Guardian of Night by Tony Daniel Read Free Book Online Page A

was “borrowed” from conquered and eradicated species. The sceeve themselves saw no major difference in kind between self-generated and stolen knowledge—and, being sceeve, they placed a higher value on the stolen knowledge, in this case the poems and tales of others.
    What Leher had to do at the moment was figure out how this trickle of poetry and rebellious propaganda that had seeped out might be used militarily. Which was practically like the Trojans putting into place a detailed defense plan against Greek invasion based on Homer’s conception of the Soap Opera of the Gods in the Iliad .
    Or was it? Was he drawing the analogy too tightly? Had he fallen into the analyst’s trap of filtering his translations through misleading preconceptions? The sceeve likely did not divide the world so sharply between truth and fiction, epic and reality.
    Leher was convinced that the trick with comprehending the sceeve was to come at it with the bare minimum of paradigms and filters necessary, and come at it from all angles, letting mistranslations cancel one another out. Not playing favorites with what you wished was the case. Build your understanding from the bottom up, not the top down.
    The Poet was in the Sporata, the sceeve navy. He was an officer assigned to a war vessel. Had to be an officer, too. No sceeve rate was allowed to think for him or herself, much less transmit on pirate beta. He’d be subject to harsh discipline if he were caught. Slow death by dismemberment, no doubt.
    There had to be some driving purpose beyond the poetry and seemingly endless rants. The poetry was good. The rants, on the other hand, were repetitious, felt trite. Sometimes like boilerplate moralizing, sometimes mere nonsense.
    Of course, it was hard to escape the feeling that the Poet was having everyone on, human and sceeve audience alike. Leher was convinced he was missing something. What?
    Sceeve beta bursts were not one-to-one “meaning” analogs, such as radio broadcast or Internet packet exchange was. They were, instead, somewhat akin to DNA instructions for constructing a body. Communication was “synapse-like” in that speech was accomplished by the interchange of chemical packets that operated in a manner similar to neurotransmitters. The packets themselves were practically alive.
    The sceeve talked via exchange of odors. Smells.
    In fact, when sceeve “speech” was examined under a powerful microscope, these semantic packages looked something like male spermatozoa. They lingered in the atmosphere anywhere the sceeve had once inhabited. The Skyhook, now in human hands, was full of “used” words floating about. CRYPT had a test-tube collection of thousands of them, most of them analyzed and filed by Leher himself.
    These packets, and the paragraph-like thoughts they contained, were known as “esters.” They were the fundamental building blocks of sceeve thought and communication. Order of receipt might not be important, but order of assembly was. Several sets of “assembly instructions” were sent during a beta burst, so that an initial coherent thought could be formed on the other end. A final set of instructions punctuated the ending and usually called for a large restructuring of the “train” of words that was being built so far. Ester order would be shifted around like boxcars in a freight yard.
    A sentence could have several different, even contradictory, meanings.
    Usually, the “caboose,” the final “word-order code,” was all that was used by Extry translators to reconstruct the meaning of a beta transmission. This method served its purpose in ordinary circumstances. But it left out all nuance.
    Which meant that building a sceeve speech-train using only the “caboose” could be misleading. One or more of the other instruction packets sent in the midst of a transmission might have a stronger construction “marker” on it. So any given “thought-block” could have two, three, four, or a hundred different