Ian Watson: The Embedding

“It has to be run this way, Tom. You see, correcting the speech defects out front, and getting the kids downstairs to speak ‘defective’ languages are like the left and right legs of the same body. Therapy and experiment back each other up, via the computer. We owe a lot to Lionel for the programming—quite a triumph for our computer boy, this!’

Rosson tossed his mane gracefully in acknowledgment. He alone of the staff never seemed bothered or bitchy. His presence had an aura of innocent kindliness about it.

“So you’re busy making language right in the public sector, and wrong in the private? What’s bad for one set of kids helps you work out what’ll be okay for the other set?”

“That’s about it—though words like ‘bad’ create the wrong impression, Tom. I’d rather put it to you that the kids downstairs are learning special languages.”

“How about the nurses—any ethical objections?”

“No problem, Tom. They’re all seconded from the Army Medical Corps.”

“Hmm. Visitors? What about parents?”

“No worries there, either. Regular visiting hours for the public wards. Of course, the ‘special’ kids don’t receive any visitors.”

“Orphans of the storm, eh?”

“Couldn’t put it better myself. You’ll see when we go down there…”

The American glanced round the room, assessing moods and personalities. Then he said casually:

“You talked about operating on the brain-damaged kids out front, before. Cutting out injured tissue. You do the same with the kids downstairs?”

“Christ no!” Sole exploded angrily. “That’s a bloody immoral suggestion. Do you think we’d damage healthy tissue?—for an experiment? The children down below never had any sort of brain damage. They’re fine. They’re healthy!”

“You have to realize they’re his pets, Mr Zwingler,” Dorothy slipped in slyly. “You’d hardly believe our Chris had his own little boy at home—”

“Hmm, this PSF drug,” nodded Zwingler. “It seems a dubious distinction to me—altering the brain by surgery, and altering it by a drug, if the drug’s as long-acting as Sam supposes. What’s the effect exactly?”

He glanced about for another victim, fixed on Friedmann. The Bionics man’s eyes bulged at the tug of his red moons, a rabbit hypnotized by a stoat. He bubbled out an eager string of explanations.

“It’s a way of hastening protein manufacture. A sort of anti-Puromycin—Puromycin blocks protein synthesis, you know, and PSF facilitates it. It works on the Messenger-RNA—”

“So PSF stands for Protein Synthesis, er—Facilitator?”

Friedmann nodded violently.

“A unique lever for improving brain performance!”

“You might say it’s a sort of… superintelligencer?”

“Oh, hardly that, no I don’t think so. No magic increase in intelligence as such—just the learning process being speeded up—”

“Isn’t learning speed the surest indicator of intelligence, though?”

“You have to appreciate the structure of nerve impulses in the brain,” Friedmann rattled on. “The way the short-term electrical signals get fixed as something long-term and chemical. That’s what learning is—this electricity being transformed into something solid. We can’t inject information as such into the brain, like slotting in some miracle memory tape. But what we can do is hurry up the manufacture of protein while the brain is busy learning. We use PSF to help dormant areas of the damaged brain to take over language work more rapidly—”

Zwingler waved a hand, quieting Friedmann.

“But what about the special kids? Chris—you said they don’t have any brain damage. Yet they’re receiving this drug. They must be learning a hell of a lot faster than average kids. So what’s the outcome?”

The rubies sparkled sharply at Sole, amused and testing him.

“Nothing harmful, I assure you,” Sole blushed.

“Oh, I’m sure. I’m just curious—”

Impatiently, Richard Jannis rapped his knuckles on the table.

“Sam—I don’t wish to appear inhospitable but couldn’t you brief Mr Zwingler yourself? Presumably he’s more interested in the Unit’s work than our personalities. Do we really need to leap through the hoops one by one?”

The Director glanced at Jannis irritably. However, it was Zwingler who answered the psychologist directly, with a boyish grin of apology.

“Guess I ought to apologize to you all—I’m afraid my role over here is a delicate one. Investigatory. Yes, it does have to do with personalities. Something pretty big has come up back home. We’re hunting about for people to help us out.”

“What kind of big thing?”

The rubies blushed more apologies—but firm as steel, with a hard cutting edge to them.

“That’s just it. I’d like to get a broader view of the people here before I go into any details—”

Sam slapped a fist on the table.

“I’ll back that up. I want you to regard Tom as a kind of emissary. Emissaries are going to be quite the fashion, eh Tom?”

Zwingler flashed an appreciative look at Sam, with just a hint of a caution in it.

Sam Bax stared round the faces of his staff—pausing momentarily on Rosson, then moving on, having rejected him as in some way unsuitable (too hippy looking?)—or as too vital to the Unit’s functioning…

“Chris—” said the Director firmly, “do you mind filling in Tom on the three worlds before we head down there? The language angle—”

Sole made an effort to concentrate on practical details. Zwingler’s ruby chips signalled attention; their wearer waited quietly behind them, a soft predator in a dark suit.

“Well, ever since Chomsky’s pioneer work, we all assume that the plan for language is programmed into the mind at birth. The basic plan of language reflects our biological awareness of the world that has evolved us, you see. So we’re teaching three artificial languages as probes at the frontiers of mind. We want to find out what the raw, fresh mind of a child will accept as natural—or ‘real’. Dorothy teaches one language to test whether our idea of logic is ‘realistic’—”

“Or whether reality is logical!” sniffed Dorothy—as though she wouldn’t be at all surprised to find reality guilty of such dereliction and was ready to discipline it if she did.

Zwingler looked bored. Only when Sole got on to the subject of the next world, did his attitude change.

“Richard’s interested in alternative reality states—what sort of tensions a language programmed to reflect them might set up in the raw human mind. He’s built a kind of alien world down there, with its own rules—”

“You mean the sort of environment an alien being might actually grow up in, on some other planet?” The American leaned forward eagerly.

“Not exactly—” Sole glanced at Jannis; but the psychologist showed no particular desire to add anything. “It’s more like another—dimension. Built out of a number of perceptual illusions. Richard’s something of a connoisseur of illusions—”

“Yeah, so I notice. Okay, I get the picture. Not a realistic alien planet. More like a kind of philosophical idea of alienness? How about the third world—I guess that’s yours?”

“Yes… Ever heard of a poem by a French writer, Raymond Roussel— New Impressions of Africa ?”

The American shook his head.

“Queer poem. Fact is, it’s practically unreadable. I mean, literally. It’s not that it’s bad—it’s bloody ingenious. But it’s the most crazy example of what we call ‘self-embedding’ in linguistics—and that’s what my children learn—”

“Self-embedding—how would you describe that?”

Having only just finished reading Zwingler’s paper on the language difficulties of astronauts a few hours before, Sole found it hard to credit the American with quite such innocence of the jargon of linguistics as he made out. Nevertheless, he explained.