Perfect People

57

Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham looked like the kind of boffin a casting agency might have suggested to a film director in search of an archetypal eccentric English professor. From behind his tiny desk in his cramped office in the Linguistics Centre, housed in Building B4 at Morley Park, he squinted at John through his monocle like some hawkish bird of prey

In his early sixties, the linguist had a weather-beaten face, intricately shot with broken veins, and mad hair. He was dressed in a shabby green tweed suit with leather elbow patches and sported a flamboyant paisley bow tie over a check Viyella shirt.

On the walls of his cluttered office were a couple of maps of ancient Britain, a picture of him shaking hands with Prince Philip, and a framed legend proclaiming: A LANGUAGE IS A

DIALECT WITH AN ARMY AND A NAVY – DR JOHNSON.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Gosh, right, hmmnnn.’ His cherrywood desk was littered with biscuit crumbs, and more avalanched down now as he reached out, offering the pack of digestives to John, then took one himself and dunked it in his coffee. ‘Quite fascinating!’

One of the things John particularly liked about Morley Park was that, unlike at the universities where he had worked before where the average age was around twenty, making him horribly aware of his advancing years, the average age here was closer to fifty. It was a good feeling to be among the younger members of staff, even if only by a narrow margin. He chewed a mouthful of biscuit.

Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham had been knighted some years earlier for services to national security. In his previous post he had worked at the Government Communications Headquarters, developing computer programs that could pick out the voices of known terrorists from among millions of landline and cellphone calls monitored daily. Now he headed a department on the Morley Park campus developing systems for controlling machines through either thought or speech.

‘Play the original again!’

A complex hi-fi system behind the linguist kicked into life, and moments later the crystal-clear voices of Luke and Phoebe filled the room.

First Phoebe. ‘Obm dekcarh cidnaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.’

Luke responded, ‘Eka foe eipnod hyderlseh deegsomud.’

Then Phoebe’s voice again. ‘Olaaeo evayeh gibra snahele.’

‘Stop!’ Chetwynde-Cunningham barked. Then, looking at John and beaming, he said, ‘This is pretty impressive, you know.’

‘What language is it? Have you identified it?’

The linguist shook his head. ‘I had a play with it yesterday, actually, got a few of my younger colleagues to listen to it. One, a woman with small children herself. Everyone agreed there are patterns distinctive of language, but no one could put a name to it. Just to be sure, we ran it in on a computer program that can identify every known language in the world – all six thousand, two hundred and seven of them,’ he added with a touch of pride in his voice. ‘But there was no match, and of course there wasn’t going to be!’

‘Why not?’ John sipped some coffee and politely waved away the biscuit pack that the linguist again pushed towards him.

‘Well, you do hear of children born with the ability to speak other languages – people talk about it as evidence of past lives, that sort of stuff,’ he said with a rather dismissive tone. ‘But I’ve never heard a small child speak a foreign language convincingly. Sometimes, as with you and your wife, when the child comes from parents of mixed races, they will pick up smatterings of each of the parents’ languages.’

‘Is there some Swedish in this? My wife and I want-’

The linguist interrupted him with a vehement shake of his head. ‘Not Swedish. There’s no Swedish there.’ He helped himself to another biscuit and suspended it over his coffee cup. ‘Of course, you do get the phenomenon with twins, more usually with identical twins, where they create their own language as a means of excluding their parents – and the outside world in general. This seems to be what’s happening in your case.’

‘Their own language?’

Chetwynde-Cunningham nodded.

‘Can you make any sense of what they’re saying?’ John asked.

‘Oh yes, once you know the key, it’s a doddle – same with any code.’

‘ Code? ’

The linguist turned to his computer. ‘Print original on screen!’ he commanded.

Moments later the words appeared.

Obm dekcarh cidaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.

Eka foe eipnod hyderlseh deegsomud.

Olaaeo evayeh gibra snahele.

John peered at them closely, trying to see if he could spot what the linguist evidently had already. But after a couple of minutes he was forced to concede defeat. ‘I can’t spot the key.’

‘No, well, I’m not surprised. Take a look at the first line.’

John stared at it.

Obm dekcarh cidnaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.

Then the linguist gave another command. ‘Reverse and sort into English!’

Moments later a second line appeared:

You ave o deide f yo wan to hve a andich r cke, Dmbo.

It was starting to become clearer to John but he still wasn’t quite there. The linguist gave a third command. ‘Insert missing letter through line!’

Now a third line appeared:

You have to decide if you want to have a sandwich or a cake, Dumbo.

John frowned. ‘Jesus!’ he said, after some moments. ‘It – it was during a tea party – they-’

Chetwynde-Cunningham commanded the translation of the next two lines. John read them as they came up on the screen.

Dumbo’s greedy, he’s already had one piece of cake.

Elephants are big, they have to eat a lot.

‘You’re saying this was spontaneous?’ he asked. ‘Not something they’d worked out in advance, somehow, John?’

‘They’re not yet two years old,’ John said. ‘I don’t think they’d have been capable of working this out in advance – I mean-’ He shrugged, unsure quite what he was thinking about this. He felt totally thrown.

‘The calculations to do this in their heads, in some kind of simultaneous translation, would be quite phenomenal. If it was just one child, one could think perhaps it was suffering from some brain disorder, some form of autism or temporal-lobe epilepsy, perhaps causing some glitch in the neural pathways. But the laws of probability rule it out for both children to have this.’

There was a long silence. John continued to stare at the words, thinking to himself, wondering how on earth they could be doing this. The linguist interrupted him.

‘If they are doing this spontaneously, John, then I think you’ve got some pretty remarkable children. They have a skill that I would think is quite unique. I’ve never heard of it before, ever.’ He gave John a look that should have filled him with pride.

But instead, John found himself feeling very uneasy.