Time was change. The glyphs of the Ambassadors seemed to be constantly changing, except for the spiral symbol that looked like a tornado. So their language had something to do with time.
But was not a written language always about time? A fixing and freezing of a spoken language? In his dream state it occurred to him that he had assumed that the markings and carvings were transcriptions of the alien tongue the twins seemed to share. Their behavior had suggested that they understood each other’s sounds. Because the one was so bizarre, he had made the link to their markings; it was not surprising that a method of transcription would appear alien, too. What had puzzled him was why they needed to write. If no one else could understand their language, what was the point of writing? They could speak to each other.
Looking at these assumptions now, he saw that people often write things down for their private benefit. (He did.) To make things clearer for themselves. To prioritize. To remember. Or for other as yet unknown people to find and read. To teach. What were most books? Messages written in the hope of being found and decoded. Perhaps the brothers were trying to teach people their language, only it was hard to find a suitable student.
Something about ghosts. And time.
In his trance state, Lloyd slipped through the hierograms and the phenomenon of their luminosity for a moment, back to the Martian Ambassadors’ speech and the question of what things would not just look like but sound like outside or in some new relation to time. Yes, there was something about ghosts and time when it came to the twins. And tornadoes—or at least the tornado that they had dropped out of.
He spiraled around and around, trying to cut through the shame and guilt he felt about his actions toward them, to hear their voices again, to visualize the changes he had imagined in their hierograms. Why was it that the one symbol that seemed the most representative of dynamism—the spiral icon—was the one element that he was certain remained constant?
It was not a letter like A or Z. It was not even a unit of meaning, he thought. It was …
It was a kind of system unto itself. A value system for interpreting all the other symbols and their relationship to each other. Was that it?
He could not grasp onto the mechanism. All his young life he had sought out with instinctive acuity the essential elements of machine operations and physical processes. He was a born engineer, with a pathological curiosity. Now he was seeing a whole new world open before his dreaming eyes—the possibility that behind and inherent in language were mechanisms equally as real as the physics of a slingshot or the chemistry of a beer vat, but far more mysterious and perhaps much more powerful.
If one could connect the mechanisms of language with ballistics and pharmacology, optics, harmonics, hydraulics and medicine, mathematics and music. If one could master the secrets of symbols and syphons, surgeries and solar energy. If one knew the exact point where the mind ended and the world began, and could render it …
Who would need projectiles if they had mastered that enigmatic science?
He glimpsed then, for just a flutter, a symbol so potent that it was beyond all representation of other things and ideas, but alive unto itself. Inclusive and yet apart. Because it was the Whole—simultaneously inside and outside itself. Not the word made flesh but the word made time—and the ghosts made flesh.
That was what the spiral of the twins was, perhaps. That was what he had caught a flicker of that night with his beloved Hattie.
A key and a keyhole, too. And if one could pass through the spiral one could look back and see and hear the secret language unified and clear. He fixed his mind on this and sent himself outward, imaginatively trying to enter the spiral, to gain the other side. And then …
Swirling strings and flowering fractals of ideograms and morphemes exploded before his eyes, as if the dusty leather-bound tomes he had pored over in Schelling’s bookshop had opened all at once inside his head. He saw Egyptian hieroglyphs, lush brush-stroked Chinese characters on long, unwinding scrolls. Arabic poems tiled into mosaics. Greek and Hebrew letters hammered in stone. Alchemical and astrological symbols. The tracks of animals in tar pits—the silhouettes of bison and ibex on cave walls—musical notes, tattoos, hand signals, constellations.