He did not know why the story seemed to console her. Perhaps, she could insert herself into it and forget, for the time being, her own identity and troubles. She might be the sad little boy whom Saint-Exupdry described in such simple but telling language. In a way, the plight of the child prince was hers. He, too, was parentless and lonely and sought a true friend and companionship and was puzzled by the world in which fate had placed him.
Jack was reading to her about the child's encounter with the desert fox when he stopped. He was silent so long that she reached out and tugged at his arm. Looking up from the book, Jack saw her questioning expression.
"I just got an idea!" he said. "From this story!"
She shook her head.
"The fox wants to be tamed by the little prince. But the prince doesn't know how to tame the fox. So ... the fox instructs the prince how to tame him. Don't you see, Tappy! You can teach me what I must do to change you! We'll try, anyway! It might be the way to do it!"
Her hunched shoulders, raised eyebrows, and spread-out hands, palms up, said, "How?"
His enthusiasm propelled him from the chair he had drawn up next to the bed and sent him to pacing back and forth. "Don't know yet. But at least I ... we ... have got something to work on. Let me think."
While he walked, he struck the palm of his left hand with the book. It was as if the hand were iron and the book were flint and he hoped to strike fire from them.
"When we were in the plane, you gave me a piece of paper on which you'd written a word. It was supposed to make me able to disobey Malva's orders over the radio. But it was in Gaol writing.
it had six different characters and two that were repeated. Now.
Listen carefully. Do each of these characters have an equivalent in English speech?"
She frowned.
"I mean ... let's say ... does one of them, for instance, symbolize any single sound in English? Like 'I' as in lend? Like It, as in Tappy? Like 'e' in lend? Or 's' as in seen? Got it?"
The girl nodded.
"Good! "
He looked around but realized that he had not seen any paper or pencils in the tent. He closed his eyes and visualized a sheaf of writing paper and three sharpened pencils. Then he summoned up an image of a knife. He'd have to have something to keep the pencils sharp.
Tappy stirred restlessly. He said, "Be patient."
A minute later, he heard a woman's voice.
"Do not be startled."
He said, "Come in," and an AI walked through the entrance into the bedroom.
He groaned. She was empty-handed.
"We do not have the strange objects you telepathed that you wanted," she said. "What use are they?"
"You can perfonn technological miracles," he said, "teleport us, read minds, but you don't know what writing paper and pencils are?"
"We don't have everything," it said. "Especially primitive artifacts. Tell me in detail what you need, their use, their materials."
After his description, it said, "I can't say precisely when I'll be back, but it'll be soon."
It walked out of the bedroom. Curious, Jack followed it into the hall made by drapes. He saw something blurry, like heat waves, appear around it, concealing it. Suddenly, the AI and the wavy envelope were gone.
He had expected a bang of air rushing in to fill the vacuum left by the AI. There was no sound.
He returned to the bedroom. "Tappy," he said, "while we're waiting, I'll tell you more of what we're going to do."
Ten minutes or so later, an AI, a male this time, appeared. Jack and Tappy were deep into the procedure. The AI, not botheringto excuse the interrupt*on, said, "This is not what you asked for.-' the equivalent, though that is not the correct noun. It's better."
It held out two white, flat, thin, and one-foot-wide squares made of what looked like plastic. One side of each was silvery.
After Jack took it, the AI extended to him two silvery objects that looked like a pen. "Pass the end of this across the screen, and it will make what you wish to write on the screen. You don't have to press it against the surface."
"We've got something like that on Earth," Jack said.
"Press the orange strip on the side after you've written on the screen," it said, "and it will voice what you've written. Press the green strip, and what is written on one will appear on the screen of the other. Press the yellow strip on the edge of the bottom, and the writing will be cleared. Activating the green strip will allow you to dictate to it and see your words in printed form. This tiny projection here, when pressed once, lets you scroll down. Pressed twice, it scrolls up."
The AI showed him the rest of the controls.
Jack guided Tappy's hand to a square and a stylus. She had heard the AI and did not need instruction.
"Thanks," he said to the AI. "You can go now."
It walked into the hallway. Jack said, "Okay, Tappy, let's go.
I've asked you a lot of questions. From your responses, I've learned that the Gaol alphabet doesn't have an equivalent letter for each letter in the English alphabet. Like, for instance, the English letter 'a' can stand for several different sounds. So can a number of other letters, like 's' stands for the initial 's' in surprise and also for the 'z' sound in the second 's." And so on.
"But the characters in Gaol writing stand for one sound only.
Some of the Gaol pronunciations don't exactly correspond to our English way of sounding them, not American English, anyway.
But the letters for them cover both pronunciations. There are some sounds in Gaol we don't have in English, but they probably won't give too much trouble. Anyway, you're going to write in English with the Gaol letters. After I learn the equivalents, right?"
She nodded. He pressed the orange strip on her recorder. He began slowly dictating sentences in English. They would include all the sounds in English speech. At least, he hoped they would.
He was no linguist. But if he found that he had overlooked some, he could supply them later.
Her printing appeared on the screen of his recorder as she made them on hers. When she was done, he said, "The Gaol alphabet is longer than ours, but I expected that."
He sat for a while studying the Gaol letters and their English equivalents. Apparently, the Gaol had no 'p' or 'd' 'n their language. He told Tappy to double the Gaol 'b' and it' to indicate these sounds.
"Now I'll ask you questions. You'll write the answers in English using the Gaol letters. More than one way to skin a cat. Whoever installed those mental blocks wasn't smart enough to make them foolproof."
Tappy's smile was so wide it reminded him of the Cheshire cat's grin.
His smile was not as big. Even if he could converse with her in this roundabout fashion, he had not found the way to make her mature seven years in three days. But it was a step forward. That is, it was unless another obstacle was revealed.
"First question, one of many, Tappy, maybe."
And the most important, he told himself, though I don't expect an answer.
"Do you know how to compress seven years of aging into three days""
Tappy looked startled. She wrote with the stylus two letters which appeared on his recorder. He had to scroll down the section with the Gaol-English equivalents to check his memory. The letters spelled out No. There went his idea, derived from The Little Prince, that she could teach him how to mature her. However, maybe she could do that but did not know it as yet.
He said, "Do you have now or have you ever had any awareness of the Imago within you? Anything that might be the Imago making itself manifest?"
No.
He sighed. If only ... Forget about it's. No time to fantasize.