The Embedding

FIFTEEN

Ph’theri emerged from the scout ship towards midnight and waited under the sharp desert stars till Sciavoni went out to greet him.

Military police hurried round the building complex alerting Americans and Russians.

The alien stood there looking sad and haunted. But when he spoke, he sounded more impatient and irritable than sad.

“Concerning the trade exchange—”

“Won’t you come inside the building, Ph’theri?”

“It is larger here. I see quite well in the dark.”

“As you like. We have a human corpse on ice—shall we bring it on board your ship?”

“To the ramp will do. Other Sp’thra will take it inside.”

“Can’t we look in your ship then? We’re very curious.”

“Technology is trade-assessable—”

These monotonous economics were beginning to get on Sciavoni’s nerves. He was supposed to believe these creatures were haunted by some kind of thwarted love—like Abelards of outer space, mutilated philosophers hunting for their Heloise in another dimension. Yet they carried on their love affair like spooks or machines.

“The corpse, Ph’theri! How about that? Isn’t that worth a look inside your ship?”

The alien exaggeratedly shook his head, a consciously reconstructed gesture creakily at odds with his anatomy.

“No. Because the corpse is a necessary sub-item of the main trade deal. We have to know in advance the right way to separate brain from body. Are you capable of performing this operation?”

“I guess not. Give us five years—”

“Wait five years? Ridiculous!”

“No, you’ve got me wrong. I don’t mean you’ve got to wait. I mean in five years our doctors ought to be able to maintain the brain in isolation. The psychological problems might be the hardest nut to crack. Tell me this, Ph’theri, what will you do to stop these brains going crazy when they’re cut off? They’re humans—we’ve a right to know.”

“We do not intend to let our property be hurt. The brains will have sensory links with the outside world. The primary difference is, they will no longer be mobiles. But they will not be idle. They have work to do, preparing them for their place in the Language Moon. You worry about their rest and dreaming function? Whatever is necessary for the human brain will be provided. The Sp’thra are used to minds from a thousand cultures of space, water, air and earth, remember. Entertainments? We have many hours of your TV output that can be screened before their eyes—”

“They’ll still have eyes?”

“Eyes usually are an integral part of the brain in the case of hominids. Isn’t that so with you? We shall examine the dead one. Bring it over to the ramp now—”

“Surely, Ph’theri. But I still think a corpse rates a look round your ship.”

“Why can you people not trade-assess correctly? If your culture revered the corpse, as the Xorghil dust-whales do, things would be different. These dust whales are the sentient patterns imposed on the densest dust of a bright nebula, who tow their dying individuals towards a stellar contraction pool where their dead bodies may finally be compacted into a star and reborn as light. They care. But your culture cares nothing for corpses. Witness your entertainments! What is not valued by you, is not trade-assessable. Surely that is obvious?”

Sciavoni called through the crowd of people who had gathered.

“Somebody bring the body out. Up to the foot of the ramp. They’ll take it from there.”

“What’s so obvious about it?” growled a Russian scientist. “So now we are the ones to suffer the fobbing-off with a few shiny beads—like your feathered Indians here in America were traded beads for their precious pelts and skins? As though we are the primitives! Quite a neat dialectical irony. Yet how naturally the spirit of man rebels against such an exploitation, when our dream is of the stars and mastery of nature!”

“It seems other beings have already mastered nature pretty effectively for themselves,” sighed an American voice. “Maybe we ought to be thankful they think enough of us to want our brains. Even if they buy them like apples off a stall.”

“I’ll remind you people,” Sciavoni snapped, “that the price tag for a human brain may still turn out to be a ticket to the stars—”

“Supposing anything materializes out of the Amazon,” grunted the elder astronomer from California.

Ph’theri’s paper-bag ears swelled up to capture the exchange of words.

“How soon till the Brain that Self-Embeds is here?” he demanded.

“Soon, soon,” soothed Sciavoni.

Ph’theri threw up a hand peremptorily. Was it only an illusion—a reflex of their minds—or did the palm actually glow in the dark?

“Now who is being vague?” asked the alien icily.

“For Pete’s sake!”

Sciavoni’s eyes ranged frantically through the crowd for the discreet man from the NSA who was handling liaison with Brazil.

“Mr Silverson, what’s the latest situation report, please?”

Silverson was a slice of low-calorie crispbread beside the doughy crusts of the Russians. Faintly scandalized at the number of people present, ambiguous in the darkness, he reported:

“Niagara hasn’t fallen yet, Mr Sciavoni. We think it’ll be at least twelve hours after that event before our team evacuate from Franklin. Big Bird and seismographs are on the look-out.” He hesitated. “Perhaps I should add there’s been some guerrilla activity reported throughout the Project area. We don’t know what effect this might have—”

“We’re proceeding as fast as we can, you see, Ph’theri,” Sciavoni said defiantly.

Ph’theri’s ears shifted shape again as he paid attention to the scarlet wires.

“The Sp’thra suggest this time bonus: you may come inside our ship with your recording equipment, if the Brain that Self-Embeds arrives within forty-eight hours. Now what about the normal language brains?”

“That’s being taken care of, right now. You’ll be given English, Russian, Japanese, Eskimo, Vietnamese and Persian language samples—they ought to fit the bill, linguistically.”

Merchant Seaman Noboru Izanami’s first journey outside of the home islands of Japan led him straight to San Francisco. He passed through the Golden Gate, where suicides stand and face the city to die, and it seemed to him like a great torii gateway to the shrine of the American dream.

Noboru took the elevator up Colt Tower, and shot of! half a reel of film from the top. Then he turned his steps towards the Japanese residential area off Post and Buchanon, to wander nostalgically along the shopping streets, delighted to find an American city so like a Japanese one. He ate a bowl of fried soba noodles in a restaurant called Teriko’s—with a display of plastic replicas of the Japanese food in its window. Outside Teriko’s he met two native San Franciscans. One of them was a second or third generation Japanese immigrant, who still miraculously spoke Japanese.

“Eego sukosi mo wakaranai? No, Lloyd, he don’t speak a word of English. Ano né, kizuke no tame ni ippai yaro, yoshi? I’m askin’ if he’d care for a pick-me-up, just along the street a little way. Tyotto sokorahen made—”

Noboru worried in case he’d be a nuisance.

“Don’t give it a thought. Do-itashimashite. Anata no keiken no ohanasi ga kikitai no desu. I’m making out we’d love to hear about his travels. Such as those are, Lloyd, such as those are!”

Noboru introduced himself with a tight little bow.

“Watakusi wa Izanami Noboru desu. Doozo yoroshiku!”

They set off eastward along Post Street, wreathed in smiles.

“Gaikokungo wa dame desu kara né!” Noboru wrinkled his nose apologetically.

“Seems like he’s no damn good at foreign languages, Lloyd. Just our boy.”

A low-slung ambulance slid through the snowploughed streets of Valdez, Alaska, towards the airfield. Its windscreen wipers scooped out arcs of glass from the feathery snow.

A flat-faced, blubbery woman lay on a stretcher breathing noisily through her mouth.

“Why does she have to be transferred in this kind of weather?” whined the nurse. “Who’s going to explain to her? She can’t speak a word of English. You know that?”

“I know,” the driver called over his shoulder. “They got some Eskimo interpreter woman in Anchorage.”

“What I’m thinking about is her husband. How do we tell him she’s been spirited away a hundred miles, maybe die on her own, nobody talking to her she knows?”

“A kidney machine has come available. She needs it. Simple.”

“I don’t get how an illiterate Eskimo woman has all this care lavished on her so sudden. Kidney machine treatments come expensive.”

“Maybe it’s her lucky day. Make sure you tell her man it’s all for his woman’s good, huh? Fisherman, isn’t he?”

“Ordinary fisherman. I don’t get it.”

The ambulance slid softly through the snow.