Native Tongue

Chapter Twelve

“This is stupid,” said Beau St. Clair.

“Second that,” said Lanky Pugh. “I move we cancel it.” And because he knew that Arnold Dolbe found it sickening, he took out his pocket knife and began cleaning his fingernails, with an air of total dedication to the task.

Dolbe tried not to moan, managed a gargled sigh, and made useless flutters with his fingers.

“Look, men,” he said. “See here. It doesn’t matter if it’s stupid. Stupid’s got nothing to do with it. The Pentagon says meet on this — we meet on it. You know that as well as I do, so get off me.”

“Shit,” said Lanky.

Showard considered the situation, and decided that Lanky Pugh offered a satisfactory model to emulate; he took out his pocket knife and began cleaning his fingernails, too, doing his best to make it a sort of duet for two pocket knives, matching his movements to Lanky’s.

“Go on then, Dolbe,” he said. “Meet.”

“Well, I think we’re up against a blank wall,” said Dolbe. A muscle twitched in his right cheek, and he rubbed at it fretfully. It would get worse, he knew, and pretty soon one of his eyelids would join in the dance of twitches, and he’d be in for weeks of both, with nothing the damn med-Sammys could do for it. Dolbe felt that it was bad enough to be six feet four inches tall and weigh only one hundred fifty rattling pounds, bad enough to be bald and have a skull that was a collage of lumps and lines and irregularities, bad enough to have a face that even his mother had not been fond of — it wasn’t fair that he had to be subject to nervous tics on top of that. He was miserably conscious of his burdens, of the injustice of it all, and the muscle jumped again. He laid one hand with elaborate casualness over the rebellious cheek and said, “I don’t see that there’s anything left for us to do. That’s all.”

The other men stared at him glumly, and it was written on their faces: he was not any sort of inspiration to them.

“Well, really,” he said defensively, “I’m sorry I don’t have the world’s greatest new snazzobang plan to offer here, but I don’t hear any of you doing any better.”

“You’re suppose to lead, Dolbe, remember?” Showard needled. “A major and profound principle — leaders should lead.”

“Damn you, Showard,” said Dolbe, looking sullen as well as twitchy. “Damn your soul.”

“Thanks,” said the other man, and dropped him. “That’s a big help. Since you refuse to do anything but whimper, I shall just move on… let’s run it by one more time, troops. What have we done — and what haven’t we done?”

St. Clair obliged him. “We’ve tried computers — they don’t show us useful patterns, or any other kind of patterns, in nonhumanoid Alien languages. Or so Lanky tells us, and I trust Lanky all the way when it comes to computers. Computers would help us after we cracked a language… but they’re no good at the initial stage. That’s one.”

“Right,” said Lanky Pugh. “That’s one, and it’s final. If computers could do it, we’d have done it.”

“Human infants,” St. Clair went on, “even when we follow the linguist specs down to the last comma, don’t help us… they can’t be Interfaced with nonhumanoid Aliens. And throwing a few dozen more into the pit doesn’t appeal to any of us… it’s useless. And horrible. And stupid. That’s two.”

“One, two, buckle our shoe,” droned Brooks Showard.

“And then there’s the linguist infant strategy — that was a bust, too. No different from any other baby… a complete mess. And we don’t have any idea why. Which means that snatching a few more Lingoe pups and running them through the same drill would be useless, horrible, etc., see above. We’ve spent months analyzing it, and we’ve found out nothing. That’s three.”

He waited for somebody to offer a comment, but nobody did.

“And that’s it,” he concluded. “So far as I know, that’s all there is. Adults can’t acquire languages… there aren’t any other alternatives.”

“Damn it, men,” said Dolbe urgently, “damn it, we’ve got a mission. The fate of this planet, and all who live on it, depends on us. We can’t just quit… we have to do something.”

“I wonder,” mused Lanky Pugh, thinking that if he picked his teeth with his knife Dolbe would get even more antsy, which would be just fine with him, “I wonder how that Beta-2 critter feels about our ‘mission’? I mean, it’s been cooped up here one hell of a long time now…”

“Lanky,” Dolbe pleaded, “please don’t bring that up. Please. For all we know, it loves it here. We’re very good to it.”

“Yeah? How do we know that?”

“Lanky — ”

“Naw, I mean it. How do we know it hasn’t got a wife and kids it’d like to go flicker at instead of us… maybe six wives and kids. Or husbands and kids. Or whatever it’s got.”

“Lanky, we don’t know, and we can’t afford to care. Come on — let’s stay with the subject at hand, such as it is.”

Lanky shrugged, and moved on to the tooth-picking project, noting Dolbe’s shudder with satisfaction. That’d hold him.

“Brooks?” said Dolbe. “Brooks, you’re our idea man. Come up with an idea.”

“You know what I would do,” said Showard.

“Put a couple dozen linguists over a slow fire till they agreed to help us?”

“At least.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Then don’t bother me, Arnold!” Showard rasped. “Our problem is pretty simple here — we don’t know what we’re doing wrong, the only people who do know what we’re doing wrong are the effing linguists, and they won’t tell us! I don’t see anything subtle or complex to be dealt with here… they have to be forced to help, since they won’t do it of their own accord. All you nicey-nicies can sit there and blather till you decompose, but it won’t change things. We’re wasting our time.”

“It’s humiliating,” said St. Clair.

“What? Failing 100 percent of the time?”

“That, sure. But what I meant was, it’s humiliating that with the entire scientific resources of the civilized universe behind us we can’t figure out what it is the linguists know. It’s degrading.”

“You’re right, Beau. It is. But it’s the way things are, and the way they’ve been ever since anybody can remember. Moping over it won’t help — but forcing them to tell would. If we weren’t so dainty and all abristle with scrupulosities.”

“Have we got any kind of leverage at all with the linguists?”

“No. They’ve got all the leverage there is.”

“Couldn’t we go public about Honcho Chornyak playing games with us while he pretends he won’t dirty his lily-whites that way?”

“Why?” Showard demanded. “What’s he done, Beau? Comes to meetings when we ask him to. Never lets anything slip — follows his party line all the way, every time.”

“But he wants that secret, Brooks. He does want that kept secret. We could spread it all over the newslines.”

“Sure,” said Dolbe. “And then he could explain to the public precisely what it is that happens to the babies they volunteer for Government Work. He’d be real good at doing that. For followup, he could tell them how we go kidnap babies out of hospitals when the parents won’t volunteer.”

“Christ… would he do that?”

“Ah hell, Beau! Sure he’d do it,” Showard answered. “And when he got through we’d look like murderers — which we are, I might add — and he’d have it all put together somehow so there’d be no penalty for him either from the public or from the Lines. That’s one smart man, that Thomas Blair Chornyak, and when you add in that he’s a linguist you’ve got smart man cubed. He doesn’t play littlegirl games.”

“Well, like Arnold says, we’ve got to do something.”

“Yeah. We could all go loobyloo, Beau.”

“Listen,” said St. Clair, “how much do we know, really, about why the babies can’t hack the Interfacing? I mean, there’s no question that they can’t — I’ve seen that enough to believe it and plenty left over — but is there something we know about the problem that we could maybe use somehow?”

“Let’s review that, men,” said Dolbe expansively, leading now that somebody’d pointed the direction for him. Lead over thataway, Dolbe… wagons, ho, Dolbe… “Let’s go over that one more time.”

“There’s nothing there,” said Lanky Pugh. “I’ve run that all through the computer I don’t know how many times — there’s nothing there.”

“Sometimes the human brain has an edge on the computer, begging your pardon for the blasphemy, Lanky,” said Dolbe. “Let’s just give it one more runby.”

“All right,” Showard said. “All right. First principle: there’s no such thing as reality. We make it up by perceiving stimuli from the environment — external or internal — and making statements about it. Everybody perceives stuff, everybody makes up statements about it, everybody — so far as we can tell — agrees enough to get by, so that when I say ‘Hand me the coffee’ you know what to hand me. And that’s reality. Second principle: people get used to a certain kind of reality and come to expect it, and if what they perceive doesn’t fit the set of statements everybody’s agreed to, either the culture has to go through a kind of fit until it adjusts… or they just blank it out.”

“Fairies…” murmured Beau St. Clair. “Angels.”

“Yeah. They’re not in the set of reality statements for this culture, so if they’re ‘real’ we just don’t see them, don’t hear them, don’t smell them, don’t feel them… don’t taste them. If you can handle the idea of not-tasting an angel.” He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head, letting the pocket knife dangle. “Now, third principle: human beings are handwired to expect certain kinds of perceptions — that’s where the trouble starts. The cognitive scientists tell us that whatever the hardwiring is in Terrans, it’s reasonably close to whatever it is in humanoid Aliens, because the brains and sensory systems are similar enough, even if there’s tentacles coming out of one humanoid’s ears and not out of some other’s. And the linguists tell us that because that hardwiring is close enough, you can take a brain-plus-sensory system that’s not set in concrete yet — say, a baby’s — and it can manage to make statements about what it perceives, even if it’s not in the consensus set. Babies don’t know what they’re going to have coming at them, they have to learn. And if it isn’t too different from what they’re hardwired to notice, they can handle it. They can include it in their reality.”

“So far, nothing,” said Lanky. “Like I said.”

“Fourth principle,” Showard went on, “even a baby, even still new to perceptions like it is, can’t handle it when it runs into a perception so completely different from the humanoid that it can’t be processed at all, much less put into a statement.”

“Babies can’t make statements,” said Lanky, disgustedly. “Shit. All they can do is — ”

“Lanky,” said Beau St. Clair, “that’s all wrong. They can’t attach the words you’d attach, they can’t pronounce the statements — but they make them. Like, ‘what I see there is something I have seen before, so I’ll look at the other thing I haven’t seen before.’ Like ‘that noise is my mother.’ Stuff like that.”

“Shit,” said Lanky again. “Fairies and angels. Fairy shit and angel shit.”

They were used to Lanky Pugh; they went ahead with it in spite of him.

“So,” Showard wound it up, “that’s what we know. There’s something about the way the non-humanoid Aliens perceive things, something about the ‘reality’ they make out of stimuli, so impossible that it freaks out the babies and destroys their central nervous systems permanently.”

“Like what?” Lanky demanded.

“Pugh,” said Showard, “if I knew that, my central nervous system would have been destroyed permanently, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to tell you about it.”

“Aw, shit,” said Lanky.

“The obvious solution,” Dolbe put in, glad to have come to at least one thing he was sure he understood, “is desensitization.”

“Yeah,” said Brooks. “And God knows we’ve tried that. We’ve tried putting the baby in the Interface for just a fraction of a second at a time, over weeks and weeks, working up to a whole second… makes no damn difference. Come the time that baby somehow gets an Alien perception, it self-destructs, all the same.”

“So let’s think about that,” Dolbe insisted. “Let’s think about that seriously. The problem is desensitization. We’ve tried it by decreasing the exposure to the absolute minimum, and that hasn’t helped. So that’s out. We can’t ask the baby to imagine it in advance; the baby can’t understand what we’re saying, and we don’t know what to tell it to imagine even if it could understand. So that’s out. What else is there, that we haven’t ruled out?”

The silence went on and on, while they thought. And at last Beau cleared his throat tentatively.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe there’s something.”

“Spit it out.”

“Maybe it’s crazy, too.”

“Let’s talk about it, man!” said Dolbe. “What is it? And you, Showard, Pugh — put those cursed knives away, before I go out of my mind!”

“Sure, Arnold,” said Lanky solemnly, and folded the offending object ostentatiously into itself and put it in his pocket. “Now that you’ve asked.”

“Go on, Beau,” said Showard. And he put his knife away, too.

“Well,” said Beau slowly, “I was just thinking. What if — just what if, now — you gave a baby, right from minute one, one of the hallucinogens? Maybe different kinds, even. What if you did that for a month or so before you ever put it in the Interface? What do you suppose you’d get that way?”

Brooks Showard stared at his colleague, as if he’d perceived an angel, and he came roaring up out of his apathy with a suddenness and intensity that startled even Lanky.

“By Christ, St. Clair!” he shouted. “You’d get a baby, you’d get a baby that had made itself a statement that went roughly ‘Well, hell, anything at all might very well come along!’ God damn. Beau, that’s it! That is it!!”

Arnold Dolbe sat there, shocked stiff. He went white, and his twitches all went chronic on him at one time. “You can’t administer hallucinogenic drugs to a baby!” he pronounced. “That’s obscene! It’s barbaric!”

The silence was vast around him, and when he finally heard it he lost all the stiffness.

“Oh, my,” he said sadly. “Oh, my. I suppose, after what we’ve already done to babies, that was not the most intelligent remark I could have made. I forget… I forget, you know?”

“Brooks,” said Lanky, politely looking away from Arnold Dolbe to give the man time to recover some of his composure, “you sound damn certain. Are you really sure?”

Showard made a wry face. “Of course I’m not sure. How could I be sure? But it sounds right. Even adults, if they don’t overdo it for starters, can get used to having their realities altered damned drastically on LSD or synthomescaline or any of the others. A baby, with its brain still soft in the mold — in a manner of speaking — hell, it ought to get broadminded enough to be ready for anything whatsoever to come its way. No, I’m not sure, Lanky — but I’m sure enough that I want to try it. Right now.”

“But we don’t have a baby right now,” Dolbe pointed out. “And unless somebody just turns up out of nowhere, like that Landry kid, we don’t have any volunteer prospects right now, either. You’re not suggesting that we go into the kidnapping business again, are you?”

“I’m not sure,” said Brooks Showard very carefully. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m suggesting.”

“But see here, man — ”

“Naw! Shut up, Dolbe, and let me think! Will you for chrissakes let me think?”

Dolbe shut his mouth and waited, while Showard frowned and beat his fist in a slow steady drumming against the edge of the table. They all waited, and they all saw the change in Showard as he got ready to tell them exactly what he had in mind. They hadn’t seen Brooks Showard with a look of optimism in so long they’d forgotten what it was like, but he looked optimistic now.

“Two things,” he said at last. “I say we do two things.”

“Name them,” said Dolbe briskly.

“I want you, Dolbe, to go twist some arms over at NSA and have them put some real muscle into digging up dirt on the Lingoes.”

“I thought you were going to talk about — ”

“I’m getting to that! This is something I want out of the way first, Dolbe! There have got to be linguists that aren’t morally the equivalent of the Virgin Mary… there’ve got to be. I want ’em. I want to know which ones are open to blackmail. I want to know what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, who or what they’re doing it with, and how often. The works. The NSA is the right unit to do that, that’s what they’re for, and you, Dolbe, I want you to get them onto it. There’s only thirteen of the Lines, and all of them crammed together like animals in a communal building — that ought to be the easiest surveillance assignment NSA’s had in decades. Let’s get that going, in case we need it later.”

“Done,” said Dolbe. “Consider it done.”

“Okay. Now, for the business of sending the babies on the fancy trips… we have got babies.”

“We have?”

“Yeah. We have. We’ve got damnall cartons and bales of babies. Freezersful of babies.”

“What?” And then, “Oh.”

“Brooks,” said Beau St. Clair, “we didn’t have very good luck with those test-tube infants. Remember? They were… they… Ah, hell, I don’t know how to put it. But you remember — you were there.”

“Yes,” said Showard, “I remember. And I agree with you, it wasn’t the greatest. But if we’ve got to go monkeying around with the brains of infants, feeding them peyote with their pablum, I for one would rather start with the tubies. We’ve got plenty of them, there are no parents to grieve over what happens to them; it’s the obvious way to go. Let’s work it out on them. The doses. How much a baby can take without it wrecking his physical system, never mind the central nervous system. We’ll start it with the test-tube babies, and we’ll learn as we go along… And by the time somebody volunteers us another Infant Hero, gentlemen, we’ll be ready. We’ll know what we’re doing. Don’t you see? We’ll bygod solve this problem!”

The whole room was crackling with the new prospect that there might, there just might, be a nugget of success somewhere in the desert of failure that had extended everywhere around them as far in space or time as any of them could remember. It was champagne time, and the bubbles already popping. Even if it meant using the tubies again.

Brooks Showard grabbed a stack of government forms lying in the middle of the table and threw them up into the air, from pure happiness, standing there and letting it rain forms on him with an expression of simple bliss.

“Hey, let’s go!” he shouted at them. “Time’s a-wasting, and all those quaint sayings from Homeroom! Let’s go!”