The Medusa Encounter Read online

  Singh rose with quick grace and went to her desk. She took another, smaller silver-framed holo from the desk and handed it to Sparta. “Our first subject was an infant chimp—her name was Molly—with a motor disorder. The poor thing couldn’t even cling to her mother. In the wild she would have died within a few hours of birth, and in captivity she would have developed severe emotional problems and probably would not have reached maturity. I had no qualms about injecting her with a mix of organic nanochips designed to restore her primary deficit . . . and at the same time, quite conservatively, to test some other parameters.”

  “Language parameters?”

  Sparta handed the holo back to Singh, who replaced it on the desk. “Questions concerning the evolution of language, rather.” Singh sat down again, attending Sparta as closely as she had before. “A chimp’s brain is half the size of a human’s but shows many of the same major anatomical structures. Fossil skull casts of the earliest hominids, now extinct but rather more closely related to chimps than we are, show development in the traditional language centers of the brain. And there are no inherent neurophysiological barriers to language, however stringently you might wish to define that term, in the organization of a chimp’s brain.”

  “The anatomical obstacles to speech were corrected surgically, weren’t they?”

  “We did no surgery on Molly. That came later, with the others. And certainly there were anatomical problems—but the corrections were minimal, and we made sure they were painless.” Singh had tensed almost imperceptibly, but now relaxed again as she got back to reciting the good news. “That initial and quite unofficial neurochip experiment on Molly showed astonishing results. Her motor control improved rapidly, until she was indistinguishable from the average infant chimp. And as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, the average infant chimp is an Olympic athlete compared to the average infant human. This one, even with her primitive natural vocal equipment, started making interesting sounds. ‘Mama’ and so forth.”

  Sparta smiled. “A good Sanskrit word.”

  “A good word in most languages.” Singh bared her teeth again. “We knew we’d done something extraordinary. We had bridged the gap between our species, something the first animal-language researchers in the 20th century had tried so hard to do but without clear results. We had done it decisively and without much effort at all. I will never forget that morning, when I went to Molly’s cage and ‘interacted’ with her—orthodox behaviorist terms are rather dry, I fear—when I simply held out my hand and gave her the food pellet. And she said ‘Mama’ to me.”

  Singh’s eyes were shining in the textured lamplight. Sparta did not break the silence.

  “Looking back, I believe it was in that moment I conceived ICEP, the Interspecies Communication Enhancement Program.” Singh suddenly frowned. “Incidentally, I hate the term ‘superchimp’ only a little less than I despise the word ‘simp.’ ” The frown dissolved, although her expression remained brusque. “Our first enhanced subjects, these eight, were ready for training a year later. The details of the program, our evaluation of the results, are of course on record.”

  “The record says nothing about your decision to abandon the program,” Sparta said. “Yet no continuing proposal was filed.”

  “I’m afraid you can put that down to the media-hounds—or perhaps I should say, to the will of the people, who become hysterical when expertly manipulated. It was plain there would be no more funding for ICEP after all of our subjects were lost in the crash of the Queen Elizabeth IV.”

  “All? I found no record of the death of the chimpanzee named Steg.”

  “Steg?” Singh looked at Sparta carefully. “I see you have read the files carefully.” She seemed to come to some unspoken decision. “Inspector, I’m scheduled to fly to Darjeeling as soon as our interview is completed here. I run a sanatorium near there, for my private patients. It’s on the grounds of the family estate. Would you care to be my guest this evening?”

  “That’s gracious of you, Dr. Singh, but I won’t keep you long. I think we can complete our business here shortly.”

  “You misunderstand me. I’m not concerned with the time. I thought you might like to meet Steg. The last of the so-called superchimps.”

  XII

  “Everything you remember about that night is true,” the commander said, “except it wasn’t her in the chopper.”

  “A stand-in? An actress?” Blake asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “How about the guy who tied me up?”

  “He was real.”

  They were walking side by side through the woods, with the distant cliffs on the far side of the Hudson barely visible through the trees. Their breath made clouds in front of them. All around, autumn blazed.

  They came to the edge of the woods. The mansion was to their left, across a wide back lawn already turning brown with approaching winter. Ellen’s window and the pantry window Blake had broken in his escape attempt were visible in the near tower; the one still had fresh putty around it, and around the other the new leading of the stained glass was as bright as pewter.

  “We were going to catch you in her room—that’s about as far ahead as we were thinking. You almost got away. Came through that window, charged the chopper. Complete surprise. If the guy in the Snark hadn’t been getting the injection ready, you could have made a mess of us.”

  “Ellen reached for me, pulled me in. You say that memory’s a fake? You can do that?”

  “With the right subject.”

  They resumed walking toward the lodge. After a moment Blake said, “Can you erase my . . . chip? Give me back the truth?”

  “Afraid not.” The commander laughed, a single sharp expulsion of breath. “If you want, we could give you our version of what you might remember if we hadn’t messed with you. It would be just as fake.”

  “Never mind.”

  “Raises interesting questions, doesn’t it?”

  “Like, how will I know tomorrow we really had this little chat?” said Blake.

  “Others too.”

  “Like, why—if this is true—are you bothering to explain? When before, you just wanted to get me out of the way.”

  “You’re dangerous, you know.” The commander nodded toward the house. Thick plastic covered the charred porch: more scaffolding stood against the ruins of the carriage house, farther on. “And that was before you knew about Salamander.”

  Blake’s laugh was sour. “What difference does it make? You can rewrite the last week of my life . . . wipe all that mayhem away.”

  “Before you knew about us, we justified the deception. A temporary lie, we said . . . and Ellen could tell you the truth later.”

  “She’s in on it?”

  “She wouldn’t have agreed, Redfield, you know her better than that. We didn’t ask her. After, when she heard our reasons, she went along.”

  Blake shook his head angrily. “I don’t know how you guys decide where to draw the line. Playing God.”

  “We’re not God. We couldn’t rewrite the last week of your life if we wanted to. An hour or two, if that. Try more, and bad things happen.”

  “How do you know bad things happen?”

  “We didn’t invent the technique, Redfield,” he said sharply. “They did.”

  “You use it. The results of their experiments.”

  “What you asked before”—the commander let the accusation pass, nolo contendere—“Human memory’s not on a chip. It’s distributed in lots of parts of the brain. You’d have to talk to the neuro people about that, it’s too complicated for me.”

  “Sure,” Blake said.

  “I understand the practical side. That it’s easier to blank out something somebody heard or read than something they saw happen. Harder still to blank out something involving the body.” The commander eyed him. “You seem to get your body into most of the stuff you learn, Redfield.” It sounded almost like a compliment.

  “That doesn’t exhaust your options, Command
er.”

  “I don’t blame you for thinking it, Redfield, but we like to believe we’re the good guys. So we don’t kill other good guys. We don’t hold their friends and relatives hostage. Only two options for us.”

  “Which are?”

  “Well, we could take your word of honor you won’t betray us.”

  Blake was caught by surprise. After a moment he shook his head. “I couldn’t give it. If they caught me, tortured me . . . or used those drugs on me again. Or if they took Ellen, or my parents . . .”

  “Good. You know yourself.” The commander nodded. “We’d take your word anyway.”

  Some resistance broke inside Blake and he looked at the older man with new respect. “What’s your other option?”

  “Recruit you.”

  “I already turned you down.”

  “Not the Space Board—Salamander.”

  “I can’t be one of you.”

  They had reached what was left of the porch. The commander paused on the first step. “Why not?”

  “You really were one of the prophetae once, weren’t you?”

  The commander stared at him. He nodded once, slowly.

  “All of you were, all these scrubbed kids,” said Blake.

  “That’s right.”

  “I never was. I never believed in that crap, that alien savior business. I only pretended.”

  “We’ll make an exception in your case,” the commander said hoarsely.

  “You’ve got it backwards,” Blake said.

  The commander, watching him with basilisk eyes, did not move, hardly seemed to breathe. Then he relaxed. “Okay. Before I fly you back to the city,” he said, “there’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  * * *

  J. Q. R. Forster, professor of xenopaleontology and xenoarchaelogy at King’s College, London, was engrossed in a leather-bound volume from a shelf of 19th-century classics when Blake and the commander entered the library. Forster was a tiny bright-eyed fellow whose expression immediately put Blake in mind of an excited terrier. When the commander made the introductions, Forster stepped forward and gave Blake’s hand a jerk.

  “My dear Redfield, let me congratulate you on the first rate job you and Inspector Troy did in recovering the Martian plaque. Splendid to have it safely back where it belongs.”

  “Thank you, sir. Ellen spoke of you often.” Blake hesitated. “Uh, excuse me for saying so, but you’re a lot younger than I expected.”

  Indeed Forster looked no more than thirty-five, instead of his true fifty-plus years. “If I continue to have frequent scrapes with death requiring visits to the plastic surgeon, I shall soon be a boy like yourself,” he said. “They said they replaced seventy percent of the skin.”

  “Sorry,” said Blake, embarrassed. He’d forgotten about the Free Spirit bomb, the explosion and fire that had been intended to kill Forster and destroy his life’s work.

  Forster coughed. “Not really necessary of course . . .”

  “Sir?”

  “After all, I’ve studied the thing for so many years I could sit down at a terminal and recreate it from memory.”

  “The Martian plaque, you mean?”

  The commander closed the hall library doors. “Mister Redfield hasn’t been briefed, Professor.”

  Forster looked at Blake with suspicion. “Do you consider yourself a scholar of Culture X, Redfield?”

  “Not at all,” he said, surprised.

  “Isn’t this the person you spoke of?” Forster asked the commander, raising a bushy eyebrow.

  “Redfield’s work relates to yours, Professor. I think after we’ve talked you’ll see the connections pretty clearly.”

  Blake glanced at the commander. Just before he’d sent him and Ellen to Mars to find the missing plaque, the commander had referred to the assignment as having to do with “archaeological stuff.” As if he’d had no idea why anyone would be interested.

  “Shall we get on with it, then?” Forster said fussily.

  The commander gestured to the library’s well-stuffed leather-upholstered chairs. After some moving of furniture, they found that they had moved their seats to the corners of an invisible equilateral triangle, facing inward.

  “If you don’t mind starting, Professor,” said the commander.

  “I’m eager.”

  “I’ll ask them to bring tea—and something stiffer for you,” he said, catching Forster’s look. He fingered his wrist unit. It chimed softly in confirmation.

  Forster had brought a flat holo projector from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, placed it on the lamp table beside him, and keyed its pad. Several dozen sculptural shapes appeared in midair above the unit, seemingly quite solid, as if cast in type metal.

  “I presume that by now both of you know of my discovery that the Venus tablets constitute a more spectacular linguistic and philological discovery than the fabled Rosetta stone itself,” Forster said brightly. His lack of modesty was so transparent Blake found it almost charming. “Not only were the tablets laid out so as to deliberately reveal the sounds associated with each of the signs you see here—which I have arranged in the frequency of their occurrence, by the way—but the texts, over a dozen different ones, were written phonetically in the Bronze Age languages of Earth. Moreover, they were matched to their translations in the language of Culture X.” Forster cleared his throat grandly. “Thus in a single stroke we were able to obtain not only a sizeable sample of the Culture X language, written and phonetic, but also, as a windfall, sample texts of several lost languages of Earth never before deciphered. Tragically, all copies of these tablets were destroyed on that terrible night.”

  “But the original Venus tablets still exist?” Blake asked.

  “Yes, buried where we left them on the surface, and I certainly intend to return to excavate them”—Forster hesitated—“someday. When the necessary funds can be raised. But meanwhile I’ve made a more pressing discovery.” His bright eyes and pursed lips expressed a curious mixture of emotions. The little boy in him craved approval, the professor in him demanded it. “I’ve translated the Martian plaque!”

  “Congratulations,” said Blake, trying to sound sincere. In his business, purported translations of untranslatable old manuscripts were almost as common as plans for perpetual motion machines at the patent office.

  “If you’ll bear with me just a moment,” said the professor, fiddling with the holo unit.

  Beneath the floating sculptural signs there appeared other signs, plain Roman letters and world-standard linguistic marks.

  “These are the sounds of the signs.” He touched the pad, and the signs, paired with their phonetic equivalents, briefly glowed one after the other as the speaker in the unit emitted disembodied phonemes: “KH . . . WH . . . AH . . . SH . . .”

  When the machine had gone through the list, Forster said, “The Martian plaque contains many of the same signs—none of the signs borrowed from human languages, of course—and lacking only the three least frequent occurrences in the Venusian tablets.” He glanced at Blake. “Because I had memorized it, I was able to reconstruct it during the period when it was missing and all records of its existence had been destroyed. Lying in a bed in the Port Hesperus clinic—amusing myself by thinking, since I could do nothing else—I established that in contrast to the Venusian tablets, which as I said are translations of texts from ancient Earth, the Martian plaque makes only a glancing reference to Earth. An Earth far too young to have evolved creatures that made intentional sounds, much less spoken languages.”

  He fingered the unit and a full-size image of the Martian plaque appeared, floating above the other signs and marks like a piece of shattered mirror.

  “Does that seem an accurate rendition to you, Mister Redfield? It’s from memory.”

  “I have to say that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

  Forster took that as a compliment. “As one might guess by looking at it, the plaque is not really a plaque. It is but a fragment of a
much longer document, most of which is missing. This is what it says.”

  The speaker spewed forth a broken string of hisses and booms and clicks, reading off the incomplete lines of the plaque in the voice Forster had reconstructed for the long-gone aliens who had inscribed the metal plaque.

  Blake tried to seem fascinated. He snuck a look at the commander, whose stone face conveyed nothing.

  After the hissing stopped, Forster said, “Here it is in English.” This time the voice was sexless and ingratiating, the standard voice of the 21st-century general-purpose computer:

  place on ZH-GO-ZH-AH 134 of WH-AH-SS-CH 9 . . .

  down upon a salt world of EN-WE-SS 9436 . . .

  were designated came humbly and peacefully to do . . .

  leader. Beneath the shore of the dark salt they . . .

  one thousand stadia of this place they . . .

  places of power and their places of production and . . .

  study and their places of rest. Later generations . . .

  over all the salt and land of this world, and . . .

  of WH-AH-SS-CH they did the work assigned to . . .

  the designates labor on this, the first of the . . .

  of EN-WE-SS 9436-7815. Their greatest . . .

  TH-IN-THA. Chariots flowed like a river from the east . . .

  great encampments. The designates honored . . .

  accomplishments. The creatures multiplied . . .

  and diversity. In their many kinds . . .

  netted together. At the same time other designates . . .

  second and third salt worlds. Then, finally . . .

  AH-SS-CH 1095, all those who were . . .

  salt worlds to await the success-signaling . . .