“We did no surgery on Molly. That came later, with the others. And certainly there were anatomical problems—but the corrections were minimal, and we made sure they were painless.” Singh had tensed almost imperceptibly, but now relaxed again as she got back to reciting the good news. “That initial and quite unofficial neurochip experiment on Molly showed astonishing results. Her motor control improved rapidly, until she was indistinguishable from the average infant chimp. And as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, the average infant chimp is an Olympic athlete compared to the average infant human. This one, even with her primitive natural vocal equipment, started making interesting sounds. ‘Mama’ and so forth.”
“A good word in most languages.” Singh bared her teeth again. “We knew we’d done something extraordinary. We had bridged the gap between our species, something the first animal-language researchers in the 20th century had tried so hard to do but without clear results. We had done it decisively and without much effort at all. I will never forget that morning, when I went to Molly’s cage and ‘interacted’ with her—orthodox behaviorist terms are rather dry, I fear—when I simply held out my hand and gave her the food pellet. And she said ‘Mama’ to me.”
“Looking back, I believe it was in that moment I conceived ICEP, the Interspecies Communication Enhancement Program.” Singh suddenly frowned. “Incidentally, I hate the term ‘superchimp’ only a little less than I despise the word ‘simp.’ ” The frown dissolved, although her expression remained brusque. “Our first enhanced subjects, these eight, were ready for training a year later. The details of the program, our evaluation of the results, are of course on record.”
“I’m afraid you can put that down to the media-hounds—or perhaps I should say, to the will of the people, who become hysterical when expertly manipulated. It was plain there would be no more funding for ICEP after all of our subjects were lost in the crash of the
Queen Elizabeth IV
.”
“Steg?” Singh looked at Sparta carefully. “I see you have read the files carefully.” She seemed to come to some unspoken decision. “Inspector, I’m scheduled to fly to Darjeeling as soon as our interview is completed here. I run a sanatorium near there, for my private patients. It’s on the grounds of the family estate. Would you care to be my guest this evening?”
They came to the edge of the woods. The mansion was to their left, across a wide back lawn already turning brown with approaching winter. Ellen’s window and the pantry window Blake had broken in his escape attempt were visible in the near tower; the one still had fresh putty around it, and around the other the new leading of the stained glass was as bright as pewter.
“We were going to catch you in her room—that’s about as far ahead as we were thinking. You almost got away. Came through that window, charged the chopper. Complete surprise. If the guy in the Snark hadn’t been getting the injection ready, you could have made a mess of us.”
“You’re dangerous, you know.” The commander nodded toward the house. Thick plastic covered the charred porch: more scaffolding stood against the ruins of the carriage house, farther on. “And that was before you knew about Salamander.”
“I understand the practical side. That it’s easier to blank out something somebody heard or read than something they saw happen. Harder still to blank out something involving the body.” The commander eyed him. “You seem to get your body into most of the stuff you learn, Redfield.” It sounded almost like a compliment.
J. Q. R. Forster, professor of xenopaleontology and xenoarchaelogy at King’s College, London, was engrossed in a leather-bound volume from a shelf of 19th-century classics when Blake and the commander entered the library. Forster was a tiny bright-eyed fellow whose expression immediately put Blake in mind of an excited terrier. When the commander made the introductions, Forster stepped forward and gave Blake’s hand a jerk.
Indeed Forster looked no more than thirty-five, instead of his true fifty-plus years. “If I continue to have frequent scrapes with death requiring visits to the plastic surgeon, I shall soon be a boy like yourself,” he said. “They said they replaced seventy percent of the skin.”
Blake glanced at the commander. Just before he’d sent him and Ellen to Mars to find the missing plaque, the commander had referred to the assignment as having to do with “archaeological stuff.” As if he’d had no idea why anyone would be interested.
The commander gestured to the library’s well-stuffed leather-upholstered chairs. After some moving of furniture, they found that they had moved their seats to the corners of an invisible equilateral triangle, facing inward.
Forster had brought a flat holo projector from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, placed it on the lamp table beside him, and keyed its pad. Several dozen sculptural shapes appeared in midair above the unit, seemingly quite solid, as if cast in type metal.
“I presume that by now both of you know of my discovery that the Venus tablets constitute a more spectacular linguistic and philological discovery than the fabled Rosetta stone itself,” Forster said brightly. His lack of modesty was so transparent Blake found it almost charming. “Not only were the tablets laid out so as to deliberately reveal the sounds associated with each of the signs you see here— which I have arranged in the frequency of their occurrence, by the way—but the texts, over a dozen different ones, were written phonetically in the Bronze Age languages of Earth. Moreover, they were matched to their translations in the language of Culture X.” Forster cleared his throat grandly. “Thus in a single stroke we were able to obtain not only a sizeable sample of the Culture X language, written and phonetic, but also, as a windfall, sample texts of several lost languages of Earth never before deciphered. Tragically, all copies of these tablets were destroyed on that terrible night.”
“Yes, buried where we left them on the surface, and I certainly intend to return to excavate them”— Forster hesitated—“someday. When the necessary funds can be raised. But meanwhile I’ve made a more pressing discovery.” His bright eyes and pursed lips expressed a curious mixture of emotions. The little boy in him craved approval, the professor in him demanded it. “I’ve translated the Martian plaque!”
“Congratulations,” said Blake, trying to sound sincere. In his business, purported translations of untranslatable old manuscripts were almost as common as plans for perpetual motion machines at the patent office.
“These are the sounds of the signs.” He touched the pad, and the signs, paired with their phonetic equivalents, briefly glowed one after the other as the speaker in the unit emitted disembodied phonemes: “KH . . . WH . . . AH . . . SH . . .”
When the machine had gone through the list, Forster said, “The Martian plaque contains many of the same signs—none of the signs borrowed from human languages, of course—and lacking only the three least frequent occurrences in the Venusian tablets.” He glanced at Blake. “Because I had memorized it, I was able to reconstruct it during the period when it was missing and all records of its existence had been destroyed. Lying in a bed in the Port Hesperus clinic—amusing myself by thinking, since I could do nothing else—I established that in contrast to the Venusian tablets, which as I said are translations of texts from ancient Earth, the Martian plaque makes only a glancing reference to Earth. An Earth far too young to have evolved creatures that made intentional sounds, much less spoken languages.”