Bud Sparhawk: Sam Boone and the Thermal Couple

“Are you sure that your interface can be hooked to an ansible?” his translator chirped plaintively to Sslivira later that day, hoping that the Rix and Ja’aar engineers were up to the effort. “Click, clickety, click, da-da-da, da-da-da” the two agreed: “It is possible.”

He had time later to wonder what in the world the interface at Gruenbrgg would be like. Maybe, he thought with a shudder, he’d rather not know.

Sam fumed as the days dragged on. All of this damned positioning and increase in team size was eating up his profit as well as ruining his disposition. To make matters worse, he still couldn’t use the Ja’aar toilet in his suite, luxurious though it might be. Ever since he had arrived he’d had to use the transit facilities in the nearest common chamber, which was damned inconvenient, not to mention crowded with other inconvenienced aliens. His periodic trips to the facility must have been confusing to the Ja’aar, who could easily conclude that humans had some very strange social habits to go with their weird appearance. He occasionally considered asking Rix engineers to construct a human toilet for him without letting his hosts know, but dismissed the idea since he was sure that he would be around that much longer.

Then again, maybe he should reconsider.

The Ja’aar engineers grew an insulating shell about the Sutr’s habitat and brought the temperature nearby down below the boiling point. Within this shell the Rix team had placed a confusing array of lights, pipes, tubes, and other apparatus that Sam couldn’t hope to describe adequately. A small furnace and smelter appeared to be hooked up to a thick torus that was pressed tightly against a wall festooned with a variety of various sized tanks and containers.

“Is analyzer and fabricator,” explained Sslivira in her rhythmic clicking speech. “We capture, we analyze, we transmit. The Resnicca’s exhalations return and we blend the response from the supply attached. Awkward, but possible to work.”

Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t, Sam thought as he sketched out the tortuous chain of translation that would take place with each bit of dialogue: To speak to the Ginnungagup he had to first translate his speech into Glax, by now almost a second language for him, so that the translator would work—humans didn’t comprise enough of a population to make it worthwhile programming their languages into it. The translator would convert his Glax to the blinking lights that Sallow Yellow Orange could understand. The Imperial would then somehow transmit(?) its version to the Gamerians who, after consultation on the meaning, would boom their understanding of the transaction through the interface of the Ginnungagup. A response would follow the same tortuous chain back to him, with Sallow Yellow Orange and the Gamerian trying to figure out what had been said and how to translate that into something that the tiny human brain could grasp.

How in the hell had he expected this to work? It had proven to be like those old games of his youth where you would whisper a story to the person beside you and have that person pass it on. By the time it went through four or five parties the story would have changed beyond belief. If the same principle applied here then what hope did he have of achieving understanding between the two? Where the story passers at least had common language and culture, this cobbled-up arrangement had none.

Sam recalled their first attempt at a dialogue. “What are your objectives?” he had said in Glax so that the translator could turn it into clicks and blinks. After that he watched in wonder as Sslivira and Sallow Yellow Orange started to work on their sides of the path. His translator gave him some hint of each interface as the two consulted with their conceptual helpers.

According to his translator the Im-pedal had flashed to the Gamerian “[?]… spectrum of… [?]… with brilliance… [?]” The Gamerian pondered these words for a moment and boomed a reply at a frequency just far enough below Sam’s level of hearing to give him an enormous headache. Several more interchanges of confusing dialogue took place before the Gamerian finally activated the interface and boomed out something to the Ginnungagup that rattled everything in the station.

Moments passed before the thundering reply began, which the Garnerians immediately rephrased for the Imperial who had turned to Sam and blinked sadly, “Cows are wettest in the Spring tides.”

He shuddered when he thought of what had come from the other side where gasbags and plasmas engaged in a long-range spitting contest. Their nonsensical reply had been etched into his mind. “Sweet rides the death of flavor.”

From such modest beginnings grew a dialogue that, despite massive nonsense and setbacks, occasionally began to make some sense. They had, for example, established identification of each other’s names and Sam’s role in the matter.

There it seemed to stop for days on end as the giants boomed and shook the station with their exchange and the spitting, fuming cage flashed and sent out blasts of heat. It appeared that anything beyond very basic exchanges of facts between the two races quickly grew into a mass of misunderstandings and miscommunica-tions. It was almost as if some unseen force was bent on frustrating and confounding the efforts of one poor human negotiator to wring an agreement from the pair.

Needless to say, Ahbbbb was growing very displeased with his progress.

A week later, and considerably further into his profit margin, Sam was even more frustrated. After the latest blast of the toms into the chamber as a result of a Resnicca exhalation light-years away, the Sutr glittered briefly as bits and pieces were thrown back and forth among themselves. From their reply to his latest query he could tell that Lattice 5 12, the leader of the Sutr, wasn’t able to understand the concept of compromise. From what he understood of what Lattice 5 12was saying, the hateful aliens could not be trusted to keep any agreement. “Cold without salt,” was the metaphorical translation. A promise from the Ginnungagup to schlep around the outer fringes while the Sutr basked in the photosphere of the sun mattered little to them.

Nor had Sloosh, that frozen blimp who represented the Ginnungagup, seemed to grasp the idea of sharing the system with the Sutr. “Holding the warmth of my God,” he had boomed through the translation chain in a surprising burst of near clarity that startled Sam and gave fragile rise to hope that there had been a communications breakthrough of some sort.

That clear statement at least made some sort of sense; implying that the cold creatures had a religion. Only later did he come to realize that it was not a Ginnungagup translation at all. It had been the intermediary Gameri-an’s request to be excused to go to the (bathroom?).

Sam wondered for the hundredth time in as many days what he had gotten himself into. It was starting to appear as if even the extension grudgingly won from his supervisor wouldn’t give him enough time to complete this assignment. “Why the hell can’t we find some basis for a dialogue?” he clicked, chirped, and flashed to his multiracial helpers.

The flashing, clicking, chirping response was almost too much for his tiny translation machine to handle, but the sum of their statements ran like this. “Conveying information is more than simply ensuring that the words are correctly spoken. It is also necessary that the proper concepts be conveyed by those words.”

“Apparently neither of the parties have any metaphors in common,” blinked the closing phrase from Sallow Yellow Orange.

Sam considered this with some skepticism. Every civilized life form had the same six basic needs: nourishment, protection, reproduction capability, socialization, acquisitive greed, and a trip to Disneyland on Earth. In every dispute he had ever mediated one of those had been the basis for achieving agreement between something entirely new in the Universe, he should be able to find the common ground for agreement in at least one of these areas.