Later that evening Darvin noticed a public telephone near the orchard’s exit. When she was on her own Kwarive had the habit of working late in the museum annexe. Sometimes she even slept there. It seemed like a good idea to call her. Darvin fumbled for coins and fed them in, connected to the operator, and told him the number of the room. After much clicking and clunking the call went through.
“Hello?” Kwarive’s voice sounded sleepy.
“Hello, it’s me.”
“You woke me up. Is everything all right?”
“Yes, everything’s fine. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“You’re juiced, Darvin.”
“Well, yes, but—”
At that point the line went noisy with a buzz that became louder. Darvin held the earpiece away and looked at it. The connections seemed secure. He could still hear the noise. He recalled how the electric shittles had been detected, and glanced around, half-expecting to see one nearby. A trudge walked past, wheeling a barrow of stumblefruit gourds. The buzz peaked and faded.
Shocked back to sobriety, Darvin returned the receiver to his ear.
“What was that?” Kwarive asked.
“Nothing, darling,” Darvin said. “Just some interference. Look, my coins are running out. Good night. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.”
“You mean tomorrow,” said Kwarive. “It’s after midnight. Good night. Sleep well.”
“You too.”
He hung up the receiver and walked back to the table. Bahron and Arrell were licking the stickiness off their hands and clearly getting ready to leave.
“Everything all right at home?” Bahron asked.
“Yes,” said Darvin. “Everything’s fine.”
Darvin spent the night in a cheap lodging — little more than a bowl to wash in and a rack to hang from — and at dawn, wakened by a prearranged and persistent telephone, waited at the quay for the return packet. The sky was red and the air was cold. Trudges lugged packages and bales to the quayside. None of the trudges showed a glint of intelligence, but, Darvin reflected, nor did many of the humans there. He doubted that he did so himself.
The steamer rounded the western headland. As he gazed at it, Darvin’s attention was caught by a golden gleam high in the sky, far out above the Broad Channel. It came from the low sun reflected off an airship, a big one, moving fast in the morning wind off the sea. After a few minutes, and long before the steamer had crossed half the bay, the dirigible was in plain sight, sinking towards Kraighor. On its underside at the front was a greenish dot, which Darvin knew to be the blue and green roundel of Gevork. The steady note of the airship’s engines sounded from the sky.
A louder, harsher throb came from the air in the shoreward direction. Darvin heard shouts. He turned and looked up, and shouted too.
Four flying machines with double wings passed overhead. They looked like the aeroplanes he had imagined, and the experimental airframes Orro had described. Painted on their red wings was the black claw of the Reach. A thrill shook Darvin from head to foot. Nobody here, he was sure, was as amazed as he.
The four craft buzzed seaward and climbed with a rising snarl to meet the descending Gevorkian. They passed it and turned around, sunlight flashing off their tilting wings. Their engine note changed, like that of a motor car throttling back. Two above, two below, they took position on either side of the airship and escorted it down. They looked like flitters beside a grazer, but that was a matter of mere size: the relatively tiny machines gave an impression of concentrated power that the vast wallowing gasbag couldn’t begin to match. Even their engines were louder.
The aircraft passed overhead again, the four aeroplanes pacing the dirigible as it dove toward the mooring masts high on the Mount. A cheer rose from the quay, and from the esplanade, and from the houses round about. The steamer left a half hour late that day.
17 — Pies in the Sky
“You did what?”
Not in five hundred years had Synchronic felt such fury. Her hands shook and the world darkened in her sight. Constantine looked back at her with a calm she was certain he would not have dared to affect if his presence before her had been physical.
“Reverse-engineered from the language module,” he repeated.
Synchronic’s hands mimed strangling him. Shocked, she calmed herself with several deep breaths and a moment of flash meditation. This could be dealt with. This disaster was not irrecoverable. This was not beyond her power. She could get on top of this. They all could.
Futile rage gave way to urgent inquiry.
“How?” she asked. “How is that possible?” The anger again. Another moment of the hard-learned mental discipline. Calm.
“Quantum-level effects,” he said. He shrugged, waggling his spread hands, palms down. “Crew scientists, you know what they’re like. I don’t claim to understand it. I’m told it’s a refinement of brain interface techniques. If that helps.”
“ ‘If — that — helps’!”
Brain interface techniques, indeed! I’ll give you brain interface, you arrogant fool! Her brain interface was right now transmitting all she saw and heard to her fellow-members of the Circle, and thereby to the Council, on which two of its members sat. Anger flared and calm restored. She returned a serene gaze to the spectre in the sunny garden. She had to keep it this way. They were sharing information. They were solving a problem together. Constantine was not on trial. Not yet.
She reviewed what he had told her, replaying the words and sentences her anger had whited out and shouted down the first time.
The problem, the intellectual problem, was this. No Rosetta stone existed for the bat people’s language. No amount of observation, no iteration of linguistic heuristics, could decode an unknown language from recordings alone. For mutual understanding, there had to be mutual interaction. One had to know directly what one side of the conversation was trying to say, and that meant one side of it had to be you. Faced with this impasse, the crew’s scientists had, in all too characteristic a fashion, worked around it. Their solution had all the grubby fingerprints of a brute-force kludge.
The neural structure of the human brain’s language-processing module, named in deep antiquity Chomsky’s Conceit, had been known since the Caves. The genetic code of the Destiny II biosphere was known from aerial microorganisms returned to the stealth orbiter. The amount of information and genetic instruction that could be packed in a nanoassembler was vaster by far than even the vast amount stored in natural genomes and machinery, cluttered as they were with redundancy and junk. The information-processing hardware capacity of the ship was beyond all human conception, and the amount of information its science software could extract from the slenderest and most fragile of evidence was limited only by the ingenuity of the human inquiry that initiated it.
So… they’d had the means to install Chomsky’s Conceit on any big enough brain down below. They had the means to generate radio transmitters within host bodies, as they’d done with the dung-beetles. And faced with the crash-and-burn and banning of that project, they’d skipped blithely ahead to a bolder one. They couldn’t install Chomsky’s Conceit on the brains of bat people — the aliens’ brains already had a language module of their own. That would have given rise to wetware conflicts and deep grammar errors, and anyway, ethically, that would never have done. Oh no. That would have been wrong. That would have interfered. What they had done, bless their reckless little souls, was to set up the machinery to install the module on the brains of the slaves, who had (they’d figured) no language module (and who were, therefore, not slaves but beasts). And once they’d received and filtered and processed and quantum-handwaved the information coming back from brains learning the bat people’s languages, the translation protocols had been—