Ian Watson - The Embedding

“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—”