Alien Tongues Page 5

  "They have real mastery of English. And that's not just technical language. If they wanted to write stories and poems, I'd love to read them."

  "Nice observation." Wilkie leaned back in his sofa. "When most of us learn other languages, we just follow the stock expressions in them, and we usually sound very ordinary and unoriginal speakers. These girls have such facility that they can move an expression from one language into another and make it sound fresh and insightful. Conversation is their power. Again, most of us don't think too much about the words we select to express ourselves. To use a wine analogy, words to us are just red or white, sweet or dry. They find all sorts of subtle flavors, like wine connoisseurs."

  Séamus turned to Alice, sitting beside him. "Remember me telling you I have retarded taste buds? I think Jenny and Chrissy have figured that out."

  Alice placed a hand just above his knee and said gently, "The point is that they like you, Séamus. They're doing what clever women do in that situation. They poke around for your weak points. This is a good thing. It means they are becoming engaged with the whole environment here."

  "She's right," Wilkie added. "Our biggest fear here is that the girls shut down mentally. They may not mean to do so, but it could happen anyway. They are highly creative, spontaneous types. If they feel danger or hostility they may instinctively retreat into their shells. The part of their brains we need so much may simply fail to function fully."

  Séamus recalled Chrissy's words: now I know why you were chosen for this job. Your boss is as clever as she is evil. Though the full meaning was still beyond him, it did appear to make some kind of perverse sense.

  The Professor added, "Séamus, it's important that you are not too hard on yourself. It's my personal belief that we define intelligence far too narrowly in society, and that in reality the gifts these girls have are another form of high intelligence. I mean, why not? If someone has a gift for maths, such as Alice, we have no trouble defining it as intelligence, even though she might be quite inarticulate. The same for a poet who can't even check his dinner bill. These girls' ability to process language and numbers implies exceptional brainpower which inevitably spills into other areas of mental activity. Circumstances have required us to put them in an extraordinary situation here. I have no doubt that their fertile minds will produce ways to thwart our control, just as an exercise in mental independence."

  "You mean, power for the sake of it?" Séamus asked.

  Wilkie gave a small, tight smile. "Have you ever wondered why business and political leaders stay in power year after year, long after they have amassed fortunes and won reputations which they cannot hope to improve? Human intelligence has evolved to seek power 'for the sake of it,' My Friend. If rich, old, white men seek it, we cannot blame these girls. And you may need to go with the flow. I think it will help a lot for these girls to feel fully empowered. We are asking them to achieve something extraordinary."

  Which means perhaps I should give them a back rub if they ask for it, Séamus thought. In this strange world, it was difficult to be convinced who was acting rationally and who was not. Who would question a busy executive ordering a massage? And he was the one person these girls could exercise some control over.

  It was time to invite down Tina, the Thai girl. Again, Séamus went upstairs, unlocked the girl's door and knocked. There was no reply so he paused, then entered. Standing near the window, facing him, was a tall, tan-skinned woman. As soon as he saw her face he sensed that Wilkie was likely to be proven correct. If Jenny and Chrissy had subtly begun playing with his mind the moment they got the measure of him, he had the impression that Tina knew her capacity for shock and awe.

  Perhaps many people would not have described Tina's look as strictly beautiful, some not as particularly pretty, and a few might even have called her strange-looking. Her face was round to the point of appearing a little swollen. She had similar East Asian, almond-shaped eyes to Jenny and Chrissy, but her small nose and full mouth were almost African. The total effect was of intense emotion, even if its owner was actually feeling little of anything. But maybe he couldn't just isolate the face. It was atop an extraordinarily long neck and an unnaturally thin yet athletic body which curved in a graceful S shape, in no way disguised by the colorful pant-suit which clung to her. It was the shape and look of a hunter, just at a time when Séamus had understood his role might include that of prey.

  From a first look that seemed slightly aggressive, Tina flashed a brilliant set of teeth in welcome. "What took you so long?" she said in amused fashion. "Yes, I know, getting ready to examine this odd specimen. Let's go!"

  Wilkie and Alice greeted her as they had done the others, and she duly gave her introduction in a highly educated British accent.

  "I was raised 'up country' – you know, rice fields, water buffalo, elephants and jungle. There are six of us children, and the five younger ones still live in the house my father built. My father couldn't make enough money for medical bills and high school, let alone college which he dreamed about for my brothers. So at age eighteen – that's five years ago – my mother suggested I go to Bangkok to make money like some other local girls. The girls told their mothers they worked in hotels and restaurants, but I knew different. I already spoke very good English from watching TV movies, and I got a job in a nightclub for foreign customers. Soon I made it to manager and catered to Japanese, Germans, Russians and Arabs as well as British, learning their languages through the satellite TV there. I have to say, the men were really mostly quite nice. It felt good to flirt with and entertain men who seemed rich and who acted like gentlemen – that was a new experience for me. I was sending home a lot of money and my mother started saving for my brothers' college, even thinking about buying a real house.

  "But when I went home, did they treat me better? No, they put pressure on me to make even more money. I got upset and felt very lonely. One of my Russian clients said he loved me and set me up in a beautiful apartment. I made the mistake of falling in love with him. After a year he found another girlfriend and I was alone again. I became unreliable at work and got fired, then found a job with a gang doing some tourist scams. I did some time in jail when a tourist accused me of short-changing him in a bar. I sent less money back home and my family was angry. I never went to visit them again."

  Wilkie explained Séamus's and Alice's roles in detail. Tina nodded politely to the explanation of how a language might be developed out of numbers, but had no questions or comments. She seemed much more attentive when Séamus was mentioned, looking at him continuously which he felt to be slightly disconcerting.

  "So how exactly will you be monitoring me?" she asked him, her tone slightly playful.

  He handed her the electronic device from his jacket pocket, for which he had studied the instructions that morning. He then fished in another pocket and held up a small bracelet, which he slipped on his own wrist. "We ask that you wear this bracelet at all times," he told her. "You can see next to T a green light. That means you're awake and within the facility and its grounds. If it turns blue, that means you are asleep, or at least resting and close to being asleep, or unconscious. Amber means you are awake but outside the facility. The fourth color is red, and you can guess that one. The device can do more things like track you down, but hopefully that will be irrelevant for us." They swapped device and bracelet.

  "I want to tell you I'm dedicated to this project," Tina continued, "Because for once and for all I want to give my mother a large sum of cash and tell her there will be no more. If my brothers then want to do drugs instead of college, that's their business. But I also know this project is going to put a big strain on all of us girls." She stared again at Séamus. "Are you going to be like, our counselor? I mean, are you really prepared to handle four crazy women from different Asian countries?"

  Has she figured out already that I have absolutely no qualifications for such a role, he thought? "No one can say for sure how this is going to work out," he replied. "All I can assure yo
u is that I am going to try very hard to make you feel at home here, and I want you to tell me how I'm doing and what else I can do to help. The first two girls already said they are going to depend upon me, and I don't want to let any of you down."

  Tina continued to look at him, and a small smile appeared on her lips. A few moments of silence passed, which all felt she was in control of. Then she said, "Professor, you mentioned we would first develop our own sign language, then this computer program would start pushing us towards a number language by sometimes blocking our view of each other. You say you hope we will make the switch instinctively, but what if nothing comes into our heads? Can't you give us some clue?"

  Wilkie frowned. "I suppose it won't do any harm to throw in the seed of an idea," he said slowly. "It may help to have one of you four who intellectualizes the process, and you seem the best candidate as you have a substantially higher IQ than the others. You need to ask yourself, how did language ever get written in the first place? It started out as pictures. Chinese clearly shows the strongest link to pictures, but even alphabets must have had some pictorial role originally. For deaf people, sign language begins as picture symbols. Obviously, as you ladies start with sign language, you will do something like this for airplane or airport…" He held his palm downwards and then raised it diagonally, "and this for ship or sea…" he made a wave movement with his hand. "Before long you will be exchanging quite a lot of basic information, and it's at that point when we stop you. The world doesn't need one more sign language, or else deaf people would have already invented it themselves. When faced with numbers, maybe you will see pictures in them. Maybe 2 looks like a swan so it becomes water, 8 a woman, perhaps 7 a man, 3 a child as it looks like part of an 8. So perhaps 22 becomes sea, 78 becomes people, 378 becomes family, and so on."

  "Seems we're a bit limited," Tina commented. "There are 26 letters in the Roman alphabet but you're giving us ten characters."

  "Good point," Wilkie replied. "Of course, the alphabet has quite a lot of near-duplicate sounds, so we could get by with maybe fourteen letters and it would still sound pretty much the same. But it's true that reading and writing are different, because we don't have tone to help us. So maybe tone comes from an additional number. Maybe a zero in front a number becomes something bad. So 022 becomes a tsunami or a flood, 078 becomes a civil war, 0378 becomes a dysfunctional family."

  "And what if one of us has never seen a swan?" Tina asked.

  "Then either she will go along with the others or have a better idea. In fact, it won't really matter for the purposes of this experiment. What you choose for such nouns is simply happenstance and won't tell us anything useful. It's only when you get on to complex grammar that you start unlocking critical areas of the brain for us."

  "Oh? Can you give me an example?"

  "Sure." Wilkie paused to think, then said, "Try this sentence: 'If she had only shown a bit more consideration, I might have been able to think differently about the situation, if you know what I mean.'"

  He allowed the words to sink in for a few moments before adding, "Most of our use of language is not about simple facts like, 'John kicks the ball.' We expend enormous mental energy expressing our feelings, desires, plans, likes and dislikes. And we often deliberately find complicated ways to do so, so as not to make a point too directly."

  Séamus interjected, "I remember one of my mother's favorite expressions, 'Séamus, you wouldn't like to make a cup of tea for me, would you?'"

  "Excellent example," the Professor replied. "The expression is very strange if we take it literally. But it is a way of acknowledging he would be making an effort on her behalf, which is being appreciated." He paused. "A complex thought, and just over a cup of tea."

  Séamus found Tina's eyes gazing at him. Not staring, he told himself; gazing. But it was equally unnerving.

  "So," she said slowly, "We mainly use language to influence people, to change their perceptions of things. Maybe we have access to the same facts, if we choose to find them out. But we spend most of our time talking to say, 'These are the more important facts, at least for me, and perhaps they should be for you, too.'"

  "Well put," Wilkie replied. "Other animals are social by instinct, but not us. Beyond our immediate family, our allegiances depend upon shared interests, and those must be expressed in words. Maybe we express the same God, or the same nation, or the same ethnic ancestry, or the same education."

  Alice asked if Tina was Buddhist. When Tina confirmed the fact, she said, "There's a sentence in the Christian Bible, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.' Now, who can fully comprehend what that really means? How can God love the world when we see so much evil? How can God have a Son? How can he give his Son? What does it mean to believe in this particular God – compared with, say, your God? What could eternal life be like and, if it exists, what does perishing mean? Yet sentences like this one inspire and drive the behavior of many Westerners during their entire lives."

  Tina grinned. "And back home we all think you are just money-driven materialists." They all laughed. "I get it. We use words to pull strings inside people. We're all manipulated every day. Perhaps the educated even more so, because of all the stuff we read, which can be even more carefully crafted to play us. And it often isn't what is actually said. It's what's implied, or suggested, or hinted. We get deliberately drawn into ideas which we then assume are our own."

  The mention of strings being pulled, so soon after Chrissy had mentioned it, made Séamus uncomfortable again. It was Sheryl's frequent remark about his boss. But was she just the latest of the Séamus-FitzGerald string-pullers? What about his father, then his mother? Was Sheryl's frustration that she had found such a malleable young man and yet had not found the way to bend him to her own will?

  When he took her back to her room, he told Tina, "I really liked what you said. Or, if I didn't actually like it, I know it was good for me to hear. This language topic is very new to me, and I perhaps should have thought about it more before now."

  Tina gave him a seductive smile. "Ah, Séamus, so you are also one of the babies here. Or maybe I should say 'innocents.' Knowing we are doing something someone considers extremely important, but not have the slightest clue why."

  "Yes, but I believe Alice doesn't know a lot more, either. She's a code-breaker, so she's here because she knows how to find patterns in languages. It's my boss and Wilkie who know the real story."

  "Some terrorist code, perhaps?" Tina threw herself on the bed and put her hands behind her neck. "Or are those terrorists freedom-fighters? Doesn't every terrorist believe he is a freedom-fighter, and isn't every freedom-fighter viewed as a terrorist by someone? Are we being manipulated for good or for bad?"

  "I can only trust my government that it's for good," Séamus replied.

  "And we girls should trust respectively the Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Philippine governments?" Tina sighed. "I think we can rely only upon our animal instincts and take care of our own families." She tapped her foot at the end of her bed. "Can you sit a moment?"

  "Literally a moment – I need to fetch Phyllis soon." He sat on the corner of the bed. "So you're still loyal to your family, despite how they treated you?"

  "Funny, isn't it? Maybe so many women want to start their own families because they want to find another one to be loyal to. We're scared of having no loyalties."

  "I don't think men are much different," he told her. "What about football teams?" He paused. "So you had dreams of starting a family with the Russian?"

  "Yes, but I realize now that would have been a mistake." She lifted her leg and placed a shoeless foot in his lap. "Anyway, I'm glad I'm here. I hope you are too, Séamus."

  "Yes." He stared down at the foot.

  "Can I ask you something? Did the other girls touch you, or ask to be touched?"

  More clearly now, Séamus felt forces moving around him which he could not understand. "Yes.
One hugged me tightly, the other one asked for a shoulder massage. How could you have guessed that?"

  Tina stared at the ceiling. "I'm guessing that we ladies have a lot in common. I mean, if we have unusual language ability, we may all lack something, or have extra something-else, or both. Maybe we read people very quickly, including even very small gestures and expressions. Who knows if we read well or badly? But I think we all studied you and quickly realized, you are the one person we can depend upon. Maybe the one person in this world. Touching is our signal for that. Most people we don't care to touch. Maybe we're all dying to find that person who feels really good to touch."

  Séamus thought of how little touching he and Sheryl had done in the last six months, and how acceptable that had felt to him. Was that because he felt he could no longer depend upon her?

  A few minutes later he knocked at the door marked "P." A clear voice invited him in. Phyllis was short like Jenny, athletically built like Chrissy and darker-skinned like Tina, but there the similarity ended. The most striking difference was her large, round eyes, she alone having natural, deep shadows around them. She was sitting on the bed as he entered but immediately jumped off it. She walked up to him and appeared to straighten his jacket.

  "Now, why did they send a handsome boy like you to look after us?" she said before he even spoke. "They want us girls fighting over you, is that it?"

  "Thanks for the flattery, Phyllis, but the key to this project is cooperation."

  "Oh, we can fight and cooperate at the same time!" Phyllis adopted a mock boxing stance, then grabbed his cheek. "Just playing with you, Silly. Do I kid myself I can keep a man like you? I couldn't keep my husband and he wasn't so much to look at."

  She shook hands with Wilkie and Alice, giving them a wide and warm smile. "I'm a 27-year-old mother of two lovely kids, a boy of three and a girl of five," she started in response to the Professor's request. "I was happily married for a couple of years but then my man started drinking and womanizing. Finally he got some young girl pregnant and said he'd have to marry her or her dad would kill him. Well, for sure he was going to leave me, so why make it difficult and hurt the children? But then he couldn't give me any money. He said his mother would take care of the kids while I got a job. What else could I do? My own mother was dead and my father wouldn't help. Our daughter got sick and we needed money quickly for the hospital. I went to Manila and applied at a night club. At first they didn't want to take me because of the stretch-marks." She indicated her belly. "But I begged them to give me a try. I can dress up quite nicely and with my quality English, Japanese and Chinese, foreigners assume I'm high-class. While I was working there I learned Korean, Arabic, Spanish and Russian. I did a little time in jail when the club was raided by the police and we didn't pay them off. Overall I did very well financially, but made the mistake of sending too much money to my mother-in-law. She continued to demand even more for me to see my own kids. Finally I hired a lawyer, got them back and I now pay for a nanny."