Ian Watson: The Embedding

Still, Dorothy had put her foot down when it came to choosing names for the children. The two boys were called Aye and Bee; the two girls Owe and Zed—symbols in a logical equation.

Although there was nothing glum about the children. “They’re dancers,” Zwingler said, impressed.

“Did you know,” remarked Rosson amiably, “that honeybees evolved their communication system away from the direction of sound to that of dance? Only primitive bees still use noises. Evolved bees developed the aerial dance to express themselves more logically. Let’s hope these children dance I Would you like to see them standing still uttering formal propositions like a group of chessmen? Oh no, Tom. We teach by dance as well as words—”

On the wall screen large abstract patterns pulsed—computer feedback from the dance; and words were spoken to the kids, whose syntax reflected these patterns.

“The trouble with logical languages, Mr Zwingler,” said Dorothy, “is there’s no redundancy in them—”

“You mean you can’t employ them?” grinned Zwingler.

An awkward silence fell. Schoolma’am Dorothy was peeved.

“Curiously, that is what she means,” murmured Rosson, coming to the rescue. “Redundancy may be a dirty word in industrial relations—too many people to do the job. That’s why the brain works so well though—plenty of back-up systems.”

“Sorry, Miss Summers, just teasing. You mean normal language has to carry more than is necessary—in case we miss part of the message. So you’ve got some kind of noise-reducing strategy in operation here?”

Dorothy still sulked, so Rosson had to explain: “We’ve built the redundancies into the design of the room itself, and into the kids’ activities, particularly the dance. This way we can do without redundancies in the design of the language—”

Sole touched Rosson on the arm, strangely moved, as soon as Zwingler was heading down the corridor again.

“Beautiful scene, Lionel. You’ve got something good going on in there. But listen, a nasty thing happened to my Vidya. Could we talk? Not now, though. Not with this fellow here—”

“Sure, Chris.”

As Zwingler approached the final room, Richard Jannis called out a warning to him, dryly.

“Don’t get giddy, friend—”

But the American disregarded this piece of advice, as merely another example of Jannis’s unhelpfulness.

Consequently he found himself staring into the third room, unprepared. Lost his balance. Fell forward.

Instinctively his hand darted out to save himself and slapped against the glass. The psychologist snatched him back by the shoulders, roughly, like a child.

“Don’t hit the aquarium, fellow. You’ll scare the fish—”

“Sorry,” grunted Zwingler, as shocked by this sudden assault on his person, as by the way the room interfered with his sense of balance.

The room had its usual effect of vertigo on Sole too; however, he was prepared for it. Rooting himself to the plane of the corridor, he let his mind drop away in free fall through the twisted depths beyond the window.

It always reminded him of the illusion worlds of Maurits Escher—where towers rear up, only to turn in upon themselves like Moebius strips, and stairways lead up to platforms, located by some sleight of hand at the foot of those selfsame stairways; where figures prowl hallways which surely must rotate through a higher dimension, to enable the inhabitants thus to meet their own images heading across the ceilings towards them.

The nearest child, a girl, sat hugely picking her nose, staring at remote distances. She looked like a great smooth sexless giantess—the boy who seemed to be standing right next to her, was only the size of one of her legs. As they watched, a second boy walked down a stairway. Half-way down he disappeared from view, apparently into thin air…

“All done with mirrors, as they say?” laughed Zwingler nervously.

“Not only mirrors,” retorted Jannis, keeping hold of the American while he spoke snappily about Necker Cube illusions, holographic projections, use of polarized light and variably sensitive interfaces…

“You’ve got to train before you go in, like an astronaut for free fall?”

“It could be a useful stamping ground for future astronauts,” Jannis granted. “The sort of concept world inhabited by the kids is perhaps more intriguing, though—”

Sole chewed on his lower lip. He could visualize Rama and Vidya emerging from their world one day all right. He could see Aye and Bee dancing out of theirs. But Richard’s kids? How could they ever emerge safely into the real world? These were true prisoners of illusion.

Tom Zwingler swung away from the window as soon as Jannis released him, recovering his crisp confidence swiftly.

“I thank you for giving up your afternoon, Miss Summers, gentlemen. I realize the nuisance. Could I take up just a little more of Chris’s time, upstairs, Sam?”

As they walked back towards the lift, Sole stared into the first room, annoyed and nervous, but Vidya seemed to be behaving himself.

Those holy fathers did their damnedest to drag me back to their view of reality. I almost went out of my head. There are things of so much greater importance going on here in this shabby jungle village amongst these so-called ‘ignorant’ savages than in their bloody Bethlehem or at that miraculous dam of theirs.

Ironically, they might just have made some headway with the Xemahoa by concentrating on Bethlehem and the miracle birth. But no, they would go at it opportunistically. All that nonsense about Noah’s Ark! A flood is rising, O my people. Once there was a man beloved of God who built himself a great big dugout canoe. And in this canoe he floated downstream with all his family and goats and chickens and macaws till he reached a large well-appointed reception centre on a hillside—easily recognizable by its bright tin roofs—some way beyond the Great Orange Wall.

Meddling imbeciles! I’m only just getting to the root of what is going on here, and I tell you it is delicate.

A cautious, inbred people, these Xemahoa. Had it not been for Kayapi mediating between us, I don’t know how I would have got anywhere. I might have taken it for ’just’ another human tragedy. ‘Just’ another example of human flotsam being washed away by the tide of Progress. Like any of the other flooded-out tribes.

Oh, but they have their plans about the Flood, these Xemahoa!

Those priests never dreamt that they’re expecting a birth as part of their answer. Even now a woman is coming to term in the taboo hut outside the village. The Bruxo visits her every day, to chant to her and give her the drug they call ‘maka-i’. I suspect it is his own child gestating in her womb—conceived in the drug trance he undertook as soon as he first divined the coming of the flood. And divine it he did, from God knows what signs. Months ago! If the Holy Fathers could have known of that pregnancy, what a field day they would have had—they would have pulled Bethlehem and Mary out of their bag of tricks then, I’ll warrant.

When the Xemahoa laughed at the priests, those good men were offended by their reception. Hostility, martyrdom, poisoned arrows—that is acceptable, excellent. Straight off to the Pearly Gates. But laughter? They ought to have realized that there is laughter—and laughter. They should have had more experience of the moods of these people than myself. I only understood when Kayapi explained the distinction his people make between types of laughter.

A useful man, Kayapi—but one thing he certainly isn’t is ‘my faithful Kayapi’ or ‘my man Friday’ as that priest Pomar seemed to think. The secret of his devotion is presumably the tape recorder. I guess he follows me round and answers my questions mainly because of the machine. In its own crude way it apes the drugged speech of the Bruxo that Chris Sole would have called ‘embedded speech’. By leaping back and forth along the tapespool it transmutes what I call Xemahoa A into Xemahoa B—or something like it. If I didn’t have longlife batteries in the machine and it was running down and wheezing to a halt, my faithful Kayapi might be off soon enough.