Learning the World

17 — Pies in the Sky

“You did what?”

Not in five hundred years had Synchronic felt such fury. Her hands shook and the world darkened in her sight. Constantine looked back at her with a calm she was certain he would not have dared to affect if his presence before her had been physical.

“Reverse-engineered from the language module,” he repeated.

Synchronic’s hands mimed strangling him. Shocked, she calmed herself with several deep breaths and a moment of flash meditation. This could be dealt with. This disaster was not irrecoverable. This was not beyond her power. She could get on top of this. They all could.

Futile rage gave way to urgent inquiry.

“How?” she asked. “How is that possible?” The anger again. Another moment of the hard-learned mental discipline. Calm.

“Quantum-level effects,” he said. He shrugged, waggling his spread hands, palms down. “Crew scientists, you know what they’re like. I don’t claim to understand it. I’m told it’s a refinement of brain interface techniques. If that helps.”

“ ‘If — that — helps’!”

Brain interface techniques, indeed! I’ll give you brain interface, you arrogant fool! Her brain interface was right now transmitting all she saw and heard to her fellow-members of the Circle, and thereby to the Council, on which two of its members sat. Anger flared and calm restored. She returned a serene gaze to the spectre in the su

She reviewed what he had told her, replaying the words and sentences her anger had whited out and shouted down the first time.

The problem, the intellectual problem, was this. No Rosetta stone existed for the bat people’s language. No amount of observation, no iteration of linguistic heuristics, could decode an unknown language from recordings alone. For mutual understanding, there had to be mutual interaction. One had to know directly what one side of the conversation was trying to say, and that meant one side of it had to be you. Faced with this impasse, the crew’s scientists had, in all too characteristic a fashion, worked around it. Their solution had all the grubby fingerprints of a brute-force kludge.

The neural structure of the human brain’s language-processing module, named in deep antiquity Chomsky’s Conceit, had been known since the Caves. The genetic code of the Destiny II biosphere was known from aerial microorganisms returned to the stealth orbiter. The amount of information and genetic instruction that could be packed in a nanoassembler was vaster by far than even the vast amount stored in natural genomes and machinery, cluttered as they were with redundancy and junk. The information-processing hardware capacity of the ship was beyond all human conception, and the amount of information its science software could extract from the slenderest and most fragile of evidence was limited only by the ingenuity of the human inquiry that initiated it.

So… they’d had the means to install Chomsky’s Conceit on any big enough brain down below. They had the means to generate radio transmitters within host bodies, as they’d done with the dung-beetles. And faced with the crash-and-burn and ba

Reverse-engineered from the language module!

Holy rocking shit.

It was turning into a big day for flash meditation. Much more of this and she might attain flash enlightenment. “You realise what you’ve done?” she demanded. “Do you have the faintest conception of the harm this will cause?”

Constantine nodded. “The disruption will be immense. It’ll destroy the entire slave economy.”

“But they’re not slaves!” Synchronic said. “If they had been, I could see why we might want to interfere, But you’ve taken what are by your own admission mute brutes, and given them language. Deep grammar. Self-awareness. Human consciousness. You’ve made them slaves.”

“Yes,” said the Oldest Man. “Slaves that will try to free themselves.”

Synchronic had already shown him the breakout she had witnessed. She flashed him a pointer to the file.

“Like that?” she said. “When these poor creatures become aware of what they are and what has been done to them, they will suffer terribly. They will flee, they will fight — kill their owners—”

Constantine agreed again. “That may all happen,” he said. “The owners have it coming.”

Synchronic just stared at him. “How can you say that? How can you be so destructive?”

“We didn’t do this to be destructive,” said Constantine. “We did it to reduce suffering, and to increase intelligence.”

“The suffering of brutes? When did that become urgent?”

“The last time I visited you,” said Constantine, “you were showing the kids the meat and milk machine. Why don’t we just raise and slaughter cattle?”

“Hah!” said Synchronic. “Convenience.”

“No moral reason? Perhaps a mere shudder of distaste, a fastidiousness we can afford. Very well. I can still tell you that these brutes suffer, whether they’re conscious of it or not. They are treated with cruelty and disdain. Their situation is much worse than that of the grazing animals the bat people prey on. These are predators and prey after all, it’s a natural relationship and the beasts have natural lives. The relationship between the bat people and their related species is nothing like that. It’s artificial, it’s u

“As no doubt it will,” said Synchronic, “in a few decades when we’ve made contact. By then, they might have invented robots for themselves. They’re an inventive lot.”

“Indeed they are,” said Constantine. “Well, we are not willing to wait a few decades. We’re here now, we have the means to stop the suffering and therefore the duty to act.”

“For all you know, the bat people might be able to keep them in slavery. I’m sure they’ll come up with all kinds of rationalizations, if the human precedent is anything to go by.”

“Then they’re no worse off, and they have the benefit of intelligence and language to help them escape or resist.”

“That poor thing I heard called a trudge didn’t exactly benefit, from what I saw and you saw.”

“Oh no?” said Constantine. “It lived five minutes as a free man. That’s five minutes more than it would ever have had without us.”

Synchronic was astonished at the ruthlessness of that argument. It was so outrageous and unexpected that she couldn’t begin to answer it. She concentrated instead on the appalled promptings now pouring in from her allies.

“Even if we grant everything you say,” she said, “why did you and the scientists not take this to the Council?”

“It would never have passed. You would never have permitted it. So we did it without asking your permission.”

“That’s outright rebellion!”

“Is it? There’s been no ruling on it. It isn’t a contact. It’s surveillance, but a different project from the one that I had stopped.”