Murasaki, page 29
Bruce Johnson stopped short. The Ihrdizu had never in the least reminded him of iguanas—where did Jane, even in her hysteria, get that? And it wasn’t like her to be so ethnocentric, so utterly imperial about the aliens.... She was a scientist. Even if the science was only botany.
“Calm down,” he, said. “She’s probably playing in the Carrot temple, or sulking somewhere.... She knows how much air is in her tanks and, what her physical capacity is. You underestimate her, Jane.
She’ll be all right.”
“Which only means you don’t want to bother to go looking for her! Well, I’m going!” She yanked on her suit, crying.
Bruce suppressed his irritation. He didn’t know what was happening to Jane. She had always been high-strung, but now...
“High emotion means an increased chance of acci-dents, Jane. Look, if you have to go out, just calm down first. Ftilla’s all right, she’s a Genjian.... “
“What? What did you say?”
“I said, she’s a Genjian.”
Jane sobered immediately. Coldly, methodically, she pulled on and sealed her suit, ran through the safety checks. She did not look at him or speak to him until she actually had her hand on the air-lock recycle. Then she said, in a voice he had never heard from her before, “She’s a Ca-nadian child.”
The QED chimed, not softly,, which meant a trans-mission of crucial, although not life-threatening, impor-tance. Bruce turned his head toward the QED. When he turned it back, Jane was gone.
Unnecessary. Rilla would be fine. She would be back in an hour. Unnecessary, and therefore wasteful.
“Transmission from Chujo,” the QED said. A Japa-nese head appeared, someone Bruce didn’t recognize.
“This is Dr. Kenzo Ohkubo,” the man said in English; Bruce recognized the slightly mechanical undertones of the QED translator. Dr. Ohkubo was speaking Japanese. am at temporary base near the sub-Genji point, twenty-five de-grees twenty-eight minutes south, where the largest of the snug mats is growing. I wish to play for my esteemed col-leagues on Genji, in which I include all scientists in reach of the information network, the recording of an interview I have just had with a Chujo Master.”
Bruce whistled. He wasn’t sure what impressed him more: that the Japanese, who tended to be formal and a little proprietary about scientific information, were sharing the interview, or that they had finally gotten one with a Chupchup at all. After twenty-eight years!
“We did not obtain this information by our efforts,” Dr. Ohkubo said. “It was fieely given. The Chujoan walked from his camp near the snug vats to our dome. When I advanced to greet him, he spoke as follows.”
The camera angle shifted; it was not a particularly good picture. The image of the Chujoan wavered, steadied; no one at the temporary camp, hopeless of any real contact, had prepared for this abrupt appearance. Bruce stared, fas-cinated, at the noseless humanoid face with the huge gold-brown eyes, slitted mouth, and flaring, scalloped ears. How good would the translation be? For two and a half decades the Japanese had been dropping transmitters into Chujoan encampments and farm centers. This electronic eavesdrop-ping had yielded only a meager vocabulary and the knowl-edge that Chupchups would not shine at cocktail parties. The QED translation program would not have much to go on.
But speak it did, forty-five seconds of trills, twitters, and growls. Bruce had the eerie impression that the Chu-joan had slowed down its speech, making an effort to be more intelligible. When the statement was over, a callused, blue—fingernailed hand extended toward the camera, offer-ing a smooth blue box about half a meter square. A human hand moved into camera range and grasped the box. Then the Chupchup simply turned and loped off.
Dr. Ohkubo reappeared. “We have run this speech through the best language programs we have.
Many of the Chujoan words were new to the computer. This is the clos-est approximation we can make, going first to Japanese and then to English. Please bear in your mind that it may not be correct.”
The voice of the translator began: “It *islwill be* *time/an animal hunted/a problem solved.*
Snug
travels
to
Genji.
*Error/hunting-mistake-which-leaves-an-animal-unkilled*
is
*solvecl/hunted/built/compkted.* Cities are empty because Chupchups not *inside/needfiil of/tied down for the kill* the cities. We eat the *beings* of Genji. The *beings* of Genji eat us. It *is/will be* *time/an animal hunted/a problem solved.*”
,
Dr. Ohkubo returned and said something brief in Jap-anese. Bruce, watching, wondered what he could have said for the translator to produce the idiomatic, resigned English translation: “There you have it,”
Jesus Christ, Bruce thought. Jesus H. Christ.
Then he remembered that he was a scientist and should take the flyer posthaste to either Okuma.
Base or—better-where the carpet whales were gathering as close as possible to the sub-Chujo node.
Only then did he remember that Jane had the flyer, looking for Rilla.
“Poetry,” Dane said. “It could be poetry. The last line repeating the first...
“The only clear points,” said Don Serranian, one of the physicists, “is that the snug is supposed to travel to Genji, and that something is supposed to be settled. But there’s no way that snug could cross space!”
“Are you sure?” Miyuki Kaneko said. Her voice held an underlying tremor that made Tatsumi watch her closely. “There has been for generations now speculation about bioengineered spaceships.”
Everyone spoke at once then. Dane tried to follow the arguments behind the positions taken by highly trained minds, none of whom agreed with each other.
“The same word carries connotations of ‘time,’ of ‘an animal hunted,’ and of ‘a problem solved.’ Is that threefold meaning a construct of our translator, or does it imply a fatalistic belief system in which time is measured by what events are resolved in a given span?”
“The Chupchups seem to be saying that they aban-doned the cities by their own choice, because they no longer needed them. Not because the race had degenerated to a pre-city level. Which, I’d like to remind everyone, is what I maintained all along.”
“What are the implications of ‘We eat the beings of Genji’? The translation of ‘eat’ is firm, but the translation of ‘beings’ is tentative, level-three uncertainty—are they talking about the Ihrdizu? Are the Chujoans possibly can-nibalistic? Or could they have been once?”
“The next sentence is The beings of Genji eat us.’ That seems to imply a metaphorical interpretation rather than a literal one. Perhaps the entire message is metaphor!”
“If the Japanese would bring that blue ‘book’ to Genji where the rest of us could have a crack at it—”
“Ihrdizu folk sayings like the groveling ‘May I never rise to Chujo’ seem to me to imply an exalted state for Chujo. If it represents a kind of perfected being-hood, a Nirvana—”
“Ihrdizu ecological disasters—”
“—carpet whales—”
They were not getting anywhere, Dane saw. They never did get anywhere. Individual researches illuminated this small fact of the Murasaki biosphere, or that small fact, or a tentative connection between this and that. But they never got anywhere creating a coherent overall picture. Not in thirty years. Did that mean that humans couldn’t grasp a big picture so alien? Or that there was no coherence to be grasped?
Dane didn’t believe the latter.
Why not? Because he just didn’t. The universe was not that fractured. Or human comprehension that limited.
“We do not really understand anything happening here,” Tatsumi said in her pretty voice, and he looked at her, startled to hear his own thoughts articulated so clearly.
Tatsumi smiled at him. No one else even heard her: they were all too loud with desperate speculation.
Why desperate? Dane wondered. But then he knew: contradictory elements in their adopted world made hash of the limited understanding they had already struggled so hard to achieve. The, lack of understanding made them feel excluded. Genji and Chujo, by its sudden eruption of events so clear to their own species and so weird to the humans, were shutting the humans out. They felt exiled.
And he, Dane, did not? No. Why not?
Tatsumi said to him, in a voice barely above a whis-per, “You, Jordan-san, already felt like an exile.”
Rilla stopped walking to check her tanks. Not quite halfway used. She could walk a little ways yet.
But not far. She would have to find Tmafekitch soon. Or
She was farther away from the field dome than she had ever been, except in the flyer. The village was far be-hind. Around her were no birth pools, no Carnot temple, no food ponds. Only low yellow plants and marshy ground and low hillocks and the path, hard and firm, that genera-tions of Ihrdizu had worn for trade. There were no people. Rilla didn’t like to admit how much she wanted to see a snorkel waving above the vegetation. Anybody’s snorkel, it didn’t even have to be Tmafekitch’s.
How could Tmafekitch leave without saying good-bye! How could she!
Rilla walked on a little farther. Above, Chujo was full face, the color of the sand that she and Tmafekitch used to build domes with. Chujo was streaked at one edge with white clouds. It was ugly.
Tmafekitch wasn’t there.
Her tanks suddenly chimed, very loud. They were half empty.
Rilla sat down on a rock beside the path and started to cry. She had to go back. She wasn’t going to see Tma-fekitch after all. She had to go back or she would die. She couldn’t even, in fact, afford the time and energy to sit here and cry.
Life was awful. Nobody had ever told her life was going to be this awful.
Rilla got heavily to her feet, and Tmafekitch came trotting around a hillock.
“Tmafekitch! You’re here!”
Tmafekitch stopped dead and clicked her feet in as-tonishment. Her snorkel waved in loops. She said to Rilla in their personal language, “Why are you here? Where do you go?”
“I came to find you! You left before I came back!–
“It was time for my mating journey,” Tmafekitch said, still clicking and looping. “Are you going on a mating journey now?”
“Of course not!” Rilla said. This was not the meeting she had envisioned. A new thought occurred to her. ‘‘Tma-fekitch—why are you traveling back toward your village?–
“I cannot go on my mating journey.”
“Cannot?” Rilla said. She had never heard of such a thing. “Why not?–
“Because it is ****.”
Rilla had never heard the word. Something odd in Tmafekitch’s snorkel loops made her think suddenly that Tmafekitch had never said the word, either. But that didn’t make any sense. Rilla wished she had the translator with her after all.
“Tmafekitch, what does that word mean? The one you just said?”
Tmafekitch came close to Rilla’s rock. She sat down on her tail, then got up again, which meant she was thinking hard. Her snorkel looped wildly. A flock of silverbirds flew overhead, and only one of her upper eyes tracked it, so distracted was she. Finally she sat down again on her tail and put her face very close to Rilla’s, as talkers often did when they came to the exciting parts in a story they were talking.
“It means time. And an animal killed after long hunt-ing. And... a problem solved.”
“What?” Rilla said. “What?”
Tmafekitch took her face away. The silverbirds suddenly started to screech, and Rilla looked up. A flyer ap-proached. Mommy or Daddy. Or both. Probably furious.
“Oh, uneaten turds,” she said. “Trnafekitch, are you really coming back to your village?”
“Yes.”
“What about your mating journey?”
“I cannot go. It’s ****.”
There it was again. Rilla had never heard of anything interrupting a mating journey once it was started. “What about your heat flush?”
“Gone.”
Rilla had never heard of that, either. “Will it come back?”
“Oh, yes.”
“When?”
“After ****.”
The flyer landed. Through the window Rilla could see Mommy, gesturing at her furiously. Nothing was going right. Except, of course, that Tmafekitch was coming back to the village. Even if that made no sense.
“Tmafekitch—how come you never told me this word before, if it’s so important it can stop your mating journey?”
Tmafekitch seemed to think deeply. Her snorkel ceased all motion. A long moment went by, in which Mommy climbed out of the flyer and stalked toward Rilla.
“Because,” Tmafekitch finally said, “it was not be-fore in me.”
“That’s crazy!” Rilla burst out angrily.
“Yes,” Tmafekitch agreed. “The Masters are some-times crazy. They did not put the word in the Ihrdizu. Not before. Only now.”
All over Genji, Ihrdizu on their mating journeys stopped, turned around, and walked back to their villages. Researchers raced to question them. Each little-she re-sponded courteously.
“It is ****.”
Fishing boats stopped fishing, stowed the catch they already had, and sailed back to their fishing ports. Two scientists, one Japanese and one Anglo, took flyers to two different ports, made ritual-greetings, and asked why the boats had returned.
“It is ****,” the Ihrdizu said.
A three-day festival in the Southland central valley, a gathering of two thousand Ihrdizu, came to a sudden halt. The festival-goers packed up their young and their provi-sions and started back to their own food ponds and birthing pools. The itinerant talkers who had come for the festival, who had much local fame but no food ponds or birthing pools of their own, each went with a different group of Ihrdizu. Bruce Johnson flew to Southland to question as many talkers as he could. Why did the festival stop? Why were the talkers each boarding with an Ihrdizu household instead of continuing on their accustomed circuit?
“It is ****,” the talkers said.
“How the hell did a Chujoan word get into their vo-cabulary?” Don Serranian cried. “A word that apparently none of them knew before the same identical moment all over the fucking planet?”
Bruce Johnson said, “Hard-wired. Into the genetic structure. Had to be. All set for conscious access at some signal. some timing system.” Johnson hardly slept. Dane thought. As tightly wrapped as Serranian, Johnson none-theless was responding differently to this latest develop-ment. He was completely absorbed, forgetting even to eat, to bathe. Serranian, like many of the others, was frustrated and scared by events that made no sense. Johnson loved it.
Serranian said tightly, “What sort of signal?”
“How should I know?– Johnson said. He walked in tight circles in front of the QED. “Maybe astronomical, like the minute variations in light that trigger some bird migrations on Earth. Maybe internal.
If knowledge was stored in the Ihrdizu brain, passed on generation after gen-eration, until some chemical inhibitor was removed in the synapses ... Yes! Yes!” He began punching keys furiously.
“Removed how?” Serranian yelled. “You can’t just have spontaneous genetic combustion!”
“We can’t,” Johnson said gleefully. “Can the Ihrdizu?”
“No!”
“How the hell do you know? Could they have an out-side trigger?”
“Like what?” Serranian was furious; Dane actually thought he might strike Johnson. Dane moved swiftly be-tween them. A First Conciliator was not supposed to be a bodyguard, but to keep fanatics conciliated ...”
But Johnson seemed to calm down a little, even if Serranian did not. His next words were very soft, almost inaudible. His face shone. “An outside trigger. Yes. Tell me, Serranian—how do the carpet whales communicate with each other across huge expanses of ocean?”
“We don’t know!”
“Carpet whales,” Johnson said musingly, his face still radiant. “Carpet whales.” He started typing rapidly in QED mode, inputting to the fuzzy-logic program he had set up to coordinate event-data. After a while he leaned back and watched the screen.
“Will you look at that,” he said softly. “Just look at that.”
Every mature carpet whale on Genji had arrived at the Southland-Nighland strait, south of the sub-Chujo node.
They blanketed the sea for kilometers with their sin-uous black flatness billowing on the waves, their dozens and dozens of pairs of thin waving tentacles. The largest of the whales stretched a hundred meters long, twenty-five meters wide. There was not enough food in the sea for all the stomatalike mouths to graze on, so the himatids seemed to have simply stopped eating. They did not move much. However alien they were, it seemed obvious what the carpet whales were doing.
They were waiting.
All over Genji, the Ihrdizu returned to their villages, and waited.
On Chujo, the mats of snug grew and writhed, and, circled around the mats, the Chupchups waited.
The humans looked at each other. The fascinated ones, Dane thought, the ones like Bruce Johnson, ran data pro-gram after program, straining even the QED’s powers. The others, the ones used to the orderly accumulation of knowl-edge that grew rather than decreased in logical connections, sat around tight-lipped—and cursed the waiting.
“I want her out of here!” Jane Johnson said to her husband. “I want Rilla on the orbital ship, away from all this! It’s just too weird, and nobody knows what will happen!’
‘
“I won’t go!” Rilla said. “I want to stay here on Genji!”
Jordan Dane doubted that Bruce Johnson actually heard either of them.
“In my grandmother’s sand garden,” Suzy Tatsumi said reflectively to Dane, “were quiet empty spaces, bare sand or bare polished rock, as much a part of the design as the living bonsai.”
For days there were storms. Powerful winds blew Gen-ji’s thick air masses. Rain whipped across the seas. In the low-lying villages, the waters rose dangerously above flood tide.
But then the winds blew themselves out, the clouds dissipated, and one of Genji’s rare clear skies shone above noontime Southland. And the carpet whales, the massed and tightly packed carpet whales in the Nighland-Southland strait below Chujo, all rolled over to their ventral sides.
