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.
The spacecraft was not obviously extrasolar in origin. Humans were creative enough to have come up with just about every possible design that would still be spaceworthy, and the visitor was rather utilitarian. It was mostly made up of a spherical fuel tank and a large fusion rocket nozzle. The crew quarters, if there were any, were probably somewhere in the middle, protected from radiation and micrometorite impacts. Other than the complete lack of external markings or decoration and the absence of a licensed transponder signal, it was exactly like any other long haul transport.
“So what’s first?” Seymour asked. “The bogie or the Wernicke’s people?”
“I’m going to land on the TNO,” Dane said. “It looks like our visitors are already there.” There was a lander parked near the colony dome, and the lack of metorite scaring on the freshly melted ice told them it had been there only a short while. “I’ll send you over to talk to these people.” “Me? Why do I have to go?”
“It’s what you’re good at, remember? You’re the bridge between the Group and everyone else.”
“How do you suppose I get inside? They won’t even talk to us.” Dane shrugged and prepared to set Farchild down an equal distance from the visitor’s lander and the colony dome. “I doubt they have to lock the door in this neighborhood. I imagine you just walk in.”
In two hours, Seymour did just that. He fussed and fidgeted with his pressure suit, procrastinated and dithered about how to work the airlock on the colony dome, but finally he left Farchild and crossed the twenty meters of dry ice and helium snowdrifts to the only obvious entrance.
“The airlock seems to be working just fine,” he said over the radio. “You’re right, it isn’t locked. Of course now it wants me to wait until my suit warms up before it will open the inner door.”
“You’ve got a function on your display that will speed that up,” Opey told him. “It’s under environmental features.”
“Got it, thanks. The door is opening now. Well, someone is home after all.” Seymour was greeted at the door by three curious people. He stepped into the antechamber and began to remove his pressure suit.
“Hi, I hope you don’t mind, I let myself in. I didn’t get any response on the radio, and I wasn’t sure if there was anyone in here.” He set his helmet on a low bench and began to shrug off the bulky suit. “My name’s Seymour Gladstone. I’m with the Coordinator Group. I’m an ombudsman.”
The three people, a middle aged man and woman, and an elderly gentleman, stared at him and said nothing.
“That’s just a fancy word for go-between,” Seymour went on. “I’m like an ambassador. I suppose you’ve noticed the space craft orbiting your little world here and the lander that’s sitting outside the door? We’ve actually come to talk to them, but we’d sure appreciate your help.” Seymour finished folding his suit as neatly as he could and placed it on the bench next to his helmet. “So, what are your names?”
“Ammma daleda kooshorol,” the old man said.
“That’s an interesting …”
“Oh la fa ma na ba baaa ba ba,” the woman interrupted.
“OK,” Seymour smiled at her. “I guess that means you’re a patient here, right? Which one of you is staff?” They probably didn’t go in for uniforms way out here in homesteader land.
“Kalamer joggoh,” the old man answered.
“I’m not quite sure I follow you. You know, I’m hypnotically conditioned to speak almost seventy languages. Sometimes it takes a few more words for the training to kick in. Sounded a little like Swahili?”
“Mencher takesov, na queltin bonto.”
“Gotcha. You must be a patient, too. Well, can you show me to a member of the staff? No? Shall I try down this hallway?” The three patients followed him. “You can come along if you like.”
He pushed off down a curving corridor. The walls were lined with paintings in water, oil, and acrylic. Some were quite good. They covered the entire range of art from abstract expressionism to photograph clarity still life. There were also a few sculptures in what appeared to be ice, displayed inside glass fronted freezer cases.
Fifteen minutes later, Seymour had collected quite a following. There were eleven people, ranging in ages from mid twenties to late nineties, tagging along behind him through the carpeted hallways of the habitat. He found the cafeteria, several apartments, the gardens and the physical plant, but no staff offices.
“Seems odd that the staff hasn’t noticed I’m here,” Seymour mused. “I’ve got just about all the patients here with me. You’d think they’d notice some of them missing from their activities.” He perched himself in a rope sling in the lounge area, and his new friends draped themselves around him, staring. Some of them babbled happily in their own private dialect, while others remained silent or hummed little tunes. A few resumed work on paintings, all abstract and all predominantly red.
“You know, maybe there is no staff. These homesteader habitats just about run themselves. I can’t imagine anyone would be so dedicated as to come all the way out here to this ice ball to take care of people who can’t talk.” He looked around him. “Who here would like to play charades?”
#
“I counted sixteen of them,” Seymour said when he got back to Farchild. “Five women and eleven men. Not a one of them speaks a word or English or any other humanish that I could tell. They don’t read either.”
“So no one is taking care of them?” Opey asked.
“Oh, they seem to be taking care of themselves just fine. The colony is running well. Air is clean, food is good.”
“You ate?” Dane asked.
“Just a little something. I didn’t eat since breakfast. Flatbread, and something that I swear was goat cheese, although I didn’t see any goat. Anyway, I got nowhere with the standard Coordinator Group spiel. I even tried to act it out. Can you imagine, diplomacy through interpretive dance?”
“Well, thanks for making the effort, Seymour. Now we’ll have to come to some decision about this bogie. I don’t imagine we can just suit up and board it like we did with the colony.”
“We may have to do that eventually,” Seymour said. “If we can’t make anything out of their radio communications, we’re going to have to try face to face. Or face to whatever. That’s what we’re here for, after all.”
They managed to avoid the problem of how to board the alien lander. Three hours later, there was movement in the spacecraft. An opening on the side of the vehicle appeared and a small rover emerged.
“Doesn’t look like a human design,” the AI said with Opey’s voice. “But there are many strange designs in the outer system. It’s using rather conventional fuel cells. About four humans could comfortably fit inside, assuming standard shielding.”
“That’s something we can’t assume. Are they headed over here?” Dane asked.
“It looks like they’re heading for the colony dome.”
“Should we go out there and meet them?” Seymour asked.
“Let’s give them their distance,” Dane answered. “We don’t want to spook them.” She pushed away from the window and began to suit up. “But I’m going to get ready anyway, in case they’re here to cause trouble.”
“What can you do if they want to cause trouble?” Seymour reached for his own suit, then pulled back. “You aren’t armed are you?”
“Would a Coordinator ever bring a weapon?” Dane asked. “Of course not. But I couldn’t let them attack that colony without at least trying to help. Opey, you are transmitting this as we go, correct?”
“Yes, M. Zaniff. Standard procedure. They’re at the airlock, and it’s cycling for them.”
“I’m going to follow them,” Dane said. “You two watch the big ship and the lander carefully. If I give the signal, or if you don’t hear from me every two minutes, take off.”
“Be careful, Dane,” Seymour said as she entered the airlock.
Dane made her way across the ice to the colony dome and cautiously peered around the rover but saw nothing. “The rover looks pretty ordinary, other than the lack of markings. It’s door is closed. I’m going through the airlock.”
Once through, she found an empty hallway. She removed her pressure suit in the antechamber, then pushed off down the hallway in search of the visitors. She found them in the cafeteria, with all sixteen Wernicke’s Children seated in a circle around them. Dane drifted into the room and the people glanced at her curiously, but there was no way she could compete with the three visitors sitting in the center of the room. Dane walked around them carefully, but no one reacted to her presence. She kept her hands to herself; she didn’t want to frighten them by touching anything she shouldn’t be touching, but no one objected to her giving the visitors a thorough inspection.
“Well, they’re not humans,” Dane said into the radio clipped to her collar. “Of that we can be sure.”
“So what do the extrasolars look like?” Seymour asked.
“They’re liquid,” Dane told him.
“What does that mean, they’re liquid?”
“I can’t think of any other way to put it, Seymour. The extrasolars are tanks of liquid. Cylindrical clear tanks of red liquid on mechanical carts. There are three of them and they’re hooked up together with clear tubing, and red liquid is moving through the tubing. The carts are quite simple. I’m very close to coming to the conclusion that the liquid is the intelligent part of this setup.”
“Red? Like blood?”
Dane considered for a moment. “Thinner than blood,” she decided.
“How can a liquid thinner than blood be intelligent?”
Dane said nothing for several seconds. “I don’t know, Seymour. I have no experience that would allow me to speculate on the minimum viscosity requirements for an intelligent liquid.”
“Like wine?” Opey asked.
“That’s right,” Dane said.
She heard the sound of Seymour slapping his forehead. “I can’t give them the wine! That would be the most bizarre kind of insult. Like if you met someone and gave them a puppet that looked just like them. Too creepy. Oh, well. I guess we’ll just have to drink it ourselves. The sacrifices we make for the Group. Are you sure there’s nothing solid in the tanks that’s doing the thinking?”
Dane sighed. “Short of grabbing one of them and forcing it through a strainer, I can’t say. Probably not a good idea at this point.”
“So what are they doing over there?” Opey asked.
“Not much. The Wernicke’s people are just sitting around and staring at the extrasolars, and the extrasolars are just sitting in the middle of the room and gurgling. I’ll set up a camera to make some recordings to send back to Solar Prime. We’ll have to search the gurgles for a pattern. They may be trying to communicate.”
“I hope they have better luck than I did,” Seymour said.
#
“What do you think about calling them the Baccha?”
Dane looked up from her analysis of the alien technology, which so far included the nearly featureless interstellar ship, the lander, the six wheeled rover and the mechanical carts. Her analysis so far: the visitors could build things that worked. A lot of the parts looked accreted, by some process like electrolysis, but some were machined. Seymour didn’t believe that liquid creatures could manufacture a space craft, that they must have had some help from another industrial race. Dane accused him of being a solidist, but otherwise ignored his theories.
“Call who, Seymour?”
“The visitors, of course. The extrasolars. You know, after Bacchus, the ancient Greek god of wine.”
Dane frowned at him. “Why do you fill your head with such useless information? Do we have to name them? Can’t we just wait until they tell us who they are before we go off stamping them with some ancient Greek moniker?”
Seymour dismissed that suggestion with a wave. “Oh, they’ll just tell us they’re the People, like everyone does. That’s just, well, boring.”
Dane shook her head. “I saw them first, and I get the right to name them. I choose to let them name themselves.”
“Well,” Seymour said. “It’s like this, Dane. I already, sort of, leaked the name Baccha into my last report. And you know how Sol Prime is. Once they get something in their jaws, it’s hard to pull it back out again.”
Dane sighed. “It isn’t going to make any difference unless we can talk to them. Any progress, Opey?”
Opey was in deep conference with the AI. It took a few seconds for the human to swim up from the connection. “We can detect no pattern to the gurgles,” Opey and the wall speakers said simultaneously. “The connection between the tanks and the mechanical carts is exceedingly simple. Changes in pressure in the tubing tell the carts which way to go. We assume that all of their equipment interfaces work in a similar way. There is not enough complexity of signal to extrapolate to a language.” He called up a screen on his display. “The NMR collar you clipped to the tubing shows complex organic molecules in the red liquid. There is no pattern to the molecules flowing through the tubing between the tanks.”
“Then what are they doing in there?” In the two days since they had set up cameras inside the Wernicke’s Children habitat, they had watched a succession of visitors and cult members sit in one another’s company in the lounge area. When the visitors were present, they sat and gurgled. The humans took turns sitting and smiling. Sometimes they hummed or babbled or painted, or made meaningless gestures, but mostly they just sat and smiled. And had tea.
“The Wernicke’s Children and the Baccha are keeping each other company.” Apparently Opey had been paying enough attention to pick up on the new name for the visitors.
Dane slammed her fist into her palm. “Why do they keep going over there? Why do the visitors feel the need to keep company with brain damaged mutes?”
Even Seymour could see that Dane didn’t want an answer. She pushed over to the communications console and began reading the latest status report from the linguistics operation. “And why do they keep broadcasting radio waves that make no sense? There is no pattern in any of this. Nothing has been repeated since they began.” She whacked the side of the console. “What’s the point?”
She bounced expertly around the small space that was Farchild’s main cabin. Seymour and Opey ducked to avoid her nervous pacing. “I don’t ask much,” she said. “I just want to know where they’re from and why they’re here.”
“Well, I’m sure they’d be happy to tell us if it weren’t for the language barrier,” Seymour said.
“We’re the Coordinator Group,” Dane said. “We don’t have language barriers. We’re the ones who help other people communicate. We’re the god damned experts. But those buckets of juice are over there sitting around with people who can’t even talk to each other. How much more stupid can this situation get?” A chime answered her.
“There’s a message incoming,” Seymour said, pulling over to the communications console that Dane had just been beating up. “It’s from Solar Prime.”
“What’s it about?” Dane asked. “Good news or bad news?”
“Weird news,” Seymour said. “Remember how we were told that these Wernicke’s Children were brain damaged because of a stroke or trauma?” His back was turned so he didn’t see Dane’s finger making a circle, telling him to skip ahead to what she didn’t know. “Well, we assumed wrong. These people are part of a cult. They did this to themselves deliberately.”
“Let me see that,” Dane said, shouldering Seymour aside. “Oh, this is perfect. Some guru convinced these people that language is a barrier to true communication. They all had their Wernicke’s areas surgically ablated.”
According to the memo, the original charter for the Wernicke’s Children colony was written by a psychologist named Sun Park. She theorized that people who had come by Wernicke’s aphasia naturally were able to understand their fellow humans on a deeper level than anyone burdened with language. She had convinced all of these people to have the surgery, and she had found the surgeon who was morally challenged enough to do it to them. Dr. Park had declined the treatment herself, preferring instead to observe the results. She had helped her followers set up the colony, but had left three years after the start of the experiment and had never returned.
Dr. Park had claimed, at the beginning, that the whole thing was a scientific study, not a cult. But there was one major flaw in her experimental design. Something so obvious even a high school student could see it. The results were locked up in the minds of the subjects. There was no way to unblind the study. It may well have worked. The colonists may have had the most profound understanding of one another. But they weren’t telling anyone.
“So I guess the situation can get stupider after all” Dane said. “Not only are the aliens ignoring us in favor of brain damaged mutes, but now we find out that they’re crazy on top of that. Just perfect.”Page 2 | Page 1 | Page 3