Alien Tongues (22 page)

The next slide showed a key and a lock mechanism.

"Imagine trying to file a key into a good enough shape to open a lock. First you need to get the shape good enough to fit into the lock, then to turn far enough to see where it actually doesn't fit." Wilkie indicated the marks on the key where it had been scratched inside the lock. "Then we keep filing until we get the right fit.  It's a trial-and-error process, but the point is that it provides us with cumulative progress.  Our software is using the number-language model to fit hundreds of millions of similar languages to the text and see how much predictive power that gives us within the text."

"What was the nature of the data in The Call?" Alice asked.

Wilkie smiled at her knowingly.  "Pulses of ten different magnitudes."

"Ten!" Alice clapped her hands. "Is that a coincidence, or what?"

"Exactly.  Does this IL have two hands with five fingers on each, or one hand with ten fingers, or five hands each with two fingers?"

Maybe they know we have ten fingers, Séamus thought, but wondered if the comment would sound ridiculous, so he did not voice it.

"Step back a bit," said one of the civil servants.  "You're using 'we' all the time.  At what point in this decoding did it cease to be just the Consortium and include you, and when did it escalate to the G8+5?  I'd like to know who owns what, and the leverage of this Consortium."

"Glad you asked," Wilkie replied, and pulled up another slide.  "Here's the deal, if you like.  Don't ask me too much about it because I'm just a humble, naive scientist.  I only think in terms of collaboration to advance the knowledge of mankind.  But the Consortium knew they couldn't assemble the brainpower of the girls, and even the G8 needed the informed cooperation of at least five Asian governments other than Japan.  The five were chosen based on a mixture of political stability and international engagement, population size, educational level, government data and language diversity.  It obviously required strong engagement from the UN. The consortium has given us a sizeable fraction of The Call, and in return they get a direct feed of everything the girls are doing.  Both the G13 and the Consortium are doing independent analyses of the girls' results. As for ownership, there is of course a very lengthy legal document, but who knows if everybody is going to adhere to that."

Wilkie opened the blinds again and late morning sunshine flooded the room.  Séamus thought how normal and familiar the lawn outside looked.  Yet it seemed that aliens, unimaginably more advanced than them, had sent them a message.  And he had run naked on that lawn with a beautiful woman, watched by another with whom he had fought almost naked.  Oh, yes, and he had had wild sex with his boss, and he was famous for a one-night-stand with an East-European girl he met in a pub.  Why had he ever imagined he could spend his future weekends mowing a lawn like that one, somewhere in Sheryl's home village?

"What are we hoping to find in The Call, Professor?" Alice was asking.

Wilkie dug his hands into his pockets.  "We've all seen and read a lot of fiction about contact with extraterrestrials, and unless it's an unprovoked attack then it has to start with some kind of message like The Call.  If we put together a calling card for our Earth then it would be a sort of autobiography, wouldn't it?  We'd talk about our achievements, like antibiotics, nuclear power and the Internet.  So maybe they will talk about a cure for cancer, solutions to world peace, elimination of poverty, long-distance space flight and maybe time machines.  That's what governments are interested in.  For myself, I'm just thrilled to hear anything they want to tell me."

"I understand the translation is going better than expected, but it's still in progress.  Can you talk to that?" the other civil servant asked.

The professor nodded. "Right now, the girls are doing an amazing job, creating a creole faster than I thought possible.  The software is constantly doing predictive modeling from their progress, forming generalized rules and endlessly cross-checking with the Consortium file.  At some point we expect the software to say, in effect 'I got what I need' and surge ahead, finalizing its creole models and finding a translation with a level of probability that meets our threshold.  There may be more than one translation, who knows.  Literally, that event could happen any time now, though I would guess it's not so likely just at this moment.  The likelihood increases every day."

"More than one translation?" the woman asked.

"No translation will be exact.  It will have what we call a 'goodness of fit.'  If we assume errors have a Gaussian distribution, we can attach a probability to it.  We're aiming for one translation that has at least an 80% chance of being correct, on that assumption.  But we could get two translations which each have a 40% probability."

"Why choose 80?"

Wilkie laughed. "It's the average of what each individual committee member asked for.  Such is scientific consensus."

After the meeting, Séamus asked Alice if she would have a walk with him.  They took one of the routes to the nearby stream he would commonly use with the girls.  Now the weather was warmer, Tina and Phyllis had also gone there regularly with him.  They walked in near silence until they reached a bench where he had sat many times.  It was a wonderful view at any time of year, but now the spring growth, flowering and blossom made it the prettiest.

Alice was first to speak.  "Disappointed that it's little green men?" she asked.

"I'm trying to decide that," he said, watching the stream sparkle.  "In theory, it's probably the most important outcome that was possible.  On the other hand, I doubt if there's anything in that file which is actionable for Séamus FitzGerald.  I think the ongoing role my boss had in mind was perpetual minder for the girls.  It sounds like their talents are going to be in demand for years to come.  I mean, this probability-of-translation thing?  I can see arguments over what the data means for decades.  One groups says this part is a cure for cancer, the other group says it's a death ray that wipes out a planet.  One very good result is that we're going to be keeping them safe from harm for a very long time."

"How does it feel to be perpetual minder?"

He turned to look at her and gave a sheepish grin.  "Actually, some of me loves it.  In some ways it's heaven.  I just haven't convinced myself that I can continue respecting myself in such a job."

Alice pushed his shoulder.  "Then maybe you should work on your boyish value system.  Everyone else thinks you're doing a fabulous job.  I think there's just this kid inside Séamus FitzGerald who hates to use his soft talents instead of his bad-ass thumping to get a result."

"Hah!  Maybe."  Séamus stood up and tossed a pebble at the stream.  It always surprised him how far he could throw, as it always had his fellow cricketers.  "But give me credit for having already grown up a lot since I've been here."

The voice behind him asked, "How do you feel about Barbara now?"

"Damn!" he shouted at the stream, realizing her choice of words was deliberate, then said, "So you know about us sleeping together?"

Alice stood next to him, throwing a pebble with twice the effort and sending it about one-tenth of the distance.  "Of course, Séamus, I'm not stupid.  But my point was not about the sex.  It was about your obvious obsession with her."

He returned to the bench. "Yes, it was bad, wasn't it?  But it's getting better.  I'm still hoping to see her when she comes tomorrow but I suspect she won't have time for me.  I know I was some kind of conquest for her, and she knows she can have me when she wants me, which is probably not very often.  I doubt if I'll ever be able to refuse her, even if I were to get married.  Yet I'm sane enough to know we're hopelessly unsuited, quite apart from the age gap.  It struck me like a hammer this morning when Wilkie talked about the G8+5 and the UN.  That's exactly up her street.  It will launch her into global security circles.  I will always be a guy who protects people.  A minder, a bodyguard.  And, very occasionally, a killer and a torturer."  He looked up to see the shock on Alice's face from these last words.

"Did you do that already?" she asked him.

"Does that make any difference?" he replied, "If I've already said I am prepared to do it?"  He stood up, folded his arms, then kicked at a loose lump of wood.  He took a deep breath, as if trying to control his emotions, staring at the stream.

"Séamus, do I actually know what kind of man you are?"

"Means what?"

"It means, you and I have been fairly intimate these past months.  You're a very special person to me.  But now I wonder, what are you capable of doing to another human being?  I'm sorry, but it makes a difference to me when I'm sleeping in someone's arms."

There was a long pause as Séamus kept his gaze fixed on the shiny stream.  "If you didn't campaign with all your personal energy against the last war," he said, finally, "Then in my mind you are an active consenter to killing and torture, practiced where there need be only probable cause to justify it.  If you don't bother to think about such things in a democracy, you are just as guilty through omission as commission."

He turned towards Alice, a little calmer now.  "They tell us at the Agency, once a war is started you can never control what happens.  No one said it better than Shakespeare.
'Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war.'
  Once you agree to war, you are signing up for murder and torture on a grand scale, and a lot of innocent people find themselves on the receiving end.  That's why we've now learned, hopefully, to avoid war at all costs.  The agony of suspected terrorists is bad enough, but it still beats thousands of kids with their limbs blown off in countries lacking even painkillers."

  Séamus sat down again. "That's how I see it, anyway.  Maybe that makes me a psychopath, I'm not sure.  I just don't see any difference between the guy who does it and the rest who don't use their freedom of speech to speak out against it being done.  If you think war is for the greater good, then you must accept its hell as being for the greater good.  There is no such thing as a surgical war."  He shook his head and smiled ruefully.  "Chrissy told me she read about the Chinese army being pursued by the Japanese during WWII.  To cut off the Japanese advance, the Chinese general ordered the flooding of the land between them.  Hundreds of thousands of Chinese farmers and their families died of drowning and famine.  We're shocked when we read this. Yet almost every general in every war on every side has either done something similar, or was replaced because he couldn't bring himself to."

He took two deep breaths. "Oh, I forgot to mention rape, didn't I?  The vast quantity of sexual coercion that's unleashed by any war.  Put a gun in a man's hand, have him watch his buddy's legs get blown off, then assume he won't help himself to nooky at the next opportunity?  We look at the horrors of Nanking and ask, were these soldiers human?  But the unspoken horror is that, if that war had never happened, the same men would have been devoted fathers, commuting themselves to death.  By accepting war as an instrument of global justice, we are accepting all the side-effects that come with the medicine.  That's why I see my job, no matter how nasty it may get at the one-on-one level, as preventing the next war.  Or more accurately, preventing voters who don't understand war from voting for it."

They both fell silent for a while.  Séamus added, "That's why I'm not really a suitable life-partner for Sheryl or for you, the girls or Barbara.  You are all mentally very gifted women, and it won't be difficult for you to find a thousand reasons why I am a bad man, a stupid man, a boring man.  I know that, because that's how I often see myself.  But I know what I'm good at doing, and I know why I do it.  When I took this job, I must have known it would kill my relationship with Sheryl, but it didn't stop me for a moment.  For a little while, when I actually saw her leaving me, I fantasized about being the husband she wanted. But what did it take for me to abandon my promise to her to reform?  Three letters on a keypad."

A cooler wind picked up.  Alice shivered and folded her arms tightly.  He wondered if he should put an arm round her, but decided it would be too presumptive at that moment.

"I know I will get over Barbara," he continued, "Because I will convince myself the relationship is extremely wrong.  I can even keep working here because you all tell me I am useful to you, and I need to be useful.  You're kind enough to tell me I have some special gift which helps all of you, and that's obviously a good thing which I should always bear in mind.  But please understand that I'm a fairly simple and unimaginative man.  I just want to be a good agent.  I reckon that, if I'm a good agent at the right time in the right place, I may be able to save someone's life, or find some vital truth, that can prevent armed conflict.  I've been trying to find something deeper in my soul than that, but so far I've come up a blank."

Alice rubbed his shoulder gently.  "Does being a good agent still include taking care of me and the girls?"

"Alice, as long as any of you are exposed to the consequences of this project, that is my sworn duty."

"One more question.  How badly did you ever torture anyone?"

"I can give you one assurance.  I have never, and will never, inflict any pain on anyone that I have not experienced to breaking point myself.  Just don't let word get around about that."

"OK." Alice embraced him.  "I think I still want to get into your bed at night, if it's still alright with you."