“Get your sposhing hands off me!” Steen shouted.
“You idiot, what was the idea of speaking Calamorian?”
“To program the robot’s translating machine!” Indignantly. “Why can’t it be given words of a civilized language?”
I was so furious over Steen’s stupid militancy that I overlooked the important thing he/she had said, for a moment. I said, “You know damn well that Anglic is the official language of this expedition, and you’ve agreed to use it throughout. If we’re going to give this robot words, they ought to be in only one language, and that language should be—”
“The robot should have a chance to know that Anglic is not the only language in the cosmos! This suppression of the Calamorian language is an act of racial genocide! It—”
“Shut up,” I said, not very tolerant of Steen’s outraged racial pride. Then I reacted to the right thing at last, ” — translating machine?”
Of course.
Inscription nodes and puzzle-boxes weren’t separate artifacts. They were meant to work together, as this robot had assembled them. And they weren’t recording devices, either.
They were machines for converting the babble of primitive barbarian races into the language of the High Ones.
Steen had seen this quickly, and wanted to get his/her own wonderful Calamorian language into the record, in defiance of expedition agreements. Maybe doing it enhanced his sense of racial pride, but it also quonked up our chances of quick communication with the robot, since it had placed a dozen incompatible sentences on the record. No translating machine ever invented would get anywhere operating under the assumption that what Steen had just blurted and what the rest of us had been saying were both the same language.
I warned Steen not to try it again. Steen gave me a surly look; but he/she had scored the intended point and now subsided, leaving me a clear shot at the translating machine.
I bent close to it.
Then I wondered what I ought to say.
Words wouldn’t come. Steen Steen had probably bellowed some glib testimonial to the everlasting merits of the Calamorian people, but I wasn’t about to do that, and I developed a paralyzing case of mike fright as I tried to imagine the most useful and appropriate possible statements.
The robot said encouragingly, “Speak words of you to this.”
I said, “What kind of words? Any words?”
Then silence. Steen laughed at me.
I said, “My name is Tom Rice. I was born on the planet Earth of the sun Sol. I am twenty-two years old.”
I stopped again, as if the machine needed time to digest one set of statements before receiving another. It didn’t, I now know.
“Speak more words,” prompted the robot.
I said, “The language I am speaking is Anglic, which is the most important language of Earth. The language spoken by the last voice was Calamorian. This is a language of another world in a different solar system.”
As I spoke, I saw streams of High Ones hieroglyphics rippling along the surface of the inscription node. The gadget was converting my sounds into the written characters of the ancient language. What good that did was hard to say, in terms of communication. When I write Dihn ruuu mirt korp, I’m converting the robot’s sounds into our kind of alphabetic writing, but I’m not getting one step closer to understanding what those sounds mean.
It must have helped, though. Because the speaking vocabulary of the robot expanded from minute to minute.
“Say name of other one,” it said.
“He/she is Steen Steen of Calamor. We have come here to seek information about the builders of this vault.”
“Say more names of things.”
I indicated and named the vault, the door, the ship, the heavens, and as much else as was within pointing range. Carefully choosing my words, I spelled out the fact that we knew that a great deal of time had passed since the construction of the vault. I tried to explain that we were archaeologists who had excavated many remains of the High Ones, but that no member of any existing species had ever encountered a living High One. And so on.
The robot studied the changing hieroglyphics on the inscription node with intense interest, but confined its statements to brief, brusque commands to go on talking. By now the translating machine had absorbed a healthy chunk of data. By now it had struck me that we ought to be letting the others in on what was going on, too, and I said to Steen, “Switch to ship frequency and call Dr. Horkkk here.”
“While you feed the robot with poisonous lies?” Steen said. “You call!”
Resisting the impulse to kick Steen in the ribs, if Steen has ribs, I switched channels briefly, summoned everyone from the ship, and cut back to vocal output. The robot wanted more words… and more… and lots more. It soaked them up.
Dr. Horkkk and Pilazinool arrived, with the others not far behind. I explained the situation. Dr. Horkkk began to glow with excitement. “Keep talking,” he said.
I kept talking.
I talked myself hoarse, and then Jan took over, and after her, Saul Shahmoon. It didn’t matter much what we said; we were stocking a high-powered computer with data, in essence, and the computer would take care of sorting things out and making sense of them. Dr. Horkkk seemed to tingle in amazement and perhaps a sort of dismay, for such a sense-from-noise machine was exactly what he had been trying without success to develop in his whole career.
After more than an hour the robot was satisfied.
“No more words,” it said. “The rest will fit in by themselves.”
Translation: the machine now was sufficiently stocked with Anglic words. It would arrange them, make them accessible to the robot, and deal with additions to its vocabulary by interpreting them in context as they came along.
The robot was silent for perhaps five minutes, studying the ebb and flow of hieroglyphics on the inscription node. We didn’t dare speak.
Then it said, in fluent Anglic that reproduced my own accent and pronunciation and even tone of voice, “I will name myself for you. I can be called Dihn Ruuu. I am a machine produced to serve the Mirt Korp Ahm, whom you call the High Ones. The meaning of my name is Machine To Serve. My purpose is to remain in readiness so that I may serve the Mirt Korp Ahm if they come back to this solar system.”
Another long silence. Dihn Ruuu seemed to be waiting for questions.
Pilazinool said, “How long has it been since the Mirt Korp Ahm were on this place?”
“How shall I say the time?” the robot asked.
“That’s a tough one,” Pilazinool muttered. “We haven’t defined our units.”
Dr. Horkkk took over, and I must say he performed brilliantly. “Our basic unit is the second,” he said. “The sound I will make is one second in length.” He flashed an order back to the ship’s computer, which obligingly generated a tone lasting one second. Then he explained how the Earth-standard time units are built up, sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, and so on up to a year. The robot, obedient machine that it was, refrained from making sarcastic comments about this inexact and arbitrary system that we have compelled all other races to adopt, at least in their dealings with us. (Why sixty seconds to a minute? Why twenty-four hours to a day? Why not a sensible system built on tens, or logarithms, or something orderly? Ask the Babylonians. I think they invented it.)
When the robot had grasped our time system, Dr. Horkkk moved on to our distance system, blocking out a line one centimeter in length on the vault floor, and then a one-meter line, and finally instructing the robot to visualize a kilometer as a thousand meters. Finally Dr. Horkkk proceeded to define the orbital velocity of this asteroid in terms of kilometers per hour. The robot stepped out of the vault and scanned the heavens for about half a minute, probably measuring parallax effects so it could see for itself how fast the asteroid was traveling through this solar system. Whatever fantastic computing machine is under its skull was quickly able to calculate the orbital velocity of the asteroid in terms of High Ones units of time and distance, and to work out a correlation from that to Earth-standard figures.