Story-P1

Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important m
oment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad a
nd I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it's after mi
dnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your
dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we're slow-dancing, a pair of t
hirtysomethings swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don't fee
l the night chill at all. And then your dad says, "Do you want to make a baby?
"
    Right now your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on
Ellis Avenue; when we move out you'll still be too young to remember the hous
e, but we'll show you    pictures of it, tell you stories about it. I'd love
to tell you the story of this evening, the night you're conceived, but the rig
ht time to do that would be when you're ready to have children of your own, an
d we'll never get that chance.
    Telling it to you any earlier wouldn't do any good; for most of your life
you won't sit still to hear such a romantic--you'd say sappy--story. I rememb
er the scenario of yourorigin you'll suggest when you're twelve.
    "The only reason you had me was so you could get a maid you wouldn't have
to pay," you'll say bitterly, dragging the vacuum cleaner out of the closet.

    "That's right," I'll say. "Thirteen years ago I knew the carpets would ne
ed vacuuming around now, and having a baby seemed to be the cheapest and easie
st way to get the job done. Now kindly get on with it."
    "If you weren't my mother, this would be illegal," you'll say, seething a
s you unwind the power cord and plug it into the wall outlet.
    That will be in the house on Belmont Street. I'll live to see strangers o
ccupy both houses: the one you're conceived in and the one you grow up in. You
r dad and I will sell the first a couple years after your arrival. I'll sell t
he second shortly after your departure. By then Nelson and I will have moved i
nto our farmhouse, and your dad will be living with what's-her-name.
    I know how this story ends; I think about it a lot. I also think a lot ab
out how it began, just a few years ago, when ships appeared in orbit and artif
acts appeared in meadows. The    government said next to nothing about them,
while the tabloids said every possible thing.
    And then I got a phone call, a request for a meeting.
* * *
    I spotted them waiting in the hallway, outside my office. They made an od
d couple; one wore a military uniform and a crew- cut, and carried an aluminum
briefcase. He seemed to be assessing his surroundings with a critical eye. Th
e other one was easily identifiable as an academic: full beard and mustache, w
earing corduroy. He was browsing through the overlapping sheets stapled to a b
ulletin board nearby.
    "Colonel Weber, I presume?" I shook hands with the soldier. "Louise Banks
."
    "Dr. Banks. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us," he said.
    "Not at all; any excuse to avoid the faculty meeting."
    Colonel Weber indicated his companion. "This is Dr. Gary Donnelly, the ph
ysicist I mentioned when we spoke on the phone."
    "Call me Gary," he said as we shook hands. "I'm anxious to hear what you
have to say."
    We entered my office. I moved a couple of stacks of books off the second
guest chair, and we all sat down. "You said you wanted me to listen to a recor
ding. I presume this has    something to do with the aliens?"
    "All I can offer is the recording," said Colonel Weber.
    "Okay, let's hear it."
    Colonel Weber took a tape machine out of his briefcase and pressed PLAY.
The recording sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of
its fur.
    "What do you make of that?" he asked.
    I withheld my comparison to a wet dog. "What was the context in which thi
s recording was made?"
    "I'm not at liberty to say."
    "It would help me interpret those sounds. Could you see the alien while i
t was speaking? Was it doing anything at the time?"
    "The recording is all I can offer."
    "You won't be giving anything away if you tell me that you've seen the al
iens; the public's assumed you have."
    Colonel Weber wasn't budging. "Do you have any opinion about its linguist
ic properties?" he asked.
    "Well, it's clear that their vocal tract is substantially different from
a human vocal tract. I assume that these aliens don't look like humans?"
    The colonel was about to say something noncommittal when Gary Donelly ask
ed, "Can you make any guesses based on the tape?"
    "Not really. It doesn't sound like they're using a larynx to make those s
ounds, but that doesn't tell me what they look like."
    "Anything-- is there anything else you can tell us?" asked Colonel Weber.
 
    I could see he wasn't accustomed to consulting a civilian. "Only that est
ablishing communications is going to be really difficult because of the differ
ence in anatomy. They're    almost certainly using sounds that the human voca
l tract can't reproduce, and maybe sounds that the human ear can't distinguish
."
    "You mean infra- or ultrasonic frequencies?" asked Gary Donelly.
    "Not specifically. I just mean that the human auditory system isn't an ab
solute acoustic instrument; it's optimized to recognize the sounds that a huma
n larynx makes. With an alien vocal system, all bets are off." I shrugged. "Ma
ybe we'll be able to hear the difference between alien phonemes, given enough
practice, but it's possible our ears simply can't recognize the distinctions t
hey consider meaningful. In that case we'd need a sound spectrograph to know w
hat an alien is saying."
    Colonel Weber asked, "Suppose I gave you an hour's worth of recordings; h
ow long would it take you to determine if we need this sound spectrograph or n
ot?"
    "I couldn't determine that with just a recording no matter how much time
I had. I'd need to talk with the aliens directly."
    The colonel shook his head. "Not possible."
    I tried to break it to him gently. "That's your call, of course. But the
only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, an
d by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing.
Without that, it's simply not possible. So if you want to learn the aliens' l
anguage, someone with training in field linguistics-- whether it's me or someo
ne else--will have to talk with an alien. Recordings alone aren't sufficient."
 
    Colonel Weber frowned. "You seem to be implying that no alien could have
learned human languages by monitoring our broadcasts."
    "I doubt it. They'd need instructional material specifically designed to
teach human languages to nonhumans. Either that, or interaction with a human.
If they had either of those,    they could learn a lot from TV, but otherwise
, they wouldn't have a starting point."
    The colonel clearly found this interesting; evidently his philosophy was,
the less the aliens knew, the better. Gary Donnelly read the colonel's expres
sion too and rolled his eyes.
    I suppressed a smile.
    Then Colonel Weber asked, "Suppose you were learning a new language by ta
lking to its speakers; could you do it without teaching them English?"
    "That would depend on how cooperative the native speakers were. They'd al
most certainly pick up bits and pieces while I'm learning their language, but
it wouldn't have to be much if they're willing to teach. On the other hand, if
they'd rather learn English than teach us their language, that would make thi
ngs far more difficult."
    The colonel nodded. "I'll get back to you on this matter."
* * *
    The request for that meeting was perhaps the second most momentous phone
call in my life. The first, of course, will be the one from Mountain Rescue. A
t that point your dad and I will be speaking to each other maybe once a year,
tops. After I get that phone call, though, the first thing I'll do will be to
call your father.
    He and I will drive out together to perform the identification, a long si
lent car ride. I remember the morgue, all tile and stainless steel, the hum of
refrigeration and smell of    antiseptic. An orderly will pull the sheet bac
k to reveal your face. Your face will look wrong somehow, but I'll know it's y
ou.
    "Yes, that's her," I'll say. "She's mine."
    You'll be twenty-five then.
* * *
    The MP checked my badge, made a notation on his clipboard, and opened the
gate; I drove the off-road vehicle into the encampment, a small village of te
nts pitched by the Army in a farmer's sun-scorched pasture. At the center of t
he encampment was one of the alien devices, nicknamed "looking glasses."
    According to the briefings I'd attended, there were nine of these in the
United States, one hundred and twelve in the world. The looking glasses acted
as two-way communication devices, presumably with the ships in orbit. No one k
new why the aliens wouldn't talk to us in person; fear of cooties, maybe. A te
am of scientists, including a physicist and a linguist, was assigned to each l
ooking glass; Gary Donnelly and I were on this one.
    Gary was waiting for me in the parking area. We navigated a circular maze
of concrete barricades until we reached the large tent that covered the looki
ng glass itself. In front of the tent was an equipment cart loaded with goodie
s borrowed from the school's phonology lab; I had sent it ahead for inspection
by the Army.
    Also outside the tent were three tripod-mounted video cameras whose lense
s peered, through windows in the fabric wall, into the main room. Everything G
ary and I did would be reviewed by countless others, including military intell
igence. In addition we would each send daily reports, of which mine had to inc
lude estimates on how much English I thought the aliens could understand.
    Gary held open the tent flap and gestured for me to enter. "Step right up
," he said, circus barker-style. "Marvel at creatures the likes of which have
never been seen on God's green earth."
    "And all for one slim dime," I murmured, walking through the door. At the
moment the looking glass was inactive, resembling a semicircular mirror over
ten feet high and twenty feet across. On the brown grass in front of the looki
ng glass, an arc of white spray paint outlined the activation area. Currently
the area contained only a table, two folding chairs, and a power strip with a
cord leading to a generator outside. The buzz of fluorescent lamps, hung from
poles along the edge of the room, commingled with the buzz of flies in the swe
ltering heat.
    Gary and I looked at each other, and then began pushing the cart of equip
ment up to the table. As we crossed the paint line, the looking glass appeared
to grow transparent; it was as if someone was slowly raising the illumination
behind tinted glass. The illusion of depth was uncanny; I felt I could walk r
ight into it. Once the looking glass was fully lit it resembled a life- size d
iorama of a semicircular room. The room contained a few large objects that mig
ht have been furniture, but no aliens. There was a door in the curved rear wal
l.
    We busied ourselves connecting everything together: microphone, sound spe
ctrograph, portable computer, and speaker. As we worked, I frequently glanced
at the looking glass,    anticipating the aliens' arrival. Even so I jumped wh
en one of them entered.
    It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It
was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. T
he one in front of me was    walking around on four legs, three non-adjacent
arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them "heptapods."
    I'd been shown videotapes, but I still gawked. Its limbs had no distinct
joints; anatomists guessed they might be supported by vertebral columns. Whate
ver their underlying structure, the heptapod's limbs conspired to move it in a
disconcertingly fluid manner. Its "torso" rode atop the rippling limbs as smo
othly as a hovercraft.
    Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod's body. It walked back
to the doorway from which it entered, made a brief sputtering sound, and retur
ned to the center of the room followed by another heptapod; at no point did it
ever turn around. Eerie, but logical; with eyes on all sides, any direction m
ight as well be "forward."
    Gary had been watching my reaction. "Ready?" he asked.
    I took a deep breath. "Ready enough." I'd done plenty of fieldwork before
, in the Amazon, but it had always been a bilingual procedure: either my infor
mants knew some Portuguese, which I could use, or I'd previously gotten an int
ro to their language from the local missionaries. This would be my first attem
pt at conducting a true monolingual discovery procedure. It was straightforwar
d enough in theory, though.
    I walked up to the looking glass and a heptapod on the other side did the
same. The image was so real that my skin crawled. I could see the texture of
its gray skin, like corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops. There was no
smell at all from the looking glass, which somehow made the situation strange
r.
    I pointed to myself and said slowly, "Human." Then I pointed to Gary. "Hu
man." Then I pointed at each heptapod and said, "What are you?"
    No reaction. I tried again, and then again.
    One of the heptapods pointed to itself with one limb, the four terminal d
igits pressed together. That was lucky. In some cultures a person pointed with
his chin; if the heptapod    hadn't used one of its limbs, I wouldn't have k
nown what gesture to look for. I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puc
kered orifice at the top of its body vibrate; it was talking. Then it pointed
to its companion and fluttered again.
    I went back to my computer; on its screen were two virtually identical sp
ectrographs representing the fluttering sounds. I marked a sample for playback
. I pointed to myself and    said "Human" again, and did the same with Gary.
Then I pointed to the heptapod, and played back the flutter on the speaker.

    The heptapod fluttered some more. The second half of the spectrograph for
this utterance looked like a repetition: call the previous utterances [flutte
r1], then this one was [flutter2flutter1].
    I pointed at something that might have been a heptapod chair. "What is th
at?"
    The heptapod paused, and then pointed at the "chair" and talked some more
. The spectrograph for this differed distinctly from that of the earlier sound
s: [flutter3]. Once again, I    pointed to the "chair" while playing back [fl
utter3].
    The heptapod replied; judging by the spectrograph, it looked like [flutte
r3flutter2]. Optimistic interpretation: the heptapod was confirming my utteran
ces as correct, which    implied compatibility between heptapod and human pat
terns of discourse. Pessimistic interpretation: it had a nagging cough.
    At my computer I delimited certain sections of the spectrograph and typed
in a tentative gloss for each: "heptapod" for [flutter1], "yes" for [flutter2
], and "chair" for [flutter3].
    Then I typed "Language: Heptapod A" as a heading for all the utterances.

    Gary watched what I was typing. "What's the 'A' for?"
    "It just distinguishes this language from any other ones the heptapods mi
ght use," I said. He nodded.
    "Now let's try something, just for laughs." I pointed at each heptapod an
d tried to mimic the sound of [flutter1], "heptapod." After a long pause, the
first heptapod said something and then the second one said something else, nei
ther of whose spectrographs resembled anything said before. I couldn't tell if
they were speaking to each other or to me since they had no faces to turn. I
tried pronouncing [flutter1] again, but there was no reaction.
    "Not even close," I grumbled.
    "I'm impressed you can make sounds like that at all," said Gary.
    "You should hear my moose call. Sends them running."
    I tried again a few more times, but neither heptapod responded with anyth
ing I could recognize. Only when I replayed the recording of the heptapod's pr
onunciation did I get a    confirmation; the heptapod replied with [flutter2],
"yes."
    "So we're stuck with using recordings?" asked Gary.
    I nodded. "At least temporarily."
    "So now what?"
    "Now we make sure it hasn't actually been saying 'aren't they cute' or 'l
ook what they're doing now.' Then we see if we can identify any of these words
when that other heptapod pronounces them." I gestured for him to have a seat.
"Get comfortable; this'll take a while."
* * *
    In 1770, Captain Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on the coast of Queens
land, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration p
arty and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals
that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine
what they were called. The aborigine replied, "Kanguru." From then on Cook and
his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn't until later that
they learned it meant "What did you say?"
    I tell that story in my introductory course every year. It's almost certa
inly untrue, and I explain that afterwards, but it's a classic anecdote. Of co
urse, the anecdotes my undergraduates will really want to hear are ones featur
ing the heptapods; for the rest of my teaching career, that'll be the reason m
any of them sign up for my courses. So I'll show them the old videotapes of my
sessions at the looking glass, and the sessions that the other linguists cond
ucted; the tapes are instructive, and they'll be useful if we're ever visited
by aliens again, but they don't generate many good anecdotes.
    When it comes to language-learning anecdotes, my favorite source is child
language acquisition. I remember one afternoon when you are five years old, a
fter you have come    home from kindergarten. You'll be coloring with your cr
ayons while I grade papers.
    "Mom," you'll say, using the carefully casual tone reserved for requestin
g a favor, "can I ask you something?"
    "Sure, sweetie. Go ahead."
    "Can I be, um, honored?"
    I'll look up from the paper I'm grading. "What do you mean?"
    "At school Sharon said she got to be honored."
    "Really? Did she tell you what for?"
    "It was when her big sister got married. She said only one person could b
e, um, honored, and she was it."
    "Ah, I see. You mean Sharon was maid of honor?"
    "Yeah, that's it. Can I be made of honor?"
* * *
    Gary and I entered the prefab building containing the center of operation
s for the looking glass site. Inside it looked like they were planning an inva
sion, or perhaps an evacuation: crewcut soldiers worked around a large map of
the area, or sat in front of burly electronic gear while speaking into headset
s. We were shown into Colonel Weber's office, a room in the back that was cool
from air conditioning.
    We briefed the colonel on our first day's results. "Doesn't sound like yo
u got very far," he said. "I have an idea as to how we can make faster progres
s," I said. "But you'll have to approve the use of more equipment."
    "What more do you need?"
    "A digital camera, and a big video screen." I showed him a drawing of the
set-up I imagined. "I want to try conducting the discovery procedure using wr
iting; I'd display words on the screen, and use the camera to record the words
they write. I'm hoping the heptapods will do the same."
    Weber looked at the drawing dubiously. "What would be the advantage of th
at?"
    "So far I've been proceeding the way I would with speakers of an unwritte
n language. Then it occurred to me that the heptapods must have writing, too."
 
    "So?"
    "If the heptapods have a mechanical way of producing writing, then their
writing ought to be very regular, very consistent. That would make it easier f
or us to identify graphemes instead of phonemes. It's like picking out the let
ters in a printed sentence instead of trying to hear them when the sentence is
spoken aloud."
    "I take your point," he admitted. "And how would you respond to them? Sho
w them the words they displayed to you?"
    "Basically. And if they put spaces between words, any sentences we write
would be a lot more intelligible than any spoken sentence we might splice toge
ther from recordings."
    He leaned back in his chair. "You know we want to show as little of our t
echnology as possible."
    "I understand, but we're using machines as intermediaries already. If we
can get them to use writing, I believe progress will go much faster than if we
're restricted to the sound    spectrographs."
    The colonel turned to Gary. "Your opinion?"
    "It sounds like a good idea to me. I'm curious whether the heptapods migh
t have difficulty reading our monitors. Their looking glasses are based on a c
ompletely different technology than our video screens. As far as we can tell,
they don't use pixels or scan lines, and they don't refresh on a frame-by-fram
e basis."
    "You think the scan lines on our video screens might render them unreadab
le to the heptapods?"
    "It's possible," said Gary. "We'll just have to try it and see."
    Weber considered it. For me it wasn't even a question, but from his point
of view it was a difficult one; like a soldier, though, he made it quickly. "
Request granted. Talk to the sergeant outside about bringing in what you need.
Have it ready for tomorrow."
* * *
    I remember one day during the summer when you're sixteen. For once, the p
erson waiting for her date to arrive is me. Of course, you'll be waiting aroun
d too, curious to see what he looks like. You'll have a friend of yours, a blo
nd girl with the unlikely name of Roxie, hanging out with you, giggling.
    "You may feel the urge to make comments about him," I'll say, checking my
self in the hallway mirror. "Just restrain yourselves until we leave."
    "Don't worry, Mom," you'll say. "We'll do it so that he won't know. Roxie
, you ask me what I think the weather will be like tonight. Then I'll say what
I think of Mom's date."
    "Right," Roxie will say.
    "No, you most definitely will not," I'll say.
    "Relax, Mom. He'll never know; we do this all the time."
    "What a comfort that is."
    A little later on, Nelson will arrive to pick me up. I'll do the introduc
tions, and we'll all engage in a little small talk on the front porch. Nelson
is ruggedly handsome, to your evident approval. Just as we're about to leave,
Roxie will say to you casually, "So what do you think the weather will be like
tonight?"
    "I think it's going to be really hot," you'll answer.
    Roxie will nod in agreement. Nelson will say, "Really? I thought they sai
d it was going to be cool."
    "I have a sixth sense about these things," you'll say. Your face will giv
e nothing away. "I get the feeling it's going to be a scorcher. Good thing you
're dressed for it, Mom."
    I'll glare at you, and say good night.
    As I lead Nelson toward his car, he'll ask me, amused, "I'm missing somet
hing here, aren't I?"
    "A private joke," I'll mutter. "Don't ask me to explain it."
* * *
    At our next session at the looking glass, we repeated the procedure we ha
d performed before, this time displaying a printed word on our computer screen
at the same time we spoke: showing HUMAN while saying "Human," and so forth.
Eventually, the heptapods understood what we wanted, and set up a flat circula
r screen mounted on a small pedestal. One heptapod spoke, and then inserted a
limb into a large socket in the pedestal; a doodle of script, vaguely cursive,
popped onto the screen. We soon settled into a routine, and I compiled two pa
rallel corpora: one of spoken utterances, one of writing samples. Based on fir
st impressions, their writing appeared to be logographic, which was disappoint
ing; I'd been hoping for an alphabetic script to help us learn their speech. T
heir logograms might include some phonetic information, but finding it would b
e a lot harder than with an alphabetic script.
    By getting up close to the looking glass, I was able to point to various
heptapod body parts, such as limbs, digits, and eyes, and elicit terms for eac
h. It turned out that they had an orifice on the underside of their body, line
d with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the
top was for respiration and speech. There were no other conspicuous orifices;
perhaps their mouth was their anus too. Those sorts of questions would have t
o wait.
    I also tried asking our two informants for terms for addressing each indi
vidually; personal names, if they had such things. Their answers were of cours
e unpronounceable, so for Gary's and my purposes, I dubbed them Flapper and Ra
spberry. I hoped I'd be able to tell them apart.
* * *
    The next day I conferred with Gary before we entered the looking-glass te
nt. "I'll need your help with this session," I told him.
    "Sure. What do you want me to do?"
    "We need to elicit some verbs, and it's easiest with third- person forms.
Would you act out a few verbs while I type the written form on the computer?
If we're lucky, the heptapods will figure out what we're doing and do the same
. I've brought a bunch of props for you to use."
    "No problem," said Gary, cracking his knuckles. "Ready when you are."
    We began with some simple intransitive verbs: walking, jumping, speaking,
writing. Gary demonstrated each one with a charming lack of self-consciousnes
s; the presence of the videocameras didn't inhibit him at all. For the first f
ew actions he performed, I asked the heptapods, "What do you call that?" Befor
e long, the heptapods caught on to what we were trying to do; Raspberry began
mimicking Gary, or at least performing the equivalent heptapod action, while F
lapper worked their computer, displaying a written description and pronouncing
it aloud.
    In the spectrographs of their spoken utterances, I could recognize their
word I had glossed as "heptapod." The rest of each utterance was presumably th
e verb phrase; it looked like they had analogs of nouns and verbs, thank goodn
ess. In their writing, however, things weren't as clear-cut. For each action,
they had displayed a single logogram instead of two separate ones. At first I
thought they had written something like "walks," with the subject implied. But
why would Flapper say "the heptapod walks" while writing "walks,"instead of m
aintaining parallelism? Then I noticed that some of the logograms looked like
the logogram for "heptapod" with some extra strokes added to one side or anoth
er.
    Perhaps their verbs could be written as affixes to a noun. If so, why was
Flapper writing the noun in some instances but not in others?
    I decided to try a transitive verb; substituting object words might clari
fy things. Among the props I'd brought were an apple and a slice of bread. "Ok
ay," I said to Gary, "show them the food, and then eat some. First the apple,
then the bread."
    Gary pointed at the Golden Delicious and then he took a bite out it, whil
e I displayed the "what do you call that?" expression. Then we repeated it wit
h the slice of whole wheat.
    Raspberry left the room and returned with some kind of giant nut or gourd
and a gelatinous ellipsoid. Raspberry pointed at the gourd while Flapper said
a word and displayed a    logogram. Then Raspberry brought the gourd down be
tween its legs, a crunching sound resulted, and the gourd reemerged minus a bi
te; there were corn-like kernels beneath the shell. Flapper talked and display
ed a large logogram on their screen. The sound spectrograph for "gourd" change
d when it was used in the sentence; possibly a case-marker. The logogram was o
dd: after some study, I could identify graphic elements that resembled the ind
ividual logograms for "heptapod" and "gourd." They looked as if they had been
melted together, with several extra strokes in the mix that presumably meant "
eat." Was it a multi-word ligature?
    Next we got spoken and written names for the gelatin egg, and description
s of the act of eating it. The sound spectrograph for "heptapod eats gelatin e
gg" was analyzable; "gelatin egg" bore a case marker, as expected, though the
sentence's word order differed from last time. The written form, another large
logogram, was another matter. This time it took much longer for me to recogni
ze anything in it; not only were the individual logograms melted together agai
n, it looked as if the one for "heptapod" was laid on its back, while on top o
f it the logogram for "gelatin egg" was standing on its head.
    "Uh-oh." I took another look at the writing for the simple noun-verb exam
ples, the ones that had seemed inconsistent before. Now I realized all of them
actually did contain the logogram for "heptapod"; some were rotated and disto
rted by being combined with the various verbs, so I hadn't recognized them at
first. "You guys have got to be kidding," I muttered.
    "What's wrong?" asked Gary.
    "Their script isn't word-divided; a sentence is written by joining the lo
gograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and mod
ifying them. Take a look." I showed him how the logograms were rotated.
    "So they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it's rotated," Gar
y said. He turned to look at the heptapods, impressed. "I wonder if it's a con
sequence of their bodies' radial symmetry: their bodies have no 'forward' dire
ction, so maybe their writing doesn't either. Highly neat."
    I couldn't believe it; I was working with someone who modified the word "
neat" with "highly." "It certainly is interesting," I said, "but it also means
there's no easy way for us    write our own sentences in their language. We
can't simply cut their sentences into individual words and recombine them; we'
ll have to learn the rules of their script before we can write anything legibl
e. It's the same continuity problem we'd have had splicing together speech fra
gments, except applied to writing."
    I looked at Flapper and Raspberry in the looking glass, who were waiting
for us to continue, and sighed. "You aren't going to make this easy for us, ar
e you?"
* * *
    To be fair, the heptapods were completely cooperative. In the days that f
ollowed, they readily taught us their language without requiring us to teach t
hem any more English.
    Colonel Weber and his cohorts pondered the implications of that, while I
and the linguists at the other looking glasses met via videoconferencing to sh
are what we had learned about the heptapod language. The videoconferencing mad
e for an incongruous working environment: our video screens were primitive com
pared to the heptapods' looking glasses, so that my colleagues seemed more rem
ote than the aliens. The familiar was far away, while the bizarre was close at
hand.
    It would be a while before we'd be ready to ask the heptapods why they ha
d come, or to discuss physics well enough to ask them about their technology.
For the time being, we    worked on the basics: phonemics/graphemics, vocabul
ary, syntax. The heptapods at every looking glass were using the same language
, so we were able to pool our data and coordinate our efforts.
    Our biggest source of confusion was the heptapods' "writing." It didn't a
ppear to be writing at all; it looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic d
esigns. The logograms weren't arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fas
hion. Instead, Flapper or Raspberry would write a sentence by sticking togethe
r as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration.
    This form of writing was reminiscent of primitive sign systems, which req
uired a reader to know a message's context in order to understand it. Such sys
tems were considered too limited for systematic recording of information. Yet
it was unlikely that the heptapods developed their level of technology with on
ly an oral tradition. That implied one of three possibilities: the first was t
hat the heptapods had a true writing system, but they didn't want to use it in
front of us; Colonel Weber would identify with that one. The second was that
the heptapods hadn't originated the technology they were using; they were illi
terates using someone else's technology. The third, and
most interesting to me, was that the heptapods were using a nonlinear system o
f orthography that
qualified as true writing.
* * *
    I remember a conversation we'll have when you're in your junior year of h
igh school. It'll be Sunday morning, and I'll be scrambling some eggs while yo
u set the table for brunch. You'll laugh as you tell me about the party you we
nt to last night.
    "Oh man," you'll say, "they're not kidding when they say that body weight
makes a difference. I didn't drink any more than the guys did, but I got so m
uch drunker."
    I'll try to maintain a neutral, pleasant expression. I'll really try. The
n you'll say, "Oh, come on, Mom."
    "What?"
    "You know you did the exact same things when you were my age."
    I did nothing of the sort, but I know that if I were to admit that, you'd
lose respect for me completely. "You know never to drive, or get into a car i
f--"
    "God, of course I know that. Do you think I'm an idiot?"
    "No, of course not."
    What I'll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remi
nd me, again, that you won't be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily d
elight, but you won't be someone I could have created by myself.
* * *