Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

“It was the weekend. I was going climbing in the canyon. I stopped at the lab first and I did a full download of the main core, backing up onto memory plates. Standard stuff, belt and suspenders because I like that extra security. Morgan came by as I was finishing up. We had a beer, talked, I ate the lunch I’d packed. Then I left to get my climb in while there was still plenty of daylight. And now … here…”

Jorl nodded, and bit back a smile as the woman’s eyes darted to follow the path of his trunk. He brought it back to center and kept it still, hoping to reestablish her gaze.

“And now here. It’s likely you died that day. The Archetype of Man told me you had suffered an accident while recreating. The you that is talking to me now is an amalgam of you as you were up to about that point in time, and there is nothing of you that existed after.”

The creature bolted upright from the bench. Her eyes widened showing still more white. “The Archetype … You talked to it … Then you, you’re really what you appear to be, an anthropomorphic … an RM!” Her voice cracked with emotion, delight, amazement, awe, all these things but also terror.

“Please, relax. We have plenty of time. For your first question — no, I did not talk with the Archetype of Man, not as I suspect you mean. It’s been destroyed. We communicated as you and I are now. I summoned it and with its help I was able to reach back, unimaginably far into the past, and find you.” He paused, and again his smile crept out. “Thank you for coming. My name is Jorl. Jorl ben Tral.”

Silence as the woman brushed her palms against her thighs. She stepped aside and walked around Jorl in a slow circle.

“I’m Castleman. Chieko Castleman … Chieko.” She stared at Jorl. “Ben Tral?”

Jorl nodded, keeping his trunk steady. “My father was Tral. Tral ben Yarva.”

Castleman stared openly now. Her jaw dropped. “But that’s Hebrew.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s a Hebrew patronymic. Hebrew. The language. Hebrew?”

“I don’t understand. Who is Hebrew.”

“Not a who, a what. It’s a language. Or … was. My father used to speak it sometimes, though not often enough around me for me to pick up more than a few words.” She stopped, shook her head as if to set herself back on track. “Why do you have a Hebrew patronymic? For that matter, why are you speaking English?”

Jorl shrugged. “It’s just language. Except for a few words here and there, all sapients speak the same. As you and I are speaking now, though following your pronunciation is a bit tricky.”

Chieko retreated to her bench and sat again. She looked like she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or scream. Jorl had seen the expression before, but only on the faces of old men who had lost themselves in too many mugs of distilled spirits.

“So … If I understand this, I’m dead, right? Dead, and I’m talking to a raised mammal. An uplifted fucking elephant, who’s complaining that I speak with an accent?”

She lowered her head between bent knees and giggled.

Jorl flicked his trunk in the woman’s face, snapping his nubs until she looked up.

“What did you call me? What did you mean by that?”

Castleman cringed, shoving herself away until she backed into the desk. She shook herself and sobered somewhat. When she again met Jorl’s gaze, she held it and would not look away.

“A fucking elephant. Sorry, I just … this is … hell, I’m sorry.”

“No, no, not the pejorative or the prefix.” Jorl shook his head. “What did you mean by ‘raised mammal?’ In what way raised?”

Castleman’s hands trembled. “In your world, your time, there are other creatures? Other species, yes? Warm blooded … live-bearing creatures. Mammals … and other kinds as well, right? Creatures of the air, birds, um, avians … and reptiles and insects. Do you understand these terms? You’re not the only living things, are you?”

Jorl’s nod did nothing to dispel his puzzlement. “Yes, whole taxonomies of animals exist. Some overlap across worlds as well. What of it?”

“Wait, wait … you said ‘worlds’ just now … intelligent life has spread out across multiple worlds.… My god, it worked, it all worked!” Chieko Castleman’s face opened up in a grin that threatened to split her face apart. The expression pierced Jorl like the miracle of a beam of sunlight on Barsk.

“Excuse me, I don’t—”

“You, you are a mammal. Warm blooded. Your females suckle your young. Those are the gross characteristics of mammals.” One hand waved vaguely toward her chest.

“We established all of that. I’d hazard the same is true of you. What’s your point?”

With a gesture not unlike the way he’d whip his trunk for attention, Castleman waved him to silence. “You don’t understand. When my parents were born all sapient life looked like me. Human. But then that changed. We began to take species of varying degrees of sentience and searched for ways to raise them to full sapience. The breakthrough came a decade before I was born, one of those accidents resulting from the synthesis of unrelated fields of study. It started when our life scientists had completed genomic maps of several dozen mammalian species on Earth.”

Castleman’s right arm waved as she spoke, describing wild ellipses through the air, her fingers held rigid as she jabbed home each point like a lecturer at the academy.

“Meanwhile, ethologists had teamed up with psychologists and returned to the question of instinct, how to account for the varieties of unlearned knowledge so many species possessed. That quickly brought up the old arguments about what sorts of human behavior could be considered instinctive. The only one they agreed on was a predisposition to acquire language.”

“You’re not making sense,” said Jorl. “People don’t acquire language, they’re born with it.”

His conversant laughed. “Your people, yes, but not mine; that’s my point. Back then there were hundreds of languages being spoken, near to a thousand, really. I remember a professor of mine during grad school telling me that a couple centuries earlier there’d been tens of thousands of them. Anyway, the point they wanted to make was that it didn’t matter what language a community spoke, human beings are hardwired to acquire language so you pick up the one in your environment.”

“But where did they get it from?”

“Exactly, it had to start somewhere, right? That’s where the cognitive scientists and biologists stepped in. They went looking for evidence of that wiring. They started by comparing the human genetic strings of information with other sentient species. And they found it! An insanely long chain of genetic instructions that unwound to a package of rules about the rules of language. It was all meta-rules and language universals, encoded guidelines that allowed every human infant to reinvent his or her community’s language.”

Castleman paused. Her arm stopped in mid arc and fell to her side. The exuberance of her explanation fell away. She stared at Jorl for a long moment, and then continued in a softer voice.

“It answered the question of why humans had language and other species did not. Not simply elaborate communication systems, but full blown linguistic productivity, to talk about abstract concepts and share insights that had no referents in the real world. Other species had intelligence, and even the leisure for communication, but only human beings possessed this meta-linguistic genetic sequence. That’s when we let the genie out of the bottle. It was a simple research question at first. If we could give that bit of genetic engineering to other species, would they develop language? Maybe not language as we understood it, but language just the same.”