A Change of Approach
by Philip J. Lees
“One … noup! … two … noup! … three … noup!”
Vladimir Noup counted the arches under his breath as he passed beneath them, as he counted them every time he came this way. There were fourteen of them before the turn, a part of his brain told him, but another part prodded him to make sure, to count them again, to be certain that everything was as it should be.
The passageway was lined with chiselled grey stone, starred with grey and yellow lichen. In places, moss grew in the cracks, a green so dark it was almost black, wetly outlining the huge granite slabs. Each arch was supported on two buttresses from which sprouted ingenious vaulting that extended high into the gloom above, where the light from the smoking cressets that studded both walls barely reached. The air smelled musty, with occasional wafts of singed mineral oil. Apart from the splutter of the cressets the only sound was the echo of Vladimir’s footsteps as he stomped along.
In contrast to the walls, the floor of the passageway was an ornate mosaic of flat cobblestones, in gleaming shades of emerald, amethyst, turquoise and amber. As Vladimir passed under the fourteenth arch a swirl of colour led off to the right, beckoning him to enter the narrow doorway that lay behind the buttress. Through that doorway was a staircase; at the top of the staircase was a room; and in that room was the creature with which Vladimir was supposed to be learning to communicate.
In a coincidence of statistics, by Vladimir’s thirtieth birthday he had achieved fluent command of the same number of languages, making one for each year of his life. After that, it got easier. He could master a new language in weeks, or at most months. He ‘had’ all the major languages ever spoken on Earth by the time he reached thirty five and was beginning to wonder how he should spend the rest of his days when the deep space radio telescope started sending back the first alien signals.
At first, these were in the languages of mathematics and physics and so were relatively easy to decipher. Later on, when the topic changed to other branches of science, to philosophy, to art, things were not so simple. There were huge sections of the communications that appeared to make no sense at all. Until, that is, Vladimir was called in. One of his former university professors was on the team and somehow managed to push through the necessary security clearance over the objections of some of the team members who had trouble dealing with Vladimir’s unconventional personality.
It was not easy, even for Vladimir, but he managed it, relishing with private glee the fact that he was probably the only person on the planet capable of such a task. Who else, for example, could begin to comprehend a concept that was a blend of karma, schadenfreude, and a few other things, expressed through a system of grammatical number that was similar to Swahili. The scientists and all their computers were helpless in the face of that challenge and Vladimir scorned them for their impotence. He was not well liked, but he was used to that.
When it was done, and Vladimir had passed along his understanding to his colleagues—or at least, as much of it as they and their computers were capable of absorbing—he began to be bored. These aliens were too far away; the collection of the data he had analysed had taken years; he would never get to meet them face to face, to talk to them in real time.
Taking advantage of new techniques of suspended animation, he had himself put into stasis until the next alien encounter, however long that would take. Nobody tried to dissuade him.
“Wake me when something interesting happens,” he said.
Eventually, something did. When Vladimir awoke it was to a completely new set of faces. The original team members were all long dead. Typically, Vladimir never asked how many years he had been asleep. It did not interest him
The clicking language of the Ikkans did interest him, though it presented him with no great problems. Many of their central concepts were familiar and he was already fluent in !Kung. Vladimir was given a diplomatic rank, a private space yacht and a pilot who could navigate it through the warped holes in space that led to other regions of the galaxy.
For by this time the human race was colonising the stars. Though Vladimir did not care about his position or property as such, he decided to use both of them as a means to explore new worlds. Somewhere there would surely be more new languages for him to learn.
And of course, there were. Some easy, some more difficult. It was mostly a matter of listening. Sometimes that meant sitting hunched up like a wet monkey; sometimes it meant lying full length, staring at the wall, for hours, or days, depending on the aliens’ body language and time scale. Eventually, though, his mind would begin to make sense of the sounds, or the gestures, or the changing colour patterns, and he could call in the technicians, if necessary, to do the menial work of constructing the devices necessary for him to try his first, tentative responses. He had never failed to establish communication with another intelligent life form. Until now.
The creature waiting in the room upstairs was so inscrutable that Vladimir sometimes doubted whether it was indeed intelligent at all. Yet its race had apparently constructed this stone labyrinth they now inhabited and maintained it in good order. Litter was cleared, the cressets were refilled regularly with the thick goo that oozed from walls in the lower parts of the structure. Nobody knew how many of them there were. Only the one upstairs had made itself available for contact: others were occasionally seen in the shadows but only for fleeting moments before they disappeared again.
He counted the stairs as he ascended—ten … noup! … eleven … noup!—there were fourteen, as with the arches, but Vladimir had no idea whether that coincidence held any significance. He paused for a moment on the threshold, then stomped in.
“Noup,” the creature said. Coming through those rolls of flesh it sounded like a belch, but Vladimir thought it was pleased to see him.
“Gllaghch,” he responded, rolling the double ‘l’ as if he was gargling and hitting a high rising intonation on the final guttural consonant. It had taken him a week to get this far.
Gllaghch, if indeed that was the creature’s name, was a squat, putty-coloured, potato-shaped biped that, upright, reached to just below Vladimir’s collar bone. However, Vladimir had only seen Gllaghch standing a couple of times. Usually the alien rested on the floor, its legs apparently retracted into its lumpy body.
Vladimir settled himself on the low stool that had been provided for his comfort and decided to begin straight away. He held up one finger.
“One,” he said.
The alien peered at him from within brown folds that could be contracted to cover its beady black eyes completely. It did so now, blinking once, then twice. Then an arm emerged from its right side, ending in three stubby fingers. Gllaghch, too, held up one finger, but it said nothing. Vladimir sighed.
“One,” he repeated, wagging his finger for emphasis. This time Gllaghch replied, making a sound that Vladimir had never heard it make before, like an eruption of air through pursed lips. Well, that was progress, but he could not be sure that this was the word for ‘one’. It could mean ‘finger’, or perhaps Gllaghch was just breaking wind.
He held the sound in his mind, forming his mouth into a shape that he thought would produce a fair imitation of it, then expelled air in a “Pfffff!” Gllaghch stared at him impassively. It looked like another long and frustrating session ahead.
§
By two weeks later Vladimir could count to ten in the alien language. At least, he thought he could. It was ridiculous. These basics had never before taken him more than a couple of hours. Some days he had made no progress at all. Gllaghch just sat there, making no attempt at speech at all except for the occasional “Noup”.
Never one for socialising, Vladimir spent his time back on the orbiter in self-imposed solitary confinement. He had his meals brought to his cabin. He wanted nobody to witness his discomfiture, but he had overheard occasional whispered remarks that told him his failure was not going unnoticed. Damn them! What did they know? He grew even more obsessive about his personal hygiene, showering three times a day, brushing his teeth until the gums bled, trimming his bristly moustache every morning, snipping around the border of his thin upper lip removing fragments of hair that were only visible through the mirror’s magnifying convexity.
He dreamed that he was on the verge of a breakthrough. All he had to do was to find the right thing to say. He was lying face down on the floor in front of Gllaghch, making swimming motions with his hands. “Please,” he whimpered, “Je vous en prie.” But Gllaghch said nothing.
Then a hole opened in the alien’s belly. It grew and grew until it was a vast, dark cavern and Vladimir felt himself being drawn towards it. He tried to struggle, but he couldn’t feel his body; he was numb from the neck down. Helpless, he was sucked into that ever widening, ghastly cavity. “Nooo!” he cried, but he could not hear his own voice.
Vladimir summoned his fading strength for one final, mighty effort and thrust himself to the side. He awoke shaking, drenched in perspiration. The luminous clock by the bunk said 3:47. He did not sleep again that night.
This could not continue. Before his next trip he requisitioned a pocket computer, a video player and a variety of disks. He had always spurned such aids in the past and his stubbornness had kept him from using them until now, but he was forced to admit there was a time for everything. He programmed the computer with the sounds he had learned and had it generate several systems of notation for numbers, with alternatives for hexal, octal, decimal, duodecimal and hexadecimal arithmetic. Then he remembered the arches and the stairs and added number bases seven and fourteen to the program. You never knew. Of course, if Gllaghch’s people did their sums using base thirteen, or base forty-one, then he was wasting his time, but he had to start somewhere. Inside, he knew that this had already been tried—otherwise he wouldn’t have been called in at this stage—but he hoped his unique talent for communication would enable him to succeed where others had failed. He resented having to do this because mathematics, even at this simple level, was not his area of expertise, but it was his problem now, and that was it.
On the way down in the shuttle, he muttered to himself “Pfffff … noup! … jeee-oh … noup!” and so on, ignoring the amused looks of his regulation two-man escort. He continued to practise as he passed beneath the arches and up the stairs, annoyed that he still had to complete the last four steps of the flight in silence. He entered the room and crossed to a low table on the far side, where he began to extract his equipment from its carrying case.
“Good morning, Mr. Noup,” Gllaghch said. “Won’t you sit down?”
Vladimir had been facing away from the alien and now he spun round. Gllaghch sat in its usual position, unmoving, silent.
“Gllaghch?” Had he really heard that, or were his ears playing tricks?
“Noup.”
The alien said nothing else that day, nor the next day either. Vladimir’s arithmetical presentations seemed to leave it completely unmoved. Vladimir was becoming frantic. By the third day his moustache had been reduced to stubble. That morning, Gllaghch spoke again, as Vladimir was entering what he had started to think of as the torture chamber.
“Sawubona, Umnumzana Noup. Hlala panzi?”
Vladimir’s mind flailed around for a moment before alighting on Zulu. Zulu!
“Ya bonga,” he said hopefully.
But after that, there was nothing. Not even another “Noup.” Vladimir had been looking at Gllaghch this time, but was unable to discern from what part of the alien’s anatomy the utterance had issued.
Three more days passed. Vladimir was now taking four showers per day: one on rising, another after breakfast, before he travelled down to the planet, a third when he returned and the last before going to bed. The only reason his moustache survived was that it hid the scar from an imperfect harelip correction he had undergone as an infant and he wanted nobody to see that deformity. The orbiter’s purser had made a diffident complaint about water economy but Vladimir had shouted him down. It was all recycled, anyway. Why was the idiot bothering him with such petty matters.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Noup. Möchten Sie sich gerne setzen?”
“Ja, ich würde. Danke schön.” Vladimir seated himself on the stool and looked at Gllaghch expectantly, but there was no further response. What was the alien waiting for?
“Wie geht es Ihnen heute?” Small talk had never been one of Vladimir’s talents, but he couldn’t think of anything else to try at that moment apart from the banal question “How are you today?” Gllaghch did not answer.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Gllaghch,” Vladimir said in desperation, feeling like a fool. “Möchten Sie sich gerne setzen?”
The alien made no sound, but two arms appeared and the hands were pressed together in front of Gllaghch’s body, two, then three times, almost as if it were applauding.
The left arm disappeared, the other raised its hand in the air, a single finger extended.
“One,” said Gllaghch.
§
Three weeks later Vladimir’s job was finished, though not in the way he had expected. In that time, Gllaghch had learned every language Vladimir knew, and had passed on his knowledge to his fellows, who now emerged from their hiding places to converse with human and non-human visitors in whatever language suited them best.
Vladimir felt furious and humiliated. While he had been trying to work with Gllaghch, the alien had been studying him. Gllaghch’s reluctance to cooperate had just been a way of goading him into continuing his efforts, looking for new approaches, while Gllaghch was assessing his responses, evaluating his intelligence, EXPERIMENTING on him as if he were nothing more than a laboratory rat. Gllaghch had also managed to establish a degree of telepathic contact that enabled him somehow to download the contents of Vladimir’s language memory without Vladimir even realising it. (It wasn’t telepathy exactly—some kind of device was involved—but Gllaghch was either unable or unwilling to explain further.) The alien’s monitoring had extended as far as the orbiter; Gllaghch had even invaded his dreams! After that, it was just a matter of establishing a few crucial points of calibration before Gllaghch’s language skills matched—no, surpassed, Vladimir thought bitterly—his own.
What was even more disconcerting was that Gllaghch was just a minor official. What were their geniuses like? their scientists? their philosophers? their LINGUISTS?
He had expressed to Gllaghch his desire to learn the alien’s language, but Gllaghch brushed him off.
“Much too complex,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand.” Then he emitted a burst of rapid squeaks, swallows, hisses and groans, followed by a human chuckle.
“There you are,” he said. “You see?”
When Vladimir disembarked from the shuttle on his final return to the orbiter, the captain was waiting to greet him. He was a short, balding man whose name Vladimir couldn’t remember.
“Congratulations, Professor,” he said.
Vladimir grunted, wanting only the privacy of his cabin.
“I thought your speciality was learning their language,” the captain said, “not teaching them ours.”
“I decided on a change of approach,” Vladimir said haughtily. “So what’s it to you?”
The captain was jarred for a second, but recovered his composure. “Professor,” he said, “my intention was to compliment you, not criticise. There was no reason to take offence.”
Vladimir glared at him for a second, then turned and stalked away.
Back in his cabin he flung his jacket over a chair, lay down on the bunk and rolled himself up in its light blanket. He closed his eyes and started counting in his head the languages he knew. “Seventy-six … noup! … seventy-seven … noup!” By the time he reached the total of a hundred and twelve he felt calmer.
A change of approach. That was it. If he carried on in the same old way there was always the chance that his next alien encounter would be as bad as this one. Or even worse. The possibility was too dreadful to face. A change was what was needed.
But what in the world was he to do instead?
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2001