Guardian of Night (6 page)

Or was it? Was he drawing the analogy too tightly? Had he fallen into the analyst’s trap of filtering his translations through misleading preconceptions? The sceeve likely did not divide the world so sharply between truth and fiction, epic and reality.

Leher was convinced that the trick with comprehending the sceeve was to come at it with the bare minimum of paradigms and filters necessary, and come at it from all angles, letting mistranslations cancel one another out. Not playing favorites with what you
wished
was the case. Build your understanding from the bottom up, not the top down.

The Poet was in the Sporata, the sceeve navy. He was an officer assigned to a war vessel. Had to be an officer, too. No sceeve rate was allowed to think for him or herself, much less transmit on pirate beta. He’d be subject to harsh discipline if he were caught. Slow death by dismemberment, no doubt.

There had to be some driving purpose beyond the poetry and seemingly endless rants. The poetry was good. The rants, on the other hand, were repetitious, felt trite. Sometimes like boilerplate moralizing, sometimes mere nonsense.

Of course, it was hard to escape the feeling that the Poet was having everyone on, human and sceeve audience alike. Leher was convinced he was missing something. What?

Sceeve beta bursts were not one-to-one “meaning” analogs, such as radio broadcast or Internet packet exchange was. They were, instead, somewhat akin to DNA instructions for constructing a body. Communication was “synapse-like” in that speech was accomplished by the interchange of chemical packets that operated in a manner similar to neurotransmitters. The packets themselves were practically alive.

The sceeve talked via exchange of odors. Smells.

In fact, when sceeve “speech” was examined under a powerful microscope, these semantic packages looked something like male spermatozoa. They lingered in the atmosphere anywhere the sceeve had once inhabited. The Skyhook, now in human hands, was full of “used” words floating about. CRYPT had a test-tube collection of thousands of them, most of them analyzed and filed by Leher himself.

These packets, and the paragraph-like thoughts they contained, were known as “esters.” They were the fundamental building blocks of sceeve thought and communication. Order of receipt might not be important, but order of assembly was. Several sets of “assembly instructions” were sent during a beta burst, so that an initial coherent thought could be formed on the other end. A final set of instructions punctuated the ending and usually called for a large restructuring of the “train” of words that was being built so far. Ester order would be shifted around like boxcars in a freight yard.

A sentence could have several different, even contradictory, meanings.

Usually, the “caboose,” the final “word-order code,” was all that was used by Extry translators to reconstruct the meaning of a beta transmission. This method served its purpose in ordinary circumstances. But it left out all nuance.

Which meant that building a sceeve speech-train using only the “caboose” could be misleading. One or more of the other instruction packets sent in the midst of a transmission might have a stronger construction “marker” on it. So any given “thought-block” could have two, three, four, or a hundred different means of assembly—and so different meanings. The listener was, in fact, expected to hold several of those meanings in mind at once. In this way, ambiguity and even a weird poetry was built into the language from the syntax up.

An algorithm would only take you so far. An intelligent translator had to figure out the context, apply judgment.

And if you really wanted to get it right, you had to print the thing out and sniff it. Breathe it in, like a fine wine.

In this very room was one of the three authentic sceeve “printers” on planet Earth. Another, a reproduction, sat in Leher’s underground apartment near White Rock Lake. Sceeve used a sort of polysaccharide “paper” that was similar to Braille in appearance, but instead of communicating through touch, each of the bumps released a trace odor. It had taken months of work to figure this out—no one had ever seen a sceeve actually reading—but it was now clear that the sceeve read this paper an entire “line” at a time, from the top to the bottom of a page. And they weren’t reading by sight. If they didn’t touch the page and release the odors for smelling, they couldn’t “read” it at all.

To add to the confusion, the sceeve didn’t share a single “emitted” language. Leher was still trying to piece together how the various language families—there were three main groups—were divided among the sceeve. It had mostly to do with the migration history of the various sceeve clans or “hypha.” Matters were made more confusing by the sceeve ability to understand the various dialects among themselves by making use of their
gid
, the collective-memory portion of their nervous system, as a translating mechanism. They also used, as did humans, the written word to achieve the same purpose, but of a smell-based variety.

What the sceeve did share was a common alphabet. In fact, the major branch of sceeve writing was a series of variations on a single family of smells.

Vanillin.

Sceeve paper smelled pretty much like a vanilla wafer to the ordinary human nose.

But oh the richness of that vanilla odor to the trained nose of a Xeno Division creep! Leher was an acknowledged master of the skill within the department itself. The “sniffer’s sniffer.” He’d been a sommelier when he was working his way through law school, and he’d found the task of sniffing sceeve paper similar to a wine tasting. Of course, he’d been a mediocre wine steward at best, but he liked to think he’d developed a much better nose for sceeve writing.

The documents on Leher’s desk were odiferous reproductions made of the Poet’s beta transmissions. They were transcripts “written out” in sceeve.

Leher tapped his Pocket Palace, which lay on the desk beside the sceeve documents, and his assistant LOVE’s geist appeared as a small heart-shaped icon to the left of his peripheral vision. Leher was wiied to the Palace, but his salt carried only the minimum charge necessary for him to lay a very basic chroma matte on top of his environment. He didn’t want LOVE to waste valuable computing space appearing in her full geist default mode as a human female, so he normally asked her to assume this minimized form. She’d always seemed happy enough to comply. Like Leher, LOVE was an obsessive when it came to her work. She did the exacting chemical analysis of the sceeve words. He handled the nuance. Leher thought they made a great team.

Leher took a drink of water, sat still for a moment to clear his palate and his mind, and then formed a “reading blade” with the side of his palm and his outstretched little finger. He ran his hand in this manner over the sceeve text. As he did so, the scratch-and-sniff smell rose to his nostrils and he breathed it in steadily with deep, regular breaths.

“All right, LOVE, let’s go over the transmission again,” he said.

As LOVE fed a train of transliteration to him, Leher disappeared into a reverie of smells. Vanilla wafer. Vanilla milk shake. Earth tones combined with vanilla, almost mushroom-like. Berries and vanilla. Chemical tang. Compared to most sceeve communication, the Poet’s transcripts were verbose and chatty. They were a veritable flower garden of scent, some of them pleasant, some of them oversweet, many uncomfortably sulfuric and carbolic—full of sceeve intensifiers often used to mean “very, very” or “pay attention” or “emergency!” It all depended on the context.

Whoever the tech was who recorded this had done an excellent job in riding the signal. The usual smell palate was expanded and tuned to particular sceeve idiomatic usage. As a result, the dynamic range of esters was much richer than most recordings of the sceeve. The tech had also, with the last transmission, come up with a way to definitely identify a single broadcaster. There had been a few multiple-origin theories floating around CRYPT, with the idea that there was some sort of cabal at work within the Sporata and all of them were the “Poet.” Leher had never really bought this theory—too many similarities in the Poet’s quirky diction among the broadcasts—and now the single-origin theory was confirmed by this frequency spike the alert tech had spotted. Leher made a mental note to put the tech up for a commendation.

Except he’d heard that she was likely dead.

Okay, he had good copy. What was he missing here? He’d read the transcript of the Poet’s last broadcast—nearly one hundred sceeve pages of it—several times since the messenger bottle had delivered it yesterday.

Our sun is dead. The stars blink broken code.
 
He kept coming back to that line. It was repeated throughout the transcript as a kind of mantra.

The smells from the paper were telling their story, too. Leher wrote down their order with a pen and small notepad on his desk.

“Retranslate with grammar using the secondary-checkpoint hydroxyl,” he said to LOVE’s heart icon.

“Yes, LTC Leher.”

He’d wanted LOVE to call him Griff, but she’d refused and seemed a bit miffed at him for asking. Or what he took for miffed. He was no expert on servant emotional analogs. In any case, they’d settled on a shortening of “lieutenant commander” for use in their private communication channels.

Leher moved his reading hand over the text again. Breathed in.

The sun is dead. The stars blink broken—

“Code,” Leher said aloud.

Leher found himself considering the confirmation that the Poet was likely one individual. And that spike in the thirty-two kilohertz range. Like popping a
p
on a microphone, but in this case with a chemical signal.

The occurrences are so regular. What if—

What if the Poet was doing it on purpose? As a whispered marker.

Leher thumbed up a projection of the frequency analysis of this particular message on his desk. He laid the printed transcript next to it. Compared chemical trace to sceeve meaning ester.

Touched each spot on the page where the overmodulation occurred.

Smelled.

And he had it. A faint cinnamon accent to the vanillin. Sceeve esters usually occurred discreetly. Rider accents were a call to rearrange esters and restructure syntax in a sceeve paragraph.

The Poet was chemically popping his
p
s at certain sentences and not others. Random? A personal tic? Or was he doing it on purpose?

“LOVE, please make a catalog search for this ‘sun is dead’ cinnamon ester.”

LOVE’s quietly intense voice. “All right, LTC Leher.” Half a second later. “I’ve found something from Skyhook Non-Euclidean B, LTC Leher.”

Skyhook Non-Euclidean B. The notoriously untranslated portion of the haul from the Skyhook raid.

“Not much help there,” Leher said.

“Sorry, LTC Leher.”

“That’s all right, LOVE.” Griff sat back, lost in contemplation.

Had to mean something. Had to . . .
 

After a moment, he turned to the other messages he’d printed out. He read through them all once and then again, mostly sniffing for the cinnamon tang. Nothing.

He reread the final communication from the Poet.

And he found the cinnamon. Several times. Once again, the scent was barely detectable within the overwhelming vanilla of the straightforward text.

It can’t be that easy,
he thought.
Can’t.

He took a pen and physically circled each instance on the page.

“LOVE, translate the esters I’ve just circled. Top to bottom. Use the final grouping as a syntax constructor.”

But he was already doing it in his head and was smiling broadly before LOVE finished her more accurate and idiomatic version.

He had it.

Attention, begin primary information: Sporata war vessel
Guardian of Night
en route to defect to Sol C government. This vessel mounts newly gleaned Sporata weapon of unknown potential and possible strategic-level value. Say again:
A.S.C.
Guardian of Night
with potential strategic weapon
seeks political asylum with United States government. Begin secondary information: Mutualist vessel
Efficacy of Symbiosis
to rendezvous with defecting Sporata vessel
Guardian of Night
in vicininty of Sol system to effect transfer of refugee passengers to
Efficacy of Symbiosis
. Say again: vessel
Efficacy of Symbiosis,
non-Administration,
successionist craft to rendezvous with defecting
Guardian of Night
to effect transfer of Mutualist Shiro refugees. Begin tertiary information: Sirius armada to recommence gleaning of Sol system within current
variado
. Repeat: Sirius armada to reinvade Sol C within five
semanatos
.

Objective: arrive before Administration invasion armada. Deliver weapon to Sol C. Discuss alliance with Mutualist enclaves. Engage Sirius armada.

Plan of action: request meeting highest levels with humans and their servant programs. Request aid, alliance, joint defensive agreement. A.S.C.
Guardian of Night
desires to trade advanced, recently gleaned weaponry for terms of political sanctuary. Mutualist vessel
Efficacy of Symbiosis
desires discussion of Sol C alliance with successionist enclaves.

Begin technical information: descriptive schematic of principal weapon on military vessel is as follows—

There was more, much more. It was a manual. Instructions for using some kind of sceeve superweapon. All the details were there, although Leher didn’t understand the science. Somebody would.

Then, after the weapon information, a final message.

Final rendezvous location to follow in separate transmission.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
Leher thought.

“Do you see this, LOVE?”

“It’s quite clear, LTC Leher, now that you have pointed it out.”

“So I’m not dreaming?”

“You are producing alpha waves indicative of a conscious state,” said LOVE.

Strategic weapon. Terms of sanctuary.

The sceeve bastard, hiding all that in plain sight.

He wasn’t a mindless ranter masquerading as an artist.