why do you need help or guidance? Have you thought of something which needs our help? Physical or mental?"

"Not yet."

The AI looked up at the sun.

"An hour and a half has passed since you came here."

"Oh, well. Just hang around for a few minutes. I'll have it all figured out by then."

"That would be most gratifying," the AI said.

The thing would not understand sarcasm, of course. Jack said, "When I really need you, I'll transmit an SOS."

"SOS? I don't have that vocabulary item," the AI said.

"And I'm wasting time talking to you!" Jack said, snarling. "Begone!"

Without replying, the AI walked around the corner of the tent. Jack hesitated, then hurried after it. By the time he had rounded the corner, the AI had returned to the building, wherever it was.

More of my precious time shot down, Jack thought.

The first day became the longest that Jack had ever endured. Yet, when the sun dropped into the slot of the horizon, it also seemed to be the shortest. His whirling brain, a mental centrifuge, threw off scores of plans and many variations and combinations of these. None was worth anything. Each was weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Meanwhile, Tappy paced back and forth within the entrance room or walked around and around the fountain. Her burnt-umber hair and yellow dress made her look very young and very pretty. And very vulnerable.

The upright and horizontal poles supporting the tent emitted light. Jack and Tappy took turns in the bathtub. For some reason, the AI had not supplied a waterless skin-cleansing cubicle. Perhaps, they sensed that water and soap were more satisfying to the humans. They were not capable of perceiving that a shower would have been even more satisfactory. Afterward, Jack and Tappy sat down to eat. Jack tried to keep talking so that the dismal silences could be brightened. But they increased in number and length.

When they were through eating, he said, "You've been kept in the dark too long, Tappy. I haven't told you what's going on because I wanted to spare you fear and distress. However, I believe now that keeping you in ignorance isn't fair. If something bad happens, it shouldn't take you by surprise. And, maybe, you could help even if you can't talk."

She listened intently while he told her the situation. He omitted the desire of the AI for him to use her love for him as a tool. She took it well, though she could not keep her face expressionless. Shadows of fear passed over her face now and then like the shades of very thin clouds on the Earth when passing below a bright moon.

"Now you know," he said. He leaned over the table and took her hand in his. "I told you all this only because we're in a desperate fix."

She squeezed his hand, and she looked confused.

He said, "I know. It's all mixed up. There are many things I probably don't understand any more than you do. One of the most perplexing is why you still don't see and talk. The AI say they've removed the blocks keeping you from doing that. They also say that it's up to you to go ahead. You don't, they say, because you aren't motivated to do so. Is that true?"

She raised her hands and hunched her shoulders. That meant, he supposed, that she did not know.

"The AI have great powers," he said, "but they're not all-powerful or all-knowing."

For a moment, he was strongly tempted to lie and to tell her that he was madly in love with her. The ends would justify the means. After all, the fate of the universe was at stake. Corny as that sounded, echoes of thousands of science-fiction stories, it was true.

However, he was not deeply concerned about the lives and deaths of perhaps trillions on trillions of people. Not at this moment. He deeply cared only about Tappy and himself.

"If you could speak, Tappy. If only you would."

He heard silence; he saw tears.

Something rose up within him. It was a red flash flood that crumbled the walls of his self-control. He banged his fist hard against the table. Then he yelled, "My God, Tappy! We'll die! What is it? What keeps you from speaking and seeing? Do you want to be blind and dumb? Do you want to die? Is there something in you that says you should die, that you deserve to die? Even if it means that I die, too?"

She reared up out of the chair and walked away, her shoulders straight, neck stiff, her body seeming to vibrate with anger. Since she was familiar with every inch of the walking space of the tent, she made her way to the bedroom as if she had 20/20 vision.

A few minutes later, he followed her. She was lying on her bed face up, tears welling. He said softly, "I'm very sorry I yelled at you. I didn't mean what I said, accusing you of wanting to die, I mean. It's just that I'm so frustrated... and scared. I am human.

"Can you forgive me?"

She smiled weakly. Then she held out her arms. He went into them and wrapped his arms around her for a while. She sobbed. When his back started to ache because he was so bent over, he eased her down onto the bed and straightened up. She reached out, picked up The Little Prince from the bedside table, and held it out to him.

He did not know why the story seemed to console her. Perhaps, she could insert herself into it and forget, for the time being, her own identity and troubles. She might be the sad little boy whom Saint-Exupery described in such simple but telling language. In a way, the plight of the child prince was hers. He, too, was parentless and lonely and sought a true friend and companionship and was puzzled by the world in which fate had placed him.

Jack was reading to her about the child's encounter with the desert fox when he stopped. He was silent so long that she reached out and tugged at his arm. Looking up from the book, Jack saw her questioning expression.

"I just got an idea!" he said. "From this story!"

She shook her head.

"The fox wants to be tamed by the little prince. But the prince doesn't know how to tame the fox. So... the fox instructs the prince how to tame him. Don't you see, Tappy! You can teach me what I must do to change you! We'll try, anyway! It might be the way to do it!"

Her hunched shoulders, raised eyebrows, and spread-out hands, palms up, said, "How?"

His enthusiasm propelled him from the chair he had drawn up next to the bed and sent him to pacing back and forth. "Don't know yet. But at least I... we... have got something to work on. Let me think."

While he walked, he struck the palm of his left hand with the book. It was as if the hand were iron and the book were flint and he hoped to strike fire from them.

"When we were in the plane, you gave me a piece of paper on which you'd written a word. It was supposed to make me able to disobey Malva's orders over the radio. But it was in Gaol writing. It had six different characters and two that were repeated. Now. Listen carefully. Do each of these characters have an equivalent in English speech?"

She frowned.

"I mean... let's say... does one of them, for instance, symbolize any single sound in English? Like 't' as in tend? Like 't' as in Tappy? Like 'e' in tend? Or 's' as in seen? Got it?"

The girl nodded.

"Good!"

He looked around but realized that he had not seen any paper or pencils in the tent. He closed his eyes and visualized a sheaf of writing paper and three sharpened pencils. Then he summoned up an image of a knife. He'd have to have something to keep the pencils sharp.

Tappy stirred restlessly. He said, "Be patient."

A minute later, he heard a woman's voice.

"Do not be startled."

He said, "Come in," and an AI walked through the entrance into the bedroom.

He groaned. She was empty-handed.

"We do not have the strange objects you telepathed that you wanted," she said. "What use are they?"

"You can perform technological miracles," he said, "teleport us, read minds, but you don't know what writing paper and pencils are?"

"We don't have everything," it said. "Especially primitive artifacts. Tell me in detail what you need, their use, their materials."

After his description, it said, "I can't say precisely when I'll be back, but it'll be soon."

It walked out of the bedroom. Curious, Jack followed it into the hall made by drapes. He saw something blurry, like heat waves, appear around it, concealing it. Suddenly, the AI and the wavy envelope were gone.

He had expected a bang of air rushing in to fill the vacuum left by the AI. There was no sound.

He returned to the bedroom. "Tappy," he said, "while we're waiting, I'll tell you more of what we're going to do."

Ten minutes or so later, an AI, a male this time, appeared. Jack and Tappy were deep into the procedure. The AI, not bothering to excuse the interruption, said, "This is not what you asked for. It's the equivalent, though that is not the correct noun. It's better."

It held out two white, flat, thin, and one-foot-wide squares made of what looked like plastic. One side of each was silvery. After Jack took it, the AI extended to him two silvery objects that looked like a pen. "Pass the end of this across the screen, and it will make what you wish to write on the screen. You don't have to press it against the surface."

"We've got something like that on Earth," Jack said.

"Press the orange strip on the side after you've written on the screen," it said, "and it will voice what you've written. Press the green strip, and what is written on one will appear on the screen of the other. Press the yellow strip on the edge of the bottom, and the writing will be cleared. Activating the green strip will allow you to dictate to it and see your words in printed form. This tiny projection here, when pressed once, lets you scroll down. Pressed twice, it scrolls up."

The AI showed him the rest of the controls.

Jack guided Tappy's hand to a square and a stylus. She had heard the AI and did not need instruction.

"Thanks," he said to the AI. "You can go now."

It walked into the hallway. Jack said, "Okay, Tappy, let's go. I've asked you a lot of questions. From your responses, I've learned that the Gaol alphabet doesn't have an equivalent letter for each letter in the English alphabet. Like, for instance, the English letter 'a' can stand for several different sounds. So can a number of other letters, like 's' stands for the initial 's' in surprise and also for the 'z' sound in the second 's.' And so on.

"But the characters in Gaol writing stand for one sound only. Some of the Gaol pronunciations don't exactly correspond to our English way of sounding them, not American English, anyway. But the letters for them cover both pronunciations. There are some sounds in Gaol we don't have in English, but they probably won't give too much trouble. Anyway, you're going to write in English with the Gaol letters. After I learn the equivalents, right?"

She nodded. He pressed the orange strip on her recorder. He began slowly dictating sentences in English. They would include all the sounds in English speech. At least, he hoped they would.

He was no linguist. But if he found that he had overlooked some, he could supply them later.

Her printing appeared on the screen of his recorder as she made them on hers. When she was done, he said, "The Gaol alphabet is longer than ours, but I expected that."

He sat for a while studying the Gaol letters and their English equivalents. Apparently, the Gaol had no 'p' or 'd' in their language. He told Tappy to double the Gaol 'b' and 't' to indicate these sounds.

"Now I'll ask you questions. You'll write the answers in English using the Gaol letters. More than one way to skin a cat. Whoever installed those mental blocks wasn't smart enough to make them foolproof."

Tappy's smile was so wide it reminded him of the Cheshire cat's grin.

His smile was not as big. Even if he could converse with her in this roundabout fashion, he had not found the way to make her mature seven years in three days. But it was a step forward. That is, it was unless another obstacle was revealed.

"First question, one of many, Tappy, maybe."

And the most important, he told himself, though I don't expect an answer.

"Do you know how to compress seven years of aging into three days?"

Tappy looked startled. She wrote with the stylus two letters which appeared on his recorder. He had to scroll down the section with the Gaol-English equivalents to check his memory. The letters spelled out NO. There went his idea, derived from The Little Prince, that she could teach him how to mature her. However, maybe she could do that but did not know it as yet.

He said, "Do you have now or have you ever had any awareness of the Imago within you? Anything that might be the Imago making itself manifest?"

No.

He sighed. If only... Forget about ifs. No time to fantasize.

"Until we came to the honkers' planet, then, nobody had ever said anything to you about the Imago? Or hinted at its existence?"

No.

"Can you remember anything before the plane crash in which your father died?"

No.

"No?" Jack said. "Then how can you remember the Gaol writing? You must have learned it before you came to Earth."

She printed: I don't know. I just do.

"Then your mind isn't completely blocked off," Jack said. "Maybe we could pry it open wider. But we don't have time to try even if we had the psychological tools."

He paused, then said, "You don't remember anything before the plane crash. But you can somehow use Gaol writing. Maybe there are other things you could use."

How to find what these were, if there were any?

He wished he could go back to Earth and locate the Daws, the last people to have known Tappy. They could tell him much— maybe.

Had the Daws or other people before them imposed this hyp-node memory-block? If they had, they could also cancel it.

Then there were the honkers, the beings who he, when he first saw them, had assumed were sapient but not very bright. One of them had implanted that tiny bead or egg in between her breasts and thus kept her from being subject to Malva's will. That showed that they were no dummies. It also showed that they must know much. If he and Tappy could get back to the honkers' planet, they might find out more or perhaps all about this mystery.

And if only Tappy were six years older and thus close enough to maturity that...

There you go again, he told himself. If, if, if.

IF!

That word suddenly glowed in his mind like a Times Square of revelation. Its light generated what might be a great idea.

Maybe it would work. But he'd have to ask the AI if they could do such a thing.

He sent out a mental message.

"Get your half-metal asses down here."