Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

Shivers ran down Jorl’s spine. “You’re saying that’s how these ‘raised mammals’ were created? You humans grafted language learning onto my ancestors and we’re the result?”

The human shook her head violently. “No. No, no, no, no. We did something even more perverse. Once the language sequence was known, psycholinguists realized it could be used to understand adult language representation. Research in the field of artificial intelligence had stagnated, but now it exploded! Entire nations joined together to combine their computational processing power with the goal of taking a language — as it was known and used by a living person, not as a system or grammar or a lexicon, but a dynamic knowledge structure — taking this thing and reverse engineering it to a genetic sequence. And because knowing a single language was much more specific, it turned out to be a much smaller structure than our predisposition to learn a language. Synthesizing that new sequence meant they could give it to almost any mammalian species, wiring in a particular language in the same way that other instinctive knowledge was already in place.”

“And that’s why we can understand each other?”

“Your language is the same English that was in the mind of a researcher somewhere. It was deconstructed and then encoded into your forebears’ genetic structure where it would breed true. I had to learn to speak my language, but you’d have been born with yours. And every generation does it the same way, so there’s no language change; any linguistic flux gets reset with the next generation of offspring.

“It changed everything. We began producing language-using species, an artificial evolution. It was the first step to an anthropomorphic movement. Once nonhuman species became active symbol users, our genetic engineers began changing the rest of their physiology to allow them to take full advantage of it. They reshaped them, giving them the entire vocal mechanism, bipedal movement, opposable thumbs, all the things which together with language had given humans mastery of our environment.”

Castleman stopped again. She looked down at her hands, bringing the fingertips of one into contact with their opposites on the other.

“That was the state of things in my time. Raised mammals. Engineered to be intelligent and functional, with the best traits of their genetic origins. We’d only raised a few species yet, some dogs and cats, animals that were already domesticated and familiar. We felt a bit like gods, creating new life which would look upon us and know that we had brought them into existence.”

“Dogs and Cats,” said Jorl. “You made them?”

“We did. Their creation changed my world. All the old issues of social equality that we were getting close to finally laying to rest burst out once again. People divided over the role raised mammals should have in the world. Were they just smarter pets, or were they people? That became the new dividing line and old issues of discrimination fell away. Countries went to war over the question. Some governments banned RMs from within their borders. Others decided to use them to supplement humans for work on our lunar bases and in space. My own nation had grand plans to expand the research and send raised mammals off in generation ships to other solar systems. My work got its start as a result, cataloging and preserving our cultural histories. The Archetype of Man was just one of several self-curating repositories that were intended to preserve who we were and give guidance to raised mammals. And it must have worked, because here you are!” She sighed, flushed with satisfaction from knowledge she could never have attained in life.

Jorl had never seen anyone looking more content, and he paused a long moment before saying, “I don’t think it happened quite that way.”

Castleman’s elation slipped away again. “What do you mean?”

“There are many different kinds of sapient beings in the galaxy, and maybe they’re descended from the things your people created, but I’m not so sure. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing we’d forget. Nor the people who created us. But there’s no record of you, not in any of our histories. But I could be wrong. Maybe we just forgot because it’s been so long.”

“How long?”

“Our history tells us that we started on the world we call Dawn, but the actual record only begins with our Expansion and the formation of the first Alliance of Worlds, a ring of eight planets that were colonized just over sixty-two thousand years ago.”

“Sixty-two thousand? You have a recorded history going back sixty-two thousand years? And there’s no mention of humans?”

Jorl nodded slowly, hearing the anguish in Dr. Chieko Castleman’s voice. “Nothing. And believe me, you’d stand out. Our records begin with the founding of those eight worlds. Anything prior to that is just the Before, and it’s all unsupported myth. We don’t know where we came from. It’s not really the subject of much speculation. And even historians like myself don’t tend to ask questions about anywhere near that far back. Maybe as a civilization we’re just focused more on going forward than looking back.”

“I don’t understand how that could be, not if we created you, gave you language and life and sent you to the stars.”

“I agree, but there are no creatures that look like you anywhere in the galaxy. No human beings.”

“Then tell me, Jorl, what became of us?”

The Fant offered his hand to Castleman, and the human took it in both of hers.

“I don’t know. But it might explain some things. The only reason I know about your Archetype is because I was there when we stumbled upon it and destroyed it. There’s no more mention of it in the official record than there is of your people.”

“Oh my god! Why would you destroy it?”

Jorl said nothing. He held Castleman’s hands in his, noting how similar they were to his own, reflecting on the many ways in which he more closely resembled the human than he did any of the furred races that included every other person in the galaxy outside of the people on Barsk. Why were there no records of human beings? Had the Patrol destroyed them all?

“I’ve been asking myself that question since it happened. But now I’m thinking it’s just a part of something much bigger. I think maybe there are forces in play that have been keeping any knowledge of you a secret. I had it wrong, and even Arlo had it wrong. And Margda didn’t see it clearly or couldn’t grasp it all.”

“I don’t understand, who are those people? What are you talking about?”

“All of this, all the missing stories, the lack of any mention of humans. That … gap … in our understanding of everything. It’s the Silence!”

JORLsat at the desk in his cabin on the station, picking at the last clusters of food on the tray. The implications of his conversation with Chieko Castleman threatened to overwhelm him, despite their simplicity. They answered questions of the origins of the peoples of the Alliance, questions that he hadn’t known even to ask. And why should he? The races of the Alliance had existed for tens of thousands of years; from the perspective of its citizens it had always been. Castleman had shattered that unexamined assumption. All the sapient life left in the galaxy had been manufactured from dumb animals. Despite his training as a historian, he doubted he truly grasped the destructive potential such a revelation would have on society.

Surely that was what the Matriarch had seen. Not the specifics, just that a weapon existed that could put an end to ignorance that had endured for millennia. And it fell to him, a simple Speaker, to tell the truth and end the long Silence.