FSF Magazine, June 2007 Read online

  "Please. We're wasting time."

  Jamal was tempted to tell them where to go with their request. But it was hot, his muscles were complaining, he was tired of trail mix and hungry for real food, and he could always experience Kilimanjaro in VR. It had been a whim anyway, born in a fit of anger when he realized what he'd done to his career. The pilot leaned out the door and extended his hand. Jamal took it and climbed in. The pilot indicated a seat, then adjusted the safety harness. There were no identifying patches or insignia on his flight suit either. The first man climbed in behind him.

  "Going to tell me what this is all about?"

  "Your dissertation's on the universal biological roots of language, isn't it, Dr. Lenana?"

  "It's not ‘Doctor’ Lenana. This some kind of joke or what?” Since when did esoteric linguistics become important to guys who spent their time in unmarked uniforms and stealth craft?

  "No joke, sir.” The man's mouth moved as if it were about to smile, then thought better of it. “I understand your work is potentially valuable, given the times we live in."

  "I'm a theoretical linguist. There are plenty of talented translators coming out of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. Enough to deal with any language or dialect around the world.” Especially terrorist ones, he thought, the hot topic when he'd started graduate school. The old man had argued—unsuccessfully—if his youngest child and only son was going to move to the West Coast, he should go to DLI.

  "Suppose we're dealing with a language that we've not encountered before? Hypothetically, of course,” the man added.

  Absurd. There were no more undiscovered languages hiding in unexplored jungles on the planet. Come to that, there were hardly any more jungles. “Not interested."

  "I'm sorry, sir,” the man said. “I can't tell you any more than that. You'll be briefed as soon as we land at Fort Meade."

  * * * *

  "I have to admit, Jamal, we haven't seen anything quite like this before."

  The man whose sixth-floor office in Maryland he'd been ushered into was someone he'd known in his childhood. Tom Wang had often been a guest in the Lenana home in the Baltimore suburbs, one of the crowd of young NSA agents with hazy backgrounds and obscure career descriptions that Miriam Lenana took pleasure in feeding. He remembered Tom Wang in particular, seated on a straight-backed chair under the portrait of Jamal's great-grandfather as a Tuskegee Airman, always laughing at some lame joke Jamal's father made. Even as a boy, he'd recognized a kiss-up when he saw one.

  Older now, heavier, black hair fading to silver, Wang had gained deep furrows in his brow. Unlike Jamal's escorts, he wore an exquisite suit, a pale blue shirt, and a slightly darker tie. He perched informally on the edge of a walnut desk as if to set his visitor at ease. Jamal wasn't fooled. The office had an ambience of comfort and informality—sprawling plants in corners, framed prints of sailboats on the wall—that seemed designed to cover a more ominous purpose. Behind Wang, a long window gave a view of the vast parking lot of the NSA compound. The windows were sealed, the pinewoods scent in the room coming from an air freshener his nose identified though his eyes couldn't find it.

  Jamal was tired from the journey and short on patience right now. He'd never had much liking for either intelligence gathering or what the military had become since his great-grandfather's day. “Mind telling me why the NSA thinks I'd be interested in working for them?"

  "Please, sit down.” Wang indicated two armchairs on either side of a faux fireplace. “I'll have someone bring us coffee and then we'll talk."

  When the coffee arrived, a young intern set the tray on a low table. Jamal made eye contact with her and she smiled. Coppery hair in a short, bouncy cut and bright blue eyes. Nice perfume, too. Sweet deal to have eye candy like that on your staff, he thought, watching her pour the coffee. From the deliberate way she bent over, letting her white silk blouse drape away from tanned cleavage, he knew she was aware of his attention, enjoying it.

  Wang waited until she left the room.

  "We have here a puzzle,” Wang began. “Three days ago, a couple of Maryland State Troopers picked up a vagrant, a man they'd found stark naked on Highway 95 just outside DC. He didn't respond to English. As the law orders, they called in interpreters. They expected he'd speak a European language, German, or perhaps Russian or something Scandinavian—logical, considering his blond features. When that didn't work, they put out a call for speakers of languages with smaller speaker pools like Basque and Amharic. They got the same lack of result every time."

  "They tried sign?"

  Wang nodded. “Again, nothing."

  "Mentally impaired."

  Wang hesitated as if he were weighing how much information to share. “Probably not in this case."

  Jamal shook his head. “Country's full of homeless people—half of them totally nuts. Maybe the troopers just found another one."

  Wang had the grace to look uncomfortable, Jamal thought, confirming that he was withholding information.

  "The secretary wants an answer ASAP,” Wang said.

  "There're still a few languages left in the world with only a handful of speakers. It's possible to find something nobody in Maryland speaks, surely?"

  "If that were all."

  "The DLI ought to be up to the job of figuring out the language of a vagrant. Why not pull them in?” And I'm outta here, he thought. Last thing he wanted was to get involved with the NSA. And secretaries giving orders—what was that all about? “I don't get why the cops can't solve their own problems. Overkill, isn't it, bringing in the NSA?"

  "Maybe not in this case,” Wang said. “I'd like to hear what you think."

  "My dissertation's on how languages evolve, not how to speak any of them."

  Wang nodded. “I've followed your career ever since those early days when your mother used to feed the starving junior agents. Brilliant piece of speculation, I'm told. Something about ‘universal bionecessities'—I think that was your term?—driving language evolution."

  "That's all it was, speculation."

  Wang set his coffee aside and stood up. “Let's take a look downstairs before we decide."

  Wang held up a palm to an armed guard who scanned it briefly, then opened the heavy door into an interrogation room. Jamal saw a long metal table holding a plastic water jug and a wrapped supply of plastic glasses, two chairs positioned on one side of the table, one on the other, and a large mirror. There was an absence of smell in the recycled air of the room that struck him as more artificial than the air freshener in Wang's office. A young man who'd been in the room nodded at them and left.

  His first view of the stranger took his breath away. My God! It's Michelangelo's David!

  The man who stood staring into the mirror—which Jamal belatedly realized was probably one-way—was probably seven feet tall, and dressed in a T-shirt and sweat pants too short for his long legs. His feet were bare. His body was well muscled, but like a dancer, not a weightlifter, his skin golden; his hair was white-gold and almost luminous. The guy was stunning. Prenatal genetic tinkering was advanced these days, but Jamal doubted it could produce results like this.

  "Our doctors did a preliminary, non-invasive examination when he arrived here yesterday,” Wang said. “X-ray and MRI revealed no injuries that might account for the unresponsiveness. There were some anomalies, slight, but rather puzzling. There's something—let's call it not quite normal—about him. He scored high on nonverbal intelligence tests but he doesn't—or won't—speak."

  The stranger was the most fantastic specimen of male humanity he'd ever seen. If he was human. Jamal thought suddenly of rumors he'd heard about secret medical labs on the East Coast producing experimental chimeras and hybrids, weapons for the ongoing defense effort. He'd never taken the rumors seriously.

  Then the stranger turned and looked at him. His eyes were a pale, almost silver gray; it was hard to meet their gaze, but Jamal forced himself to do so. Some intelligence leaped the gap between them like a jol
t of electricity, and he took an involuntary half-step back.

  "How long have you had him?"

  "At Fort Meade? Almost twenty-four hours."

  Abruptly aware of the one-way mirror and the potential presence of observers, he demanded, “Is he a prisoner?"

  "No, no. He's in custody for his own protection, until we know more about him."

  Both men stared at the improbably perfect individual whose gaze never wavered. Something about him—Jamal felt a shiver of excitement run down his spine. Instinctively, he reverted to Homo sapiens' oldest language, gesture. In the harsh light of the interrogation room, he held his right hand up above shoulder level, fingers splayed, palm facing the stranger, sending the nonverbal message: Hail. No threat.

  No response. Yet he had the impression his gesture had been understood, but the stranger had not felt a need to respond—Or as if Jamal should've known he wasn't a threat without being told—Or at least, he could be a threat but didn't choose to—

  His mind reeled with complexities he couldn't have explained to Wang and wasn't about to try. Already he was aware of some kind of subliminal bond forming between himself and the stranger: Us and the NSA.

  He fought it. “You've got yourself a problem. But I don't see how it involves me."

  "We need your help. We may be looking at a biological construct of some kind.” Wang hesitated, again seeming to weigh how much information to share with Jamal. “Not one of ours. We want to know who sent him to us."

  Jamal absorbed that information for a moment. So the rumors were true—and not only the United States was doing it. Something about the idea of creating life in the human image didn't sit right with him; too many Sunday mornings fidgeting beside his mother in a stiflingly hot Baptist church had left their mark.

  "I told you, I'm a theorist. I don't do fieldwork. And I sure as hell don't work for the intelligence community or the military."

  "I'm not asking you to. But you come from a military family. And we need a linguist with an open mind, someone who's creative, not afraid to speculate."

  It went against his principles, but at the same time there was no way he could pass up an opportunity to work with this mysterious stranger. At the very least he might get a paper out of it for one of the professional journals, damage control for his self-sabotaged career.

  "There's one more thing you should know,” Wang said. “When the troopers found him on the highway, he suddenly appeared. One moment the road was empty. The next, he was there."

  He reluctantly dragged his attention away from the stranger and stared at Wang.

  "We have no technology to do that,” Wang added. “We didn't think anyone else did either."

  * * * *

  At ten minutes to six the next morning, Jamal sat at a desk with an untouched pastry and a cooling cup of coffee in front of him, thinking about the problem he'd been handed. He'd slept fitfully last night, although Wang had instructed the cute intern to find him a comfortable room and arrange for his meals.

  If the U.S.A.—and everybody else, including its enemies, according to Wang—was incapable of creating a bioconstruct that could appear out of thin air, then what were they looking at? Wang had dodged the question when he'd asked after they left the interrogation room.

  Whatever the explanation for the stranger's origins, the problem remained how to plan a series of language lessons. Nothing in his course work at Berkeley had prepared him for this. You dropped yourself right into this one, bro, he told himself. The dissertation that so defiantly claimed to know a way to decipher the basics of just about any language that turned up in the galaxy was going to be put to the test.

  Pulling out the small keyboard he found in the desk drawer, he typed in his code. Immediately, a flat screen rose out of the desk, displaying the home page of his personal desk computer back in Berkeley. He accessed the dissertation and scrolled rapidly through, looking for anything that might be useful, pulling it out and sending it to the nearby printer.

  Well, he amended half an hour later, he hadn't actually promised to be able to do it, just that it was theoretically possible. The committee hadn't been impressed. This morning, staring at his words on the screen, he wasn't impressed either.

  Where did that leave him?

  There were no undiscovered tribes with unknown languages left on Earth, so no call for people doing original fieldwork anymore. The last linguist who'd done that died almost a century ago. And he was too impatient to enjoy spending hours making recordings of ancient native speakers, last of their tribe or whatever. That was why he'd gone into theoretical linguistics. But he knew how it was done in the old days; he'd taken the first step yesterday with his gesture of greeting.

  A knock on the door disturbed him. Wang's red-haired intern put her head around the door. A faint whiff of a floral perfume with darker notes entered with her.

  "Did you need anything, sir? It's my job to take care of you."

  He sized her up. She was young, early twenties he guessed, with a fresh-faced innocence. But there was a hint of sauciness to her that lent more than one meaning to her words. He guessed she was one of those groupies hooked on the aura of power that surrounded the important men she worked for. How far would that power addiction go, he wondered? He had the impression she wouldn't turn him down if he put the moves on her. But for the moment he was preoccupied with the stranger.

  "Maybe later."

  "I'll keep it in mind,” she said, winking at him. “By the way, my name's Corinne."

  When she'd gone, he looked back at the notes he'd printed out. Useless. He crumpled them up and tossed them into the recycling chute under the desk. This was a situation that called for playing from his strength, what his thesis committee had dismissively called intuition. Nothing wrong with intuition, but he preferred the stronger image of flying by the seat of his pants, like his great-grandfather. He opened the door.

  The man who stood outside was dark-eyed and ascetic-looking with a shaved head; he seemed as if he'd be more at home in a priest's collar than the impeccably tailored gray suit and tie he was wearing.

  "'Morning, sir.” The man saluted him with precision that spoke of a military background. Light in the hallway struck a small reflection from the tiny comm unit he wore on his lapel.

  "Guarding me against the enemy?"

  The man smiled. “I'm here to assist you, sir, and to guide you through the maze of corridors in this building in case you don't remember the way. Whoever the architect was, he had a sense of humor. The name's Glenys, Aldo Glenys."

  "Interesting combination."

  "My father was Welsh, but I grew up in Switzerland with my mother's family."

  They shook hands. Aldo Glenys was maybe ten years older than he was. Jamal sensed something cool and focused in the man. Not your ordinary career soldier or intelligence agent, he thought; more like the NSA was doing its recruiting at the seminaries these days.

  "You said, ‘assist.’ Are you a linguist?"

  "Only in the amateur sense of the word, sir. Language has long been a hobby of mine. I taught myself to speak several."

  "And Latin's one?” He caught a flicker of surprise in Glenys's eyes and added, “Just a guess."

  "A good one,” Glenys agreed.

  Score one for me, he thought and let it go; he had other things to think about.

  "The interrogation room is equipped for both video and audio recording, fully automated. You won't see the equipment, but it's there,” Glenys told him. “We'll be analyzing every word you can coax out of him."

  "That important, huh?"

  Glenys glanced at him, his expression neutral. They made their way through corridors of closed, unmarked doors, past uniformed receptionists who recognized Glenys and waved them through, until they arrived at the door of the room he'd visited last night. Another armed guard stood on duty.

  "Necessary security, sir,” Glenys said. “We don't know what we're dealing with yet."

  "And when we do?"

 
; Glenys presented his palm to the sensor pad and didn't answer.

  When they entered, they found the tall stranger with his back to the one-way mirror which at the moment had morphed itself into a glowing portrait of a tranquil river meadow with lots of trees. Maybe the stranger knew there was someone behind the glass and that was why he'd turned his back. Jamal wondered uneasily if those odd silver eyes could see through the one-way glass. Today the visitor's gray shirt and sweat pants outfit was almost the right size; it looked as if it had been borrowed from someone in the NBA. His feet were still bare.

  There were two other men in the room, one blond, one—slightly older—dark-haired, both wearing dark suits; they had arranged folding chairs along one wall. They acknowledged his arrival with brief nods but didn't identify themselves.

  The stranger obviously wasn't a normal human, so he had to be a bioconstruct—even if Jamal personally found it hard to believe any lab was capable of creating one, and no matter how he arrived on the highway in front of the troopers.

  "Did this guy spend the night in here?” he asked.

  The two NSA agents didn't move a facial muscle.

  "He has a room normally occupied by a junior grade agent,” Glenys said. “Do you see a problem?"

  Jamal shook his head. “Forget it."

  The agents were an annoyance. He didn't feel comfortable enough with his assignment to want witnesses. “I'll ask you gentlemen to keep your thoughts to yourselves while I work,” he told them. “I do this my way or not at all."

  One of the agents—the blond one—nodded. The other stared past Jamal.

  How was he going to start the session? “Bionecessity,” his dissertation called it, the need for an intelligent organism to control its environment through the assignment of symbols to objects, and to manipulate the symbols according to a set of strict rules governing the play of objects, causes, and goals. Physiology and environment affected world view. Whatever they were dealing with here, the stranger resembled normal humans closely enough: bipedal, opposable thumbs, air breather; he might come equipped with similar rules for language.