The Tower of Babel

Posted by Sappho on July 25th, 2013 filed in Fiction

“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” Steve Minas said, “to be the first one to understand an alien language.”

“It’s a pipe dream,” said his wife, Christina, “You know those people who see the Virgin Mary in a pancake? Denise is like that, but with aliens.”

“Denise is a solid astrophysicist,” said Steve, “SETI wouldn’t have hired her if she were a flake.”

“Denise?” said Christina, “She’s been starry-eyed about aliens since she was six. If anyone at SETI turned up with recovered memories about being abducted by aliens, it would be Denise.”

Steve reflected that Christina had no idea what his Denise had thought when she was six. But there was no winning an argument about his ex’s character, so he shrugged.

“If there are aliens, I get a first crack at their language. If there aren’t, I get to prove Denise wrong. Either way, it’s a win for science.”

“There won’t be aliens,” said Christina, “Aliens are the angels of our time. They’re a way to avoid solving our own problems.”

Steve didn’t care who else’s problems the aliens did or didn’t solve. They sure as hell looked like a great solution to his problem. If he wanted tenure at Stanford, he needed to publish or perish. Lately, his publishing rate hadn’t been up to snuff. What better way to fix that flaw than to tackle the linguistics challenge of a lifetime? And if he got the chance over others because the scientist with the goods was his ex-lover, well, why not? Success had always been about who you know, as well as what you know. As long as you delivered the goods, no harm in using any connection you could. So the next morning, he met Denise Takahashi, his ex, in the parking lot.

Denise yanked off her motorcycle helmet to show a buzz cut that Steve found unattractive. Pity, for he had loved her long hair. Any regret over Denise’s changed appearance left, though, when she led him inside and showed him the computer files.

“These signals,” she said, “have patterns of mathematical equations. As if someone’s trying to show us their signals aren’t just random noise. And this file has other signals, ones that seem ordered, but not in any pattern I can parse. I think this may be their language.”

“I can handle it,” Steve said, “though we might want to bring in Howard as well.”

Howard, Steve’s former roommate at MIT, was CTO at a small company that specialized in computer translation software.

“Once I figure out their language,” Steve said, “Howard can code it.”

“Whoever you need,” said Denise.

Tenure, here I come, thought Steve. As he headed to lunch with his friend Kemal Yilmaz, he sang an old song he’d learned from his father, the one about the little girl shaking the almond tree. It was a favorite of his, which he sang any time he was in a particularly good mood. “Etinakse tin anthismeni amygdalia.”

He was still singing when he reached the coffee house. Kemal offered his customary greeting.

“All this place lacks,” he said, “is the right kind of coffee.”

The two had met while buying phyllo dough at a local Middle Eastern grocery, and had bonded ever since over food, music, and films. And, of course, coffee.

“And a backgammon board,” Steve agreed, “of course, you Turks make some of the best Greek coffee around.”

He was dying to tell Kemal about his opportunity, for he knew his friend appreciate it more than his wife. But before he could begin, his neurologist friend had news of his own.

“It’s a brand new neurotransmitter,” said Kemal, “that no one else has found. We think, based on where it is in the brain, that it has something to do with language acquisition.”

On an ordinary day, Steve would be fascinated. Today, though, he could hardly listen, for wanting to spill his own news. It was only as he was leaving, news duly spilled, that he realized he’d found out almost nothing about Kemal’s research on the new neurotransmitter.

2

“With all their spiffy technology,” said Howard James, “are you sure they aren’t going to beat us to the punch with that translation software?”

Through the glass windows of Howard’s office door, Steve saw several of Howard’s software engineers in a cubicle, one of them bent over a computer screen and the others looking over the first one’s shoulder. The other office window looked down on a Mountain View street.

Across the street, a young couple exited a frozen yoghurt shop, as an older woman entered a Chinese grocery.

“You’d be surprised,” said Steve, “They’re remarkably bad at languages.”

“But we’re not the first species they’ve met?” Howard raised his eyebrows.

“They’ve sent photos and videos of encounters with several species,” said Steve, “but I guess they always let others interpret. Languages aren’t their thing.”

Howard shook his head, “You’d think a species that could manage star travel could learn a new language.”

“Why?” said Steve, “We can’t do everything dolphins can.”

“Probably just lazy,” said Howard, “Or it’s some kind of status thing. Anyway, what have you got so far on their language?”

“It’s pitched high for human ears,” said Steve, “There are some sounds that my undergraduates find grating, but that I can barely hear at all.”

“Like that buzzing sound on that web site I once showed you, that only teenagers can hear?” asked Howard, “Only I have teenage ears and could hear it just fine.”

“You can have your teenage ears,” said Steve, “I can still run like I did in college.”

“Only because you couldn’t run worth shit in college,” said Howard, “Anyway, adjusting voice recognition software for that pitch is trivial. What about their written language?”

“They do have a kind of alphabet,” said Steve, “The trick is the grammar. It’s highly inflected. As best I can tell, they have twelve cases for their nouns, and maybe five different genders.”

“Five genders? Their bar scene must be a bear.”

“I don’t know how many genders physically,” said Steve, “and I still haven’t figured out their verb declensions. They seem to have half a dozen different kinds of past tense.”

Steve handed Howard a thumb drive.

“Your notes?” asked Howard, and as Steve nodded, he said, “Good. I’ll keep you posted.”

3

“Behold,” said Howard James, bringing up a window on Steve’s home PC, “the new alien translation software.”

Steve, Christina, Denise, and Kemal crowded around the screen to see. Several months after Denise’s and Steve’s conversation about the alien communications, Howard’s software had already had its official unveiling at SETI. But Steve wanted a more personal show for friends, and so he and Christina had invited the others to dinner.

“So,” said Christina, “now that we’ve seen the top secret software, can you dish about the top secret things the aliens are saying?”

Denise shot Steve a “this is classified” warning glance, but Steve ignored her. After all, this was his wife, and his two best friends.

“Great news,” said Steve, “they have a fabulous source of energy for us.”

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” said Kemal.

“It’s on the level,” said Steve, “we’ve seen it work. And all they want in exchange is this substance in our air that does nothing for us, totally biologically inert, useless really.”

“We’re the ones snookering them,” Howard agreed, “not that I mind. I think they want the substance for some religious rite or other. And that’s about all it’s good for.”

“Steve,” said Kemal, “How many times, in our history, has some more powerful country come in and robbed a smaller country blind? How many times do the other guys really have your best interest at heart?”

“You should know,” said Steve.

His voice was teasing, for it was an old joke between them, to rib each other about their ancestors’ feud. But it was his wife who replied.

“He’s right,” said Christina, “We have no reason to trust them. We may need that useless substance more than we know.”

“We don’t,” said Denise, “and every government on the planet is champing at the bit to sell the aliens harvesting rights to it.”

“We sure as hell aren’t getting left out,” Howard agreed.

4

“They’re late,” the army officer by Steve’s side frowned.

Steve and Denise stood among a knot of people at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, waiting for First Contact. Denise’s eyes shone, but Steve could feel knots in his stomach. He ought to feel triumphant, but instead he recalled his wife’s words. Could he to trust the aliens? Heck, why would they trust humans? To fight off the thought, he turned to the officer.

“Give them a break,” Steve said, “They’ve travelled eighty-five light years. What’s a few minutes, at that distance?”

“Half an hour,” said the officer, “Just how much of an error margin are we talking about, on this arrival time? Days?”

“Eighty-five light years?” a stout woman to Steve’s left spoke. “Just how long do these creatures live?”

Steve tried to recall who she was. The mayor? A Foreign Service Officer? A Presidential aide? Christina would have remembered these things. But Christina had stayed behind in Palo Alto.

“We don’t know,” said Denise, “They may live a long time, or perhaps they made this trip their life’s work. Maybe we’ll meet the children or grandchildren of the ones who started the trip.”

A dot appeared in the sky, and grew larger. It shone silver, about the size and shape of a space shuttle. On its side was a pattern of circles and triangles.

“They came all this way in that?” asked the stout woman.

“The main ship is larger,” said Denise.

The ship landed. A hatch opened halfway up its hull, and a rod extended from the hatch. On the rod perched a creature with wings, feathers, and a parrot-like beak. Its plumage shone a splendid gold, orange, red, and green. But its four hands and prehensile tail broke the avian resemblance.

It spoke, almost sang.

“What’s it saying?” the speaker, this time, was the Secretary of State.

“It’s greeting us,” said Steve.

He found no time to add the other things he had gotten from the greeting. The endings on the verbs the creature used in greeting showed that it was of the first of their five genders – Steve still wasn’t sure how these genders might map to anything like human sexes – and that it considered itself of higher status than the humans it was addressing.

Steve struggled through the formalities of interpreting greetings between the creature and his companions, but soon came the part of the conversation that all could understand, the creature’s demonstration of its power source. It produced several small black balls.

“You have the equipment it needs?” Steve said to Denise.

Denise nodded, for she and her colleagues had exchanged diagrams with the aliens in advance. She produced a small box, into which the creature dropped one of the black balls. She then plugged a lamp into the side of the box. The lamp glowed. The small crowd applauded. In further demonstrations, Denise and the alien showed that the balls could power DVDs and computers, and work instead of gas to run a small car. When the demonstration had finished, Denise whispered to Steve.

“I think the aliens have their deal.”

5

Tenure, here I come, Steve thought, as he hopped into the shower. Today was the big day, the day he’d hear the Tenure Committee’s decision, and he had no doubt which way it would go. How could the famous Steve Minas, whose linguistics work had led to the first treaty ever between humans and aliens, be anything other than a prize? Stanford would never let him go. And he began, again, to sing that old favorite song of his.

“Etinakse tin anthismeni amygdalia,” Steve sang, “Etinakse tin anthismeni amygdalia. Kai ta – “

He stopped. He couldn’t, for the life of him, remember the next word.

Christina found him at the breakfast table in tears.

“So?” she said, “You just forgot a few words to a song. Lots of people forget words to songs, especially foreign ones. It’s not as if Greek is your first language.”

She was right, of course, it wasn’t. It was Steve’s parents who were the immigrants, and they had been determined that he grow up Americanized. Chicago, where Steve grew up, had a thriving Greek-American community, but the Minas family lived in a different part of the city. They spoke English at home, went to a local Unitarian Church in place of the Orthodox Church in which they had been raised, and named Steve, not after his grandfather Stavros, but with a name that would sound more American at school. It was only when Steve was a teenager that he had taken it on himself to learn his parents’ birth language. Still, Steve protested.

“Not this song,” he said, “not this song.”

“Amygdalia” had been the first Greek song Steve ever learned, before he even learned the Greek Easter hymn “Christos anesti ek nekron.”

He had sung it often, ever since he was fourteen. How could he forget it?

“I know,” said Christina, “You’re afraid that you’ll wind up like your grandmother. You won’t. This is nothing like what happened to her.”
Steve’s father had told him, many times, of how his mother hadn’t recognized him when he went back to Greece to see her.

“She called me Kyrie,” he would say, “Mister. Only when I spoke to her in Italian did she remember that I was her son.”

“You’re not your grandmother,” said Christina.

The days passed, and the worry faded. Steve Minas, newly tenured professor at Stanford University and master of seven human languages and one alien one, attended one event after another honoring him, and lectured at other universities about how he had parsed the alien language. Often when he plugged one of the alien power devices, cheap, non-polluting, and long lasting, into his car, he grinned to think that none of this would work if not for him. The roads were a bit more crowded, with all the cheap fuel, but it was worth it.

Why should he fear becoming like his grandmother? True, she, too, had spoken many languages, growing up, as she did, in the decidedly multilingual Ottoman Empire. But as soon as such thoughts occurred to Steve, he dismissed them. He had almost forgotten the incident entirely a few weeks later, when he met his friend Kemal for lunch.

“Merhaba,” said Kemal.

“Merhaba,” Steve replied.

Kemal didn’t usually greet him in Turkish, but, after all, his friend had taught him a few Turkish words: hello, and thank you, and two separate words for good bye, depending on whether you were the one staying or the one leaving. Steve’s first clue that something was wrong came when he continued in English.

“So, shall we go for Mexican this time, or Chinese?”

Kemal stared at him blankly, and said something, of which Steve could make out only the Turkish word for “understand.”

“Hey,” said Steve, “Quit kidding around.”

But Kemal continued to chatter to him in Turkish. Had he had a stroke? Steve spoke to his friend slowly.

“Smile,” Steve said, and demonstrated by smiling and showing his teeth, “and raise both your arms,” and raised both his arms.

Kemal raised both his arms. Then he shook his head.

“I’m not sure what happened,” he said, “but just now I couldn’t remember a word of English.”

That evening, Steve found his wife indignant about the results of some educational study she and her colleagues at SRI were doing.

“It just goes to show,” she said, “What a disaster No Test Left Behind has been.”

“What goes to show?” asked Steve, for he had been distracted by thoughts of Kemal.

“The students,” Christina said, “are going backwards in their English scores.”

“Which students?” asked Steve, “Those Mexican immigrant kids?”

“Yes,” said Christina, “and they were doing fine at English, until this last set of tests. You know what it is? The schools start teaching more to the tests, and they don’t give kids the broader instruction they need. And they start losing skills.”

“Maybe,” said Steve, “but in this case, I think there may be something else going on.”

He phoned Kemal, set the cell phone on speaker phone, and told him what he’d heard.

“So,” said Christina, “your forgetting the words to that song, my students test scores …”

“And Kemal’s incident today,” said Steve.

“Are you saying there’s something in the water?” asked Christina.

“Something like that,” said Steve.

“I think I know where to look,” said Kemal, “Remember that neurotransmitter I told you I found? It operates in the language areas of the brain. But only the parts that get used for second languages.”

“So the language you learned as a toddler,” said Christina.

“Or languages,” said Steve, “for those people who are fully bilingual.”

“Aren’t affected by this neurotransmitter,” said Kemal, “but other language acquisition is. If something disrupted just this neurotransmitter – “

“You’d get the Tower of Babel,” said Christina.

“But what could screw up that neurotransmitter?” Steve asked.

“That changed recently?” said Kemal, “I have an idea. You need to talk with Denise, get a sample of that supposedly inert chemical the aliens are harvesting.”

Several days later, Steve, Howard, Christina, Denise, and Kemal again assembled for dinner at Steve’s and Christina’s house, but this gathering was not as triumphant as the last one.

“There’s no doubt about it,” said Kemal, “that neurotransmitter that’s used in learning new languages depends on the chemical the aliens are harvesting. We need to put a stop to their harvest, before it’s too late.”

“You don’t know that,” said Denise, “You can’t know that, so fast. First your research needs to be replicated. Your results could be as ephemeral as cold fusion.”

“We don’t have time,” said Kemal, “if we don’t at least suspend the alien harvesting, we may not be able to talk to each other anymore, by the time the research has been properly replicated and peer reviewed.”

Howard agreed.

“You know the development group at my company,” he said, “One guy’s from Pakistan, another from Vietnam. Half the guys there speak English only as a second language. And right now, let me tell you, it shows. They’re not talking to each other anymore, not doing code reviews for each other, not critiquing each other’s specs. I think they’re having the same kinds of language lapses that Kemal had.”

“I had a sociology professor,” said Christina, “at Harvard, who told us a story once. It was a story that happened when he was much younger, during the Vietnam War.”

“And it relates to the alien substance how?” asked Denise, but Christina ignored her.

“A student who had just graduated got his draft lottery number called up,” she said, “and he called my professor to help him get a deferral. Said he’d remembered something that my professor had said, about what people can do with connections. My professor didn’t think he could get the student off, and told him so, but the student pleaded, and so my professor called another former student of his, now working for a Senator. The next day, the first student called him and said, you old faker. You said you had no influence, but President Nixon himself just told the draft board not to touch me.”

“So?” said Denise.

“So, we’ve all been to good schools,” said Christina, “and a couple of us,” looking at Steve and Kemal, “have taught at good schools. We know people who have gotten places. I say we head to Washington, DC, and contact every big shot we know.”

Over Denise’s objections, that’s just what they did. Christina, a lefty peace activist in college, worked every old lefty friend of hers who had joined the Democratic establishment. Howard worked the Republican side of the aisle, as suited his political sympathies and connections. Steve and Kemal made their pitch anywhere Christina or Howard made a connection.

They worked in vain, for the politicians they contacted proved even less willing to believe them than Denise. One disbelieved that the loss of language was even happening, while another was sure it could have nothing to do with the alien harvesting operation.

Discouraged, the friends assembled once they had returned to Palo Alto.

“I’m getting reports from linguistics departments all over the world,” said Steve.

“And I from all my sociologist friends,” said Christina, “there’s no doubt about it. People are losing their languages.”

“I’m having more and more forgetful moments myself,” Kemal admitted.

“As am I,” said Steve.

“How can we convince people to believe us?” Howard asked.

“Just show them the science,” said Denise, who had come around to their point of view after some research of her own, “You’ll get through.”

“Because governments always listen to science,” said Christina.

“Well,” said Denise, “What’s the alternative?”

“The army,” said Kemal, “We need someone to strike at the aliens, and strike fast. Better to ask forgiveness than to get permission.”

“Our army,” said Steve, “doesn’t seize control. It submits to civilian leaders.”

“Do you really want to go there?” said Kemal, “A military that meddles in politics isn’t the best thing, but would you rather have an isolationist, fundamentalist Turkey or a pro secular pro west Turkey?”

“Since when do we need to attack the aliens?” Denise protested, “If we explain to them what’s going on, I’m sure they’ll leave us the rest of that element and go harvest elsewhere.”

“And we give back all that energy supply they provided?” said Howard.

“Wouldn’t you rather that,” said Denise, “than lose any common language?”

“Denise is right,” said Christina, “and you know, any time we’re both on the same side, you should listen. We need to talk with the aliens.”

“We need to strike the aliens first, before they know we’re figured them out,” said Kemal, “catch them by surprise.”

“I’d agree with you,” Howard said to Kemal, “except that we don’t have the ability to get the army to do what we want, and we do have translation software.”

“So we talk to the aliens,” said Christina, “on our own. It’s the one thing we can do, without getting any government to agree with us.”

The next day, Steve, Howard, and Denise gathered at SETI headquarters, to compose a message to the aliens. They wrote it out. They fed it into the software.

“So,” Howard asked Steve, “does the translation look good?”

“Beats me,” said Steve, “I don’t remember their language any more. I think you lose the more recently learned languages first.”

They sent the message off. There was no reply.

“Maybe the software garbled it,” said Steve to Denise, “Computer translation is limited. For instance, the word trapezi, in Greek, means both bank and table. I’ve seen translations of articles about finances that turned the word into table. Or even into trapeze.”

“I’ll try wording it differently,” said Denise.

They tried translating a second message from her, and then a third. None of them received any response from the aliens.

Defeated, the friends returned to their affairs. Christina and Howard continued to lobby Washington, but with dwindling hope.

One day, Steve visited Kemal in his lab, and found his friend writing on cards.

“Flashcards,” Kemal said, displaying the cards to his friend, “for when I forget my English.”

Some of the cards had instructions about tasks that could be performed in the lab, others phrases useful for tasks like grocery shopping.

Grocery shopping could be an ordeal. One day, Steve and Kemal went shopping together, to pick up some things for Christina. In the store, Kemal began to speak in Turkish. One bystander hissed to another in fury,

“They come to this country, and they don’t even learn to speak our language.”

That night, Steve told Christina,

“I’m worried about my parents. What happens when they stop speaking English?”

“Call your sister,” Christina said, “the one who stayed in Chicago.”

Steve did, and his parents, who were so proud of their independence, were talked into moving in with their daughter.

Papers began to report stories about the loss of languages, from international trade problems to stranded immigrants no longer speaking English. Shared and related words and pointing allowed bits of communication; dolmas in Turkish are dolmadakis in Greek, and aspirin in English is still aspirin in Turkish. But more and more, people relied, not on learned second languages, but on software and the few people who had grown up since infancy speaking two languages. Still, some people disbelieved.

“It’s just more excuses,” Christina heard one woman say to another at the bus stop one day, “When my grandfather came to this country, he damn well learned the language. But these newcomers? They’re just too lazy.”

One day, Steve and his friend Kemal met a colleague for at their usual coffee house.

“The only thing wrong with this place,” said Kemal, “is they don’t serve the right coffee.”

“Yes,” said Steve, “but then, you Turks always serve the best Greek coffee.”

“I thought Turks and Greeks hated each other,” said their colleague.

Steve laughed.

“Our grandfathers hated each other,” he said, “but that’s all in the past. We’re friends now.”

Kemal frowned.

“Yes,” he said, “We’re friends now. But for how long?”

Steve remembered a visit to Europe in 1992. He’d gone to a linguistics conference in Budapest, and took advantage of the occasion to visit his cousins in Greece. Ignoring his colleagues cautions about travelling through a war zone, he took a train through Serbia, stopping a couple of times along the way. He remembered the beautiful city of Subotica, with its city hall with stained glass windows of local civic figures, its black market money changers turning forints to dinars, and the outdoor café where Art Garfunkel’s voice played, in the background, singing, “Don’t know much about history.” How much of that beauty had survived the war? He remembered the woman on the train, telling of her Serbian father and her Bosnian mother.

“I am a Yugoslav,” she had said, “My country doesn’t exist anymore.”

Kemal was right. If a country could fall apart so violently among people who could all understand each other’s language, what hope was there for old feuds to stay settled, once any common language was lost?

But the weeks moved on, and Christina’s and Howard’s calls still bore no fruit. The day came when Steve and Kemal could no longer speak. They still met for coffee, and they exchanged a few words by showing each other Kemal’s flash cards, but real conversation was gone.

It was several weeks after Kemal had lost his English that the army finally acted.

In the Pentagon, Joe Hanks typed the message into the translation software, for human interpreting was no longer possible.

“We attack the aliens at 15:00 GMT.”

“Are you sure?” General Dimitri Alexandrovich turned to Pyotr Vassilievich, who manned the translation software.

“Yes, I’m sure,” said Pyotr, “The message says, we’ll attack you at 15:00 GMT.”

And in Tel Aviv, General Asher Binyamin turned to Yitzhak Goldberg and said, “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” said Yitzhak, “The message says, they’ll attack you at 15:00 GMT.”

And so, around the world, in one country after another, at around 15:00 GMT, the bombs came down.