Tricia Sullivan - The Question Eaters.txt

The Question Eaters - short story by Tricia Sullivan



      The Question Eaters
      a short story by Tricia Sullivan
      John watched. The sky had warmed from dark green to a burnished bronze, 
      the color of age. Over the plain the spires inside the research station 
      seemed sharp and clear, yet unimaginably remote across the distance of 
      graying sand. The sky sucked color from the ground; green lay only on the 
      edges of the dunes. The hollows were ashen.
      Someone had told John this plain had once been an ocean. He tried to 
      imagine waves covering the dark ground, but the effort made him sick. He 
      was not even aware of his own sweat, and he sometimes felt light enough to 
      float. Water was starting to seem like poison.
      "Bowl," the crone said suddenly. Her voice cracked out of the long silence 
      like one of the fissures in the hardened clay of the desert floor.
      He jerked his head toward her. Her profile was almost entirely collapsed 
      around the bones of her skull. Her eyes were far recessed. He had not seen 
      her lips move, and her face was still now. But the voice had come from 
her.
      He could not see a bowl anywhere. The tent was open on all sides; there 
      was no place to hide.
      "Break," said the boy behind John. He tossed a glass bead into the eye 
      socket of a lizard skull.
      The crone was silent.
      "Carry. Fill. Paint. Make. Roll." The boy tripped the words out so 
      quickly, John could hardly follow.
      "Water," said the crone.
      The boy, dark-skinned, seemed uncannily human. Adolescence made his voice 
      crack.
      "Fill," he said at last.
      John willed himself not to move. Light was failing rapidly. With the tips 
      of his fingers he coded notes into his personal data unit. He was so 
      well-practiced at this he hardly thought about it.
      The boy speaks only in verbs. Woman-thing persists in using single nouns. 
      He defies her.
      Now why had he said that? The boy stood up, overturning his seat, which 
      proved to be a hollowed shell rather like a tortoise's. In the boy's hands 
      it molded into a simple bowl, a large smooth thing of symmetry. John 
      wondered if he should delete the last sentence of his entry. Under the 
      eyes of the boy the bowl began to fill with water. John could smell it.
      Hypothesis: observer witnessing some manifestation in physical terms of 
      sandwriting language. Each has some role. Are they physically present or 
      not?
      Still, the sense of defiance. He stared at the boy's hands, at the lovely 
      lines of tendons and veins under the skin, the graceful long fingers.
      He had never expected them to seem so human. How could the woman, awkward 
      and misshapen, squatting on the dark sand, belong to the same species as 
      the boy? And this was to say nothing of the third. Three of their kind 
      were present, but after one glance at it when he first had startled out of 
      a vague sun-dream to notice the three of them and the shade of their tent, 
      John had avoided looking at the last. He had blocked out the part of his 
      vision that contained it, and the pile of mats on which it lay.
      "Not everyone has the stomach for this planet, John," Elaine had told him. 
      As the research station psychiatrist, she had treated people for a variety 
      of personality disorders that seemed obscurely linked to the appearance of 
      the sandwriting. Until John had come, no one could read the markings, 
      although everyone in the domed station had seen the lines and shapes creep 
      into existence on the desert sands as though written by invisible hands. 
      The writing hadn't been translated, but its manifestations had coincided 
      with unexplained incidents among the Station personnel: violent nightmares 
      at the least, and in two cases, psychotic episodes and followed by 
suicide.
      "Language is the key to xenopsychology," John had told her when he 
      arrived, eight months ago, on special assignment to help the research 
      station cope with the problem. The researchers had not been prepared to 
      run into conflicts with aboriginal ecology: the planet had been lifeless 
      for several thousand years. But John had set to work translating the 
      sandwriting into human terms, and so had begun an uneasy dialog with 
      someone--or something.
      "Language creates reality," John had continued, wanting to make Elaine 
      understand why his work was important. "It's like, when you are American 
      and you learn to think in Japanese, you don't think the same thoughts. 
      This is just more extreme. Other species have other languages. When we 
      learn them we enter into their subjective experience of reality. Maybe 
      people see the sandwriting, get a glimpse of the alien nature of the 
      language, and experience the kind of contact shock humans always 
      experience when encountering an alien intelligence. And that's where the 
      psychiatric problems come in."
      "It's a touch far-fetched," Elaine had replied. "For one thing, what makes 
      you so sure that it is a language? This is a dead planet. You need an 
      intelligent species to produce a language."
      "Humans are an intelligent species," John had said, thinking aloud.
      "Are you saying that the sandwriting is some kind of... I don't know... 
      some kind of manifestation of the collective unconscious? Don't tell me 
      Jung is coming back into vogue after all these years!"
      "It's a funny thing," John had mused. "Someone has to start a language, 
      but once it's going it kind of perpetuates itself. The sandwriting 
      language could be a relic left over from some earlier civilization, and 
      now that we're here ... well, I'm not certain. Imagine that a dead species 
      left behind its way of thinking, as the Egyptians left their architecture. 
      And now, any mind will do--this language acts on the substratum of memory 
      and becomes self-propagating."
      He remembered Elaine's nervous laugh. "Now you make it sound... alive. 
      Almost like a virus."
      That had been an interesting metaphor. John had just started thinking 
      about the possibilities in it when Elaine grabbed her notebook. "So, tell 
      me," she asked casually, "just how long have you been thinking in these 
      terms?"

      "Bowl water," said the crone.
      The boy looked at the floor and said, 
      "spillthrowdrinkforgetgivepissitflyseecoverunmake--"
      "Bowlwater," she interrupted. The boy glared at her.
      "Spill throw drink--"
      "What comfort?" This was the first time John had heard its voice: the 
      third. Reluctantly John turned his eyes to the mats on the floor. "What 
      hope?" It was a cool, deep, male voice, eminently reasonable in tone. John 
      shivered, dry-skinned in the heat. He could not bear to look at this one. 
      His insides twisted. He felt if it spoke to him, he would have to obey.
      "Give," said the boy grudgingly.
      "Bowlwater."
      He gave it to her.
      Sentient Baby has command power over others, John noted tersely. 
      Subjective horror, observer.
      Sentient Baby? Again he wondered at his own notes. He looked at #3 to see 
      if the description fit. It looked back. John cringed. He couldn't help it.
      "Why?" said Baby, to him.
      It makes no sense that I can understand them. I shouldn't be able to. What 
      language am I hearing?
      The crone took the bowl and set it in front of her. She held up her hands, 
      palms facing each other a few inches apart.
      Sentient Baby speaks only in questions, John remembered to note. He felt 
      dizzy, and noted that. The tent was almost dark. Outside the sand seemed 
      to be glowing a dark, dead green.

      Trying to translate the sandwriting into something he could comprehend had 
      been the greatest challenge of John's career. He had gotten in the habit 
      of standing on the sand outside the research dome waiting for the signs to 
      appear, and then trying to interact by stenciling in his own responses to 
      the language in the sand. This was how he had learned to translate it. 
      "There's no such thing as 'translation,' really," he'd explained to 
      Elaine. "We actually translate ourselves into the other language." And 
      that was what he had been doing. But his progress was slow, and he could 
      not share it with anyone because he had no objective information to 
      impart. So he had tried to develop a structure. In the course of doing 
      this he noticed contradictions of meaning. He had struggled with the fact 
      that the sign for "womb" seemed to be the same as the sign used for 
      "desert."
      He remembered thinking that it was ironic to associate fertility with the 
      sterile desert. He'd copied the womb/desert sign in the sand and spent a 
      long time thinking about it, wondering how--or if--the sandwriters had 
      reproduced.
      To his astonishment, the sandwriting that came up the next morning 
      stretched in a long line across the desert, leading away from the domed 
      station. He had never had a clearer invitation. He arranged for a survival 
      kit, but first he had to clear his exit from the dome with Elaine, who he 
      knew blamed some factor in the atmosphere for the outbreak of madness. 
      Because of this, he had always been surprised that she had even 
      entertained his spe...