The Embedding

NINE

The jet began its landing approach over mountains which moonlight cut out harsh and rutted with shadows. These rapidly dipped into foothills as the plane fell keeping pace with the falling ground. Hard to be sure they were descending except for the gut sense of changing inertia. Then the jet touched and was rolling along a level barren valley between landing lights towards a bright-lit cluster of buildings. A droop-nosed SST with cyrillic letters on its side dwarfed the other jets parked there.

Despite the presence of these brightly lit buildings and jets, the whole area struck Sole as empty and meaningless. These artefacts existed in a limbo like a flat concrete zone hidden away in the subconscious of a catatonic. They represented wealth, surely. Investment. Expertise. But investment in nothing; expertise for no apparent motive; a bankrupt wealth. This meeting place between Man and Alien might have been set down prepacked in this desert valley, clipped off the back of a cereal carton.

An armed military policeman in a white helmet met them outside the terminal, checked their names off a clipboard and waved them upstairs.

Here they found forty or fifty people gathered in a long room, one wall of which was glass, giving a view of the airstrip illuminated by its landing lights and the dark moon-silhouetted hills.

The crowd formed local eddies of three or four people each. Zwingler acknowledged a few nods, but made no move to join any of the sub-groups. He stood with Sole looking out at the night while the last few arrivals filtered into the room. Sole heard Russian voices as well as American. After ten minutes the soldier stepped inside and flashed a brief, subdued salute at a man in his late forties with short-cropped wiry black hair highlighted by a few grey strands, lending him a certain maestro-like presence.

“They’re all here now, Dr Sciavoni—”

Sciavoni looked as though he could be holding a conductor’s baton—he had something of the poise and personal electricity. But maybe not for a symphony orchestra, maybe for a night club band. Sciavoni wasn’t quite impressive enough for the occasion he was now called upon to supervise.

He had a habit of opening his eyes imperceptibly while he was speaking to someone. The extra white made the eyes seem to gleam from his sallow face with an inner light. But it was a mechanical trick rather than real charisma.

Sciavoni cleared his throat and made a speech of welcome.

“Gentlemen. Ladies too, I’m pleased to see. First off, let me say how delighted I am to welcome you to the State of Nevada. And to the USA, for those of you whose first visit this is—” He smiled engagingly at the Russians in their heavy tweed suits.

Tomaso Sciavoni, who’d been put in charge of the reception team, worked for NASA. Sole’s attention wandered as ‘the conductor’ talked on about the communication and data-processing facilities available at the airstrip—facilities of no-place they seemed, servomechanisms of the void in Man. He found Sciavoni’s slightly theatrical gestures and occasional gleams of the eyes as meaningless, after a while, as this whole house of cards erected in the desert. Apparently the place had something to do with the Atomic Energy Commission—but all trace of alternative function had been carefully erased. A quiet fantasy developed in his mind of white-helmeted soldiers walking round the desert with giant gum erasers, rubbing out a face here, and a building there, and a jet plane somewhere else—and pencilling in alibi men and alibi machinery. When the alien spacecraft landed, did they hope a giant eraser would descend from the sky and remove it conveniently too?

Sciavoni broke off talking about protocol and personalities and cocked his head, as news came through the plug in his ear.

“Tracking reports a separation,” he announced. “Right now the Globe is heading up over the East Siberian Sea. A smaller vehicle is veering away, swinging sharply towards North America. Altitude is falling rapidly. It’s at eight hundred nautical miles now. Velocity is down from an initial ten thousand to nine thousand five and falling—

Sciavoni carried on a running commentary as the smaller vehicle dropped swiftly across the roof of the world. Above the Arctic ice. Over the Beaufort Sea. Mackenzie Bay. The Yukon. Then along the chain of the Rocky Mountains, till over Western Montana it began sharply decelerating and losing height.

“We’ve got visual acquisition now. The vehicle’s a blunt cylinder shape about a hundred metres long by thirty. There’s no indication of the means of propulsion. It’s crossing the Idaho stateline now at an altitude of eighty nautical miles. Velocity down to three thousand—”

“I’ll tell you one thing, Chris,” hissed Zwingler. “We’d give our eyeteeth to be able to handle reentry the way they’re doing now. I hate to think of the energy wastage—”

“They’re across the Nevada stateline now. Altitude ten nautical miles. Velocity one thousand. Commencing rapid descent—”

“What are we all standing about inside for anyway?”

Sole turned away from the throng that were now pressing closer to the window, hesitated only briefly before heading downstairs.

The soldier stepped in his way to scrutinize his identity tab, then pushed the glass door open and followed him outside.

Sole gazed north.

Already a shape was visible. A rushing blob of darkness against the stars.

“Can’t hear a sound. How’s that thing staying in the air?” The soldier shivered.

“I hate to think. Antigravity? That’s only a word. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“If there’s a word, Mister, must mean somethin’—”

“No, there are a lot of words for things that don’t exist. Imaginary things.”

“Such as what?”

“Oh I dunno. God, maybe. Telepathy. The soul.”

“I don’t much care for that notion, Doctor What’s-your-name. Place I come from, words mean things.”

The squat dark cigar shape, without portholes or fins, hung briefly over the airstrip. No lights or jetglow visible. No engine noise audible.

Slowly and silently it slid down on to the concrete, a couple of hundred yards from where they stood. At the last moment before it grounded, Sole glanced up at the mass of faces pressed to the long window upstairs. They looked like kids staring into a sweetshop.

Then came the sound of people fighting their way downstairs, pushing and elbowing.

“How about some traffic duty, soldier?” said a familiar voice.

Zwingler darted a curious glance at Sole, while he dusted off his own suit and smoothed the creases out of it.

“Gentlemen! Ladies!” cried Sciavoni. “Let’s not trip each other up. May I suggest we stick to protocol? The alien vehicle will be met by the agreed delegation of five, consisting of Dr Stepanov, Major Zaitsev, Mr Zwingler, myself and Dr Sole—”

Sole reacted with surprise.

“I didn’t know about that, Tom, honest. When was that arranged? I can’t have been concentrating.”

Zwingler laughed eerily.

“Your subconscious must have propelled you downstairs, in that case. You know, there was a time when I wondered why you, with your dubious attitudes, were involved in that speech project at Haddon. Not any more. You must have your own built-in pragmatism. Things just arrange themselves for you, without you paying attention.”

“Bullshit, Tom.”

Zwingler dealt him a mock blow in the back, pushing him forward.

“Do the Dr Livingstone bit for us. We didn’t perform any too well in the opinion of the Russians. What was that Paulus Sherman said? Ball’s in their court? Balls to you, Doctor Sole—”

As the five men approached the dark cylinder, a circular doorway opened up in the side and a ramp slid down to ground level. A cone of yellow light flooded the concrete.

“Will you go up first, Dr Sole,” requested Stepanov, the burly Russian scientist whose name Sole remembered reading in the Leapfrog Transcripts. “Both great powers need somebody to hate cordially—”

Yet, in the event, precedence was decided for them.

An eerily tall figure moved into the shining cone of light and came down casually to meet them.

It was half as tall again as a six foot man. Skinny and flat-nosed with great sad eyes set far apart and with ears like crinkly paper bags and a dark orange slash of a mouth—as the Leapfrog astronauts had reported. A simple transparent mask covered its mouth and nose. Thin scarlet wires ran from ears and mouth to a pack strapped on to its long thin chest. The figure wore a grey silky coverall and grey forked boots, like a Japanese workman’s.

No air tanks. The face-mask would have to be a permeable filter membrane…

The being drifted down the ramp towards them, casual and faintly sad, looking a little like an El Greco saint, and a little like a starved Giacometti sculpture.

Sole couldn’t think of anything momentous—or even unmomentous—to say.

So their visitor said it for them. He spoke neutral east coast American—a perfect copy of the accent of the speech tapes flown up by Leapfrog.

“Nice planet you have here. How many languages are spoken?”

Zwingler jabbed Sole in the back a second time, more viciously, near his kidneys.

“Why, thousands I suppose,” stammered Sole. “If you count all of them. Dozens of major languages at least! We sent you tapes of English, that’s the main international language. You’ve learnt remarkably fast! How did you do it?”

“By recording your television transmissions on the way in. But we needed a key. Which your astronauts gave us. So we saved time.”

“Well… shall we come on board your ship? Or go inside the building?”

(And the incredible thought drummed through Sole’s skull, as insufficient as it was all-embracing: that this nine-foot-tall being is from the stars!—that those specks of white and blue and yellow up there have swollen up huge and filled the sky with alien light for it…)

“I prefer the building.”

If this visitor could learn perfect English in three days from recorded TV and a hastily cobbled together teaching programme, what techniques they must have. And—the more devastating thought—what minds.

“You can imprint a language directly into the brain, then?” Sole hazarded.

“Good guess—provided it conforms to…”

“… the rules of Universal Grammar! That’s it, isn’t it?”

“A very good guess. You are saving yourself information repayment. We shall not waste much time here—”

“You worry about wasting time?”

“True.”

“Let’s get on trading information then. We’re all geared up.”

“Trade it, yes—you have the correct formula.”

“Good man,” whispered Stepanov gruffly. “You have my confidence.”

The people outside the terminal broke into a spontaneous round of applause as Sole led the tall visitor through them—almost as though it was some grand sporting achievement to be nine feet tall. Sole wondered whether the alien would recognize this banging together of hands for the primitive courtesy it was—look, our hands are otherwise occupied, no weapons in them.

“Careful of your head—”

The alien stooped to negotiate the door.

“Upstairs?” he enquired. And people gasped to hear him speak.

“Upstairs,” Sole confirmed.

People seemed like a flock of tiny bridesmaids flooding upstairs behind them, tripping over the alien bride’s train. But if Sole was a bridegroom, with all the anxieties of a virgin on the first night, how many marriages of species had this being already been involved in across the light years—and how many divorces, as quickly over and done with as the State of Nevada’s own quickie divorces? That was the disconcerting question.

“He learnt English in the time since Leapfrog delivered the speech tapes,” Sole warned Sciavoni as they reentered the momentarily deserted reception room. “Direct neural programming.”

“Christ. I guess that’s to our advantage though, communication-wise.”

“Seems he’s anxious not to waste time. Wants to trade information—”

“Fine. Stick with this thing, Chris.” Sciavoni smelt strongly of some pine-scented shave lotion or deodorant, Sole noticed—and this smell got mixed up with the alien being in his mind for a while, creating a picture of a chemical forest of hydroponic tanks in that Globe in the sky.

Sciavoni turned to address the tall grey visitor, but hadn’t a chance to say anything before the being spoke himself.

“I shall make a statement—for brevity’s sake?”

“Why surely,” smiled Sciavoni lavishly, staring up at that face a yard above him with its broad orange mouth—hunting for definable expressions.

Blunt teeth with no incisors, noted Sole. No meat tearing or ripping in their recent past—long evolved past their animal origins? Or eating a different kind of diet in any case—the long butterfly tongue? In some respects they were primitive teeth, simply modified cartilage. Or else, devolved teeth—which suggested ages of evolution.

And the blunt flat nose—it was said that Man’s nose would have flattened back into his features in another hundred thousand or million years, as the animal urgency of scent messages receded further and further…

Those flexible, sac-like ears, that might pick up far slighter signals than the human ear, yet adjust faster than a cat’s eye to sudden alterations—a wide acoustic spectrum and considerable sophistication in processing sounds, evident there.

As the alien talked, the maroon butterfly tongue flickered over the blunt teeth.

“We call ourselves collectively the Sp’thra. You do not hear the ultra and infrasonic components of the word so I drop them. It means Signal Traders. Which is what we are—a people of linguists, sound mimics and communicators. We have individual names too—mine is Ph’theri. How did I learn your language so quickly? Besides being expert communicators in many modes, we use language machines. You use these here?” He addressed Sole.

“No… though we’re developing concepts—”

“Information may be traded about language machines, then. You wish to know where we come from? Two planets of an orange sun a little larger than your own, further along this same spiral arm inward towards the galaxy heart, but below the main mass of suns—”

“But you didn’t come from that direction,” a heavy Russian voice like dumplings in a greasy soup protested.

“True, we have been further out—we return inwards now. But our home star is in the direction I say—One One Zero Three away, using your light year units—”

Eleven hundred and three light years.

A moment of disbelief; then shock waves rippled through the room.

“Tell us how you travel so far!—how is it possible?” demanded the same oil and suet voice.

The reply flicked back across their heads like a full stop on a typesheet, a tight blackball.

“No—”

Sole scrutinized those alien features. What expressions did another of the Sp’thra read in them? What did those soundless flickerings of the tongue signify? The narrowing and subsequent bulging of the eyes? The faint colour shifts of the otherwise grey skin? Ph’theri’s eyes possessed a double nictitating membrane that flickered across the bulge of the eyes from either side. Every time he blinked, the twin membranes met each other—a brief, transparent window that lagged an instant behind the reopening of the eyelids, giving the eyes a kind of cloudy afterglow. Ph’theri blinked maybe once a minute to begin with, later more rapidly.

Sole also wondered how easy the visitor found it to read the ape signals of Homo Sapiens.

The refusal had triggered a spate of minor arguments in the room—about faster than light particles, and hibernation travel, holes in the fabric of space, and relativity—that grew noisier and more chaotic till abruptly Ph’theri held up his hands.

Bright orange patches the size of a large coin spotted each of his palms. The long thumb sprouting from the centre of his wrist bone and normally resting on the middle finger of three, was now twisted aside to display this orange patch.

A Russian woman physiologist fiddled with her own hand, manipulating it, trying to work out what sort of dexterity that isosceles arrangement of the hand might make possible.

The central thumb seemed exceptionally mobile. It arced across the orange blush on the palm and back again, in a pendulum or metronome action. Demonstrating impatience? Giving warning? As Ph’theri swung his thumbs to and fro, covering and uncovering the orange patches, Sole heard Zwingler gasp and saw him swing his own twin ruby moons into action, defensively.

Ph’theri’s abrupt, absurd gestures had their effect: people stopped chattering and gaped at him.

“I must make one thing clear,” the alien said loftily. “There are answerable questions, and non-answerable questions, at this stage. The formula for discussion is trading information. We owe you some free data, for the trading language you supplied us. Since we took the trouble to come to this planet, naturally we shall assess the trade value. Is this acceptable? If not, we mean to leave—”

Another babble, of astonished protests, began to grow.

But Sciavoni quickly nailed it dead.

“Careful,” he cried. “What if he means it?”

“I quite agree,” Stepanov thundered at his team. “We have to accept, of necessity—

“—at least, as a tactic,” he growled sidelong at Sciavoni. “Go ahead, Ph’theri,” begged Sciavoni, signalling his orchestra to soft-pedal it. “Tell us any way you want to—” “We Sp’thra are in a hurry,” said the alien. “Because of our mode of travel. The technique is non-negotiable, understand. But I may say as courtesy information that, in general terms, it involves sailing the tides of space. There is a balance of energies as the spiral arms of the galaxy rub against one another. As their energy fields tense, slip and leap. Let me make a comparison. A planet has a hard surface over a soft core. The surface slides this way and that in sections. Consequently it has earthquakes. Likewise the arms of the galaxy rub against each other till they bleed energy. Till stars must explode. Or till they are forced to swallow themselves—to disappear to a point—”

“Collapsars,” an American voice murmured, enthralled. “We Sp’thra sail near the fault lines where the tension is greatest—the cracks in the dish of curved space. Space is a bowl that perpetually cracks and remakes itself like the planetary crust. We can measure the course of the tides that flow underneath space and beneath light—through the sub-core of the universe, on which matter floats and light flies—and sail these—”

“So you can travel faster than light!” boomed a golden crew-cut astronomer from California.

“No! We sail below light—using the points where the tide is about to change, to throw us quickly on our way. But only some tides are fast and powerful, others are slow and weak. And tides periodically reverse. The fastest tide to the Sp’thra twin worlds is available at present. Soon it will switch and flow back out again, diminishing. Either we hurry—or go the long way round, sailing slowly on lesser tides to reach a major tide-race. We came slowly into your solar system for the reason that tides are too ’choppy’ to sail where much large matter is irregularly dispersed. We have to revert to orthodox planetary drive. The tide effect only becomes feasible beyond your outermost gasgiant’s orbit in deep space—”

A remark that would have produced some consternation up till the year before, when the trans-Plutonian planet Janus had been found at last and named after the two-faced Roman god of doorways—doorway to the Solar System and doorway to the Stars.

As it was, the Californian grinned at a colleague and said:

“Like surfboard riders! Seems there’s truth in my kids’ comics—these guys’d be Silver Surfers, I guess, only they’re a bit tarnished looking, and ride a beachball instead of a surfboard—!”

“This tide business could explain the whole damn setup of collapsars, quasars, gravity waves—right down to the organization of stellar populations!” his older, grizzled colleague flung back excitedly.

“What is this orthodox planetary drive, please?” interrupted the Russian, who had earlier asked about the star drive.

Ph’theri raised one hand, set that thumb of his to playing tick-tack across the orange mark on his palm. Caution, Stop, thought Sole. A universal traffic signal?

“That question is technical, in the ‘trading’ category—”

“Go on, Ph’theri,” Sciavoni said hastily. “We’re just excited.”

Ph’theri lowered his hand.

“Let me give you an example of trading. Who can read the tides to best advantage? Obviously a swimmer whose mind is evolved by tidal rhythms on his planet. We Signal Traders found after much searching of stars by slow means, a world of Tide Readers. These beings trade us their services. It is a highly assessed trade, and still essential to us—”

“Are they fishes, birds, or what, these Tide Readers’?” enquired a ruddy-faced Navy man, whom Sciavoni recollected was involved in a project down in Miami to train whales and dolphins to service subsea stations and defuse mines—one of the leading hunters for the key to the so-called Cetacean Languages.

Ph’theri fluttered a hand impatiently.

“They read atmosphere tides, but theirs is a gasgiant world, and they are methane swimmers—”

“Fair question, you’ll admit, Sciavoni,” the sailor apologized in a blustery way. “Maybe we’ve got ourselves a tradeable commodity in our whales. Whales as starship pilots, imagine—”

“We saw your whales on television,” Ph’theri retorted dismissively. “You have no concept of the tide forces operating in a gasgiant. There is no analogy on this planet. Only the gasgiant is as vast and complex as the star tides. Even so, the Tide Readers need our machines to stand between their minds and the reality—”

“You can’t build machines to read these tides yourself?” the sailor grunted, disappointed.

“Let me explain. We did not evolve in that way. But the Tide Readers did. Tide-reading is an inherited part of their reality, coded into their nervous systems. We Sp’thra cannot instinctively read the tides, no matter what machine-assist is used. Yet the steersman has to be a living being, to react flexibly enough. We buy this ability of theirs—”

Yet hereabouts the alien’s cool detachment evaporated. A queer change seemed to be coming over him. Like a medium going into a spirit trance, he began to elaborate, almost lyrically:

“’Their-Reality’, ‘Our-Reality’, Tour-Reality’—the mind’s concepts of reality based on the environment it has evolved in—all are slightly different. Yet all are a part of ‘This-Reality’—the overall totality of the present universe—”

His voice rose shrill with emphasis.

“Yet Other-Reality outside of this totality assuredly exists! We mean to grasp it!”

His eyes blinked rapidly. He licked his lips in a lizardy way.

“There are so many ways of seeing This-Reality, from so many viewpoints. It is these viewpoints that we trade for. You might say we trade in realities—”

Like a patent medicine salesman launching into his spiel—or was it more like an obsessed visionary? The latter was perhaps nearer the truth, Sole decided, as the alien talked on raptly:

“We mean to put all these different viewpoints together, to deduce the entire signature of This-Reality. From this knowledge we shall deduce the reality modes external to It—grasp the Other-Reality, communicate with it, control it!”

“So then,” broke in Sole, getting excited himself, “what you people are doing is exploring the syntax of reality? Literally, the way a whole range of different beings ‘put together’ their picture of reality? You’re charting the languages their different brains have evolved, in order to get beyond this reality in some way? That’s the idea?”

“Nice,” conceded Ph’theri. “You read our intention well. Our destiny is to signal-trade at right angles to This-Reality. That is the tide of our philosophy. We have to journey out at right angles to this universe. By superimposing all languages. And our language inventory for This-Reality is nearly done—”

Sole was not interrupting now—as the others had been with their clamour about technology—but clearly touching upon an obsessive chord deep in the alien, harmonizing with his people’s search among the stars.

Sciavoni was nervous at first; then accepted Sole’s lead as the only visible thread in the labyrinth.

Ph’theri regarded him sadly.

“The length of time already elapsed is agony to us—”

“Agony? Why is that?”

“Perhaps the answer will mean nothing to you. It is our quest, not yours, to go at right angles to This-Reality. Maybe a quest specific to our species?”

Sole recalled the stringy, bitch face of Dorothy Summers as she raised a logical quibble some time ago at Haddon during one of their bull sessions there.

He shook his head in bewilderment.

“This idea of getting outside of the reality you’re already part of—it’s illogical,” he protested. “Reality determines how you view things. There’s no such thing as a perfect external observer. Nobody can move outside themselves or conceive of something outside of the scope of the concepts they’re using. We’re all embedded in what you call This-Reality’—”

“It may be illogical in This-Reality. But in para-Reality, other systems of logic apply…”

Harking back, as an anchor, to Dorothy’s preoccupation with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sole felt tempted to quote the Austrian philosopher’s bleak summing up of how much, and how little, human beings could ever hope to know.

“Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must keep silent—” he murmured.

“If that’s your philosophy,” the alien said haughtily, “it is not ours.”

“In fact it isn’t our philosophy at all,” Sole rejoined more briskly. “We humans are constantly searching for ways to voice the unvoicable. The sheer desire to discover boundaries already implies the desire to pass beyond them, I suppose.”

The alien shrugged. (His own native gesture? Or was he picking up the gesture speech of human beings already?)

“You cannot hope to explore all the boundaries to reality on one single world, with only one intelligent species working on the problem. That isn’t science. That is… solipsism. I think that’s the word.”

“Yes, that’s the word—defining the universe in terms of one individual.”

As the alien spoke, Sole marvelled at the extent of Ph’theri’s stock of words—wondered exactly how the trick was done. Neural implant of so much information?

“One planet is solipsism. The Sp’thra duty is to avoid solipsism to the nth degree.”

“But we’re all embedded in one universe ultimately, Ph’theri. That’s a sort of solipsism nobody can escape. Or by ‘one reality’ do you mean one galaxy? Are other galaxies other modes of reality? Do you people plan on intergalactic travel?”

An overwhelming impression of a huge wild sorrow came from the alien’s gently-bulging, widespaced eyes. A wise calf waiting outside the slaughterhouse kind of look.

“No. All the galaxies of This-Reality obey the same general laws. We are searching for another reality. We have to achieve it. We are so late.”

Again, this time factor.

“The problem,” Ph’theri said dismally, “is what a two-dimensional being would face, trying to behave three-dimensionally: to the mocking laughter and love-taunts of superior three-dimensional beings—”

It sounded like nonsense or some kind of schizophrenia. Whose mocking laughter? Whose love? Whose taunts?

Sole decided to get back on a more solid footing.

“It all comes down to the laws of physics and chemistry that govern this reality, doesn’t it, Ph’theri? Those decide how much we can ever know—or communicate. How much the brain of Man or Alien can think.”

“True.”

“We ourselves are experimenting with chemical techniques to improve the brain’s capacity. We want to seek out the exact boundaries of universal grammar.”

Several Americans and Russians stared at Sole. He was aware he was giving something confidential away, but didn’t care right then.

“That approach is worthless,” Ph’theri said impatiently. “Chemical techniques? Trial and error? Don’t you realize there are a myriad conceivable ways in which proteins can be combined to code information? More than the sum total of atoms in this planet of yours! The rules of reality can only be understood by superimposing the widest range of languages from different worlds upon one another. There is the one and only key to This-Reality—and the way out.”

Sole nodded.

“Ph’theri, another question I must ask—what you’re saying now, is it being monitored and aided in some way? Your fluency has me worried.”

Ph’theri pointed a finger at the scarlet wires leading from his lips and paper-bag ears into his chest pack.

“True. This is sending signals through the ship outside into the language machines in our larger ship in the sky. It is also a witness to our trade negotiations. With machine-assist, I save time. Vocabulary fast-scan. Heuristic parameters for new words—”

“Yet even without this machine link-up you speak English—by direct programming into the brain, you said?”

“Yes, though not so easily. The technique is…”

“… I know, tradeable. Was I wasting time just now, asking about grammar and reality?”

“No. We are understanding each other at the optimum rate. We thank you. And assess it highly.”

“That’s good. But I suppose you want to get on to what we’re going to trade each other. You talked about buying realities—”

There were instant protests in the room. Voices cutting Sole down to size. Insisting that he didn’t have any mandate to negotiate.

Ph’theri raised both arms high in a histrionic gesture.

“There is low likelihood we find any trade worth losing the tide for, on this world. In too many ways you are predictable. So, is this your representative, or not?”

“Let’s hear Dr Sole bargain on our behalf,” growled Stepanov, “since that is apparently unavoidable. We’re not at the United Nations now. I’m sorry to say we’re in an auction room—and the bidding has already commenced.”

Zwingler nodded sarcastically in Sole’s direction; and Sciavoni squeezed the Englishman’s elbow surreptitiously, like an embarrassed godfather.

“Touchy impatient bastard! Do your best, Chris.”

Yet Sole felt suspicious of loopholes in this alien’s logic and integrity. For bargaining is a competition, not a free exchange of gifts.

“Presumably you want information about human languages?” he said, gently detaching himself from Sciavoni’s grasp.

“Yes. So long as we select the format—”

Sole tried another tack. Laid down a challenge.

“I think you’re being dishonest, Ph’theri. All this business about you people being the right ones to assess values, on account of you came here first—and pushing off if we don’t behave ourselves. In fact, we came out to you to start the trading, when we gave you a language to trade in, out by the Moon. That cost us some effort—as much effort for a culture at our stage, maybe, as it costs you to hop from star to star. We have a right to assess the value too. What you’ve told us—it’s interesting, but it’s pretty thin and mystical-sounding, a lot of it. Not like what we gave you—a complete working language. Which, by the way, tells you a hell of a lot about us human beings and our outlook on reality. I’d say you’re already in our debt—you’re just trying to browbeat us with these threats about leaving, to get something on the cheap!”

For the first time since his arrival, Ph’theri seemed nonplussed—stood there wasting time, while the seconds drew out visibly. Sole noticed how the Nevada skyline was lightening with premonitions of dawn.

Finally Ph’theri clasped his hands together.

“Some credit is owing to you, true. But in some situations no-information is valuable. Who knows, the fact that we have not flown over your cities may be highly assessed by you?”

Sole ignored this, despite venomous looks darted at him, and argued strenuously:

“You can’t possibly trade without an agreed system of communication, Ph’theri. Right? We gave you that when we gave you the key to English. Right? But by giving you it, we gave you the outline idea of all human language as such—since all human languages are related deep down. You want to buy an exact description of human language, to get at our basic set of concepts? I’d say you’re already some way there for free, thanks to us!”

Ph’theri waved an orange palm cursorily.

“May we appear over your cities? Interest ourselves in recording architectural and urban data?”

“We would prefer,” intervened Sciavoni nervously, “to arrange tours for you. There’s such a lot of air traffic over our cities, you see. The system’s really very complicated—”

“So you accept the pay-off?”

Ph’theri’s question produced an awkward hush. Nobody was willing to commit themselves. During the silence that followed, the alien’s paper-bag ears inflated to pick up tiny sounds, brought him by the scarlet wires.

Ph’theri was the first to speak.

“The Sp’thra make the following offer for what we want to buy,” he said to Sole. “We will tell you the location of the closest unused world known to us, habitable by you. The location of the nearest intelligent species known to us ready to engage in interstellar communication, together with an effective means of communication using modulated tachyon beams. Finally, we offer you an improvement on your current technology for spaceflight within your solar system—”

“In return for which you want more tapes and grammar books on microfilm?”

“No. That has been your mistake all along. Tapes and books cannot provide a full model of language in action. We need six units programmed with separate languages as far removed from each other as possible.”

“Units?”

“We need working brains competent in six linguistically diverse languages. Six is an adequate statistical sample—”

“You mean human volunteers, to go back home to your planet with you?”

“Leave Earth for the stars?” cried an American whose face—younger then, grinning toothily from the cover of Newsweek—Sole remembered from one of the Apollo missions. “I’d sure say yes to that, even if it did mean never coming home again. That’s the human spirit.” The astronaut stared defiantly round the room, as though he’d staked a claim to something.

“No,” Ph’theri retorted sharply. “That isn’t reasonable. To have our ship crowded with a zoo of beings on the loose. We have been trading with many worlds. If we took beings on board from every one—”

“That globe of yours looks big enough.”

“And I say it is full—it carries the space tide drive, which is not small. The planetary drive. And the ecology for the methane Tide Readers, who are huge beings.”

“But, methane breathers I We humans can fit in with you, surely,” the astronaut begged. “You’re just wearing a simple air filter.”

“Atmospherically compatible you may be. Whether culturally compatible, is very doubtful.”

“Then what do you mean if not live human beings!”

“What we say—language-programmed brains. In working order. Separated from the body. Machine-maintained compactly.”

“You want to cut a human brain out of its body and keep it alive in a machine for you to experiment on?”

“The requirement is for six brains, programmed with different languages. And instruction tapes.”

“Jesus Christ,” murmured Sciavoni.

“Naturally we consult on which units are most suitable,” said Ph’theri.