The Embedding

ELEVEN

“Would you people do the same, Ph’theri?” Sole asked. “Would you trade us a living brain from one of the Sp’thra?”

“That depends on how we assessed the trade gain. Yes, if it was adequate.”

“So you wouldn’t personally refuse to trade your own brain, even? If you were chosen?”

“The Sp’thra are Signal Traders. Surely the trading of a live brain is the ultimate form of signal trading. The brain contains all the signals of a species.”

“How long will these brains be kept alive?” Sole was asking; but the astronaut who had earlier staked his claim so vociferously cried out:

“I’d want a ticket to the goddam stars in exchange for six human brains put in a tin box. Star travel, no less, sir!”

Ph’theri raised a hand, exposing the orange palm flash.

“You cannot hope to trade starship technology for six brains from a world such as this. You reject the trade deal, then?”

“We’re not necessarily rejecting anything,” Sciavoni protested quickly. “But you know exactly what you want. What are we getting out of it? It’s too vague. How far is this habitable world? We could probably detect it ourselves long before we had the means to go there. How far’s this intelligent race? Maybe so far communicating would be a waste of time! And these technological improvements—”

Sole’s query about how long the brains would stay alive was shelved for the moment, by tacit consent. The prospect, after all, was no more terrible—far less terrible indeed—than X or Y or Z happening elsewhere in the world, in Asia, Africa, or South America.

“To give the other side all the information,” argued Ph’theri in a finicky way, “is the whole content of the trade—”

“To be sure! But you really must let us know less approximately. We can’t buy a pig in a poke—”

Sciavoni mopped his brow, though the sun had barely risen on the building and the air within was merely warm. Sole realized how rigid his own stance had been for so many minutes past and made an effort to relax. The incoming sunlight woke other people up too, physically. A nose blew honkingly. Glasses were taken off and polished. Feet shuffled. Hands plunged into pockets. One man lit a cigarette, with a tiny stab of flame.

Ph’theri stared at the smoke and the smoker.

“You meet the sun with burning? Is that customary here?”

“More like habitual,” grunted Sciavoni sardonically.

Outside the window the ship Ph’theri had come in lay with the ramp jutting out of its side like the tongue of a man hanged at dawn.

“The technology we offer will enable you to reach the inner gasgiant of your system in twenty of your days. With good energy conservation. Or else reach the outermost gasgiant in one hundred days, retaining fifty per cent energy. You want other destinations listed?”

Sciavoni shook his head.

“We can work it out from that. How about the method?”

“The method will be adequate, you have the word of the Sp’thra for that. Signal Trading demands truth, otherwise there is only disorder and entropy, and reality will never be articulated—”

“Okay, damn it. How about those stars then? How far?”

Ph’theri’s ears crinkled, cubed and inflated, as he concentrated on the whispering of the wires.

“In your light years, the closest habitable planet known to the Sp’thra is approximately Two One units away—”

A Russian scientist calculated swiftly and looked crestfallen.

“Which means 82 Eridani, Beta Hydri, or HR 8832. Nothing closer. So Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti and all those other promising stars are useless.”

“Not at all,” the younger of the Californian astronomers contradicted him. “The operative concept is ‘known to the Sp’thra’. Don’t forget that. We’ve no guarantee they know all the local stars.”

“The message distance is Nine Eight light years,” Ph’theri said flatly.

“One way?”

“True.”

“But that means—let’s see, ninety eight times two… one hundred and ninety six years to send a message and get an answer! Did I hear someone mention a pig in a poke, Sciavoni?”

“You did indeed.”

The astronomers began to squabble about tachyons—particles supposed to travel faster than light implied a shorter transit time—but Sole felt impatient.

“We need to find out some more about these peoples’ motives,” he snapped. “Ph’theri—why are you so anxious to escape from ‘This-Reality’?”

“To solve the Sp’thra problem,” Ph’theri replied shortly.

“Maybe we can trade some help in solving it?”

“Very unlikely,” said Ph’theri coldly. “I would say it is species-specific to the Sp’thra.”

The Englishman shook his head.

“No. The problem has to involve all the species in the universe—if you’re approaching it by comparing all their languages. That stands to reason. Unless… is it a sexual problem? I suppose that would be intimately specific to the species. Obsessional, too, into the bargain I”

“A breeding problem? The Sp’thra have no breeding problem on the twin worlds.”

“An emotional problem—a problem of feeling?”

Ph’theri hesitated, though his ears did not modify themselves to listen to any words whispered into them. He considered the question, himself, for what seemed minutes on end.

“There is an emotional area beyond sex, true. You have a word ‘Love’. Perhaps that is the name of the problem. But it is not a problem of love for the Sp’thra mate—that sort of love is a form of solipsism, which we detest: ‘He’ loves himself in the mirror of ‘Herself’. ‘She’ loves herself in the mirror of ‘Himself’. That is to love the signal of the Self. The transmission of the genetic code, the ritual greetings, the embrace gestures are part of this same solipsism. But there is an area of emotion we feel, which involves Bereft Love—that is our problem.” The alien faltered. “The Bereft Love we feel for the Change Speakers—”

Sole waited patiently, but nothing more was forthcoming. The alien had clammed up.

Sciavoni was whispering angrily to the astronomers, “We’ve got to know what makes these creatures tick, before we can judge their honesty. If that involves defining their concepts of Love and Morals, that’s okay by me!”

“Who are these Change Speakers, Ph’theri?” Sole demanded. “Is that another species?”

The alien stared down at the man, disparagingly. Nothing of the missionary about this bastard, thought Sole, wincing under that aged, grey gaze. Slowly—spelling it out to a child—the alien explained his faith… or science… or delusion: a queer fusion of the three that Man would maybe need to hypnotize himself with the like of, if he was ever to drive himself to the Stars.

“They are variable entities. They manipulate what we know as reality by means of their shifting-value signals. Using signals that lack constants—which have variable referents. This universe-here embeds us in it. But not them. They escape. They are free. They shift across realities. Yet when we have successfully superimposed the reality-programmes of all languages, in the moon between the twin worlds, we too shall be free. It has to be soon. The time span to date is One Two Nine Zero Nine, your years—”

“Sweet Christ, this all started thirteen thousand years ago?”

“True. The primitive startings. The first quarrying of the Language Moon. That happened soon after the first dawn of Bereft Love for the Change Speakers. At first exploration went slowly, jumping from star to star. The subsequent discovery of gasgiant Wave Readers approximately Seven Zero Zero Zero years later, saved much time—”

Sole felt horrified at this span of time. What was Homo Sapiens doing then? Painting the cave walls at Lascaux?

“A physical search for the Change Speakers in this Three-Space would be useless,” said the alien meditatively—in a measured, weary way, as though he’d explained all this before across the universe till he was sick of it. “A speech-changing search is the only hope. Only at the places where the languages of different species grate together, presenting an interface of paradox, do we guess the nature of true reality and draw strength to escape. Our language moon will finally reveal reality as a direct experience. Then we shall state the Totality. We shall stand outside of This-Reality and pursue our Bereft Love—”

“Is it Beings you’re searching for, Ph’theri? Or a Being? Or the nature of Being? What?”

“There are races that have many more inflections of the concept ‘Being’ than yourselves,” Ph’theri replied witheringly. “The Change Speakers are para-beings. We Sp’thra feel a deep bereft ‘love’ for them, since they phased with the twin worlds so many years ago. And went away. They change-spoke away from Sp’thra—by modulating their embedding in reality—and left us…

“LEFT US,” he howled terrifyingly, though he did not move or wring his hands or show any sign of tears, as a human being giving vent to such an expression of loss would—he stood, bound up in an alien agony, Cross and Crucified united in the same tall dry form. Raised arms and orange palms would be too feeble a protest to express this pent-up inner grief.

“I don’t get it,” Sole shouted in frustration—though nobody else was making a noise now. Many had moved back from the alien, as if scared. “How do you communicate with creatures that are changing meanings all the time? What sort of permanence is that? But—thirteen thousand years! And you’ve kept this crazy love alive for all that span of time? How—and why?”

Ph’theri’s cry had been like the howl of an untuned radio set—when he got to tune himself in again, his message came through clearly enough, for an alien answer to a human question.

“The Change Speakers desired something when they phased with the Sp’thra—what it was we did not understand. They themselves were hurting with love. Our signal trading quest is to cancel the great sense of their sadness, so that we Sp’thra can be left alone again—without that vibration in our minds, imprinted so many centuries ago by their passage. Yes, they branded us! They left a long echo in their wake. It is the eddy in water left standing in a bowl. A retinal image of a blinding light. We are haunted by the Change Speakers. By this ghost of love, which is pain.”

“Did they ‘phase’ with no other races you’ve met on your travels?” asked Sole. “Has no one else got this echo in their minds?”

“Surely we humans have, in the person of Our Saviour!” an evangelical Southern voice cried out. “I swear it’s God he means, in his alien way—”

Sciavoni made an angry pianissimo gesture.

“No, it’s a collective psychosis,” a Jewish specialist in Abnormal Psychiatry from New York offered as his diagnosis—though he sounded hysterical himself. “These aliens are collectively insane. Their obsessive activity is simply a way of hiding the truth from themselves—by turning their delusory system upside down and externalizing it. All that time ago some collective madness took hold of them. Maybe a genetic mutation. Or some bug they caught on their travels. Maybe they’re breathing their mind poison out into our air and minds right now?” His voice rose giddily. “What have we done to quarantine ourselves and this creature? What’s fifty miles of wild country—to a star virus?”

“Not so,” howled Ph’theri, raising both arms and tick-tacking his thumbs in the utmost anger or agitation. “We Sp’thra are not sick. We are aware. Change Speakers exist—in another reality plane! When they phased with This-Reality, the event set up a resonance which is this Bereft Love and this Anguish and this Grim Haunting all at once. You have not known this. No other race has. The Change Speakers modulate all the reality tangents to the plane of our embedding here. But where they brushed, they set that point in this universe resonating—like a sounded bell in ancient Sp’thra. With the reality-pictures of so many species in our moon, we shall transcend This-Reality as they do, pursue the Change Speakers and—”

Ph’theri hesitated.

“What then?” pressed Sole. The alien’s arms collapsed. A mute, eroded witness to the inexplicable, he admitted:

“We disagree what to do. Signal them? Love them? DESTROY them for the anguish they inflicted on us? Some heretics even suggest that the Change Speakers are ourselves, from some far future or alternative reality. A preecho of our own Evolved Selves resonating back in time—to force us to assassinate them in a future that has grown intolerable to them, but which they cannot escape from of their own will. These future Sp’thra, caught up in the incredible anguish of some unknown situation—perhaps it is Immortality?—can only commit suicide through the agency of their earlier selves; so the story goes—”

“Is this a popular explanation among your people?”

“No! This heresy has appeared several times since the language moon was hollowed out, been discounted and destroyed—”

“And those who believed in it?”

“Destroyed too! It is against the signal-trading destiny and duty of the Sp’thra.”

“For God’s sake, the creature is paranoid! Isn’t it obvious his whole race is? Assassinate the future?

“Who would say that your own species is mentally pure,” accused Ph’theri, “when you send out repetitive pictures of dying, killing, maiming and torture?”

“But that isn’t the idea of being a human being,” the psychiatrist protested angrily. “That is a misreading. Those things are all accidents, mistakes, disasters.”

“Really? You seem to dote on them. As we see it, your signals are you. These things are your sport, your art, your religion. Why do you balk at trading six brains of Earth, whom a great destiny awaits—to escape from the Embedding with the Sp’thra. To master the tangents. To enjoy the freedom of love sated and satisfied!”

The Embedding.

It was a concept that seemed to haunt the aliens as fiercely as it had, in another context, haunted Sole. Was there any real comparison—or was it just a chance similarity of words?

It didn’t seem like a chance similarity to Sole, right then. More like a miraculous discovery.

Sole felt himself filled with wonder, as he saw his way through to a fusion of Ph’theri’s obsession with his own.

“Ph’theri—I’ve tried to achieve a kind of ‘embedding’, to test out the frontiers of reality, using young human brains. Maybe it’s a coincidence of words? No, I don’t think so. You think it’s impossible to test out reality with one species on one planet. Tell me this, Ph’theri, would you be willing to miss the tide if it was worth your while? If it brought your search to an end? If it saved all time for the Sp’thra?”

Sole fished Pierre’s letter out of his pocket.

And began to tell the tall alien all that he knew of the Xemahoa tribe of Brazil…

Outside, it was full daylight now. The sun shone on to Ph’theri’s ship, on the desert scrub, the peaked mountains beyond. The sky hadn’t a single contrail in it. The area must have been cleared of air traffic.

When Sole had finished explaining—and while people stared at Sole, bemused—Ph’theri considered for a long time. His paper-bag ears crinkled through rapid shape changes as he communicated like a silent ventriloquist with the other Sp’thra.

The alien finally addressed the crowd.

“If this is true, we Sp’thra shall miss the tide. And for the Xemahoa brain unit, we assess the value thus: the transfer to you of interstellar travel techniques, together with the lending of one gasgiant Tide Reader. This ‘package’ will enable your race to reach the Tide Reader star within five of your years and make your own trading arrangements.”

A hush of awe filled the room. The bright sunlight made it a moment of eternity.

Then a groundswell of naked greed took hold of the crowd, and Sole felt himself being clapped and pounded on the back.

“You damn clever bastard,” Sciavoni hissed in his ear. “Was any of that true?”

“But it has to be,” muttered Sole. “Doesn’t it?”

“Sure it does!” Sciavoni laughed.

“Hey, Dr Sole,” another voice insinuated, “we’d better be turning the taps off down Brazil way, hadn’t we?”

“Before we lose our baby in the bathwater, eh?”

An almost hysterical gaiety. Amid it all the tall Sp’thra stood like a gloomy lighthouse in a storm.

As the babble grew deafening, Ph’theri’s ears scaled down to flat cardboard packets.

A sub-committee of the Washington Special Action Group met in a walnut-panelled room with false windows. Views of New England in the Fall surrounded them—a blaze of russet trees, that could change at the touch of a switch to the Everglades, Hawaiian beaches, or the Rocky Mountains.

The President’s Chief Scientific Adviser, a German emigré with a leonine head of white wiry hair, said:

“There’s a hell of a lot more to it than just snatching a couple of Indians. We’ve got to safeguard our assets—and if these Indians have stumbled on to something so unique that it’s worth the secret of star flight to our friends, then we need it too—”

“We’re going on pretty slender evidence. A letter from a crazy Frenchman full of propaganda,” said a quiet man from the CIA, who’d been doodling on his notepad, producing a series of awkward drawings of a winged dragon like an advertisement for a correspondence course in art in a comic book.

“But we know the thing’s possible. What did that man Zwingler say they’d discovered at that Hospital in England? Some kind of chemical to enhance the intelligence—”

“He said they weren’t sure of that, sir.”

“Yes, but they said lasers were impossible a few years ago then they were in commercial production not long afterwards. The more we find out about the mind, the more likely it seems we can make it do tricks we never dreamed of. The Russians can make a person feel bravery or fear just by injecting a chemical into the brain. Any emotion they like. We can prevent senility to a certain extent. It’s no big deal to predict we’ll be able to make people think better in the near future—”

The President had a visionary—some would say, romantic—taste in scientific advisers. The current adviser’s rise to power took him out of an obscure professorship in social psychiatry at a Mid-Western university, through the Hudson Institute’s Committee on the Year 2000, to his present position, with a speed that alarmed some of his former colleagues. Not that he was a young man. On the contrary. He’d stayed a suspect maverick for too long, pursuing research into dubious topics such as genetic intelligence and conditioning techniques. However, the President had a firm faith in the possibility of managing people and events according to well-defined scripts drawn up by ‘responsible’ psychologists and sociologists. Or, as he put it in a State of the World message, of ‘orchestrating domestic and international events to make harmonious music’.

“Take that Russian who was smashed up in a car crash in Moscow. Bokharov. They reversed his death okay but they couldn’t do anything about the damage to his brain during the time he was dead. His value as a scientist was quartered. But look what we accomplished with that nuclear fusion man at Caltech—”

“Hammond?”

“Sure. His IQ rating was going off by a few fractions of a percentage point. Not enough to make any difference to the average guy. But in a top scientist like him, that’s the difference between excellent routine work—and what for want of a better word we’ve got to call genius. We managed to buck him up for those vital months till we caught up with the Russians—”

“That was using DNA extract?” a sharp-faced Italian-American—the Treasury Department’s head of drug intelligence—asked the Adviser, who nodded.

“Imagine if we could inject some drug that makes the difference of whole percentage points of intelligence at the peak of a man’s career. Give him the power to integrate everything he knows. We have to save the whole environment of these Indians—we need that drug, and at this stage that means the whole natural system it comes from.”

“It ain’t so awkward as it sounds,” said the CIA man, looking up from his dragons. “We can repair the dam afterwards—make it smaller. Then the area those Indians live in can be made into a sort of reserve—big enough so they don’t cotton on and act unnatural, like stop cultivating the drug…”