Alien Tongues Read online

  The reporter nodded. "OK, I'll hold this one for a week. Make sure you get back to me."

  Such were journalistic principles, Séamus thought as he saw the man out of the building, but just then he was grateful for their flexibility. Yet this was just one journalist who had the thoroughness to follow up with him. What if someone else was unscrupulous, inventing the parts he or she didn't know? It didn't bear thinking about. He had to just put it out of his mind until time gave him more reassurance.

  * * * *

  Some two weeks later, he was able to tell himself that the matter had effectively gone away. There was no further evidence of break-ins, so he persuaded himself that this Kevin Grant now saw him as an irrelevant auditor whose work clearly was unconnected with call-girl rings, given that he himself indulged in them. He had contacted Petra to say he was still interested in following up, but that his girlfriend was visiting him for a while. She seemed pleased to hear from him and said he was welcome to meet her for a drink anytime.

  During those two weeks, the girls talked progressively less about each other. He understood they were going through the transition away from sign language to the number keyboard, and this would inevitably restrict the flow of information for a while. He thought the best thing during their times together was to avoid talking about the project unless they themselves raised it. So instead they talked about their earlier lives, what they would do with plenty of money and free time, the new things the girls were learning about England from watching TV programs, some news items that took their interest and, curiously for Séamus, sports. All the girls adopted one or more sports as their favorites and watched many hours of them. Tina's choice was the most obvious, because she had followed British football since a small girl in Thailand. It was also understandable to Séamus that Phyllis would watch boxing, wrestling and any full-contact sport such as rugby. Jenny's choice of cricket was more surprising. Out of season in England during the Winter, she instead followed the international matches taking place in Australia and India. She studied the rules online, but often had to ask Séamus technical questions.

  "It's hard to explain why I like it so much," she told him. "I liked baseball in Japan, but now this is much better. It's so slow and thoughtful, then there's sudden action. A bit like Sumo, and I like that very much too."

  Perhaps Chrissy's choice was most intriguing, and seemed to follow from their earlier conversation about racehorses. She loved all such racing, but got most excited at steeple-chasing. When she learned about the Grand National Hunt Race, she made herself an expert by watching every recording she could find. She wished she could be one of the jockeys. She explained to Séamus how she was fascinated by the sheer power of the horses, the raw competition of individuals, and how the huge animals seemed to agree to give their best for the small men who rode them.

  "Are we your racehorses, Séamus?" She asked him teasingly one day as they walked through the woods.

  "Only in the sense that you're doing all the running, and I feel like I'm just here for the ride. I think the better analogy is me being your guard dog. In any event, your reward's going to be a lot more than hay and grooming."

  "If we succeed," Chrissy replied quietly.

  "We have to believe you will," he told her.

  She frowned, looking back towards the facility. "I'm not sure it's looking so hopeful just now. But we'll see."

  He did not pursue the topic. By that time he was already starting to get some negative feedback from Alice. She had begun to signal that the initial results from switching to numbers were disappointing. For periods of time now, the girls' view of each other was blocked and they had to make any communication through the numerical keypad. They had been given time to prepare for the switch by working out together in sign language what certain numbers meant but, once faced with the keypad alone, inventiveness came almost to a stop. After a while, they would be allowed to return to their visual contact and prepare themselves for a return to numbers, but progress seemed to be minimal.

  Alice insisted that this was very early days in the process and, in theory, they could spend weeks or even months trying to get it right. Yet both she and Séamus knew that the weak point was the girls' morale. No matter how determined they were to succeed, if they found no intuitive path leading them through the puzzle then they would start to lose confidence. In turn, lack of confidence could well undermine the effectiveness of their efforts. Since no one really understood the nature of the brain functions at play here, it was impossible to say how or to what extent morale had an impact. Yet knowledge of its impact upon other intuitive brain functions was not encouraging.

  "Think about sportsmen," Alice explained to Séamus. "You know how quickly some famous player can go 'off his game.' Because a lot of their skills are extremely fine judgment outside of their conscious control, they can't think their way back to playing better. In fact, actually starting to think about their game can be the source of their downfall. It can trigger self-doubt, which can be fatal to their animal judgment. Our clunky consciousness starts to over-ride the fine-tuning, our split-second timing, our ability to grasp the environment as an integrated whole. What gave that sportsman the constant edge in the past gets suddenly lost. The danger here is, our girls lose their edge with language because now, for the very first time, they are having to think consciously about it."

  Listening to her on a Wednesday evening in the cafeteria, Séamus's thoughts briefly returned to his sporting days at high school. He had been a reasonably good cricketer overall, but had excelled at slip fielding. The goal was to stop or catch with bare hands a ball coming off the bat less than ten yards away, but traveling at speeds of up to 50 mph. Rarely did he know about a ball until it was actually in his hand, though often requiring a dive and stretch to get to it. If you tried to think about what you were doing, you couldn't do it.

  "Is there anything I can do to help here?" he asked.

  Alice reached across the table and rubbed his hand with hers. "I would say, just keep doing what you're doing. It seems you're doing an amazing job so all I can say is, please keep it up!"

  He could not recall anyone saying he had done an amazing job of work before. About the best praise he could recall for work or study was something like, you're doing just fine. More remarkably, he did not know why he deserved any praise. "How do you know that?" he asked.

  "From the girls, Silly. You know I spent some time with each of them yesterday and they were unanimous. As long as you don't quit, they'll never quit trying." She grinned slyly. "How did you manage that with four girls at the same time, Mr Bond? You are really some subtle seducer, you know. I guess I should have known as much from our Saturday nights together. Anyway, I've reported this all back to Wilkie. The girls' statements, I mean, not our Saturday nights!"

  Séamus smiled dutifully at the humor. He reminded himself that he had no right to expect a free ride on a train headed for Success. He was co-pilot of a plane, where Success was an unmapped, small island in a vast and still expanding ocean. To mix more metaphors, this spectacular team of prize steeplechasers now depended on their guard dog. It was unfortunate that the guard dog couldn't tell his winning moves from his losing ones.

  As for the Saturday nights, there had now been a sequence of pub visits and overnight stays by Alice in his room. Each time she had showered and worn the pajamas; each time her bedwear had not been removed until her morning shower. There had been lasting hugs in bed and a few short kisses. There were plenty of signs from both of them that they were suppressing an obvious physical desire. But the fact that it was being suppressed made clear that neither of them wanted to make the first, irrevocable move. So far, there was nothing to interrupt their professional relationship, nothing that gave either reasonable cause to make any personal claim over the other. The following morning had each time been cheerful, the dialogue about work unruffled. That was a fortunate thing.

  But the project itself continued to deteriorate. The girls started to express
increasingly pessimistic remarks about their work, and Alice's reports were progressively downbeat. The use of numbers remained elementary, allowing little meaningful conversation. Though the girls said they were trying their hardest, it was not evident from what Alice saw. This failure started to affect the sign dialogue when it was allowed to continue. The girls had already exchange all the facts about each other they wanted to know or share. Their signing was now being blocked by opaque glass every time they attempted to develop a grammatical structure that would allow full expression of feelings. The girls would try to pick up their discussion through the number system, but it seemed hopeless to them. Instead, they started playing number games with each other. The software recognized the games and began blocking them also. There were now length periods during which there was little communication. Sessions started ending earlier and earlier in the day.

  At first the girls expressed their frustration to Séamus, but gradually ceased referring to it. They knew there was nothing he could do to help them. They now chose their time with him as an escape from the lab, which they faced each day with a vague sense of resentment. They each felt that, somehow, the system was not being fully fair to them, that it did not really understand what they needed for dialogue. But they had no idea what was actually unfair about it. Their language ability was so intuitive that, if they tried to think what might be missing, they found themselves stumbling in even the languages that they mastered. Like professional golfers thinking too hard about their swing or their putt, it carried the danger of starting to unravel everything.

  His time with them was spent increasingly on jogs, workouts, and sitting watching sports on TV. The sports were addictive to all of them. On cricket, rugby, boxing and horse-racing, Séamus had encyclopedic knowledge to share with the girls. On British football, he knew relatively little compared with Tina, and felt no shame in learning from her. He explained that, whenever he kicked a ball hard, he was unable to prevent it from sailing high into the air – an asset in rugby, but a fatal flaw in soccer.

  Pleasant though these times were, Séamus also experienced mounting frustration. This project had an increasing likelihood of heading for failure. If it was, then at best it would be one more unsuccessful project to add to his experience. At worst, he would be seen as the one who blew it. The girls' faith in him would be irrelevant to the Agency. Perhaps it would conclude that he made life too easy for them, diminishing their incentive to get the job done. Maybe it would even conclude that the girls had played him, and that certainly had a ring of truth. Alice and Wilkie commending his work would not count for much. Termination from the Agency started to loom again in his mind.

  He searched for reasons to keep hopeful.

  "You said at the start that you might be able to learn something from their method even if they were still struggling," he said to Alice one evening over drinks.

  "It's still possible," she replied, "but right now we're not getting anything useful from the brain activity. Put it this way, it's not significantly different from patterns we've seen before."

  "The girls have all spoken about something missing which they can't put their finger on. Have you any idea what that might be?"

  Alice shook her head. "Wilkie and I have talked about it, but we've decided any suggestion must come from the girls. It doesn't make sense for us to just keep throwing things at them – that would be a mess. I know this is really testing their motivation." She paused and rattled the ice in her glass. "Quite honestly, I think the only thing which is motivating them to keep going right now is you."

  "I can't believe that. What about the money?"

  "Of course that's tempting, but all of the girls are pretty good at earning money anyway. Their families have already got quite a good advance, which they can keep. And without you, I think this is a prison for them. How much would you pay to get out of jail?"

  The reference to jail triggered Séamus's recollection of Tina's fear. So that was another incentive for them to quit without success – they could be sure of staying alive. Equally significantly, if he were to release them from this obligation by quitting himself, he would probably be doing the one thing most likely to keep them safe. That was ironic – Séamus FitzGerald doing his job best by getting the f*** out of the way. So much for his illusion that he was doing the girls a great favor by "never giving up."

  After a silence, he asked, "Alice, what are the chances now that we're going to get something worthwhile?"

  "According to my modeling software, not too high," she told him. She opened a notepad and typed for a few moments. "We're down to about 6%. We were at about 40% during the first week. And that's for achieving something academically worthwhile. I have no idea if it will be sufficient for the ultimate aim of the government. Remember, they want to do more than just get a dissertation out of this. Surely they want to solve some gigantic, life-or-death problem."

  "A 94% chance of academic failure, which probably means a 99% chance of government failure." Séamus drained his glass of beer and took another can from the fridge. "Why were our expectations so much higher going in?"

  Alice gave a sad laugh. "We bet on the favorite, and the outsider came in."

  "Chrissy would appreciate that irony. Please explain."

  "The combination of the language and numerical abilities in so many of these types of gifted people led us to believe that they operated within the same region of the brain, and that somehow language and numbers were interchangeable within a grammatical structure. Now it seems there are two distinct regions, which just happen to either share this gift or both not to have it. So in a sense, we now realize we know less than we thought we knew. Progress of a sort!"

  Séamus laughed. "I make that sort of progress on most days." He stared out of the window into the dark. "So we just grimly hang on and hope?"

  "Until the girls give up or Wilkie pulls the plug."

  "Want to stay over tonight?"

  "Yes, sure." Alice replied immediately, then paused before adding, "Are we going seriously into the whiskey, is that it?"

  He nodded. He didn't want to lie awake all night worrying about the future, and the best way to prevent that was mild intoxication combined with the warmth of Alice's back. It worked effectively, though he worried he was somehow using Alice, despite the terms of their "deal" seeming quite clear.

  When they woke the next morning, neither of them seemed to want to get up immediately and face the day's work. Having about half an hour to spare, they continued to lie there, still wrapped against each other. Finally Alice turned to face him and ran her hand through his hair.

  "My handsome James Bond," she said. "I'm not silly enough to imagine I'll be your James Bond Girl but I want to say, I really appreciate the way you've treated me. I know I'm really going to miss you when this ends."

  Séamus felt grateful to her for easing his conscience. He knew he was going to need her company over the coming weeks and now she had given him permission to view it as a temporary measure.

  Thereafter, she stayed over in his room about half the time, and would probably have made it more if she had not felt the need to spend the remaining nights with her mother. Faced with increasing chances of failure, it helped make their lives more bearable for the time being. Séamus realized how important that extra dose of comfort was to him when suddenly the girls themselves started fighting.

  8. Assault

  The incident happened about two weeks later when the sequence of unsuccessful days had begun to feel endless. Each day the girls began with about an hour of sign language where they could prepare ideas for the use of numbers. According to the transcript – admittedly an imprecise translation – the conversation took the following turn:

  Jenny: No matter bad things, I think we stick together like four sisters.

  Chrissy: You not my sister, you Japanese. Japanese monsters attacked China, kill millions

  Jenny: We had bad past war. We are sorry, it was mistake. Long ago, no one today did this.<
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  Chrissy: You have guilt of parents. You are not sorry.

  Tina: Crazy! You have guilt of your parents, Chrissy?

  Chrissy: You not talk. Thailand and Japan friends that time. See Bridge on River Kwai.

  Tina: Chinese killed millions Chinese. Chinese hate own parents?

  Chrissy: I told you, not your business.

  Jenny: Chrissy, you very cruel.

  Phyllis: But she right, Jenny. Japanese did same Philippines.

  Tina: Phyllis, not help Chrissy

  Phyllis: But good remember. We remember always.

  Jenny: Why remember? Bad are dead. Now we heal, make friends.

  Chrissy: Japanese say wrong always.

  Alice decided to stop the day's session so that Séamus could discuss the problem with the girls. He first met with Chrissy in her room to ask why she had started the conversation. He was not accusing in any way, simply referencing the conversation and asking why such a topic had come to mind.

  "I had been reading about Manchuria and Nanking last night," Chrissy said, staring at her glass of tea. "I'd been chatting with my father the night before and mentioned how nice Jenny was. He got angry and told me to read about Japanese atrocities in China. Of course I remember some stuff about it in school but I couldn't be sure what was really true or not. So this time I was able to read Western accounts of it. If Japan's friends think it was very bad, then in must have been."

  Séamus nodded. "Yes, it was very bad. As a result, the West killed two million Japanese civilians, mainly through burning them alive during fire-bombing raids. Since then, an army of Cambodians killed two million of their own people. So who should Cambodians hate: the people who actually committed the crime, or themselves because they are Cambodians?" He paused. "So does it make any sense to blame Jenny?"