Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31 Read online

  Gary held open the tent flap and gestured for me to enter. “Step right up,” he said, circus barker-style. “Marvel at creatures the likes of which have never been seen on God’s green earth.”

  “And all for one slim dime,” I murmured, walking through the door. At the moment the looking glass was inactive, resembling a semicircular mirror over ten feet high and twenty feet across. On the brown grass in front of the looking glass, an arc of white spray paint outlined the activation area. Currently the area contained only a table, two folding chairs, and a power strip with a cord leading to a generator outside. The buzz of fluorescent lamps, hung from poles along the edge of the room, commingled with the buzz of flies in the sweltering heat.

  Gary and I looked at each other, and then began pushing the cart of equipment up to the table. As we crossed the paint line, the looking glass appeared to grow transparent; it was as if someone was slowly raising the illumination behind tinted glass. The illusion of depth was uncanny; I felt I could walk right into it. Once the looking glass was fully lit, it resembled a life-size diorama of a semicircular room. The room contained a few large objects that might have been furniture, but no aliens. There was a door in the curved rear wall.

  We busied ourselves connecting everything together: microphone, sound spectrograph, portable computer, and speaker. As we worked, I frequently glanced at the looking glass, anticipating the aliens’ arrival. Even so I jumped when one of them entered.

  It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three non-adjacent arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them “heptapods.”

  I’d been shown videotapes, but I still gawked. Its limbs had no distinct joints; anatomists guessed they might be supported by vertebral columns. Whatever their underlying structure, the heptapod’s limbs conspired to move it in a disconcertingly fluid manner. Its “torso” rode atop the rippling limbs as smoothly as a hovercraft.

  Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body. It walked back to the doorway from which it entered, made a brief sputtering sound, and returned to the center of the room followed by another heptapod; at no point did it ever turn around. Eerie, but logical; with eyes on all sides, any direction might as well be “forward.”

  Gary had been watching my reaction. “Ready?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. “Ready enough.” I’d done plenty of fieldwork before, in the Amazon, but it had always been a bilingual procedure: either my informants knew some Portuguese, which I could use, or I’d previously gotten an intro to their language from the local missionaries. This would be my first attempt at conducting a true monolingual discovery procedure. It was straightforward enough in theory, though.

  I walked up to the looking glass and a heptapod on the other side did the same. The image was so real that my skin crawled. I could see the texture of its gray skin, like corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops. There was no smell at all from the looking glass, which somehow made the situation stranger.

  I pointed to myself and said slowly, “Human.” Then I pointed to Gary. “Human.” Then I pointed at each heptapod and said, “What are you?”

  No reaction. I tried again, and then again.

  One of the heptapods pointed to itself with one limb, the four terminal digits pressed together. That was lucky. In some cultures a person pointed with his chin; if the heptapod hadn’t used one of its limbs, I wouldn’t have known what gesture to look for. I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate; it was talking. Then it pointed to its companion and fluttered again.

  I went back to my computer; on its screen were two virtually identical spectrographs representing the fluttering sounds. I marked a sample for playback. I pointed to myself and said “Human” again, and did the same with Gary. Then I pointed to the heptapod, and played back the flutter on the speaker.

  The heptapod fluttered some more. The second half of the spectrograph for this utterance looked like a repetition: Call the previous utterances [flutter1], then this one was [flutter2flutter1].

  I pointed at something that might have been a heptapod chair. “What is that?”

  The heptapod paused, and then pointed at the “chair” and talked some more. The spectrograph for this differed distinctly from that of the earlier sounds: [flutter3]. Once again, I pointed to the “chair” while playing back [flutter3].

  The heptapod replied; judging by the spectrograph, it looked like [flutter3flutter2]. Optimistic interpretation: the heptapod was confirming my utterances as correct, which implied compatibility between heptapod and human patterns of discourse. Pessimistic interpretation: it had a nagging cough.

  At my computer I delimited certain sections of the spectrograph and typed in a tentative gloss for each: “heptapod” for [flutter1], “yes” for [flutter2], and “chair” for [flutter3]. Then I typed “Language: Heptapod A” as a heading for all the utterances.

  Gary watched what I was typing. “What’s the ‘A’ for?”

  “It just distinguishes this language from any other ones the heptapods might use,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Now let’s try something, just for laughs.” I pointed at each heptapod and tried to mimic the sound of [flutter1], “heptapod.” After a long pause, the first heptapod said something and then the second one said something else, neither of whose spectrographs resembled anything said before. I couldn’t tell if they were speaking to each other or to me since they had no faces to turn. I tried pronouncing [flutter1] again, but there was no reaction.

  “Not even close,” I grumbled.

  “I’m impressed you can make sounds like that at all,” said Gary.

  “You should hear my moose call. Sends them running.”

  I tried again a few more times, but neither heptapod responded with anything I could recognize. Only when I replayed the recording of the heptapod’s pronunciation did I get a confirmation; the heptapod replied with [flutter2], “yes.”

  “So we’re stuck with using recordings?” asked Gary.

  I nodded. “At least temporarily.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now we make sure it hasn’t actually been saying ‘aren’t they cute’ or ‘look what they’re doing now.’ Then we see if we can identify any of these words when that other heptapod pronounces them.” I gestured for him to have a seat. “Get comfortable; this’ll take a while.”

  In 1770, Captain Cook’s ship Endeavor ran aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration party and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replied, “Kanguru.” From then on Cook and his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn’t until later that they learned it meant, “What did you say?”

  I tell that story in my introductory course every year. It’s almost certainly untrue, and I explain that afterwards, but it’s a classic anecdote. Of course, the anecdotes my undergraduates will really want to hear are ones featuring the heptapods; for the rest of my teaching career, that’ll be the reason many of them sign up for my courses. So I’ll show them the old videotapes of my sessions at the looking glass, and the sessions that the other linguists conducted; the tapes are instructive, and they’ll be useful if we’re ever visited by aliens again, but they don’t generate many good anecdotes.

  When it comes to language-learning anecdotes, my favorite source is child language acquisition. I remember one afternoon when you are five years old, after you have come home from kindergarten. You’ll be coloring with your crayons while I grade papers.

  “Mom,” you’ll say, using the carefully casual tone reserved for requesting a favor, “can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, sweetie. Go ahead.”

&n
bsp; “Can I be, um, honored?”

  I’ll look up from the paper I’m grading. “What do you mean?”

  “At school Sharon said she got to be honored.”

  “Really? Did she tell you what for?”

  “It was when her big sister got married. She said only one person could be, um, honored, and she was it.”

  “Ah, I see. You mean Sharon was maid of honor?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Can I be made of honor?”

  Gary and I entered the prefab building containing the center of operations for the looking-glass site. Inside it looked like they were planning an invasion, or perhaps an evacuation: Crewcut soldiers worked around a large map of the area, or sat in front of burly electronic gear while speaking into headsets. We were shown into Colonel Weber’s office, a room in the back that was cool from air conditioning.

  We briefed the colonel on our first day’s results. “Doesn’t sound like you got very far,” he said.

  “I have an idea as to how we can make faster progress,” I said. “But you’ll have to approve the use of more equipment.”

  “What more do you need?”

  “A digital camera, and a big video screen.” I showed him a drawing of the setup I imagined. “I want to try conducting the discovery procedure using writing; I’d display words on the screen, and use the camera to record the words they write. I’m hoping the heptapods will do the same.”

  Weber looked at the drawing dubiously. “What would be the advantage of that?”

  “So far I’ve been proceeding the way I would with speakers of an unwritten language. Then it occurred to me that the heptapods must have writing, too.”

  “So?”

  “If the heptapods have a mechanical way of producing writing, then their writing ought to be very regular, very consistent. That would make it easier for us to identify graphemes instead of phonemes. It’s like picking out the letters in a printed sentence instead of trying to hear them when the sentence is spoken aloud.”

  “I take your point,” he admitted. “And how would you respond to them? Show them the words they displayed to you?”

  “Basically. And if they put spaces between words, any sentences we write would be a lot more intelligible than any spoken sentence we might splice together from recordings.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “You know we want to show as little of our technology as possible.”

  “I understand, but we’re using machines as intermediaries already. If we can get them to use writing, I believe progress will go much faster than if we’re restricted to the sound spectrographs.”

  The colonel turned to Gary. “Your opinion?”

  “It sounds like a good idea to me. I’m curious whether the heptapods might have difficulty reading our monitors. Their looking glasses are based on a completely different technology than our video screens. As far as we can tell, they don’t use pixels or scan lines, and they don’t refresh on a frame-by-frame basis.”

  “You think the scan lines on our video screens might render them unreadable to the heptapods?”

  “It’s possible,” said Gary. “We’ll just have to try it and see.”

  Weber considered it. For me it wasn’t even a question, but from his point of view it was a difficult decision; like a soldier, though, he made it quickly. “Request granted. Talk to the sergeant outside about bringing in what you need. Have it ready for tomorrow.”

  I remember one day during the summer when you’re sixteen. For once, the person waiting for her date to arrive is me. Of course, you’ll be waiting around too, curious to see what he looks like. You’ll have a friend of yours, a blond girl with the unlikely name of Roxie, hanging out with you, giggling.

  “You may feel the urge to make comments about him,” I’ll say, checking myself in the hallway mirror. “Just restrain yourselves until we leave.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” you’ll say. “We’ll do it so that he won’t know. Roxie, you ask me what I think the weather will be like tonight. Then I’ll say what I think of Mom’s date.”

  “Right,” Roxie will say.

  “No, you most definitely will not,” I’ll say.

  “Relax, Mom. He’ll never know; we do this all the time.”

  “What a comfort that is.”

  A little later on, Nelson will arrive to pick me up. I’ll do the introductions, and we’ll all engage in a little small talk on the front porch. Nelson is ruggedly handsome, to your evident approval. Just as we’re about to leave, Roxie will say to you casually, “So what do you think the weather will be like tonight?”

  “I think it’s going to be really hot,” you’ll answer.

  Roxie will nod in agreement. Nelson will say, “Really? I thought they said it was going to be cool.”

  “I have a sixth sense about these things,” you’ll say. Your face will give nothing away. “I get the feeling it’s going to be a scorcher. Good thing you’re dressed for it, Mom.”

  I’ll glare at you, and say good night.

  As I lead Nelson toward his car, he’ll ask me, amused, “I’m missing something here, aren’t I?”

  “A private joke,” I’ll mutter. “Don’t ask me to explain it.”

  At our next session at the looking glass, we repeated the procedure we had performed before, this time displaying a printed word on our computer screen at the same time we spoke: showing human while saying “Human,” and so forth. Eventually, the heptapods understood what we wanted, and set up a flat circular screen mounted on a small pedestal. One heptapod spoke, and then inserted a limb into a large socket in the pedestal; a doodle of script, vaguely cursive, popped onto the screen.

  We soon settled into a routine, and I compiled two parallel corpora: one of spoken utterances, one of writing samples. Based on first impressions, their writing appeared to be logographic, which was disappointing; I’d been hoping for an alphabetic script to help us learn their speech. Their logograms might include some phonetic information, but finding it would be a lot harder than with an alphabetic script.

  By getting up close to the looking glass, I was able to point to various heptapod body parts, such as limbs, digits, and eyes, and elicit terms for each. It turned out that they had an orifice on the underside of their body, lined with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the top was for respiration and speech. There were no other conspicuous orifices; perhaps their mouth was their anus too. Those sorts of questions would have to wait.

  I also tried asking our two informants for terms for addressing each individually; personal names, if they had such things. Their answers were of course unpronounceable, so for Gary’s and my purposes, I dubbed them Flapper and Raspberry. I hoped I’d be able to tell them apart.

  The next day I conferred with Gary before we entered the looking-glass tent. “I’ll need your help with this session,” I told him.

  “Sure. What do you want me to do?”

  “We need to elicit some verbs, and it’s easiest with third-person forms. Would you act out a few verbs while I type the written form on the computer? If we’re lucky, the heptapods will figure out what we’re doing and do the same. I’ve brought a bunch of props for you to use.”

  “No problem,” said Gary, cracking his knuckles. “Ready when you are.”

  We began with some simple intransitive verbs: walking, jumping, speaking, writing. Gary demonstrated each one with a charming lack of self-consciousness; the presence of the video cameras didn’t inhibit him at all. For the first few actions he performed, I asked the heptapods, “What do you call that?” Before long, the heptapods caught on to what we were trying to do. Raspberry began mimicking Gary, or at least performing the equivalent heptapod action, while Flapper worked their computer, displaying a written description and pronouncing it aloud.

  In the spectrographs of their spoken utterances, I could recognize their word I had glossed as “heptapod.” The rest of each utterance was presumably the verb phrase; it looked like they had analogs of no
uns and verbs, thank goodness.

  In their writing, however, things weren’t as clear-cut. For each action, they had displayed a single logogram instead of two separate ones. At first I thought they had written something like “walks,” with the subject implied. But why would Flapper say “the heptapod walks” while writing “walks,” instead of maintaining parallelism? Then I noticed that some of the logograms looked like the logogram for “heptapod” with some extra strokes added to one side or another. Perhaps their verbs could be written as affixes to a noun. If so, why was Flapper writing the noun in some instances but not in others?

  I decided to try a transitive verb; substituting object words might clarify things. Among the props I’d brought were an apple and a slice of bread. “Okay,” I said to Gary, “show them the food, and then eat some. First the apple, then the bread.”

  Gary pointed at the Golden Delicious and then he took a bite out of it, while I displayed the “what do you call that?” expression. Then we repeated it with the slice of whole wheat.

  Raspberry left the room and returned with some kind of giant nut or gourd and a gelatinous ellipsoid. Raspberry pointed at the gourd while Flapper said a word and displayed a logogram. Then Raspberry brought the gourd down between its legs, a crunching sound resulted, and the gourd reemerged minus a bite; there were corn-like kernels beneath the shell. Flapper talked and displayed a large logogram on their screen. The sound spectrograph for “gourd” changed when it was used in the sentence; possibly a case marker. The logogram was odd: after some study, I could identify graphic elements that resembled the individual logograms for “heptapod” and “gourd.” They looked as if they had been melted together, with several extra strokes in the mix that presumably meant “eat.” Was it a multi-word ligature?

  Next we got spoken and written names for the gelatin egg, and descriptions of the act of eating it. The sound spectrograph for “heptapod eats gelatin egg” was analyzable; “gelatin egg” bore a case marker, as expected, though the sentence’s word order differed from last time. The written form, another large logogram, was another matter. This time it took much longer for me to recognize anything in it; not only were the individual logograms melted together again, it looked as if the one for “heptapod” was laid on its back, while on top of it the logogram for “gelatin egg” was standing on its head.