The Caterpillar's Question by Piers Anthony and Philip José Farmer (20 page)

Her hunched shoulders, raised eyebrows, and spread-out hands, palms up, said, "How?"

His enthusiasm propelled him from the chair he had drawn up next to the bed and sent him to pacing back and forth. "Don't know yet. But at least I... we... have got something to work on. Let me think."

While he walked, he struck the palm of his left hand with the book. It was as if the hand were iron and the book were flint and he hoped to strike fire from them.

"When we were in the plane, you gave me a piece of paper on which you'd written a word. It was supposed to make me able to disobey Malva's orders over the radio. But it was in Gaol writing. It had six different characters and two that were repeated. Now. Listen carefully. Do each of these characters have an equivalent in English speech?"

She frowned.

"I mean... let's say... does one of them, for instance, symbolize any single sound in English? Like 't' as in tend? Like 't' as in Tappy? Like 'e' in tend? Or 's' as in seen? Got it?"

The girl nodded.

"Good!"

He looked around but realized that he had not seen any paper or pencils in the tent. He closed his eyes and visualized a sheaf of writing paper and three sharpened pencils. Then he summoned up an image of a knife. He'd have to have something to keep the pencils sharp.

Tappy stirred restlessly. He said, "Be patient."

A minute later, he heard a woman's voice.

"Do not be startled."

He said, "Come in," and an AI walked through the entrance into the bedroom.

He groaned. She was empty-handed.

"We do not have the strange objects you telepathed that you wanted," she said. "What use are they?"

"You can perform technological miracles," he said, "teleport us, read minds, but you don't know what writing paper and pencils are?"

"We don't have everything," it said. "Especially primitive artifacts. Tell me in detail what you need, their use, their materials."

After his description, it said, "I can't say precisely when I'll be back, but it'll be soon."

It walked out of the bedroom. Curious, Jack followed it into the hall made by drapes. He saw something blurry, like heat waves, appear around it, concealing it. Suddenly, the AI and the wavy envelope were gone.

He had expected a bang of air rushing in to fill the vacuum left by the AI. There was no sound.

He returned to the bedroom. "Tappy," he said, "while we're waiting, I'll tell you more of what we're going to do."

Ten minutes or so later, an AI, a male this time, appeared. Jack and Tappy were deep into the procedure. The AI, not bothering to excuse the interruption, said, "This is not what you asked for. It's the equivalent, though that is not the correct noun. It's better."

It held out two white, flat, thin, and one-foot-wide squares made of what looked like plastic. One side of each was silvery. After Jack took it, the AI extended to him two silvery objects that looked like a pen. "Pass the end of this across the screen, and it will make what you wish to write on the screen. You don't have to press it against the surface."

"We've got something like that on Earth," Jack said.

"Press the orange strip on the side after you've written on the screen," it said, "and it will voice what you've written. Press the green strip, and what is written on one will appear on the screen of the other. Press the yellow strip on the edge of the bottom, and the writing will be cleared. Activating the green strip will allow you to dictate to it and see your words in printed form. This tiny projection here, when pressed once, lets you scroll down. Pressed twice, it scrolls up."

The AI showed him the rest of the controls.

Jack guided Tappy's hand to a square and a stylus. She had heard the AI and did not need instruction.

"Thanks," he said to the AI. "You can go now."

It walked into the hallway. Jack said, "Okay, Tappy, let's go. I've asked you a lot of questions. From your responses, I've learned that the Gaol alphabet doesn't have an equivalent letter for each letter in the English alphabet. Like, for instance, the English letter 'a' can stand for several different sounds. So can a number of other letters, like 's' stands for the initial 's' in surprise and also for the 'z' sound in the second 's.' And so on.

"But the characters in Gaol writing stand for one sound only. Some of the Gaol pronunciations don't exactly correspond to our English way of sounding them, not American English, anyway. But the letters for them cover both pronunciations. There are some sounds in Gaol we don't have in English, but they probably won't give too much trouble. Anyway, you're going to write in English with the Gaol letters. After I learn the equivalents, right?"

She nodded. He pressed the orange strip on her recorder. He began slowly dictating sentences in English. They would include all the sounds in English speech. At least, he hoped they would.

He was no linguist. But if he found that he had overlooked some, he could supply them later.

Her printing appeared on the screen of his recorder as she made them on hers. When she was done, he said, "The Gaol alphabet is longer than ours, but I expected that."

He sat for a while studying the Gaol letters and their English equivalents. Apparently, the Gaol had no 'p' or 'd' in their language. He told Tappy to double the Gaol 'b' and 't' to indicate these sounds.

"Now I'll ask you questions. You'll write the answers in English using the Gaol letters. More than one way to skin a cat. Whoever installed those mental blocks wasn't smart enough to make them foolproof."

Tappy's smile was so wide it reminded him of the Cheshire cat's grin.

His smile was not as big. Even if he could converse with her in this roundabout fashion, he had not found the way to make her mature seven years in three days. But it was a step forward. That is, it was unless another obstacle was revealed.

"First question, one of many, Tappy, maybe."

And the most important, he told himself, though I don't expect an answer.

"Do you know how to compress seven years of aging into three days?"

Tappy looked startled. She wrote with the stylus two letters which appeared on his recorder. He had to scroll down the section with the Gaol-English equivalents to check his memory. The letters spelled out NO. There went his idea, derived from The Little Prince, that she could teach him how to mature her. However, maybe she could do that but did not know it as yet.

He said, "Do you have now or have you ever had any awareness of the Imago within you? Anything that might be the Imago making itself manifest?"

No.

He sighed. If only... Forget about ifs. No time to fantasize.

"Until we came to the honkers' planet, then, nobody had ever said anything to you about the Imago? Or hinted at its existence?"

No.

"Can you remember anything before the plane crash in which your father died?"

No.

"No?" Jack said. "Then how can you remember the Gaol writing? You must have learned it before you came to Earth."

She printed: I don't know. I just do.

"Then your mind isn't completely blocked off," Jack said. "Maybe we could pry it open wider. But we don't have time to try even if we had the psychological tools."

He paused, then said, "You don't remember anything before the plane crash. But you can somehow use Gaol writing. Maybe there are other things you could use."

How to find what these were, if there were any?

He wished he could go back to Earth and locate the Daws, the last people to have known Tappy. They could tell him much-- maybe.

Had the Daws or other people before them imposed this hyp-node memory-block? If they had, they could also cancel it.

Then there were the honkers, the beings who he, when he first saw them, had assumed were sapient but not very bright. One of them had implanted that tiny bead or egg in between her breasts and thus kept her from being subject to Malva's will. That showed that they were no dummies. It also showed that they must know much. If he and Tappy could get back to the honkers' planet, they might find out more or perhaps all about this mystery.

And if only Tappy were six years older and thus close enough to maturity that...

There you go again, he told himself. If, if, if.

IF!

That word suddenly glowed in his mind like a Times Square of revelation. Its light generated what might be a great idea.

Maybe it would work. But he'd have to ask the AI if they could do such a thing.

He sent out a mental message.

"Get your half-metal asses down here."

Chapter 8

They, consisting of one female AI, met Jack by the fountain. Before he proposed his plan, Jack asked it about something that had occurred to him while he was waiting for the AI to show up. It had little to do with the previous idea except that it involved Tappy's mind. Also, it might be important later on.

"Could you get through the block that keeps her from remembering her first six years?" he said.

"My data indicates that it would be extremely difficult and would take a long time," the AI said. "We don't have time for that. Also, it's tricky even with the instruments we have. Using them could drive her mad or even completely destroy the memory now inhibited."

Jack said, "I thought I'd ask for future reference."

He explained what he had in mind for her immediately and asked the AI if his plan was workable. Within the deadline, that is. The AI took about ten seconds to consider. Jack drought that it must be linked to a data bank because it surely did not have the required information in its brain. There was no use asking it about a linkage just to satisfy his curiosity. It did not matter enough for him to waste time over it.

"It's possible that we can do what you have proposed," the AI said. "Of course, we can't give her a complete false memory covering seven years. That would mean imposing trillions and trillions of data of different kinds, sensory, iconic, verbal, oneiromantic..."

"I get the idea," Jack said. "No use to list them all."

"Thus, the impressions would have to be relatively few. But they would be vivid; they would seem to be real. As I've been informed, you humans have great gaps in your memory."

"Some don't," Jack said. "A few gifted people have photographic memories."

"We know that," the AI said. "In the woman's case, it doesn't matter. She can't remember back before she was six years old, and any seeming gaps of memory after her treatment could be accounted for by the traumas she's endured. However, since she would supposedly be twenty years old, how would we fool her? Wouldn't she wonder why she, a twenty-year-old, still looks thirteen?"

"She'd just think that she looks very young for her age," Jack said. "She's one of those people who probably will look younger than their age. I suggest that you insert a few memories of people telling her how young she looks."

"Noted. It'll be done. But... we have doubts that the memory insertion will deceive the Imago."

"I don't know if it will be fooled or it won't be," Jack said. "It makes no difference. We have to try. And we'd better get cracking very soon."

He started to say something more on the subject, but no sound came from his mouth. His lips were open, and his jaw hung down. Then he snapped it shut and frowned.

The AI waited patiently for him to speak.

"All of a sudden," Jack murmured, "all of a sudden..."

"What?" the AI said.

"It struck me that I've got an ethical problem! I haven't asked Tappy if it's okay if we mess around with her mind! It's a terrible thing to do that and not even ask her if we can! Yet, the situation is such that we can't ask her if she'll cooperate! To do that would negate the plan from the start!"

"The larger ethical issue overrides the smaller," the AI said. "Our data makes that clear."

"You have no intuition about ethics," Jack said. "You rely on data. We humans do, too, but we also have feelings. Mine tell me that we are sinning against Tappy."

"We know the definition of 'sin'," the AI said. "It's a philosophical and theological concept which has no relation to reality-- except as it governs the behavior of Homo sapiens... and some other sentients."

"How about the Imago's concept of sin, its ethical standards?"

"I have no direct knowledge of that. But it always works for the general good of sentient groups who are also ethical."

Jack thought that no group, or individual, for that matter, believed that it was doing evil. Did Hitler or Stalin or Mao believe that he was evil? No. What they did was for the good of the group they ruled. Or so they believed. Apparently, though, the Imago could perceive what and who was truly good.

"Go away," Jack said. "Let me think."

"The larger does not always outweigh the smaller," the AI said. "But, in this case, it does."

It turned and walked out of the tent and around the doorway. Jack paced back and forth. Presently, he heard the tinkling of the little bell which he had gotten from the AI and then placed on the table near Tappy's bed. She could not call out to him if she wanted him, but the bell could be heard throughout the tent and some distance away from it. He went to the bedroom, where she was now sitting on a pile of pillows near the bed.

"What do you want?" he said.

She held up her recorder. He went to her and read what she had printed on it. By now, he was becoming fairly proficient in reading the Gaol alphabet. He only had to refer to his equivalence list twice.

She had written: What is happening?

"I've been busy with the AI," he said. He hesitated, then said, lying, "We're going to put you under hypnosis and try to break through your memory barrier. Maybe, if we're lucky, we can find out what happened before the plane crash."

Suddenly, he had known what he must do to her. It was making him lie to her because the most important thing, the only really important thing, was to develop that entity inside her to the Imago phase.

God help her! God help him! They were, from the cosmic viewpoint, only agents. In some respects, their fate was no more important than the AI's. But it mattered greatly to Tappy and him. They were not unfeeling robotic AI.