FOUR

Beyond the energy curtain was a short tubular passage set with odd projections that might be handgrips.

Yvonne used them to pull herself along. The corridor, like the room to which it led, was lined with an unknown material, smooth, slightly yielding, in which colours swirled and eddied, a slow, intricate dance that could fascinate you close to hypnotism if you watched. The substance also provided adequate neutral illumination.

From the passage Yvonne entered a hemispherical chamber, about thirty metres in radius. It likewise was provided with grips, whereon successive human visitors had secured sleeping harness, cameras, portable analytical kits, and other such gear, until its original harmony was lost in clutter. A paraboloid bulged into it, leaving a maximum of four metres between sections.

This seemed to be a veranda projecting from whatever rooms lay behind. It was transparent, seemingly unbroken. On occasion it had dilated, when the Sigman passed out small biological samples in glass containers through a oneway force screen. The being had declined the terrestrial specimens offered, by simply not admitting them, and had made no further presents since the early days.

The light within the dome was orange-yellow in hue and more intense than what falls on Earth. The atmosphere likewise differed from the kind provided in the 'guest quarters'. The Sigman had obliged with a bottleful. The composition turned out to be approximately like Earth's on a humid day, but twice as dense. Bolometers indicated a tropical temperature, variable but averaging 33 * C. How these facts could be reconciled with the hypothesis that the planet of origin was smaller than man's, no one was sure and everyone wanted greatly to know.

It was likewise unclear why the dome was crowded, not only with a three-dimensional lattice of fixed objects (mostly adjustable, frequently moving or changing shape as if of themselves, none understandable to men albeit always pleasing to the eye) but with a hundred varieties, a thousand colours of plants (blue-green fronded leaves, exquisite when they weren't magnificent) which seemingly grew out of certain lattice members. To renew oxygen? But man already had more efficient methods for that. Some unheard-of symbiosis? A hobby, to relieve loneliness? An aspect of religion? Scientists had come to damn their beauty. It blocked them from, seeing more than a few metres past the inner wall.

The Sigman rarely showed itself before its visitors had unsuited and stowed their baggage. Yvonne did this quickly. She had soon got the hang of operating in weightlessness. Bluestocking she might be, but she was in addition a good swimmer and ferocious tennis player.

The air was comfortably warm. It held a slight spicy odour. The utter stillness—ventilation without pumps was another trick humans would like to acquire—added to the surreal feeling of flight. Yvonne suppressed a desire to indulge in acrobatics as sternly as she suppressed the wish for a cigarette. A job was on hand. She checked the camera and recording instruments, which had naturally been left going.

Ample tape remained. Doubtless it held as little of interest as all its predecesors.

Blast it, the Sigman can't be busy every moment on those junkets around our system! This ship must be wholly self-running; ours almost are. I can imagine the creature taking off to make planetological studies or simply to break the monotony. I can even see that it might not care to have us around for more than limited periods of time. But why won't it go on camera and start establishing a language? Point to a drawing or photograph or whatever of something, make a noise or write a word. Lord knows our people tried. They'd point to a companion and say, 'Man'.

They'd diagram the Solar System, the periodic table, the water molecule. We never got a response in kind.

I think the suggestion must be right, that the Sigman refuses our specimens because it already knows about them. Perhaps they are dangerous to it. (Though we, taking elaborate precautions, found nothing to fear. How could a life using dextro amino acids and levo sugars eat us, let alone infect us?) More plausible is the idea that this is not the first Sigman visit. A long development must lie behind a ship as perfected as this; and Sol is among their nearer stars. Probably they made their scientific studies ten thousand years ago. Or one thousand; we'd have no reliable record. Probably Earth's radio emission attracted them back and our visitor is a cultural anthropologist.

Then why doesn't it act like one?

And if, contrariwise, it has no interest in us, why does it admit us at all?

The thoughts, worn smooth by repetition, passed through Yvonne's head like a tune she couldn't shake loose. She must concentrate too hard on her chores. But when, at last, she had placed her cluster of apparatus on the dome with suction cups, and herself in an aluminium frame similarly fastened—then her new thoughts rushed forth, and she quivered with eagerness.

The Sigman came.

No amount of earnest effort could altogether prevent the sight from turning her slightly queasy. Many people, seeing it on television, were physically sickened. 'We look as horrible to it as it does to us' had become a cliche, like 'This ought to show us how tiny the differences between humans really are.' Neither had made many converts.

A comedian had described the being as a cross between a slug and a pine-cone. The phrase stuck.

About three metres long, 130 centimetres thick, the body was a flexible ellipsoid shingled in squarish golden-brown plates. Those were independently mounted, on muscular stalks at three different levels, so that seen from outside they overlapped. When the Sigman stretched itself, cameras occasionally recorded glimpses of the inner body thus protected, a spongy black mass.

Symmetry was preserved by four stumpy, shell-covered legs near the middle, with disc-shaped webbed feet, and by a pair of arms farther out at either end. Hence the Sigman had no front or rear; it moved and worked as easily 'backward' as 'forward'. Each arm possessed shoulder joint, elbow, and wrist, but there the resemblance to man's stopped. The hard brown material sheathed it like a crab's. Vaguely crustacean, too, were the four mandibles at the end, whose cutting and grinding surfaces worked against each other. The Sigman had been observed eating. The claws macerated what must be food, then held the mess against the spongy surface they surrounded. There, apparently, fierce digestive juices broke it down till it was absorbed straight up the arms.

The claws in turn were, set by set, surrounded by six ropy short tentacles. These made excellent fingers but, to a man,.suggested a snakepit.

Retractible beneath the shingles or extensible between them, here and there over the whole body, were assorted thin tendrils. Presumably they were sensors but, aside from four unmistakable eyes, their functions remained unidentified.

The plates always glistened, hot simply with moisture but with dripping slimes that were thought to be excreted matter.

Yvonne had her repugnance well under control. 'Hello,' she said. Her smile, she knew, was useless.

The shape hauled itself through the lattice until two of those stalked, unwinking black eyes stared into hers. Fog wraiths curled behind; water droplets formed on leaves, broke loose and danced among them like tiny stars.

The Sigman boomed. Somehow sound was passed through the dome. Phonograms were automatically made. Yvonne wondered how many thousand man-hours had been spent poring over them. She'd contributed plenty herself.

Before her was a console from which a wire ran back to the sonic synthesizer that had been installed. It could reproduce elements of Sigman speech, if speech was what those noises were, in any combination.

To date it had got no response, had seemed rather to make the Sigman go away sooner.

Yvonne refreshed memory by a glance at her clipboarded notes, and struck the first of the phrases she had planned. It came forth as a chord, twanging bass through treble, simultaneous chirp and whistle.

Will it work? Her heartbeat shook her.

The Sigman's eyestalks rose rigid.

Yvonne played a second phrase. Claws spread wide. The creature was showing more reaction than to any previous attempt. Yvonne let the notes die away. She took from her clipboard the first of a series of photographs and drawings. It showed a nude man. She played the phrase again.

A slight variation in it accompanied the picture of a woman. A third variation was associated with a mixed group. The Sigman extended tendril after tendril. Was it getting the idea at last? Did it realize that she was suggesting words for 'human-male', *human-female', 'humans'?

The Sigman trilled and withdrew from sight. Yvonne waited, head awhirl. The Sigman returned quickly, carrying a small globular object. The projector! flashed through Yvonne. O God, O God, it hasn't brought that out for ¦more than two years!

In the air appeared a three-dimensional multicoloured interweaving of shapes, curves, lines. It flowed through changes, complex and beautiful as running water. The Sigman meanwhile piped and growled, waved tendrils in a kind of ballet, and exuded a fine spray of yellow fluid.

Yvonne shook her head. Disappointment was like a belly blow. 'I don't understand,' she said, dry-mouthed.

The Sigman paused. Silence waxed. And then, retracting most of its tendrils, it operated to project a red band whose pointed end was directed at itself. It waited. She brought forth a chord. The Sigman repeated it. The band swung to indicate her. She sounded what she had given for 'woman' and heard it given back.

For a second, darkness passed through her. She came out of the near faint sobbing, but for glory. After three years, the stranger was ready to help create a common language, Yvonne turned when her team-mate's spacesuited form floated in. Damn! was her first reaction. In the flame of achievement, she had actually forgotten Wang Li was due to join her. Then she realized she was atremble with tension and the sweat that soaked her coverall gave off an unladylike smell.

Maybe the Sigman welcomed a break too. It stuck the optical projector between two bars which lifted from the deck in superb helices, and floated off into the flowers. Presently leaves began to wave and rustle; it had turned a blower on them, as it often did.

Yvonne paused not to wonder why. With jittering fingers she assembled her notes. She went to the sound recorder and tapped its keys, projecting on to the screen the successive phonograms of the words.

'Good day, Dr Canter.'

Her exasperation vanished. She couldn't help herself, even before this man she didn't like. He had unsuited and now hung close beside her, lightly holding a handgrip. Her arms went around him, almost knocking him loose. She cried into his ear: 'I've done it! We've won! We have the key!'

'What?' His habitual impassivity broke to the extent of widened eyes and open mouth. 'Are you certain?'

She released him. 'Ten words, this past hour,' she chattered. 'We ran through them over and over, m-m-mak-ing sure there was no mistake. See, no, listen, I'll play back the tapes, you can look at my notes and the 'grams—here, pictures of several different men, colour, clothes, build .. the Sigman itself can't confuse them… and I got the same word each time, "human-male"—' The clipboard slipped from her grasp and twirled out of reach.

Wang retrieved it. He stayed where he was, paging through the sheets, frowning in his concentration.

Maybe just as well he's such a cold fish, Yvonne thought while she calmed down. If he were somebody who could celebrate, I might… have done anything. And we do have a long, tough haul before us, calling for every brain cell we've got.

She studied him. He was a North Chinese, hence taller than she though of slender build. Clean-shaven in the manner of his country, his face was strong in jaws and nose, beneath a high forehead and short grey hair. Free fall or no, he remained ramrod-straight in the drab brown quasi-uniform common among officials of the People's Republic. For he was not simply a professor at Peking University. The government had backed his research into what was called 'linguatherapy' more because the results might help in absorbing Tibetans, Mongols, and other minorities, than for their possible value in treating mental illness. (She did assume that he himself had had the latter purpose in mind.)

'Wonderful, if true,' he said at length. His English was fluent, the accent slight. *No discourtesy, of course. But we have had false hopes in the past. The Sigman would apparently be co-operative, but after minutes it would go away for hours, and has invariably dismissed us within a few days.'

'Exactly,' Yvonne answered. 'I've had a full hour. And for the first time, as I said, the results are reproduced. It will adopt any word I give it in association with something, and repeat that word next time the something is indicated. Always before, it seemed to be trying to teach us a word of its own, but disappeared very shortly when we played those phonemes back. And our attempts at setting up vocal or visual codes had still more dismal endings. I tell you, now— Wait! It's returning! You'll see for yourself.'

The Sigman carried an iridescent ovoid, which it attached to a bar near the dome wall. 'I have seen that thing,' Wang said, 'albeit not for some while. I believe it is a recording device.'

'Sure. It'd about given up on trying to communicate with us. But now that we can build a mutual language, naturally it'll have to take notes.'

Yvonne and the Sigman got back to work. Wang Li floated motionless, watching. The cameras filmed nothing dramatic—exchange of sounds, woman holding up pictures, non-human projecting recognizable copies (as a David painting might recognizably have suggested one by Van Gogh)—what was happening was too big for drama.

At the end of two more hours, the Sigman had evidently had enough for a while and retired. Yvonne didn't mind. She felt wrung out. Entering the sanitary cubicle, she undressed, sponged herself clean, and donned a fresh coverall. Emerging, she found that Wang had opened the rations and started them heating at the glower. He already had a squeeze bottle of coffee for her.

'Thanks.' It warmed and relaxed her. She strapped her body loosely into place and stretched out.

'A pity we have no champagne,' he said, faintly smiling.

'Oh, I seldom drink. I would like a smoke—tobacco, I mean, not marijuana.'

'We are similar in that respect.' Wang's look was very steady on her. 'Would you like to explain your accomplishment? It really does seem as if you have succeeded, and I offer congratulations both heartfelt and humble.'

Down underneath, he's human. Maybe that thought joined with triumph and with the need to uncoil, to make her feel friendlier towards him than would otherwise have been the case. And they were, after all, alone in this strange, quiet room.

'Certainly.' She sipped. 'Only… well, I'm tired, my mind's in disarray. May I keep things on a kindergarten level and tell you stuff you know as well as you know your name?'

'That might actually he best. It will give perspective and point out what, in a welter of data, is significant.

Your eventual full report may not be easy reading for me.'

The words rushed from her as if she were intoxicated:

'Perhaps not. You recall my research before this project was in mathematical semantics, though my PhJD. was in comparative linguistics. I used a lot of math.

'What was the situation? The Sigman can't produce human-type sounds; its own appear to come from a set of vibrating tympani. We can't produce Sigman vocables. That is, we can with the synthesizer, but it's almost impossibly difficult. Ten ringers, moving through electromagnetic fields, are supposed to generate a high-fidelity version of a language that uses hundreds of frequencies and amplitudes simultaneously?

'Not having a corresponding instrument—and I think, now, I know why not—the Sigman attempted at first to teach men its tongue. Those sounds, those incomprehensible however lovely drawings and whatnot it exhibited… we didn't get the idea. I mean, none of the research teams did; I wasn't here at the start, of course. We tried showing objects and pictures ourselves. The Sigman would make a noise.

We'd take a phonogram of that noise, feed this into the synthesizer, and try haltingly to combine elements to get higher abstractions. "Man" and "Sigman" together equals "intelligent beings"—that sort of thing. The Sigman quickly retreated to its inner suite.

'We guessed its language might be so hopelessly alien that our combinations were nonsensical. In fact, I've always felt Fuentes' idea is right. The Sigman language is only vocal in part. Position, gesture, perhaps odours emitted at will, may be more important. Therefore communication may be extremely subtle and complex. It may be nonlinear, it may involve many concepts at once that we humans put separately, it may deal with whole aspects of reality where we have to take a piece at a time. The cellular study of those biological samples hints at something like this.

'Well, if we couldn't learn Sigman, might the opposite approach work? We tried to build an artificial language from the ground up, one that it could pronounce and we could synthesize and both races could comprehend. The attempt got results just as bad, or worse. Do you realize that in three years men have been aboard this vessel a total of ninety-eight days?'

'I keep track,' Wang said. 'Ah, I believe dinner is ready.'

Yvonne sighed. 'I did have a reason for that lecture. Your suggestion that I emphasize the points which spurred my thinking. Or did I need to? Maybe I'm high on happiness.'

'Please say whatever you desire.' Wang handed her her rack. To simplify work, meals were standardized. 'Tonight' they both had fish filet, fried rice and onions (in squeeze bags), bok choy (in covered disposable dishes), and cookies. They scarcely noticed.

'The real job I did can't be put in words,' Yvonne said.

It involved every kind of statistical analysis of data that I could think of. If I didn't have a priority on computer time, I'd still be at it.

'Oh, yes, others have done the same. But none of those people demonstrated that any patterns they found were significant. Remember, given finite sets of numbers, you can construct a literal infinity of functions relating them. I applied some results from my earlier work in human linguistics, especially a theorem I'm quite proud of. That let me make quantitative predictions of the consequences of certain hypotheses which occurred to me.'

She stopped to chew. Wang ate on, imperturbably.

'Well, I'll give you the results,' Yvonne said. 'First, I can show, that we've been going too fast. The frequencies with which identifiable combinations recur in the Sig-man's utterances average out at half the median of human languages. Maybe it actually thinks more slowly, if more deeply, than we do. But if I'm wrong about this, our comparative machine-gun chatter must at any rate be confusing and annoying. The confusion it could overcome— the annoyance, not. In fact, I suspect we've been inflicting outright pain.'

Wang's hand paused half-way to his mouth.

Yvonne nodded. Your people hear English as harsh and staccato, mine hear Chinese as high-pitched and singsong,' she said. TSTot too pleasant till one gets used to it. Our musics are a still more clear-cut example. Actually, I enjoy some Chinese music, as you perhaps enjoy my beloved Beethoven, but to many of my countrymen a concert would be excruciating. We needn't go outside of a single society, though. I find today's popular American music merely banal. But I've heard recordings from, oh, fifty years back. Having to sit through an evening of that stuff would be, to me, literal torture.

'I came to believe the Sigman simply can't endure our clumsy attempts to make its kind of sounds.

'And that, I think, is why it didn't bring a synthesizer. Continuous human speech would have been unbearable. Attempts at communication by visual symbols broke down for similar reasons. Our drawings, our alphabet are too ugly, perhaps too angular. Maybe we should have tried Chinese characters.'

Wang frowned while he consumed the interrupted morsel. 'Would so shrinkingly sensitive a soul cross interstellar space?' he asked finally.

'We don't know its psychology. Suppose it, trying to speak to us, kept making noises like a fingernail scraping on a blackboard—or else those subsonic notes that induce fear reactions. Many humans couldn't have stood that.

'I admit you have a good point, Professor Wang, so good that no one before me thought it might be invalid. Oh, the question may not turn on actual pain. The trouble may, as I said before, just be annoyance. The Sigman may keep going off in a huff because we keep making such awful cacophonies.

'So I went back to the tapes and phonograms and analysed them for musical rules.'

'Intonation?' Wang asked at once.

Yvonne laughed. 'I'm not sure. Principally what I found were relationships like those governing our scales and keys. Furthermore, there are relationships between tonal qualities—some occur together, some don't—and the interludes between them. It's extraordinarily complicated. I doubt if I've extracted more than a fraction yet.

'But I could see what we'd done wrong. We can record a phrase and play it back with high fidelity.

However, Sigman grammar doesn't operate by tacking phrases together, any more than a heavily inflected language like Latin does. Besides, the method is hopelessly slow and awkward. Later we tried creating an artificial speech, with the synthesizer making Sigman-type vocables. Only we got every relationship wrong. The effect was as bad—as irritating or outright painful—as that of a tone-deaf person trying to sing. Or worse, probably.

'What I did, therefore, was start fresh. The computer helped me devise a spoken language which obeys the basic harmony rules but which is not too complicated to produce on the synthesizer. And it can't be hopelessly amiss ..„ because the Sigman is working on learning it!'

Wang sat quiet a long while before he nodded. 'Wonderful indeed.' His smile didn't seem to go farther than the teeth. Well, no doubt he felt a degree of jealousy, on his country's behalf if not his own.

'Oh, I anticipate,' Yvonne confessed. 'This is very new. What I have, thus far, is about a hundred nouns, verbs, and adjectives that can be defined ostensibly. I've roughed out a pidgin grammar, the simplest and least ambiguous I could invent on short notice. It's positional, like English or Chinese. So far the only inflections are to show plurals. I think we'll want them for tenses too, but maybe not. Maybe the Sigmans have a time-concept like the HopL We'll have to feel our way. But we'll get there!"

The existing vocabulary was soon conveyed, and a few trial sentences constructed. That went less well.

Perhaps Sigmans didn't make anything strictly corresponding to sentences. However, towards the end the non-human was projecting its eldritch sketches in animation and suiting words to the actions depicted.

'Man walks. Men walk. Sigman walks. Men and Sigmans walk. Planet rotates. Planet revolves. Blue planet revolves. Green planet revolves. Blue and green planets rotate and revolve.'

Wang watched, studied her notes, made occasional suggestions, generally kept in the background.

On the third day the Sigman dismissed the Earthlings. The indication was a warbling note. After the first two times, when a gradual but inexorable drop in air pressure followed, men had got the message,,

'I'm not sorry, to be honest,' Yvonne said. 'I suspect it wants to rest and ponder. And I could use a rest myself.'

'You deserve one,' Wang replied tonelessly.

Their respective spacecraft removed them in response to a red flicker-signal. Yvonne took the records—films, tapes, plates, rolls, from a score of scientific instruments— because it was an American's turn to do so. The rule impressed her as ridiculous, when they were promptly scanned for the public data banks; but it hung on.

Or is 'ridiculous' the proper word? crossed momentarily through her Joy. The arrangement means nothing per se. However, as a symbol of anachronisms that are deadly dangerous in an era when men can blow up the world— 1 wonder.