“Sorry, Lionel. I simply won’t have Chris distracted.”
“I can imagine what he’ll have to say about that when he gets back here to find Vidya babbling his brains out and throwing fits!”
“Which is precisely why I won’t have Chris told now. But I’ll tell you what we 11 do. We’ll set a nurse on permanent stand-by. He can go in there and trank the child if there are any more incidents. We’ll keep him that way till Chris gets back. Keep him on ice. Will that suit you?”
Far from it.
However Sam Bax was already heading out of Sole’s room, leaving Rosson staring at a blank screen.
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—”