Ian Watson - The Embedding

This cover sheet read:

SECRET THIS IS A COVER SHEET Basic Security Requirements Are Contained In AR 380-5

THE UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURE OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THE ATTACHED DOCUMENT(S) COULD RESULT IN SERIOUS DAMAGE TO THE UNITED STATES…

There was a full page of warning instructions, ending with the information that the Cover Sheet was not in itself secret, provided no secret document was attached to it. Plain to see that the National Security Agency had thought long and hard about the mad logic of secrecy.

Sole tossed the document back across the desk to Tom Zwingler.

Initially, while he cooled his heels in the National Cryptological Command, he had fretted about Vidya. Latterly, the possible impact of the arrival of these aliens had begun to preoccupy him, generating a mood of semi-euphoric pessimism.

“So you’re orbiting them entirely over oceans?”

“Well—that orbit passes over a lot of shipping and right over Iceland’s capital, but otherwise we’re in the clear. The Soviets are announcing the launching of an expanding balloon reflector on that orbit. We’ll confirm the announcement.”

“Tom, you’ve got to be joking. How many people know already? And how many more will make educated guesses?”

“By the latest count the number in the know is pushing nine hundred fifty. That’s not so huge, considering. It is an unbelievable kind of a secret, after all.”

Sole glanced out of the window at the twilit woods outside. These insulated the buildings from the outside world like another Haddon Unit. Only, this place was so much vaster, so much more technologically hip, so much more secure.

Getting through the security net into the NCC was more than a matter of fitting a couple of keys in a couple of doorways. Now Sole was wearing an identity tab with coded data conveying voice and retina prints as well as his photograph.

Zwingler grinned, catching some of the comparison Sole was making, from the look in his eyes.

“The most elaborate computer system in the world, Chris. Breaking codes and ciphers and inventing them, is kids’ play here. We’ve some of the finest linguists and cryptanalysts and math wizards—”

“I’m flattered,” smiled Sole.

“Ah well, one thing we do lack is any little aliens running round in our basement…”

Zwingler meditated a while, then said thoughtfully:

“It’s always been a way-out possibility, this. Statistically, so many solar systems have to exist out there. If only it could have put off happening for another century! Still, if we can keep it under wraps—”

“What makes you think we would be any better prepared next century? The most you could hope for by then would be a small base on the Moon. A few landings on Mars. Maybe on one of Jupiter’s moons. There’s no essential difference between that, and the state we’re at now—compared with say a century ago. Now seems as good a time as any to sail in here playing our TV shows back at us. Letting Caliban see his features in the mirror. It’s just our particular sickness that we worry about it. How would the Elizabethans have handled it? Probably written epic poems or magnificent new King Lears.”

“I resent it, Chris. I feel like an atheist confronted by the Second Coming in the grand style—angels blowing silver trumpets in the sky.”

“Yes, but you aren’t a disbeliever in that respect. You just said yourself there must be so many other solar systems out there.”

“I still resent it.”

Sole listened to the noise of the building. The muted clatter of a printout. Footfalls. The flatulent bubbling of the water cooler.

“How are you going to stop them flying down to Nevada via Los Angeles, just to take a look at a city? Give all the saucer spotters a field day—”

“Oh, Sherman made it pretty plain which way we want them coming in—a DEW line approach. They’ll see some of the other equipment in orbit—realize what a lot of nuclear tripwires there are in our skies…”

“So we’re the big boys still,” smirked Sole acidly. “Honour restored?”

“That’s as may be,” the other said didactically. “But we can’t afford any loss of cultural confidence, can we? The world’s in a pretty volatile state nowadays.”

The phone burbled softly and Zwingler spoke into it briefly.

“Our plane’s waiting, Chris. Orbiting should start about four hours from now. Leapfrog has just leapt off—NASA didn’t want our frog in a transpolar orbit. Transfer to the Skylab Shuttle system’s a bit awkward from that angle. Oh, and they tell me the Russians are flying to Nevada in their SST. The Concordski thing.”

“That’s bound to attract attention.”

“No, it shouldn’t. Nevada is mostly desert and mountains. We’re not asking these aliens to land in Las Vegas you know.” He smiled dubiously. “Howard Hughes wouldn’t have liked it.”

Sitting on the plane flying West, Sole listened in on the seat earphones to the different stations whose airspace they were passing through. WBNS, Columbus Ohio. WXCL, Peoria Illinois. KWKY, Des Moines Iowa. KMMJ, Grand Island Nebraska.

Station KMMJ was playing some oldies from West Coast acidrock bands.

The Jefferson Airplane sang:

‘Hijack the Starship!

They’ll be building it up in the air ever since 1980

People with a clever plan can assume the role of the Mighty

Hi-jack the Starship!

And our babes’ll wander naked thru the Cities of the Universe—‘

The album was called Blows Against the Empire .

And yet, thought Sole, the Empire still stands strong. Intercepting the first real starship. Orbiting it over oceans where none of the people, except a few frostbitten Icelanders and sailors on the high seas can see it. Flooding the Amazon. Funding through dummy foundations neuro-therapy units in other lands.

He glanced at Zwingler. The American was sleeping like a prim babe in his seat. Wasn’t it a fact that all those who were in the know wanted to get this embarrassing alien business cleared out of the way as quickly and clinically as possible, so that they could get back to their own obsessions again—whether these happened to be the breaking of Chinese codes, the flooding of Brazil… or the rearing of Indo-Pak refugee children to speak alien languages?

Zwingler was right. The visitation was as idiotic and annoying as a bout of flu—but maybe as potentially lethal as a dose of flu had been to isolated tribes in the South Pacific.

So the aliens had invited the Leapfrog crew into a cage of glass—and now this plane was heading for a manmade cage of sand hidden in Nevada. Which raised the question: who was quarantining who?

On Station KMMJ the Jefferson Airplane sang:

‘In nineteen hundred and seventy five

All the people rose from the countryside

To move against you government man

D’you understand?’

Sorry, Jefferson Airplane, murmured Sole, it’s later than that already, and the Empire still stands firm.

Bored with the radio sounds, but unable to sleep, Sole hunted through his pockets till he found Pierre’s letter. Idly, he recommenced reading it.

‘…Their Bruxo is practising with amazing skill that deep embedding of language—that Rousselian embedding which we talked about so long ago in Africa as the most freakish of possibilities.

‘To do this, he makes use of some psychedelic drug. I haven’t yet pinned down the origin of it. Every night he chants the complex myths of the tribe—and the structure of these myths is reflected directly in the structure of the embedded language, which the drug enables him to understand.

This embedded speech keeps the soul of the tribe, their myths, secret. But it also permits the Xemahoa to participate in their myth life as a direct experience during the dance chant. The daily vernacular (Xemahoa A) passes through an extremely sophisticated recoding process, which breaks down the linear features of normal language and returns the Xemahoa people to the space-time unity which we other human beings have blinded ourselves to. For our languages all set a barrier—a great filter—up for us between Reality and our Idea of Reality.