Wind ramped, rain and hail struck like bullets, the aircraft flew onward.
It was not clear to Nansen and Yu why the Tahirian Emil asked them to come with en, or took them where en did. The mutual command of Cambiante was, as yet, too limited. The scope of the language was. Probably in many ways it always would be.
Its creation, which was still in process, had been comparable to the great breakthroughs in physics. Without computers to generate possible approaches, try them, discard them, and generate better ones, it would doubtless have been impossible — certainly within a lifetime, let alone a pair of years. Sonics would not do. To a Tahirian, a vocable by itself was a signal — an alarm cry, for example — but not a word. Indeed, en did not converse in what humans knew as words, but rather in mutable concepts that shaded into each other. Straightforward writing was equally insufficient. A man or woman found Tahirian ideographics hopelessly complex, while to a Tahirian any human system, even Chinese, was bafflingly rigid.
The races had evolved separately, they experienced the world differently, and thus their minds were unlike. The most fundamental thing they had to work out was a mutual semantics.
A parleur screen displayed three-dimensional hypertext. Changes in any part of it, especially cyclic or to-and-fro changes, added a fourth dimension. Learning to write this would have imposed an intolerable strain on memory, but the nanocomputer rendered what a party entered, within the logicogrammatical rules, into agreed-on symbols. With diligence and patience, one could master these.
From either viewpoint, Cambiante was a restricted language, functioning best when it dealt with scientific and technological matters, poorly or not at all in poetics, faith, or philosophy. However, by now it could generally convey practical statements or questions reasonably well. As users discovered some of the cues in tones, attitudes, movements, even odors, they added to the vocabulary, both written and connotative.
Whatever one person understood another to be saying would scarcely ever be quite identical with the intent. But they improved.
The site was an upland, wind-swept and stony, where turf clung in crannies and the few trees were gnarled dwarfs. Seen from above, the country showed signs of former habitation: roads, levelings, excavation where communities had been, occasional rubble heaps. Yu shivered. “Bleak,” she said.
“I suppose, as the axis of rotation shifted, it got too uncomfortable here to be worth bothering with,” Nansen suggested prosaically.
“Abandonment. A millennial necessity. What do they do when the obliquity becomes extreme?”
“Well, they seem to keep the population at half a billion or less. It will never overcrowd whatever lands are suitable. They can move gradually. We know they plan ahead much further than that.”
“Humans would never be able to. We aren’t . . . sane enough. Is it really easy for Tahirians?”
The laboratory where the aircar set down was isolated, small, with sparse facilities. Although it and associated buildings were well maintained by robots, everything stood long unused. Such amenities as heat and running water must be restarted. The guests had been told to bring their own sanitary unit and whatever else they would need.
Two who were strangers to them waited outside. With Emil, they hustled the newcomers along, barely letting them unload their baggage in a house before conducting them to the laboratory. “No time for a cup of tea?” asked Yu, only partly in jest.
“Plain to see, they’re in a hurry.” Nansen frowned. “Do they want to make sure they accomplish what they have in mind before anyone else finds out?”
Once inside, the two other Tahirians were straightaway busy at control boards. Emil faced the humans. “(We wish to convey certain information,)” en spelled out. “(At the present stage of communication, it is best done through graphics, using a larger screen than a parleur’s.)”
“But why just here?” Nansen muttered in Spanish. Yu trembled, mainly with eagerness.
Imagery appeared, drawings and numbers, symbolizations meaningful to the watchers.
A sun that exploded, blown-off gas ramming outward to shock against englobing nebulosity —
The remnant dwindling and dwindling, as if downward into nothingness —
Against the background of the stars, a sphere absolutely dark, save for a fiery ring of matter whirling inward —