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

means of assembly—and so different meanings. The listener was, in fact, expected to hold several of those meanings in mind at once. In this way, ambiguity and even a weird poetry was built into the language from the syntax up.
    An algorithm would only take you so far. An intelligent translator had to figure out the context, apply judgment.
    And if you really wanted to get it right, you had to print the thing out and sniff it. Breathe it in, like a fine wine.
    In this very room was one of the three authentic sceeve “printers” on planet Earth. Another, a reproduction, sat in Leher’s underground apartment near White Rock Lake. Sceeve used a sort of polysaccharide “paper” that was similar to Braille in appearance, but instead of communicating through touch, each of the bumps released a trace odor. It had taken months of work to figure this out—no one had ever seen a sceeve actually reading—but it was now clear that the sceeve read this paper an entire “line” at a time, from the top to the bottom of a page. And they weren’t reading by sight. If they didn’t touch the page and release the odors for smelling, they couldn’t “read” it at all.
    To add to the confusion, the sceeve didn’t share a single “emitted” language. Leher was still trying to piece together how the various language families—there were three main groups—were divided among the sceeve. It had mostly to do with the migration history of the various sceeve clans or “hypha.” Matters were made more confusing by the sceeve ability to understand the various dialects among themselves by making use of their gid , the collective-memory portion of their nervous system, as a translating mechanism. They also used, as did humans, the written word to achieve the same purpose, but of a smell-based variety.
    What the sceeve did share was a common alphabet. In fact, the major branch of sceeve writing was a series of variations on a single family of smells.
    Vanillin.
    Sceeve paper smelled pretty much like a vanilla wafer to the ordinary human nose.
    But oh the richness of that vanilla odor to the trained nose of a Xeno Division creep! Leher was an acknowledged master of the skill within the department itself. The “sniffer’s sniffer.” He’d been a sommelier when he was working his way through law school, and he’d found the task of sniffing sceeve paper similar to a wine tasting. Of course, he’d been a mediocre wine steward at best, but he liked to think he’d developed a much better nose for sceeve writing.
    The documents on Leher’s desk were odiferous reproductions made of the Poet’s beta transmissions. They were transcripts “written out” in sceeve.
    Leher tapped his Pocket Palace, which lay on the desk beside the sceeve documents, and his assistant LOVE’s geist appeared as a small heart-shaped icon to the left of his peripheral vision. Leher was wiied to the Palace, but his salt carried only the minimum charge necessary for him to lay a very basic chroma matte on top of his environment. He didn’t want LOVE to waste valuable computing space appearing in her full geist default mode as a human female, so he normally asked her to assume this minimized form. She’d always seemed happy enough to comply. Like Leher, LOVE was an obsessive when it came to her work. She did the exacting chemical analysis of the sceeve words. He handled the nuance. Leher thought they made a great team.
    Leher took a drink of water, sat still for a moment to clear his palate and his mind, and then formed a “reading blade” with the side of his palm and his outstretched little finger. He ran his hand in this manner over the sceeve text. As he did so, the scratch-and-sniff smell rose to his nostrils and he breathed it in steadily with deep, regular breaths.
    “All right, LOVE, let’s go over the transmission again,” he said.
    As LOVE fed a train of transliteration to him, Leher disappeared into a reverie of smells. Vanilla wafer. Vanilla milk