“Very well. How much detail do you want?” asked Dolbe.
“As little as possible, please. I’m a very busy man.”
“You have here,” Dolbe said in the requisite monotone, “numbers 20 through 30 of the test-tube babies, popularly referred to as ‘tubies,’ temporarily in the custody of my unit. They were brought to normal term, decanted, provided standard health and social care, and are all in satisfactory physical condition. Two modifications were made in their environment, under my direction. First: from their initial day of life they were given small amounts of various hallucinogenic drugs, in gradually increasing doses. You’ll find precise listings in their files. Second: at some point prior to the age of three months, each one was put into the G.W. Interface with a specimen of the Alien creature known as Beta-2, in the hope that this would lead to our cracking the language of the aforementioned Alien, which language is also known as Beta-2. The experiment was carried out eleven times, with appropriate modifications in the relevant variable — that is, in the combinations, doses, and scheduling of the hallucinogens. Results proved unsatisfactory, and the experiment has been terminated. The children are now being transferred, per regulations, to your custody, pursuant to their taking up residence at the federal orphanage in Arlington, Virginia. Any other information you may require is available in the files or on a need-to-know basis.”
He did not say “END OF BRIEFING” or click his heels, but the nuance was there in the way he snapped his teeth shut at the period.
“I see,” said Taylor Dorcas. “I see.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“You say the experiment didn’t turn out to be satisfactory. I take it that means these children didn’t learn any Beta-2.”
“You take it correctly.”
“The memorandum you sent over by pouch said something about ‘abnormal language development.’ What does that mean, precisely?”
“We have no idea what it means — precisely.”
“Oh, come on, Arnold.”
“We do know what it means imprecisely.”
“I’ll settle for that.”
“Look at them,” Dolbe advised. “Do you notice anything unusual about them?”
Dorcas considered it, looking at each child in turn. They seemed quite ordinary. A bit oddly colored, perhaps, from too much sunlamp and not enough natural sunlight, but otherwise perfectly ordinary.
“They seem normal to me,” he hazarded, “except that they’re awfully quiet. I suppose they’re intimidated by all the hauling about, and the strangers.”
“No. They’re always like this.”
“Always?”
“Always. They never make a sound. Not in any language.”
“But — ”
“These children,” Dolbe stated, “have never made a sound since they were Interfaced. Never cried. Never babbled. You will notice that they appear to be almost expressionless, and that they change their position very little — that is, there appears to be no development of body-parl to speak of, either.”
“Good lord! What’s the matter with them?”
Dolbe sighed.
“Nothing. Not so far as anyone can tell. Their vocal tracts are normal. Brain scans, in various modes, show no abnormality. Hearing is entirely normal, perhaps a bit better than normal. They should be able to talk, but they don’t — and I might just add here that we have tried exposing them to native speakers of American Sign Language. No response whatsoever.”
“Jesus. How long will they be like this?”
“If I knew that, Taylor, I wouldn’t be turning them over to you… that is, if I had any reason to believe that the condition was temporary. And you’ll find specific instructions, straight from the top, to notify me if any one of them shows even the most rudimentary sign of attempting to communicate. In any way. It could be of the most extraordinary importance, if that happens.”
Taylor Dorcas whistled an idle tune between his teeth, and looked at the children again. They could have been dolls, he realized. And their eyes… he wouldn’t have cared to spend much time looking into those eyes.
“They’re not retarded?” he asked abruptly.
“No so far as we know. They’re a little difficult to test, as you might imagine. But so far as the experts can determine, they have the ordinary intelligence of any human child. They just make no effort of any kind to communicate — or if they do, we are unable to recognize it as such.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Isn’t it.”
“They’re not catatonic…”
“Oh, no. They move about perfectly appropriately for whatever action frame they’re engaged in. Feeding themselves, for instance. No, it’s not catatonia, or anything like it.”
“Well, haven’t you got anything at all, any kind of explanation at all, to offer? Hell, man, the women who will care for these kids need some basis for dealing with them!”
“I’m sorry,” said Dolbe. Meaning it.
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing at all.”
That wasn’t strictly the truth, of course. Dolbe did have an explanation, straight from the lips of Thomas Blair Chornyak, who had graciously dropped by at Dolbe’s request to see what he could contribute to the effort. According to Chornyak the problem wasn’t that the tubies had no language, since only a condition like deep coma could be said to constitute true absence of language in a human being. The problem was something he called “absence of lexicalization.”
“I can’t be positive, of course,” he’d told them, obviously fascinated, “because I don’t have enough data to go on and I don’t have time to gather more. But I can make a guess. And my guess is that these children have their heads full of nonverbal experiences and perceptions for which no language offers a surface shape… experiences for which no lexicalizations — no words, Dolbe, no signs, no body-parl units — exist. Not in the Earth languages they’ve been exposed to, and not in your Beta-2 language. If there is any such language.”
When Lanky Pugh complained that he didn’t understand, Chornyak put it into words of one syllable for them. Say a human being sees the sun come up, and wants to express that perception to another human being. The shape he gives that expression, in sound or any other mode, is a lexicalization. Human beings can presumably either find a lexicalization or coin one for any human experience, or any humanoid experience. But whatever these children were perceiving and experiencing, they either had no lexicalizations available to them for those perceptions and experiences, or they were using a mode of lexicalization that was literally impossible for human beings to recognize.
“Such as?” Dolbe had asked.
“Hell, I don’t know. How do you expect me to give you, in words, an example of a perception for which there are no words? I could give you a rather strained analogy.”
“Please do.”
“Say they were communicating quite normally in English, but made sounds at frequencies the human ear is incapable of hearing… that wouldn’t be precisely English, Dolbe, but let it go at that. Or say that whatever physical means they were employing to produce the words of American Sign Language were carried out at a speed so fast that the human eye was incapable of seeing it happen. That’s not it, Dolbe — it’s quite a different matter, because those would be approximately physiological problems — but perhaps it will serve as an analogy. The effects would presumably be the same.”