Ian Watson - The Embedding

The Englishman shook his head.

“No. The problem has to involve all the species in the universe—if you’re approaching it by comparing all their languages. That stands to reason. Unless… is it a sexual problem? I suppose that would be intimately specific to the species. Obsessional, too, into the bargain I”

“A breeding problem? The Sp’thra have no breeding problem on the twin worlds.”

“An emotional problem—a problem of feeling?”

Ph’theri hesitated, though his ears did not modify themselves to listen to any words whispered into them. He considered the question, himself, for what seemed minutes on end.

“There is an emotional area beyond sex, true. You have a word ‘Love’. Perhaps that is the name of the problem. But it is not a problem of love for the Sp’thra mate—that sort of love is a form of solipsism, which we detest: ‘He’ loves himself in the mirror of ‘Herself’. ‘She’ loves herself in the mirror of ‘Himself’. That is to love the signal of the Self. The transmission of the genetic code, the ritual greetings, the embrace gestures are part of this same solipsism. But there is an area of emotion we feel, which involves Bereft Love—that is our problem.” The alien faltered. “The Bereft Love we feel for the Change Speakers—”

Sole waited patiently, but nothing more was forthcoming. The alien had clammed up.

Sciavoni was whispering angrily to the astronomers, “We’ve got to know what makes these creatures tick, before we can judge their honesty. If that involves defining their concepts of Love and Morals, that’s okay by me!”

“Who are these Change Speakers, Ph’theri?” Sole demanded. “Is that another species?”

The alien stared down at the man, disparagingly. Nothing of the missionary about this bastard, thought Sole, wincing under that aged, grey gaze. Slowly—spelling it out to a child—the alien explained his faith… or science… or delusion: a queer fusion of the three that Man would maybe need to hypnotize himself with the like of, if he was ever to drive himself to the Stars.

“They are variable entities. They manipulate what we know as reality by means of their shifting-value signals. Using signals that lack constants—which have variable referents. This universe-here embeds us in it. But not them. They escape. They are free. They shift across realities. Yet when we have successfully superimposed the reality-programmes of all languages, in the moon between the twin worlds, we too shall be free. It has to be soon. The time span to date is One Two Nine Zero Nine, your years—”

“Sweet Christ, this all started thirteen thousand years ago?”

“True. The primitive startings. The first quarrying of the Language Moon. That happened soon after the first dawn of Bereft Love for the Change Speakers. At first exploration went slowly, jumping from star to star. The subsequent discovery of gasgiant Wave Readers approximately Seven Zero Zero Zero years later, saved much time—”

Sole felt horrified at this span of time. What was Homo Sapiens doing then? Painting the cave walls at Lascaux?

“A physical search for the Change Speakers in this Three-Space would be useless,” said the alien meditatively—in a measured, weary way, as though he’d explained all this before across the universe till he was sick of it. “A speech-changing search is the only hope. Only at the places where the languages of different species grate together, presenting an interface of paradox, do we guess the nature of true reality and draw strength to escape. Our language moon will finally reveal reality as a direct experience. Then we shall state the Totality. We shall stand outside of This-Reality and pursue our Bereft Love—”

“Is it Beings you’re searching for, Ph’theri? Or a Being? Or the nature of Being? What?”

“There are races that have many more inflections of the concept ‘Being’ than yourselves,” Ph’theri replied witheringly. “The Change Speakers are para -beings. We Sp’thra feel a deep bereft ‘love’ for them, since they phased with the twin worlds so many years ago. And went away. They change-spoke away from Sp’thra—by modulating their embedding in reality—and left us…

“LEFT US,” he howled terrifyingly, though he did not move or wring his hands or show any sign of tears, as a human being giving vent to such an expression of loss would—he stood, bound up in an alien agony, Cross and Crucified united in the same tall dry form. Raised arms and orange palms would be too feeble a protest to express this pent-up inner grief.

“I don’t get it,” Sole shouted in frustration—though nobody else was making a noise now. Many had moved back from the alien, as if scared. “How do you communicate with creatures that are changing meanings all the time? What sort of permanence is that? But—thirteen thousand years! And you’ve kept this crazy love alive for all that span of time? How—and why?”

Ph’theri’s cry had been like the howl of an untuned radio set—when he got to tune himself in again, his message came through clearly enough, for an alien answer to a human question.

“The Change Speakers desired something when they phased with the Sp’thra—what it was we did not understand. They themselves were hurting with love. Our signal trading quest is to cancel the great sense of their sadness, so that we Sp’thra can be left alone again—without that vibration in our minds, imprinted so many centuries ago by their passage. Yes, they branded us! They left a long echo in their wake. It is the eddy in water left standing in a bowl. A retinal image of a blinding light. We are haunted by the Change Speakers. By this ghost of love, which is pain.”

“Did they ‘phase’ with no other races you’ve met on your travels?” asked Sole. “Has no one else got this echo in their minds?”

“Surely we humans have, in the person of Our Saviour!” an evangelical Southern voice cried out. “I swear it’s God he means, in his alien way—”

Sciavoni made an angry pianissimo gesture.

“No, it’s a collective psychosis,” a Jewish specialist in Abnormal Psychiatry from New York offered as his diagnosis—though he sounded hysterical himself. “These aliens are collectively insane. Their obsessive activity is simply a way of hiding the truth from themselves—by turning their delusory system upside down and externalizing it. All that time ago some collective madness took hold of them. Maybe a genetic mutation. Or some bug they caught on their travels. Maybe they’re breathing their mind poison out into our air and minds right now?” His voice rose giddily. “What have we done to quarantine ourselves and this creature? What’s fifty miles of wild country—to a star virus?”

“Not so,” howled Ph’theri, raising both arms and tick-tacking his thumbs in the utmost anger or agitation. “We Sp’thra are not sick. We are aware . Change Speakers exist—in another reality plane! When they phased with This-Reality, the event set up a resonance which is this Bereft Love and this Anguish and this Grim Haunting all at once. You have not known this. No other race has. The Change Speakers modulate all the reality tangents to the plane of our embedding here. But where they brushed, they set that point in this universe resonating—like a sounded bell in ancient Sp’thra. With the reality-pictures of so many species in our moon, we shall transcend This-Reality as they do, pursue the Change Speakers and—”

Ph’theri hesitated.

“What then?” pressed Sole. The alien’s arms collapsed. A mute, eroded witness to the inexplicable, he admitted:

“We disagree what to do. Signal them? Love them? DESTROY them for the anguish they inflicted on us? Some heretics even suggest that the Change Speakers are ourselves, from some far future or alternative reality. A preecho of our own Evolved Selves resonating back in time—to force us to assassinate them in a future that has grown intolerable to them, but which they cannot escape from of their own will. These future Sp’thra, caught up in the incredible anguish of some unknown situation—perhaps it is Immortality?—can only commit suicide through the agency of their earlier selves; so the story goes—”