From:             paul underhill
To:               marie_evelyn@eng.cam.ac.uk
Subject:          Who are you?
Send reply to:    underhill@unios.un
Date sent:        Sat., 22nd September 20- - -- 11:18:52
Status:           Confidential
Encrypt ion:       XLV-MorseBinary

My dear Marie,

01:00 AM: It's the "end" of my day and I've a little time to spend at the keyboard. I got your 
latest letter and, yes, I can answer some of your questions. Also, Sophie's finally arrived, 
along with the last of her enormous load of equipment. I don't know if you can appreciate 
the logistics involved in getting even one person down here, much less all the computers, 
power-supplies, pre-fab buildings to house the stuff, food, and whatever. There seems to 
be a constant stream of military carriers landing and taking off at the strip, and the weather 
constantly changes from lousy to vile to impossible and back to lousy. Imagine how nasty 
it'd be without global warming!

Well, she's here, and seems to be in good health, and looking younger than I'd expected 
her to, though she has many more grey hairs, and her "witch's streak" is pretty solidly white 
now. She arrived yesterday and I had a chance to chat to her this AM. We spent half an 
hour in the cubby-hole that is supposed to be my "room."  She does (surprise, surprise!!) 
look strained. Cutler's written a memo to the committee that goes straight for the throat, 
calling her entire effort into question. I'll see if I can get a copy of it cleared for you.  I asked 
Sophie about it and she just frowned and said "Fuck him."


When I mentioned you, she became rather shifty and silent. She asked about Charles and I 
told her what you'd written. She changed the subject fairly quickly, and when I tried to drag 
her back, she said that she was too involved in her work to think about "such difficult things" 
now. I left it at that. But just before she returned to the main dome to fiddle with cables and 
dials, she asked me to send her love to you and Charlie. Consider it sent herewith.

What did we talk about? She had quite a lot to say about South Africa, where conditions 
are, perhaps expectedly, much worse than we read about. Cape Town may be beautiful, 
but it is also poor and violent. The deep old traditions of race also seem to continue. 
Depressing. She hardly said a thing about her work, only "You'll see, you'll see." and she 
spent much of the day in a huddle with Carol Staghunter. 

Your questions: 

What do I make of the DT? Well, I can understand why you asked — I've hauled up and 
looked at my last few letters, and I do, as you say, seem a bit like "a man without my own 
opinions". The fact is, I don't really know what I think, or I've been repressing or refusing to 
formulate an opinion of my own. The DT is just that, a Damned Thing. I watch the scurry of 
ideas that it has generated and each one seems so very clever, so carefully argued, that I 
feel "This must be the One!" ... but the next seems just as clever, perhaps even smarter 
than the last. And so on.  I have a love-hate relationship with it. Hate the cold, love the 
excitement, the discussion, the mystery. Love seeing linguists and even poets (like Larry) 
being taken seriously by the UN stuffed shirts. I don't know what, whence, or anything else 
about the DT, I'm not even sure if it's possible to know anything about it.  If that sounds 
opinionless, well then so be it.
 
Good God, it's 03:35 and way past bedtime! Must get some sleep as I want my next watch 
to coincide with Sophie's. 

23rd September, 01:00 AM: Here I am again. 

She has a project: she's going to try to enter into direct communication with the DT. She's 
brought even more equipment than the Staghunter, and they've been setting up and 
calibrating for a while. She can't just leave her computers in place at the Cape Town 
headquarters and hook up to them by the fat-link (that's the tight-beam and fibre-optic 
linkage that connects us to the rest of the world) because of the time delay - she'll be 
operating in real-time. So they've schlepped the boxes (quite small, really) down here and 
are installing and tweaking them. She spent six or seven hours wearing VR goggles and a 
glove, fine-tuning the software environment. Ah, yes... the software environment...  

The shit that old Cutler's been stirring is all about his team's inability to duplicate her results. 
You know how hard it is to understand smart code that someone else's written. Well, it 
seems that, even if they download her virtual reality software complete, it won't run without 
her. I can believe it, but it pisses him off no end. I did manage to persuade the Old Man to 
release a copy of one of Cutler's memos (herewith.) In the wake of Cutler's attack, some 
people (too tedious to say who) are starting to worry that her project may turn out a failure, 
and that they will sink along with the good ship Zaar. The balance is starting to shift, and I 
get the feeling that Altmann is giving her enough rope.... He is certainly placing all his (not at 
all inconsiderable) material clout behind her, but I see him glowering and mumbling, and he 
looks bitterly unhappy. At one stage he strode into the dome, holding some papers in his 
hand. He walked right up to Sophie, stopped about a meter in front of her and leaned 
forward, stared intently into her eyes. Everyone stopped everything and watched, and the 
two of them just stood there for all of what must have been ten or fifteen seconds. Then she 
pulled her goggles over her head and pushed her right hand into the glove and he spun 
and strode out. No words.

Sambodhi has latched onto Sophie and spends a lot of time with her in the canteen. It 
seems he did know her. I can't work out what they're on about. When I tried to join them, the 
old geezer giggled and started a rambling story about the sexual preferences of a certain 
abbot in an obscure valley in some place called La Duck. Sophie just sat there looking 
unfocused and fiddled with her ring, the big amethyst one. Then he turned to me and smiled 
and said "Paul, do you have any idea what this whole effort is costing?" And I said that I did, 
that I handled some of the budgets (which he knows). Anyway, he said "Well, I worked it out 
in various other ways. On a year's budget, let's say that you could feed, house and clothe 
450,000 people for that year. Or that you could go out and buy one really state-of-the-art 
bomber. Just like that, out of the box." I was nonplused. 


You have no idea of how the excitement is building: the idea is that Sophie's actually going 
to TALK to the beast. The dome is now crammed with equipment. I've sketched it roughly 
here though it doesn't give a sense of all the cables and wires, all the ELECTRICITY and 
light going about the place. The floor is raised to cover all the spaghetti, except in the 
middle where the DT seems to just go into or through the ice. I've labeled that area DT's 
Orbit. The grey wart on the upper right is where the power supplies lie buried, and the  
darker box on the right is actually much longer and goes on to our living quarters.  
Tomorrow she'll link herself into the computer environment and, I gather, do something like 
the weird dance that I watched on video. The feeling is something like dress-rehearsal 
night at a major opera house.

Chatted to her again. She spoke of all sorts of things; her life in Cape Town (which she 
loves) the old Cambridge days...    Thinking of you, I asked her what she thought the DT 
might be.  I pressed the record button on my hand-comp, and here's the printout, with all the 
ums and ahs left in. Sambodhi barged in while we were talking, so he's there too. There's a 
bit of what I suspect is Tibetan in the transcript, so I'll have it translated. Click, click, click. 
And  it's whisked around the world faster than Ariel, to KETHER, a smart translation 
package at Berkeley (one of AIN-SOPH's distant cousins.)

 I don't know how the cunning little comp recognised Sam - I've certainly never taught it his 
voice pattern, and it isn't linked to the big machines, to my knowledge. And here's the 
transcript back, with the translation patched in!

Dr. Paul Underhill: Come in?
Prof. S Sambodhi: Hello Paul. Sophia, there you are.
Dr. Paul Underhill: Come in, come in. Sorry it's a bit cramped. Please sit down.
Dr. Sophia Zaar: Paul and I have been talking about the mystery out there in the Dome. Dr. Paul Underhill: Yes, and Sophie was saying that she thinks it's a...
Dr. Sophia Zaar: A language, or the husk of a language. Something like that. What do you think, Sam?
Prof. S Sambodhi: That depends on whom you ask.
Dr. Paul Underhill: Well, you for starters.
Prof. S Sambodhi: And that would depend on which hat I was wearing. At the moment, as you can see, my shiny pate is unclad, so I would agree just a little bit with Sophia. It's a communicative entity. Maybe that makes it a language. Sophia?
Dr. Sophia Zaar: You can't fool me with your long words.
Dr. Paul Underhill: And if I were to ask Your Holiness? Prof. S Sambodhi: Ah. His Holiness. Yes. (pauses 18 seconds)

Prof. S Sambodhi: (continues in English) ... and so on. You wouldn't know what that is. Comes from the Dorje Phurba Yoga. Something I studied between the ages of, let's see... yes, twelve and sixteen. Terrible, when you think of it. I mean the wasted childhood... anyway... ah... the Dorje Phurba. The blood-drinking Dorje Shonnu... (laughs) OK, so His Holiness believes that the DT. is an avatar of Dorje Phurba, or something uncannily similar. "The void-penetrating wisdom of self-arising awareness, the blinding light that stops one from grasping for structure and content." (laughs) Professor Sambodhi, naturally, believes no such thing. He's rather inclined to agree with our Sophia, with maybe a dash of invigorating Cutler just to add spice. Perhaps "Object" is an acceptable term after all... in the Kleinian sense.
Dr. Sophia Zaar: Sam, you're a poly-cultural schizophrenic.
Dr. Paul Underhill: No, wait, I think that's really interesting. Tell me more about this ... dorgy... What does, what does His Holiness think it implies, you know, for the project...
Prof. S Sambodhi: His Holiness, if you really want to know, thinks that the entire project, as you call it, is dangerous, that it's a waste of money and resources on a scale equaled only by the American-Russian Space Programmes of the last century.
Dr. Paul Underhill: But, the importance of the...
Prof. S Sambodhi:(interrupts) And how important is common hunger, Dr. Underhill? How important is your Damned Thing to... to a peasant in North Sikkim?
Dr. Sophia Zaar: Lets just get back to "dangerous".
Prof. S Sambodhi: Well, the Dorje Phurba is a powerful, how to say, an entity, a state. I think your ancestors would have called him a devil. (laughs) But look at your hands, Sophia: restless, restless. To accommodate the energies of such states, the anger, the feelings - ah - one would need a quality of stillness. His holiness doesn't think that you should go ahead at all. Not at all. But I've been through all that.
Dr. Paul Underhill: I'm really fascinated by your esoteric interpretation...
Prof. S Sambodhi: The Dorje Phurba? Yes. You must come to my room some time. I'd be very happy to discourse on these things. Oh, but the reason I came was, ah, Sophia... The Old Man is...
Dr. Sophia Zaar: (interrupts) looking for me. Again. All right, let's go.

---

Now it seems to me that getting that stuff recorded and translated, and sending traces of it 
to you was showing off.

His Holiness Sam whiffed a little of sake, but when he chanted (that's what he was doing in 
the odd bit in the transcription) he sat up straight and his voice changed. It became sort of 
high and low at the same time; it was very eerie and affected me in a way that I can't 
describe.  Christ, look at the time! To bed, to bed! Tomorrow's the big day!  Now I'll send 
this out into space, and down into the cable networks, and all the way to Geraldine at Christ 
in Cambridge, who'll pop it in the post to you, and I hope it finds you well.

With all my Love

Paul

---

Attachments: Memorandum from Prof Ivan Cutler

 

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