Old reliable peed-off Shef here.
Look, we got your message. I don’t want to discuss it. You’ve got a nerve. You’re in a bad mood, aren’t you? If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. We do the best we can, and that’s not bad, and if we don’t do exactly what you want us to, maybe it’s because we know quite a lot more than you did when you fired us off at that blob of moonshine you call Alpha-Aleph. Well, thanks a lot for nothing.
On the other hand, thanks a little for what little you did do, which at least worked out to get us where we are, and I don’t mean spatially. So I’m not going to yell at you. I just don’t want to talk to you at all. I’ll let the others talk for themselves.
Dot Letski speaking.
This is important. Pass it on. I have three things to tell you that I do not want you to forget. One:
Most problems have grammatical solutions.
The problem of transporting people from the Earth to another planet does not get solved by putting pieces of steel together one at a time at random, and happening to find out you’ve built the
Constitution
by accident. It gets solved by constructing a model (= equation (= grammar)) which describes the necessary circumstances under which the transportation occurs. Once you have the grammatical model, you just put the metal around it and it goes like gangbusters.
When you have understood this you will be ready for:
Two: There is no such thing as causality.
What a waste of time it has been, trying to assign “causes” to “events”! You say things like, “Striking a match causes it to burn.” True statement? No, false statement. You find yourself in a whole waffle about whether the “act” of “striking” is “necessary” and/or “sufficient” and you get lost in words. Pragmatically useful grammars are without tenses. In a decent grammar (which this English-language one, of course, is not, but I’ll do the best I can) you can make a statement like “There exists a conjunction of forms of matter (specified) which combine with the release of energy at a certain temperature (specified) (which may be the temperature associated with heat of friction).” Where’s the causality? “Cause” and “effect” are in the same timeless statement. So,
Three: There are no such things as empirical laws
. When Ski came to understand
that, he was able to contain the plasma in our jet indefinitely, not by pushing particles around in brute-force magnetic squeezes but by encouraging them to want to stay together. There are other ways of saying what he does (= “creates an environment in which centripetal exceed centrifugal forces”), but the way I said it is better because it tells something about your characters. Bullies, all of you. Why can’t you be nice to things if you want them to be nice to you? Be sure to pass this on to T’in Fa at Tiantsin, Professor Morris at All Soul’s, and whoever holds the Carnap chair at UCLA.
Flo’s turn.
My mother would have loved my garden. I have drumsticks and daffodils growing side by side in the sludgy sand. They do so please us, and we them: I will probably transmit a full horticultural handbook at a future date, but meanwhile it is shameful to eat a radish. Carrots, on the other hand, enjoy it.
A statement of William Becklund, deceased.
I emerged into the world between feces and urine, learned, grew, ate, worked, moved and died. Alternatively, I emerged from the hydrogen flare, shrank, disgorged, and reentered the womb one misses so. You may approach it from either end, it makes no difference at all which way you look at it.
Observational datum, Letski.
At time t, a Dirac number incommensurable with GMT, the following phenomenon is observed:
The radio source Centaurus A is identified as a positionally stable single collective object rather than two intersecting gas clouds and is observed to contract radially toward a center. Analysis and observation reveal it to be a Black Hole of which the fine detail is not detectable as yet. One infers all galaxies develop such central vortices, with implications of interest to astronomers and eschatologists. I, Seymour Letski, propose to take a closer look but the others prefer to continue programmed flight first. Harvard-Smithsonian notification service, please copy.
“Starbow,” a preliminary study for a rendering into English of a poem by fames Barstow:
Gaggle of goslings but pick of our race
We waddle through relativistic space.
Dilated, discounted, despondent we scan:
But vacant the Sign of the Horse and the Man.
Vacant the Sign of the Man and the Horse,
And now we conjecture the goal of our course.
Tricked, trapped and cozened, we ruefully run
After the child of the bachelor sun.
The trick is revealed and the trap is confessed
And we are the butts of the dimwitted jest.
O Gander who made us, O Goose who laid us,
How lewdly and twistedly you betrayed us!
We owe you a debt. We won’t forget.
With fortune and firmness we ll pay you yet.
Give us some luck and we’ll timely send
Your pot of gold from the starbow’s end.
Ann Becklund:
I think it was Stanley Weinbaum who said that from three facts a truly superior mind should be able to deduce the whole universe (Ski thinks it is possible with a finite number, but considerably larger than that). We are so very far from being truly superior minds by those standards, or even by our own. Yet we have a much larger number of facts to work with than three, or even three thousand, and so we have deduced a good deal.
This is not as valuable to you as you might have hoped, dear old bastardly Kneffie and all you bastardly others, because one of the things that we have deduced is that we can’t tell you everything, because you wouldn’t understand. We would help you along, some of you, if you were here, and in time you would be able to do what we do easily enough, but not at remote control.
But all is not lost, folks! Cheer up! You don’t deduce like we deduce, but on the other hand you have so very much more to work from. Try. Get smart. You can do it if you want to. Set your person at rest, compose your mind before you speak, make your relations firm before you ask for something. Try not to be loathsome about it. Don’t be like the fellow in the Changes. “He brings increase to no one. Indeed, someone even strikes him.”
We’ve all grown our toes back now, even Will, although it was particularly difficult for him since he had been killed, and we’ve inscribed the bones and used them with very good effect in generating the hexagrams. I hope you see the point of what we did. We could have gone on with tossing coins or throwing the yarrow stalks, or at least with the closest Flo could breed to yarrow stalks. We didn’t want to do that because it’s not the optimum way.
The person who doesn’t keep his heart constantly steady might say, “Well, what’s the difference?” That’s a poor sort of question to ask. It implies a deterministic answer. A better question is, “Does it make a difference?” and the answer to that is, “Yes, probably, because in order to do something right you must do it right.” That is the law of identity, in any language.
Another question you might ask is, “Well, what source of knowledge are you actually tapping when you consult the hexagrams?” That’s a better kind of question in that it doesn’t force a wrong answer, but the answer is, again, indeterminate. You might view the
I Ching
as a sort of Rorschach bundle of squiggles that has no innate meaning but is useful because your own mind interprets it and puts sense into it. Feel free! You might think of it as a sort of memory bank of encoded lore. Why not? You might skip it entirely and come to knowledge in some other tao, any tao you like. (“The superior man understands the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end.”) That’s fine, too!
But whatever way you do it, you should
do
it that way. We needed inscribed bones to generate hexagrams, because that was the right way, and so it was no particular sacrifice to lop off a toe each for the purpose. It’s working out nicely, except for one thing. The big hangup now is that the translations are so degraded, Chinese to German, German to English, and error seeping in at every step, but we’re working on that now.
Perhaps I will tell you more at another time. Not now. Not very soon. Eve will tell you about that.
Eve Barstow, the Dummy, comes last and, I’m afraid, least.
When I was a little girl I used to play chess, badly, with very good players, and that’s the story of my life. I’m a chronic overachiever. I can’t stand people who aren’t
smarter and better than I am, but the result is that I’m the runt of the litter every time. They are all very nice to me here, even Jim, but they know what the score is and so do I.
So I keep busy and applaud what I can’t do. It isn’t a bad life. I have everything I need, except pride.
Let me tell you what a typical day is like here between Sol and Centaurus. We wake up (if we have been sleeping, which some of us still do) and eat (if we are still eating, as all but Ski and, of course, Will Becklund do). The food is delicious and Florence has induced it to grow cooked and seasoned where that is desirable, so it’s no trouble to go over and pick yourself a nice poached egg or clutch of French fries. (I really prefer brioche in the mornings, but for sentimental reasons she can’t manage them.) Sometimes we ball a little or sing old campfire songs. Ski comes down for that, but not for long, and then he goes back to looking at the universe. The starbow is magnificent and appalling. It is now a band about 40° across, completely surrounding us with colored light. One can always look in the other frequencies and see ghost stars before us and behind us, but in the birthright bands the view to the front and rear is now dead black and the only light is that beautiful banded ring of powdery stars.
Sometimes we write plays or have a little music. Shef had deduced four lost Bach piano concerti, very reminiscent of Corelli and Vivaldi, with everything going at once in the tuttis, and we’ve all adapted them for performance. I did mine on the Moog, but Ann and Shef synthesized whole orchestras. Shef’s is particularly cute. You can tell that the flautist has early emphysema and two people in the violin section have been drinking, and he’s got Toscanini conducting like a
risorgimento
metronome. Flo’s oldest daughter made up words and now she sings a sort of nursery-rhyme adaptation of some Buxtehude chorales; oh, I didn’t tell you about the kids. We have eleven of them now. Ann, Dot and I have one apiece, and Florence has eight. (But they’re going to let me have quadruplets next week.) They let me take care of them pretty much for the first few weeks, while they’re little, and they’re so darling.
So mostly I spend my time taking care of the kids and working out tensor equations that Ski kindly gives me to do for him, and, I must confess it, feeling a little lonely. I
jwould
like to watch a TV quiz show over a cup of coffee with a friend! They let me do over the interior of our mobile home now and then. The other day I redid it in Pittsburgh suburban as a joke. Would you believe French windows in interstellar space? We never open them, of course, but they look real pretty with the chintz curtains and lace tiebacks. And we’ve added several new rooms for the children and their pets (Flo grew them the cutest little bunnies in the hydroponics plot).
Well, I’ve enjoyed this chance to gossip, so will sign off now. There is one thing I have to mention. The others have decided we don’t want to get any more messages from you. They don’t like the way you try to work on our subconsciouses and all (not that you succeed, of course, but you can see that it’s still a little annoying), and so in future the dial will be set at six-six-oh, all right, but the switch will be in the “off” position. It wasn’t my idea, but I was glad to go along. I
would
like some slightly less demanding company from time to time, although not, of course, yours.
Once upon a time the building that was now known as DoD Temp Restraining Quarters 7—you might as well call it with the right word, “jail,” Knefhausen thought—had been a luxury hotel in the Hilton chain. The maximum security cells were in the underground levels, in what had been meeting rooms. There were no doors or windows to the outside. If you did get out of your own cell you had a flight of stairs to get up before you were at ground level, and then the guards to break through to get to the open. And then, even if there happened not to be an active siege going on at the moment, you took your chances with the roaming addicts and activists outside.
Knefhausen did not concern himself with these matters. He did not think of escape, or at least didn’t after the first few panicky moments, when he realized he was under arrest. He stopped demanding to see the president after the first few days. There was no point in appealing to the White House for help when it was the White House that had put him here. He was still sure that if only he could talk to the president privately for a few moments he could clear everything up. But as a realist he had faced the fact that the president would never talk to him privately again.
So he counted his blessings.
First, it was comfortable here. The bed was good, the rooms were warm. The food still came from the banquet kitchens of the hotel, and it was remarkably good for jailhouse fare.
Second, the kids were still in space and still doing some things, great things, even if they did not report what. His vindication was still a prospect.
Third, the jailers let him have newspapers and writing materials, although they would not bring him his books or give him a television set.
He missed the books, but nothing else. He didn’t need TV to tell him what was going on outside. He didn’t even need the newspapers, ragged, thin and censored as they were. He could hear for himself. Every day there was the rattle of small-arms fire, mostly far-off and sporadic, but once or twice sustained and heavy and almost overhead, Brownings against AK-47s, it sounded like, and now and then the slap and smash of grenade launchers. Sometimes he heard sirens hooting through the streets, punctuated by clanging bells, and wondered that there was still a civilian fire department left to bother. (Or was it still civilian?) Sometimes he heard the grinding of heavy motors that had to be tanks. The newspapers did little to fill in the details, but Knefhausen was good at reading between the lines. The Administration was holed up somewhere—Key Biscayne or Camp David or Southern California, no one was saying where. The cities were all in red revolt.
Herr Omnes
had taken over.
For these disasters Knefhausen felt unjustly blamed. He composed endless letters to the president, pointing out that the serious troubles of the Administration had nothing to do with Alpha-Aleph; the cities had been in revolt for most of a generation, the dollar had become a laughing stock since the Indochinese wars. Some he destroyed, some he could get no one to take from him, a few he managed to dispatch—and got no answers.
Once or twice a week a man from the Justice Department came to ask him the same thousand pointless questions once again. They were trying to build up a dossier to prove
it was all his fault, Knefhausen suspected. Well, let them. He would defend himself when the time came. Or history would defend him. The record was clear. With respect to moral issues, perhaps, not so clear, he conceded. No matter. One could not speak of moral questions in an area so vital to the search for knowledge as this. The dispatches from the
Constitution
had already produced so much!—although, admittedly, some of the most significant parts were hard to understand. The Gödel message had not been unscrambled, and the hints of its contents remained only hints.
Sometimes he dozed and dreamed of projecting himself to the
Constitution.
It had been a year since the last message. He tried to imagine what they had been doing. They would be well past the midpoint now, decelerating. The starbow would be broadening and diffusing every day. The circles of blackness before and behind them would be shrinking. Soon they would see Alpha Centauri as no man had ever seen it. To be sure, they would then see that there was no planet called Aleph circling the primary, but they had guessed that somehow long since. Brave, wonderful kids! Even so they had gone on. This foolishness with drugs and sex, what of it? One opposed such goings-on in the common run of humanity, but it had always been so that those who excelled and stood out from the herd could make their own rules. As a child he had learned that the plump, proud air leader sniffed cocaine, that the great warriors took their sexual pleasure sometimes with each other. An intelligent man did not concern himself with such questions, which was one more indication that the man from the Justice Department, with his constant hinting and prying into Knefhausen’s own background, was not really very intelligent.
The good thing about the man from the Justice Department was that one could sometimes deduce things from his questions, and rarely—oh, very rarely—he would sometimes answer a question himself. “Has there been a message from the
Constitution
?” “No, of course not, Dr. Knefhausen; now, tell me again, who suggested this fraudulent scheme to you in the first place?”
Those were the highlights of his days, but mostly the days just passed unmarked.
He did not even scratch them off on the wall of his cell, like the prisoner in the Chateau d’If. It would have been a pity to mar the hardwood paneling. Also, he had other clocks and calendars. There was the ticking of the arriving meals, the turning of the seasons as the man from the Justice Department paid his visits. Each of these was like a holiday—a holy day, not joyous but solemn. First there would be a visit from the captain of the guards, with two armed soldiers standing in the door. They would search his person and his cell on the chance that he had been able to smuggle in a——a what? A nuclear bomb, maybe. Or a pound of pepper to throw in the Justice man’s eyes. They would find nothing, because there was nothing to find. And then they would go away, and for a long time there would be nothing. Not even a meal, even if a meal time happened to be due. Nothing at all, until an hour or three hours later the Justice man would come in with his own guard at the door, equally vigilant inside and out, and his engineer manning the tape recorders, and his questions.
And then there was the day when the man from the Justice Department came and he was not alone. With him was the president’s secretary, Murray Amos.
How treacherous is the human heart! When it has given up hope, how little it takes to make it hope again!
“Murray!” cried Knefhausen, almost weeping, “it’s so good to see you again! The president, is he well? What can I do for you? Have there been developments?”
Murray Amos paused in the doorway. He looked at Dieter von Knefhausen and said bitterly, “Oh, yes, there have been developments. Plenty of them. The Fourth Armored has just changed sides, so we are evacuating Washington. And the president wants you out of here at once.”
“No, no! I mean—oh, yes, it is good that the president is concerned about my welfare, although it is bad about the Fourth Armored. But what I mean, Murray, is this: Has there been a message from the
Constitution
?”
Amos and the Justice Department man looked at each other. “Tell me, Dr. Knefhausen,” said Amos silkily, “how did you manage to find that out?”
“Find it out? How could I find it out? No, I only asked because I hoped. There has been a message, yes? In spite of what they said? They have spoken again?”
“As a matter of fact, there has been,” said Amos thoughtfully. The Justice Department man whispered piercingly in his ear, but Amos shook his head. “Don’t worry, we’ll be coming in a second. The convoy won’t go without us … . Yes, Knefhausen, the message came through to Goldstone two hours ago. They have it at the decoding room now.”
“Good, very good!” cried Knefhausen. “You will see, they will justify all. But what do they say? Have you good scientific men to interpret it? Can you understand the contents?”
“Not exactly,” said Amos, “because there’s one little problem the code room hadn’t expected and wasn’t prepared for. The message wasn’t coded. It came in clear, but the language was Chinese.”