The Embedding

FOURTEEN

The view on the screen looked calm. But Rosson was well aware it was a deceptive calm. There was violence in the children’s minds now. Mostly it kept below the surface. But every day some time it erupted.

They’d accomplished what it had taken hundreds of generations of Stone Age children to accomplish—and done it in a flash of days. They had invented language. But what language was it they had invented?

Vidya, followed by the other children, had passed through the babbling phase. It was now clear to Rosson that it hadn’t been just a babbling of sounds—but a babbling of ideas and concepts. They had resumed whole speech. However it was a whole speech that bore little relation to the whole speech they had been learning before the crisis. And it was interrupted by storms of violent, destructive activity that left the children lying about the room exhausted, hunted nearly to death by the pack of zombie words.

The computer programme to analyse their new language lay barely started on Rosson’s desk. He had no time. Things were going too fast. He felt like a blind man staring at Madame Curie’s blob of radium—seeing nothing, but getting his blind eyes burnt in the process.

As he watched, Vidya rose with a savage snarl twisting his face. He began to stalk an invisible prey. Picking up speed, he trotted off in a long ellipse around the room.

Every time a crisis occurred, a fresh variable seemed to be thrown into the equation. Fresh neural pathways fused open. The brain was blowing fuses—but the fuse wires sprouted across the gaps spontaneously, and rapidly—almost as a function of the fusing itself.

The experiment was out of control now, and only Rosson was interested.

What to do about it? Withdraw PSF from their diet? When the drug was so obviously producing results?

Vasilki got up next and set off on her own course round the room, helter-skelter.

Then Rama. Then Gulshen.

Soon the four children were running round the room, faces warped with concentration.

Briefly Rosson switched the monitor to the two other environments, hunting for a nurse. But there was nobody on duty in the logic world. Nobody seemed to be on duty in Richard Jannis’s world.

He telephoned the nurses’ standby room upstairs.

“That’s Martinson? Rosson here. Get down to the Embedding World will you? You may have to use the Trankkit. But stay in the airlock till I tell you. I want to watch the crisis develop—”

Then he cut back to Sole’s children. Zoomed in on their snarling, obsessed expressions.

The ellipses they were running wound tighter and more furiously as he looked. He understood the relation between movement and speech in his own logic world. There, the dance of the children was a redundancy strategy—letting language be purified of excess. But here something else was going on. Some different, new relationship between motion and thought. Between the movement areas of the brain and the symbol areas. Were the tensions in the children’s minds discharging themselves out of the symbol world of thought and language, into the world of movement? Or were new symbolic relationships being formed by these mad bursts of activity themselves?

Rosson chewed his fingernail as he thought about the effect of new cross-modal connections forming in the brain…

“Martinson here. I’m in the airlock. They’ve got some pretty vicious expressions on their faces, that lot, Mr Rosson—”

“Yes, well don’t go in yet.”

Suppose PSF speeded up the manufacture of ‘information molecules’ to such an extent that the mind got over-saturated, would the mind be forced to create fresh symbols to carry on functioning? And would these symbols be formed in the action centres of the brain, if the normal symbol areas were already overloaded? Then these would be ‘action-symbols’—symbols that sensed it as their duty to manipulate the outside world directly. The way that magicians used to believe they could, through their spells and magic shapes—their ‘reality symbols’.

The children raced closer to a fearful density of symbolic experience.

Abruptly, they collided. Limbs were mixed up together as madly as a Hindu god’s. Then the four bodies were hurled apart as if by an electric shock.

They fell apart so violently that Gulshen was left lying up against the maze wall with her left leg crumpled under her body at an impossible angle.

“Martinson—get in there! The girl’s smashed her bloody leg!”