Barsk (36 page)

“And now here. It's likely you died that day. The Archetype of Man told me you had suffered an accident while recreating. The you that is talking to me now is an amalgam of you as you were up to about that point in time, and there is nothing of you that existed after.”

The creature bolted upright from the bench. Her eyes widened showing still more white. “The Archetype … You talked to it … Then you, you're really what you appear to be, an anthropomorphic … an RM!” Her voice cracked with emotion, delight, amazement, awe, all these things but also terror.

“Please, relax. We have plenty of time. For your first question—no, I did not talk with the Archetype of Man, not as I suspect you mean. It's been destroyed. We communicated as you and I are now. I summoned it and with its help I was able to reach back, unimaginably far into the past, and find you.” He paused, and again his smile crept out. “Thank you for coming. My name is Jorl. Jorl ben Tral.”

Silence as the woman brushed her palms against her thighs. She stepped aside and walked around Jorl in a slow circle.

“I'm Castleman. Chieko Castleman … Chieko.” She stared at Jorl. “Ben Tral?”

Jorl nodded, keeping his trunk steady. “My father was Tral. Tral ben Yarva.”

Castleman stared openly now. Her jaw dropped. “But that's Hebrew.”

“Excuse me?”

“That's a Hebrew patronymic. Hebrew. The language. Hebrew?”

“I don't understand. Who is Hebrew.”

“Not a who, a what. It's a language. Or … was. My father used to speak it sometimes, though not often enough around me for me to pick up more than a few words.” She stopped, shook her head as if to set herself back on track. “Why do you have a Hebrew patronymic? For that matter, why are you speaking English?”

Jorl shrugged. “It's just language. Except for a few words here and there, all sapients speak the same. As you and I are speaking now, though following your pronunciation is a bit tricky.”

Chieko retreated to her bench and sat again. She looked like she couldn't decide whether to laugh or scream. Jorl had seen the expression before, but only on the faces of old men who had lost themselves in too many mugs of distilled spirits.

“So … If I understand this, I'm dead, right? Dead, and I'm talking to a raised mammal. An uplifted fucking elephant, who's complaining that I speak with an accent?”

She lowered her head between bent knees and giggled.

Jorl flicked his trunk in the woman's face, snapping his nubs until she looked up.

“What did you call me? What did you mean by that?”

Castleman cringed, shoving herself away until she backed into the desk. She shook herself and sobered somewhat. When she again met Jorl's gaze, she held it and would not look away.

“A fucking elephant. Sorry, I just … this is … hell, I'm sorry.”

“No, no, not the pejorative or the prefix.” Jorl shook his head. “What did you mean by ‘raised mammal?' In what way raised?”

Castleman's hands trembled. “In your world, your time, there are other creatures? Other species, yes? Warm blooded … live-bearing creatures. Mammals … and other kinds as well, right? Creatures of the air, birds, um, avians … and reptiles and insects. Do you understand these terms? You're not the only living things, are you?”

Jorl's nod did nothing to dispel his puzzlement. “Yes, whole taxonomies of animals exist. Some overlap across worlds as well. What of it?”

“Wait, wait … you said ‘worlds' just now … intelligent life has spread out across multiple worlds.… My god, it worked, it all worked!” Chieko Castleman's face opened up in a grin that threatened to split her face apart. The expression pierced Jorl like the miracle of a beam of sunlight on Barsk.

“Excuse me, I don't—”

“You, you are a mammal. Warm blooded. Your females suckle your young. Those are the gross characteristics of mammals.” One hand waved vaguely toward her chest.

“We established all of that. I'd hazard the same is true of you. What's your point?”

With a gesture not unlike the way he'd whip his trunk for attention, Castleman waved him to silence. “You don't understand. When my parents were born all sapient life looked like me. Human. But then that changed. We began to take species of varying degrees of sentience and searched for ways to raise them to full sapience. The breakthrough came a decade before I was born, one of those accidents resulting from the synthesis of unrelated fields of study. It started when our life scientists had completed genomic maps of several dozen mammalian species on Earth.”

Castleman's right arm waved as she spoke, describing wild ellipses through the air, her fingers held rigid as she jabbed home each point like a lecturer at the academy.

“Meanwhile, ethologists had teamed up with psychologists and returned to the question of instinct, how to account for the varieties of unlearned knowledge so many species possessed. That quickly brought up the old arguments about what sorts of human behavior could be considered instinctive. The only one they agreed on was a predisposition to acquire language.”

“You're not making sense,” said Jorl. “People don't
acquire
language, they're born with it.”

His conversant laughed. “Your people, yes, but not mine; that's my point. Back then there were hundreds of languages being spoken, near to a thousand, really. I remember a professor of mine during grad school telling me that a couple centuries earlier there'd been tens of thousands of them. Anyway, the point they wanted to make was that it didn't matter what language a community spoke, human beings are hardwired to acquire language so you pick up the one in your environment.”

“But where did they get it from?”

“Exactly, it had to start somewhere, right? That's where the cognitive scientists and biologists stepped in. They went looking for evidence of that wiring. They started by comparing the human genetic strings of information with other sentient species. And they found it! An insanely long chain of genetic instructions that unwound to a package of rules about the rules of language. It was all meta-rules and language universals, encoded guidelines that allowed every human infant to reinvent his or her community's language.”

Castleman paused. Her arm stopped in mid arc and fell to her side. The exuberance of her explanation fell away. She stared at Jorl for a long moment, and then continued in a softer voice.

“It answered the question of why humans had language and other species did not. Not simply elaborate communication systems, but full blown linguistic productivity, to talk about abstract concepts and share insights that had no referents in the real world. Other species had intelligence, and even the leisure for communication, but only human beings possessed this meta-linguistic genetic sequence. That's when we let the genie out of the bottle. It was a simple research question at first. If we could give that bit of genetic engineering to other species, would they develop language? Maybe not language as we understood it, but language just the same.”

Shivers ran down Jorl's spine. “You're saying that's how these ‘raised mammals' were created? You humans grafted language learning onto my ancestors and we're the result?”

The human shook her head violently. “No. No, no, no, no. We did something even more perverse. Once the language sequence was known, psycholinguists realized it could be used to understand adult language representation. Research in the field of artificial intelligence had stagnated, but now it exploded! Entire nations joined together to combine their computational processing power with the goal of taking a language—as it was known and used by a living person, not as a system or grammar or a lexicon, but a dynamic knowledge structure—taking this thing and reverse engineering it to a genetic sequence. And because knowing a single language was much more specific, it turned out to be a much smaller structure than our predisposition to
learn
a language. Synthesizing that new sequence meant they could give it to almost any mammalian species, wiring in a particular language in the same way that other instinctive knowledge was already in place.”

“And that's why we can understand each other?”

“Your language is the same English that was in the mind of a researcher somewhere. It was deconstructed and then encoded into your forebears' genetic structure where it would breed true. I had to learn to speak my language, but you'd have been born with yours. And every generation does it the same way, so there's no language change; any linguistic flux gets reset with the next generation of offspring.

“It changed everything. We began producing language-using species, an artificial evolution. It was the first step to an anthropomorphic movement. Once nonhuman species became active symbol users, our genetic engineers began changing the rest of their physiology to allow them to take full advantage of it. They reshaped them, giving them the entire vocal mechanism, bipedal movement, opposable thumbs, all the things which together with language had given humans mastery of our environment.”

Castleman stopped again. She looked down at her hands, bringing the fingertips of one into contact with their opposites on the other.

“That was the state of things in my time. Raised mammals. Engineered to be intelligent and functional, with the best traits of their genetic origins. We'd only raised a few species yet, some dogs and cats, animals that were already domesticated and familiar. We felt a bit like gods, creating new life which would look upon us and know that we had brought them into existence.”

“Dogs and Cats,” said Jorl. “You made them?”

“We did. Their creation changed my world. All the old issues of social equality that we were getting close to finally laying to rest burst out once again. People divided over the role raised mammals should have in the world. Were they just smarter pets, or were they people? That became the new dividing line and old issues of discrimination fell away. Countries went to war over the question. Some governments banned RMs from within their borders. Others decided to use them to supplement humans for work on our lunar bases and in space. My own nation had grand plans to expand the research and send raised mammals off in generation ships to other solar systems. My work got its start as a result, cataloging and preserving our cultural histories. The Archetype of Man was just one of several self-curating repositories that were intended to preserve who we were and give guidance to raised mammals. And it must have worked, because here you are!” She sighed, flushed with satisfaction from knowledge she could never have attained in life.

Jorl had never seen anyone looking more content, and he paused a long moment before saying, “I don't think it happened quite that way.”

Castleman's elation slipped away again. “What do you mean?”

“There are many different kinds of sapient beings in the galaxy, and maybe they're descended from the things your people created, but I'm not so sure. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing we'd forget. Nor the people who created us. But there's no record of you, not in any of our histories. But I could be wrong. Maybe we just forgot because it's been so long.”

“How long?”

“Our history tells us that we started on the world we call Dawn, but the actual record only begins with our Expansion and the formation of the first Alliance of Worlds, a ring of eight planets that were colonized just over sixty-two thousand years ago.”

“Sixty-two thousand? You have a recorded history going back sixty-two thousand years? And there's no mention of humans?”

Jorl nodded slowly, hearing the anguish in Dr. Chieko Castleman's voice. “Nothing. And believe me, you'd stand out. Our records begin with the founding of those eight worlds. Anything prior to that is just the Before, and it's all unsupported myth. We don't know where we came from. It's not really the subject of much speculation. And even historians like myself don't tend to ask questions about anywhere near that far back. Maybe as a civilization we're just focused more on going forward than looking back.”

“I don't understand how that could be, not if we created you, gave you language and life and sent you to the stars.”

“I agree, but there are no creatures that look like you anywhere in the galaxy. No human beings.”

“Then tell me, Jorl, what became of us?”

The Fant offered his hand to Castleman, and the human took it in both of hers.

“I don't know. But it might explain some things. The only reason I know about your Archetype is because I was there when we stumbled upon it and destroyed it. There's no more mention of it in the official record than there is of your people.”

“Oh my god! Why would you destroy it?”

Jorl said nothing. He held Castleman's hands in his, noting how similar they were to his own, reflecting on the many ways in which he more closely resembled the human than he did any of the furred races that included every other person in the galaxy outside of the people on Barsk. Why were there no records of human beings? Had the Patrol destroyed them all?

“I've been asking myself that question since it happened. But now I'm thinking it's just a part of something much bigger. I think maybe there are forces in play that have been keeping any knowledge of you a secret. I had it wrong, and even Arlo had it wrong. And Margda didn't see it clearly or couldn't grasp it all.”

“I don't understand, who are those people? What are you talking about?”

“All of this, all the missing stories, the lack of any mention of humans. That … gap … in our understanding of everything. It's the Silence!”

 

THIRTY-SIX

LETHE

JORL
sat at the desk in his cabin on the station, picking at the last clusters of food on the tray. The implications of his conversation with Chieko Castleman threatened to overwhelm him, despite their simplicity. They answered questions of the origins of the peoples of the Alliance, questions that he hadn't known even to ask. And why should he? The races of the Alliance had existed for tens of thousands of years; from the perspective of its citizens it had
always
been. Castleman had shattered that unexamined assumption. All the sapient life left in the galaxy had been manufactured from dumb animals. Despite his training as a historian, he doubted he truly grasped the destructive potential such a revelation would have on society.