“Listen Sam, if he’s in a hurry, he can see the kids just as easy over the closed circuit from next door—”
“Don’t be tiresome, Richard,” sighed the Director. “We already agreed Tom’s not going into any of the worlds.”
“I should bloody well hope not!” snapped Jannis, his voice toughening.
The Director touched Zwingler on the arm, in embarrassment.
“If you went inside—well, it’s like contaminating a cell culture with a foreign body: a word out of place could be pretty awkward, Tom.”
“That sounds like the understatement of the afternoon,” glowered Jannis.
But the American waved a ruby at him, blandly.
“By no means, Mr Jannis. The understatement of the afternoon, if not of the whole damn decade, was Sam’s crack earlier on. About emissaries—”
The cufflink halted. Beat a hasty retreat. He’s said too much, thought Sole. But too much—about what? Jannis wore a slight smile of contempt on his lips, as they rose from the table.
Vasilki had just gone into the maze—they saw her clearly through the tough thin plastic walls. Rama and Gulshen were chattering to each other outside the entry. Vidya lounged about, looking sullen.
“Why, they’re Indo-Paks! War refugees? Or disaster victims? Hell, but I guess it saved their lives!”
“Precisely my sentiments, Mr Zwingler,” Dorothy chirped—a Victorian well-wisher visiting the workhouse. “What else was their future but deprivation and death? As I’m always saying to Chris.”
As Vasilki moved deeper through the plastic pathways, the walls increasingly discoloured her limbs. Jaundiced her body, till an alternative vision of the girl imposed itself on Sole’s mind. She dragged herself through the maze on skeleton legs, with the pot belly and the dead empty eyes of so many million other children cast on the refuse heap of the twentieth century. And he thought: isn’t the saving of four such children a valid enough reason for this underworld’s existence, whatever the outcome? How would Pierre face up to that one? The taking away of four children speaking that language, Xemahoa, to a safe place like this? Supposing the chance was offered him. He’d come round. Wouldn’t he?
“Can I listen in on what they’re saying, Chris?”
“What? Oh—yes, just a minute.”
Sole fiddled with the audio controls on the wall panel, passed Zwingler a pair of headphones.
The American held them to one ear, pursing his lips. Meanwhile Richard Jannis stalked off along the corridor towards his own territory…
“Yeah. It is different. You sure have messed up the syntax!”
Vasilki had reached the maze centre. Now she was standing by the Oracle, talking to the tall cylinder.
“Kid’s saying something about… rain?”
“It does rain in there, actually. Sprinkler system washes the place out and gives them a shower. You should see them enjoy it. They have a ball.”
“Nice. Say, when you go in there, how does that speech-mask gizmo you were talking about operate?”
“We go through the motions of speaking. But we only sub vocalize the words. The mask picks the words up, runs them through the computer programme, then re-synthesizes the sentences out loud in an embedded form. The masks are hooked into the computer by radio.”
“Neat—so long as the kids don’t go in for lip reading.”
“We thought of that too. That’s why we call it a mask. Only place they see our lips moving is on the teaching screen—and that’s mime.”
Zwingler shifted the phones to his other ear.
“Wonder just how deep this embedding will reach? Will the kids try shifting your own ‘corrections’ back again to the norm?”
“Then,” said Sole with conviction, “we really shall have found out something about the mind’s idea of all possible languages.”
“You mean all possible human languages, don’t you Chris?”
Sole laughed. It seemed such a pointless objection.
“Put it another way then. All languages spoken by beings evolved on the same basis as ourselves. I can’t vouch for languages that silicon salamanders elsewhere in the universe might have dreamt up!”
“Could be such beings would use a kind of printed circuit, binary set-up, more like a computer?” mused Zwingler, apparently taking the joke seriously.
Vidya trod a few paces away from the maze, to a large orange plastic doll, picked it up and set it on its feet. The doll stood as high as his shoulders.
He fiddled with its side and the doll unhinged. He lifted out a smaller doll, a red one, stood it next to the first doll, then closed the first doll’s body again. This second doll came as high as the first doll’s shoulders…
“Teaching aids,” Sole commented as he took the phones back from Zwingler and hung them up again. “The dolls’ bodies carry memory circuits imprinted with a couple of dozen fairy tales. Opening the large doll triggers one of these stories at random. But the cute wrinkle is this: they have to disassemble and reassemble the whole set in the right sequence to get the full story—and the story itself is linguistically embedded, same way as the dolls are embedded physically. There’s seven in all. See, he’s unpacking number three—”
However, Zwingler was still busy wondering aloud about computer-style languages.
“It’s just not on, linguistically,” said Rosson. “You see, the brain has its data associated together in multi-layered networks. Language reflects this. Whereas a computer has a separate ‘address tag’ for each bit of data. In point of fact, Chris’s embeddings may be rejected simply because the mind isn’t a computer. It won’t know where to associate the incoming data because the clues are delayed too long—and it can’t afford to store so much, even if we do use PSF…”
As he spoke, Dorothy began urging the American away from Sole’s world towards her own little empire by brisk rushes away from and back to his side, a hen marshalling a chick—plucking at his sleeve, finally, to shift him.
“Idea associations. Yes, that’s the trouble,” she clucked. “Illogical for words to have multi-value meanings. Of course, we could try teaching a form of Gruebleen, to test for logic values—”
“That sounds like some kind of rotten cheese,” chuckled Zwingler.
“Oh does it! Gruebleen is a form of English. With special words like ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’. For instance, ‘grue’ means something you’ve already examined which is green, or which you haven’t examined and which is blue. But this kind of concept is much too complex for the young child, alas—”
“So it is a moon made of green cheese after all?”
“How do you mean?”
“This Gruebleen is a fantasy, like a moon made of cheese.”
“We weren’t foolish enough to try teaching Gruebleen, Mr Zwingler. I’m trying to indicate the lines of research we ruled out in advance—”
Dorothy shepherded Zwingler along the corridor in a series of precise, logical swoops; while Sole hung back a while, to watch Vidya. Something about the way the boy was behaving troubled him. Something jerky. Robotic.
Vidya finished setting out the seven dolls in a row.
Then his face froze into a mask, and he stared rigidly at the smallest of them.
A minute passed. Abruptly a spasm twitched across the boy’s face. Like a skater coming to grief on thin ice, the tight surface of sanity cracked and he fell through into chaos. His lips parted in a scream. His face distorted. Mercifully, the sound-proofing kept the sound from the corridor. Eyes wide, Vidya stared in Sole’s direction—though he couldn’t see anything but his own reflection in the one-way glass. With a blow of his fist he cannoned the dolls into each other, bowling them over as if they were skittles.