"Texture of Other Ways" by Mark W. Tiedemann (Part 3 of 3)

Texture of Other Ways

by Mark W. Tiedemann

[Continued from Part 2]

The oval-shaped room contained several comfortable chairs, three or four recorders, and a commlink panel. A curious flower-shaped mass on the ceiling apparently provided the unique environments for the species present.

The two people assigned to my group shook our hands quickly, smiling anxiously. We resisted the urge to telelog them to see why they were so nervous. Merril told us we had to trust them and do nothing to damage that trust.

The light dimmed when our counterparts entered. Our group had been assigned the Cursians. They were bulky, almost humanoid types. Their torsos began where knees should have been and their limbs looked like dense extrusions of rope. Individual tendrils would separate to perform the articulations of fingers, but they constantly touched themselves with them. No eyes that we could discern, but a thick mass of lighter tissue gathered in the center of the bumpy mass we thought of as its head. They wore threads of metal draped in complex patterns over their dense torsos. We were told that they breathed a compound of CO₂, CH₃, and CH₅N. The air seemed to glow a faint green on their side of the room.

"We need to touch them," I said.

"That's not possible," one of the linguists said, frowning. "I mean…" She looked at her colleague. "Is it?"

"I don't think so," he said, and went to the comm. He spoke with someone for a few minutes, then turned back to us, shaking his head. "Not advised. There could be some leakage of atmospheres. Cyanide and oxygen are mutually incompatible. We don't know how dangerous it might be."

"Then we can't do this. We have to touch them."

"Shit," she said. "Why didn't anybody see this problem?"

He shrugged and returned to the comm.

We spent the rest of that day's session staring across the thin line of atmosphere at each other. I wondered if the Cursians were as disappointed as we.

* * *

The next day there was no session. Everyone had experienced a similar problem with their seti groups. In one case it was incompatible atmospheres, in another it was a question of microbe contaminants, in another it was just a matter of propriety. The sessions were canceled until some way of getting across the notion could be devised.

Before we could touch and share our logos, Admiral Kovesh ordered us separated.

"Once they make contact," she said, "this is how it will be. May as well start them now so they get used to it."

Merril protested, but we ended up in separate rooms anyway. The three of us huddled close together all through the night.

Admiral Kovesh came twice to wake us up and ask if we had sensed nothing, if perhaps we had picked up something after all, but we could only explain, as before, that to telelog it was necessary to touch, or the biopole could not be transferred—

She didn't want to hear that. The second time I told her that and she grew suspicious.

"Are you reading me?" she asked.

"Would you believe me if I said no?"

She did not come back that night.

* * *

Three days later we once more went to the meeting room. Now there was a solid transparent wall between the Cursians and us with a boxlike contraption about shoulder height that contained complex seals joining in its middle in a kind of mixing chamber. It was obvious that an arrangement had been made.

"How does it work?"

"As simple as putting on a glove," one of the liaisons said. "Just insert your hand here, shove it through until you feel the baffles close on your arm. Self-sealing. The touchpoint chamber will only allow one finger through. Is that enough?"

It was annoying and confusing that no one had asked us. But perhaps Merril had told them. In any event, yes, we told them, it was enough.

On the other side of the clear wall, one of the Cursians came forward. A limb jammed into its end of the box and a tendril separated and pushed through until a tip emerged into the central chamber. I looked at the other two, who touched my free hand and nodded. I put my hand into the box.

My finger poked through the last seal and the membrane closed firmly just below the second joint. The air in the chamber was cold and my skin prickled. I stared at the Cursian "finger" as it wriggled slowly toward the tip of my finger. I concentrated a biopole discharge there and when it touched me it was almost as if I could feel the colony surge from me to the Cursian. Imagination, certainly, I had never been able to "feel" the transfer; the only way any of us ever knew it had happened was when the colony established itself and began sending back signals.

There should have been a short signal, a kind of handshake that let us know it had been a successful transfer. I waited, but felt no such impulse.

I gazed through the layers of separation between us and wondered if it was feeling the same sense of failure. To come all this way, to prepare all your life for this moment, and then to find that for reasons overlooked or unimagined you have been made for nothing…I thought then that there could be no worse pain.

I was wrong.

* * *

"Texture of Other Ways" by Mark W. Tiedemann (Part 2 of 3)

Texture of Other Ways

by Mark W. Tiedemann

[Continued from Part 1]

Admiral Kovesh came over to meet us after the convoy arrived at the orbital platform. She was a tall, straight-backed woman with deep creases in her face and very pale eyes. I thought she looked perfect for her command.

"As soon as our counterparts signal us," she explained, "then you'll all be taken down by shuttle. The Forum negotiators are already here."

"Can we see the other ships?" I asked.

Kovesh frowned. "What—?"

"The seti ships."

"Oh. Of course. As soon as I've briefed you on procedures."

"We've already been briefed."

Kovesh looked at Merril, who seemed nervous.

"Before we left Earth," he said, "we were all given a thorough profile of what to expect. They know their mission, Admiral."

"I don't care what they were told on Earth. We're thirteen parsecs out and this conference is under my aegis."

Merril gave us an apologetic look. "I see. Well, perhaps you could let them take it directly?"

"How do you mean?"

Merril blinked. "They're telelogs, Admiral. It would be quicker, surer—"

"Not on your life."

"I assure you it's painless, Admiral—"

"I'm assured. The answer is no. Now, if you don't mind…"

I felt sorry for Merril. He meant well, but I was glad the Admiral refused. Merril had an exaggerated notion of what we did. People are really a muddle.

The Change was mechanistic. We aren't psychics in the traditional sense. That's why we're called telelogs rather than telepaths. At infancy we were implanted with a biopole factory, a device called the logos. The logos transfers a colony of biopole, which seats itself in the recipient brain, and starts setting up a temporary pattern analyzer. Very quickly—I'm talking nanoseconds—the colony establishes a pattern, sets up a transmission, and within moments the contents of the mind are broadcast to the primary logos.

But the contents!

To be honest, it is much easier for someone to simply tell me, verbally, than for me to try to make sense of all this clutter!

We grew up living in each other's minds, we know how we operate, but the rest of humanity? It's a miracle there's any order at all.

Still, Admiral Kovesh's reaction disturbed me.

* * *

The idea made elegant sense.

Humans can't communicate with the seti, and vice versa. There is no mutual foundation of language between us. Even the couple of humanoid ones have languages grown from linguistic trees sprouted in different soils. Nothing matches up except for a few snatches of mathematics, which was how we all managed to pick one system in which to have a meeting.

That and the evident desire on the part of the seti to figure out how to communicate demands a solution.

There are only two solutions. The first will take decades, maybe centuries, and that will be the construction of an object by object lexicon. State a word—or group of words or collection of sound-signifiers, which will only be valid for those species that use sounds for communication—and point at the thing to which it attaches. How this will work with abstracts no one knows.

The other solution is us.

We smiled at each other, passed along encoded biopole of self-congratulation and mutual support, broadcast positive logos. Of course, we thought, what better way to decode a completely alien language than to read the minds of the speakers?

We learned linguistics and practiced decoding language on native speakers of disparate human tongues. With difficulty we learned to decode the patterns into recognizable linguistic components and eventually came to speak the language ourselves. Navajo, Mandarin, !Kung, Russian, Portuguese, English—the hard part was finding speakers of all these languages who were not also fluent in Langish, official Panspeak. But there are enclaves and preserves and the subjects were found and we learned.

The only troubling part—and none of us actually brought this up, but I imagine we all thought it—was that all these languages are ultimately human languages. All grown from the same soil. Hardwired. At some level, then, all the same.

* * *

Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #16: "Texture of Other Ways" by Mark W. Tiedemann (Part 1 of 3)

Following is story #16 from my forthcoming anthology Alien Contact, to be published in November by Night Shade Books. For more information on this anthology, and to see the first 15 stories, please begin here.

"Texture of Other Ways"
by Mark W. Tiedemann

This story was originally published in the September 1999 issue of Science Fiction Age¹, and is approximately 5,700 words in length.

In my first blog post on the Alien Contact anthology on November 23, 2010, I asked readers -- and authors -- to recommend stories. Mark W. Tiedemann was one of the responders, and in addition to recommending a Philip K. Dick story, he also, thankfully, recommended his own story "Texture of Other Ways."

I wanted a story for the anthology that focused on human-alien communication. I've read enough stories in which the aliens easily communicate with humans because they've been studying our language for years, or decades, or even centuries. And though I read quite a few stories that approached the human-alien communication issue differently, I selected "Texture of Other Ways." I asked Mark to share some thoughts with us on the story:

One of the problems I've always had with alien-human interactions in stories is the whole language barrier. Quite a few excellent stories have been written dealing with this, but a significant body of science fiction just assumes it's less of a problem than it really would be. Our language is based on assumptions rising not only out of sociology and psychology but basic biology and to assume "simple" translation will suffice in these scenarios is, well, wishful thinking. The other element in "Texture of Other Ways" is my consternation with telepathy as a standard SFnal trope. I just don't accept it. If it could be done, I see no reason to assume it would be in any way preferable to simple spoken communication. The mind is a morass and thoughts, as pure form, don't conform directly to speech, so "reading" a mind would not be easier but probably harder. Nevertheless, I thought it would be fun to play with these two elements and see what would emerge. The language barrier might be so difficult as to guarantee failure in relations…so let's cheat and bypass language altogether. Naturally, that would create a whole different set of problems.

So how is this story different in terms of human-alien communication? The humans selected to meet with the aliens are "telelogs." As the narrator states later in the story: "We aren't psychics in the traditional sense. That's why we're called telelogs rather than telepaths. At infancy we were implanted with a biopole factory, a device called the logos. The logos transfers a colony of biopole, which seats itself in the recipient brain, and starts setting up a temporary pattern analyzer. Very quickly—I'm talking nanoseconds—the colony establishes a pattern, sets up a transmission, and within moments the contents of the mind are broadcast to the primary logos." So we have this unique group of humans able to communicate amongst themselves as telelogs. And, by the way, these humans will be meeting with multiple alien species representing five primary language groups. But then, as the author states, let's just bypass language altogether.

Read the story for yourself here on More Red Ink, which I am posting in its entirety, in three parts, with the kind permission of the author. Enjoy.