Alien Tongues (8 page)

Pouring himself tea, Séamus found his thoughts returning to Sheryl.  If they did get married, what was the exchange?  Access to a beautiful woman in return for fidelity and mowing the lawn?  Of course, they talked often about love and there did seem something very special.  But was love simply the amount of good feeling needed to make such an enormous and semi-permanent exchange?  Could he seriously elevate his motives, or even Sheryl's motives, above those of the girls?

He was able to catch the cafeteria open for dinner.  The dining area was pleasant, and he took a table next to the glass wall where he could just make out the moon rising.  He messaged Alice and she joined him.  As they ate from trays, he asked her if she and Wilkie had been satisfied with the day.

"Yes, very," she replied.  "We're all set for tomorrow morning.  I feel the girls have a very good grasp of what we're expecting."

Séamus chewed for a moment in silence and then said, "You mentioned yesterday not to judge them for their criminal convictions.  Now I am going to offer a preliminary judgment – these girls are saints, doing whatever it takes to help their families.  I don't know whether to conclude they come from cultures where women are particularly selfless, or families which are particularly demanding."

Alice frowned. "A little bit of both, perhaps.  But also, three out of four are from poor backgrounds where sufficient medicine or education can be out of reach.  In Tina's case, she was just unlucky with her family's fortunes.  I agree, these girls are not sinners – at least, no more than you or I."

"Do we Westerners believe so much in sin?"  He recalled his parish priest.  Endless booze and cigarettes had probably managed to control his sex drive.  And exactly for what purpose?

"Séamus FitzGerald," Alice chided him playfully. "Are you arguing that, to the pure-hearted, all things is pure?"

He grinned. "It doesn't sound a bad philosophy to me."  Sipping from a mug of tea, he added, "Going back to the demands on those girls, not much was said about how much time we expect them to spend in the lab each day.  Was that deliberate?"

"Yes, because we have no idea and want to keep it completely flexible.  Maybe after two hours they will be exhausted.  Maybe after eight hours we can't stop them talking.  There's only two controls over time.  One is how many have gone inactive – we need at least two girls talking at the same time.  The second is the advancement of sign language.  We're happy with any amount of
pidgin
signing.  We just won't let them turn the signing into a
creole
."

"You mean, they can invent as many sign words as they like, they just can't build a grammar round it.  That's because you want them to save all their grammar efforts for the number language."

Alice pointed at him with a sly smile.  "Séamus, My Boy, you're becoming an expert in this."

"No," he told her, "I'm becoming really dangerous with a little knowledge.  You have all this managed by some amazing software, correct?  It can read their signing and figure out what's grammar and what's not?"

"Wish we had.  The signing is fed to a team of signing experts somewhere in the world and they figure it out.  There are hundreds of sign languages so this is not going to be an exact science.  But signing grammar, like verbal grammar, tends to follow certain rules in general.  The whole point, though it sounds cruel, is to frustrate the girls.  We want them to get very interested in each others' life stories through the signing.  For example, Girl A tells Girl B that she met a guy in a bar.  Girl B learns enough through
pidgin
to be intrigued
,
but she can't really know what happened or how Girl A felt about it until they can break into a
creole
together.  Even if these girls didn't all share half a dozen languages already, they would rapidly develop such a creole through signing or voice.  But we have no idea if it's possible when faced with ten digits."

It was time, Séamus thought.  "Alice, I have to ask, even if you're going to have to lie to me.  Do you know what this numerical creole is going to be used for?"

"Séamus, I have no information on the matter, and I swear to you that's the honest truth."

What a strange expression that is, he thought.  What other type of truth exists?  "It's probably wrong for me to ask anyway," he commented.

Alice placed a hand on his forearm, rested on the table.  Ah, that touch, he mused.  Suddenly he was becoming very self-conscious about it, though it didn't seem to lessen the pleasure.  "Don't say that, please."  Her voice was surprisingly emotional.  "I told you I love this job and I do.  But I feel very alone here.  Wilkie is a sweetie but he's the typical professor type.  He is his work and his work is him.  This could be the end of the world and he would still keep chatting about unscientific theories like they were the ultimate danger.  I really needed someone on my wavelength with whom I can do sanity checks on all this.  I want you to really feel you can trust me, and I'm very ready to trust you, Séamus." She had kept her hand on his arm, and now gave it a small squeeze.  'I promise you that, if I know more about the project, I will tell you that fact, even if I'm not allowed to tell you what it is I know."

He looked at her closely.  "Is there anything about this project that is worrying you?  Something you haven't yet mentioned?"

She gazed back, shaking her head.  "Nothing, other than fear that we won't succeed.  I get a feeling that so much depends upon our success."

"Since you're the cryptographer," he said slowly, "At least let me ask you this.  Could it be some code-breaking exercise?  I mean, the girls are doing something all the computers in the world aren't able to do yet?"

Alice's eyes darted briefly either side of her.  The cafeteria was now empty except for them.  "It couldn't be a code for an existing language – there's nothing the girls could add to our machine capabilities.  So let me give you my best guess. We know terrorists are not going to talk directly about bombs and the like in emails that are read by the government.  They'll invent elaborate stories around business trips or vacations or even fun with their families.  Buried in hundreds of millions of messages, this stuff would normally just wash through our computer filters.  But suppose there was a pattern of talk around such matters which didn't match the innocence of the topic?  Just because we're talking about some critical scheme like the 911 attacks, our approach to grammar may shift.  Perhaps we get more precise, or we use certain constructions more often. Maybe we are developing the ultimate national-security, big-data tool."

Séamus nodded.  In theory, he thought, that sounded quite plausible.  In practice, however, he knew enough about the politics of current intelligence to strongly doubt its correctness.  At the best of times, the ROI on big-data intelligence investments was slow to materialize, and just then they were still living in the aftermath of public outrage over what many perceived as excessive surveillance.  As one of his colleagues has put it, Joe Public was telling the government, "You'd better keep us safe and if that means bombing foreign cities, OK.  But don't you dare go checking the length of my phone-calls.  Don't you understand fundamental human rights?"  He couldn't see a big-data tool, especially one this uncertain of success, getting the funding, let alone qualifying for a full-time agent for up to a year.  The reason had to be much more specific, but what?  He decided not to sow further doubt into Alice's mind, and kept this thought to himself.

After dinner he went to visit each of the girls.  His main question was about their mental preparedness for the next day's work.  He told them that it could be a long time before they made progress, and it was vital that they maintained their patience and not get frustrated.  Each girl, in her own way, had a very positive response which reflected the personalities he was beginning to understand.  Jenny saw it as simply fate, and was prepared to embrace any outcome.   Chrissy felt no desire to speed up the experiment, content in what she saw as her new-found freedom to be alone.  Tina felt that anything exceptional they achieved would, by its nature, not be easy and she herself would be suspicious of fast results.  Phyllis said her only care was that her children were safe and she was earning adequate money for their future.

This time round he did not feel any particular challenge.  Jenny asked him to read a poem to her from a book.  When he told Chrissy that shoulder massages were back on offer, she said she would save it up for when she felt the strong need, just in case he got cold feet after trying one.  Most of the chat was simply pleasant and fun, lively people from different worlds sharing perfect English to ask questions or offer comments.  At some point, each girl touched his face, ran a hand through his hair, gave him a squeeze or playfully boxed him.  He left each room with the memory of a gaze, some provocative body movement, and the feeling of a hand on him.

He went down to the gym and ran for most of an hour on a machine, then lifted a few weights.  He returned to his room, showered then, wearing a dressing-gown, sat down at his PC.  There was a message from his boss to call her.  He tried her direct ID and her video image appeared on his screen.  She was obviously in her home office, and it must have been very warm that cold night – her thin blouse had a deep-V neckline.  It gave the impression she wasn't wearing a bra.  Séamus quickly looked down at his dressing-gown, adjusted it slightly to cover the hair on his chest, then pressed his own cam button. No reason to be too coy.  He got her usual smile when she saw him, and they exchanged quick pleasantries.

"I had someone check out the local organized crime," she told him.  "Seems there's evidence of a call-girl ring in the region, but never enough for an arrest.  Local police view it as highly sophisticated.  Moreover, it appears linked into a Europe-wide syndicate.  Maybe human-trafficking across the North Sea."

"Unfortunate coincidence," Séamus commented, "if they find out we've brought four Asian girls, convicted of crimes back home, to the facility."

"Exactly." His boss frowned.  "These types of criminals don't believe much in coincidences.  They can't afford not to assume the girls include one of their own, or at least girls who are familiar with such operations.  They may well attempt a kidnapping."

"What do you suggest?  Extra security?"

"No." As she talked, his boss put her hand inside the front of her blouse as if to scratch an itch in the area of her breast.  It then seemed to massage the area. "More security would just increase suspicion.  We need to get a signal to these people that we are not interested in them.  That means you sending the signal that
you
are not interested in them, at least as criminals."

His boss's words rattled around his head for a moment, his brain trying to make sure he had picked up their correct implication.  "Principal," he said very slowly, "Are you suggesting I show an interest in their services?"

Mrs Coates head inclined slightly.  "I think we just have to be logical about this, Séamus.  What is the most effective way to show them that we are not there to threaten them?  I know it may seem distasteful, but I can assure you that our mission here is of infinitely greater importance.  We cannot reject the best solution on the grounds of squeamishness."

Ah, now Alice has her James Bond, he thought, but not exactly the style she bargained for.  He knew the famous one-liner from
You Only Live Twice
("Oh, the things I do for England…") as Bond had unfastened the evening dress of his would-be killer, Helga Brandt.  The FitzGerald version would be a less-than-glamorous purchase of sexual favors, requiring authentic activity in order to avoid suspicion.  Did this prospect amuse his boss?  Her face could have been pure Vulcan as she argued the Spockian logic behind the need to purchase full service.

He told his boss he would follow instructions.  After the call he poured himself a whiskey and an equal amount of water.  He slumped into an armchair.  Until that call, he realized, he had been naively enjoying this strange role in the belief that it had all the features of something worthwhile and wholesome.  Keep these girls safe, happy and motivated.  They had in turn started to fill him with a sort of exotic intrigue which, on reflection, was feeling something like happiness and contentment.  Now he was plunged back into the reality of life's many no-win choices.  Sometimes every choice that came by seemed to bear that rock-versus-hard-place set of options.  He had almost enjoyed a whole day of escape, and now it was back to work as usual.

         The next morning he fetched each girl separately and took her to the designated cubicle in the lab.  Having done that, his own job there was finished until such time as the girls decided to quit for the day, in which case they would send him a message.  So he returned to his room and opened his mailbox.  Despite the overriding priority of his current mission, there was plenty of use for any free time left over.  Updates on many other projects were regularly posted, often requesting input from anyone who had relevant knowledge.  On anything related to Ireland, Séamus was constantly fed progress reports and asked for his perspective.  He was the Expert Paddy, his colleagues would say.  Not a sizeable fraction of his father's expertise, to be sure, but the very fact that he had learned from his father was enough to make him an exceptional resource.

One of his emails was from Alice, answering his query about more local pubs.  She mentioned one about ten minutes away that suited his needs perfectly.  At lunchtime, the girls ate meals they had prepared for themselves, heated with microwaves in their cubicles which saved returning to their rooms.  This allowed Séamus to go to the local pub at that time, where he sat at the bar with a cooked lunch and a pint.  A few days of that routine would help start a conversation with someone which would hopefully allow him to pursue the arrangement discussed the prior night with his boss.

The girls decided to finish for the day at 3 pm and he escorted them back to their rooms.  They seemed cheerful and energized, but he chose to speak first with Alice, asking her to his room for a quick tea.

"It was a good day," Alice confirmed.  "The girls had no problems developing a working sign
pidgin
which allowed them to swap a lot of basic information about themselves.  They were all very animated and there was quite a lot of laughter – pity they could only hear their own laughs!"

"Any improved sense of timeline from today's action?"

"Certainly – my programs are always updating expectations, though understand they are very vague right now.  They are suggesting that the sign-pidgin develops rapidly for another week, allowing them to exchange increasing information, then plateaus off.  By the end of the second week they will start to find the sign-pidgin increasingly inadequate to express themselves, as they want to move onto more complex thoughts with each other.  That's when they should start experimenting with real grammar, and the system will start shutting off the sign language, pushing them into the number language.  After that, we simply can't say anything yet."

"Where can I access a translation of what they said today?"

Alice pointed to an icon on his screen. "Just click here.  Remember, we have no idea how accurate it really is.  Also the girls may be misunderstanding each other to some extent.  Particularly at this point, everyone is making inspired guesses."

Séamus offered Chrissy a walk, which she accepted this time.  They hiked out over one of the adjacent fields using a public right-of-way marked by weather-beaten wooden signs.  Despite an uphill climb, Chrissy walked briskly ahead of him until they reached a crest where there was a bench offering a sweeping view of the next valley.  She sat down, breathing hard which produced clouds of steam in front of her.  Her face, previously so pale, now had real color to it.

"I enjoyed it," she commented in reply to a question.  "Right now this doesn't feel like work.  It's just like my old hobby of talking to strangers – I'd do this for fun any day. It's always so good to hear about lives different from your own.  I don't know what it is – maybe a sense of freedom.  Like walking over these fields."

He asked her for impressions of the other girls.

"The Japanese girl is cute.  I think she most enjoys the kind of community aspect of this.  The Filipina seems typical as we would imagine someone from there – you know, the perfect nanny, loving kids and everything domestic, and being convinced there's a God watching over everything we do.  The Thai girl seems a very thoughtful type – I can't quite make her out yet, but she's interesting."

After Chrissy, Jenny enthusiastically accepted the offer of a walk.  He took her the same way, and Jenny gently trotted about half of it.  She lay on the bench, exhausted for a short while.  He sat beside her.

"Oh Séamus, the girls are so nice!" she told him.  "I really felt like we're a family together.  You know, Phyllis is sort of like me, wanting to share everything.  But unlike me she actually has a
real
family too – I'm so jealous!  Brothers, sisters, cousins, kids… I can't wait to learn more about how they all treat each other.  Chrissy and Tina – you know they're so cool.  Sometimes even a little scary, if you know what I mean. But I think they have really good hearts."

When she had regained her breath, Jenny danced again in the fresh air, as if this was the one place she had the opportunity to do it.  Probably the only place she felt like doing it, he thought.

"I know you said that you were made to feel like a freak by your family, and the others were likely to have had the same experience," he said to her.  "Did you get the chance to ask that question?"

Jenny rotated with her arms outstretched as she approached him, then suddenly sat on his lap, facing him.  He was acutely aware of a small posterior weighing on his thighs.  She pulled off her gloves and held her hands against his face.

"Now Séimi, you should know the answer to that as well as I do.  As soon as I start trying to express ideas like "freak" using sign language, someone spying on us is going to decide we're being much too clever and push us to use those numbers.  So I'm saving it for later.  Wow, it's really cold today, isn't it?  Let's head back."

Neither Tina nor Phyllis wanted to venture out, both finding such temperatures wholly unnatural.  In both cases, he sat with the girls in their kitchens and drank English tea which he showed them how to make.  Both of them were comfortable with their new colleagues, but also both singled out Chrissy as the one most difficult to read. 

Being able to finish his rounds with the girls early, Séamus thought he would take advantage of it by going to his lunchtime pub that evening.  He explained to Alice his intention to do some detective work, and she joined him for dinner at the bar but left him there afterwards.  He spent his time alone reading a book, wondering when he might get the chance to interact.  Within an hour, a small crowd had assembled at the bar, mostly of men with strong local accents.  One large man was starting to talk politics.  Séamus sensed the others were politely listening but perhaps hoping they could move off the topic.  The man was making a point of attacking the Shadow Defense Secretary, which at least was likely to be a popular position for the type of individuals in the group.

"If he gets back into power," the large man was saying, "He'll be stupid enough to start another war in the Middle East."

"He's probably crazy enough to start another war in East Middleton," Séamus added, referring to a local village, "And even then pick the wrong side in the fight."

There was an appreciative chuckle at this lightening of the conversation.  "Which side would that be?" Another man asked, "The Middleton Sunnis or Shi'ites?"

"Anglicans, of course, David," another man joined in, happy to prolong the humor. "They've been a dominant minority for far too long, and it's time the down-trodden Methodists rose up and claimed what is rightly theirs."

"They cannot lose," Séamus agreed, "They have all the wind-farms on their side."

There was a mock toast to the liberation of East Middleton, and politics was duly finished as a topic.  The obvious question arose as to Séamus's new face in the pub, which could now be asked in a friendly manner.  He said he had just moved to the area as a government auditor, stationed at the Labs, and was likely to be there several months.  There was a brief silence as the locals digested the news, which he knew would not be the best introduction.  Then one older man said, "Well, we can't all be farmers, can we? Someone's got to check how they're wasting our taxes.  Welcome to Yorkshire, Young Lad.  What do they call you?"

When he told them Séamus FitzGerald, the reply in a mock-Irish accent, "Sure and that's a fine French name," might in other cultures have been judged offensive, but there was intended as good if not somewhat worn humor and readily accepted by the owner as nothing but fun. 

Giving back as good as he got, he replied, "I'm so glad you recognize the Hiberno-Norman origins of my family dynasty.  But then, it takes one Norseman heritage to know another, doesn't it?"

The group was large enough, he thought, for at least one of them to appreciate the Pythonesque reference.  The FitzGeralds had come as Norman knights to conquer and settle in Ireland during the Middle Ages.  The Normans were in turn descended from Norsemen, or Vikings, who had also largely settled the area of Yorkshire.  Though he carried a very Irish name in a very English corner of the British Isles, if you went far enough back in history, all of them were various combinations of a few Germanic and Scandinavian tribes.  There was not a drop of pure blood and, at heart, Anglo-Saxons were proud of their mongrel lineages.

"Bejesus, I always knew you FitzGeralds were a bunch of Gypsies ruining the virgin pastures of Eire.  Would you go back to wherever you came from before the Middle Ages?  Do you always outstay your welcome like that?"

The voice came from behind Séamus and carried a genuine Irish accent, a bit emphasized for comic effect.  The men looked in the voice's direction with some surprise but friendliness.  Séamus first felt a hand on his shoulder, then saw another one offered on his right side, which he shook as best he could.  Turning his head he saw a young man with a red beard.

"I'm leaving the Old Sod green as ever," he replied, "because I'm over here, like you, tramping on the Dales."

A gentle chuckle rippled through the group as the new man still gripped his hand firmly.  "Ryan McMahon," he introduced himself.  "Resident Paddy to the Dales, and don't you forget it."

"Don't you go worrying, Young Ryan," an older man commented.  "Séamus's just up here on an audit with the government.  Even you will stay more popular than that."

McMahon gave a nod to the barman who began drawing beer into a glass. "One Irishman damned, another damned with faint praise.  Séamus, what's that in your glass?"

"It's Best, but I'm fine," Séamus replied.

"No, you're not fine, you're surrounded by Yorkshiremen.  Alex, a pint of Best for my countryman."

Noticing Séamus's glass was still half-full, Alex behind the bar proceeded to fill a fresh one.  "Don't see you in here much these days, Ryan.  Snobbing it at the White Hart, I hear?"

"Aye, but a man's got to get back to his roots sometimes, no matter what they're growing in." McMahon held his glass up to Séamus.  "Honest work and honest pay."  He drank deeply while Séamus sipped.  The other men had started their own conversation.  McMahon asked in friendly fashion about the move from London and the nature of the audit work.  He also offered his own biography, saying he had a background in animal breeding and had come over from Ireland six years before, finding he could make much more money for his skills in England.  Now this place felt like home – the locals seemed to warm to his wild Irish ways.

No one ever accused me of wild Irish ways, Séamus thought.  Was this Ryan accepting him as a full, fellow-Irishman or something different? To even consider such a question, he told himself as he had many times before, was utterly pathetic.  Like the name FitzGerald itself, his character was a bridge between two tangled nations.  And what of the McMahons, with roots back to Brian Boru and yet one of whom had been President of France?  Very little was pure, and good riddance to purity. That's how he should have answered Alice over dinner.

"So a beautiful young lass, waiting for you in London," his new acquaintance remarked.  "Isn't she coming up here to visit you at weekends?"

How to explain the situation innocently? "To be honest, this is a sort of trial separation," Séamus explained.  "Things were not going so well.  We'll wait and see at the end of this if it's worth getting back together or not."

McMahon nodded.  "I've been there, My Friend.  But sort of a Limbo, isn't it?  I mean, you don't have her right now, but you can't really start over again either.  How is that going to feel as the months drag on here?"

Was this just happy coincidence, Séamus thought, or should I be allowing my suspicions to rise?  Could the crime ring be so widespread that, on a chance meeting with an Irishman in a nearby pub, the subject of prostitution would be floated by him after half-an-hour's conversation?  Well, he was here to take the bait, so no point in agonizing over it.

"Not good," he replied.  "I don't want the complications of another relationship, but I didn't choose the celibacy of the priesthood, either."

McMahon nodded gravely. "I can tell you as a professional breeder, you can't fight Mother Nature.  One thing about farming communities, they understand these things.  Lock Jack away from Jenny and you get Crazy Jack."  He paused.  "If I could find the right solution for you – you know, something that disqualified you from taking Holy Communion but didn't involve a series of candlelit dinners – would you have any interest?"

Séamus sighed.  "Do I get to pick dress size?"

His acquaintance looked satisfied, his gaze shifting slightly over Séamus's shoulder.  Séamus heard him say, "What do you think of the pair at the table behind you?"