Ian Watson - The Embedding

“That’s good. But I suppose you want to get on to what we’re going to trade each other. You talked about buying realities—”

There were instant protests in the room. Voices cutting Sole down to size. Insisting that he didn’t have any mandate to negotiate.

Ph’theri raised both arms high in a histrionic gesture.

“There is low likelihood we find any trade worth losing the tide for, on this world. In too many ways you are predictable. So, is this your representative, or not?”

“Let’s hear Dr Sole bargain on our behalf,” growled Stepanov, “since that is apparently unavoidable. We’re not at the United Nations now. I’m sorry to say we’re in an auction room—and the bidding has already commenced.”

Zwingler nodded sarcastically in Sole’s direction; and Sciavoni squeezed the Englishman’s elbow surreptitiously, like an embarrassed godfather.

“Touchy impatient bastard! Do your best, Chris.”

Yet Sole felt suspicious of loopholes in this alien’s logic and integrity. For bargaining is a competition, not a free exchange of gifts.

“Presumably you want information about human languages?” he said, gently detaching himself from Sciavoni’s grasp.

“Yes. So long as we select the format—”

Sole tried another tack. Laid down a challenge.

“I think you’re being dishonest, Ph’theri. All this business about you people being the right ones to assess values, on account of you came here first—and pushing off if we don’t behave ourselves. In fact, we came out to you to start the trading, when we gave you a language to trade in, out by the Moon. That cost us some effort—as much effort for a culture at our stage, maybe, as it costs you to hop from star to star. We have a right to assess the value too. What you’ve told us—it’s interesting, but it’s pretty thin and mystical-sounding, a lot of it. Not like what we gave you—a complete working language. Which, by the way, tells you a hell of a lot about us human beings and our outlook on reality. I’d say you’re already in our debt—you’re just trying to browbeat us with these threats about leaving, to get something on the cheap!”

For the first time since his arrival, Ph’theri seemed nonplussed—stood there wasting time, while the seconds drew out visibly. Sole noticed how the Nevada skyline was lightening with premonitions of dawn.

Finally Ph’theri clasped his hands together.

“Some credit is owing to you, true. But in some situations no-information is valuable. Who knows, the fact that we have not flown over your cities may be highly assessed by you?”

Sole ignored this, despite venomous looks darted at him, and argued strenuously:

“You can’t possibly trade without an agreed system of communication, Ph’theri. Right? We gave you that when we gave you the key to English. Right? But by giving you it, we gave you the outline idea of all human language as such—since all human languages are related deep down. You want to buy an exact description of human language, to get at our basic set of concepts? I’d say you’re already some way there for free, thanks to us!”

Ph’theri waved an orange palm cursorily.

“May we appear over your cities? Interest ourselves in recording architectural and urban data?”

“We would prefer,” intervened Sciavoni nervously, “to arrange tours for you. There’s such a lot of air traffic over our cities, you see. The system’s really very complicated—”

“So you accept the pay-off?”

Ph’theri’s question produced an awkward hush. Nobody was willing to commit themselves. During the silence that followed, the alien’s paper-bag ears inflated to pick up tiny sounds, brought him by the scarlet wires.

Ph’theri was the first to speak.

“The Sp’thra make the following offer for what we want to buy,” he said to Sole. “We will tell you the location of the closest unused world known to us, habitable by you. The location of the nearest intelligent species known to us ready to engage in interstellar communication, together with an effective means of communication using modulated tachyon beams. Finally, we offer you an improvement on your current technology for spaceflight within your solar system—”

“In return for which you want more tapes and grammar books on microfilm?”

“No. That has been your mistake all along. Tapes and books cannot provide a full model of language in action. We need six units programmed with separate languages as far removed from each other as possible.”

“Units?”

“We need working brains competent in six linguistically diverse languages. Six is an adequate statistical sample—”

“You mean human volunteers, to go back home to your planet with you?”

“Leave Earth for the stars?” cried an American whose face—younger then, grinning toothily from the cover of Newsweek —Sole remembered from one of the Apollo missions. “I’d sure say yes to that, even if it did mean never coming home again. That’s the human spirit.” The astronaut stared defiantly round the room, as though he’d staked a claim to something.

“No,” Ph’theri retorted sharply. “That isn’t reasonable. To have our ship crowded with a zoo of beings on the loose. We have been trading with many worlds. If we took beings on board from every one—”

“That globe of yours looks big enough.”

“And I say it is full—it carries the space tide drive, which is not small. The planetary drive. And the ecology for the methane Tide Readers, who are huge beings.”

“But, methane breathers I We humans can fit in with you, surely,” the astronaut begged. “You’re just wearing a simple air filter.”

“Atmospherically compatible you may be. Whether culturally compatible, is very doubtful.”

“Then what do you mean if not live human beings!”

“What we say—language-programmed brains. In working order. Separated from the body. Machine-maintained compactly.”

“You want to cut a human brain out of its body and keep it alive in a machine for you to experiment on?”

“The requirement is for six brains, programmed with different languages. And instruction tapes.”

“Jesus Christ,” murmured Sciavoni.

“Naturally we consult on which units are most suitable,” said Ph’theri.

Lionel Rosson tossed his hair fitfully as he came into Haddon Unit out of the crisp January air, unshouldering his sheepskin coat hastily as he encountered the wall of heat.

And how about the hothouse growths within?

Damn Sole for a bastard, ducking out of sight at this first sign of trouble on his mysterious errand to America. Leaving Rosson, like some little Dutch boy, to stick his thumb in the leaking dyke. Then watch helplessly as the cracks got wider and wider.

Sole’s alibi was really as thin as ice. If Sam Bax didn’t keep up the illusion of its solidity by skating over it.

Who had that man Zwingler been?

And what was this instant-mash ‘Verbal Behaviour Seminar’ the American had invited Sole to attend? Rosson’s private theory was that some space tragedy had happened that no one had been told about. Some radical breakdown in communication with the long-flight astronauts as they swung round the world for months on end in Skylab. They’d been expelled from the womb of Earth, with its comforting tug of gravity and its well-spaced sunrises and half a hundred other natural and necessary signals, longer than any other men had been. Had they altered their patterns of thinking to fit some new celestial norm? Or fallen in between two stools—bastards of Earth and of the Stars? And now they needed rescue—conceptual rescue, before they could be rescued physically. Was that it?

A memory nagged at him—something he’d read years ago, that the initiate to the Orphic Rites in ancient Greece had to learn by heart for recitation after death. ‘I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven. Give me to drink of…’ Of what? The waters of forgetfulness—or the waters of memory? One of the two; but he couldn’t remember which it had been. Yet the distinction was critical. Perhaps it was critical too, for the Skylab astronauts.