“Yes,” said the voice.
“The Wall has different effects. It gives us languages, for instance.”
“There is a stimulant field coterminous with the Wall that prepares your brain to accept and produce all the phonemes, morphemes, and memes of all the languages ever spoken within a given wallfold.”
“So the languages are contained in the Wall.”
“Languages can only exist in the human mind.”
Rigg sighed. “This stimulant field that is coterminous with the Wall has enough information about languages spoken within the wallfold that it can prepare any human brain to understand and produce the language as if it were the person’s native language.”
“Yes.”
“Is there any limit to the number of languages a person can know?”
“No.”
“But humans can’t learn that many languages.”
“True,” said the voice.
Rigg wanted to demand the answer to the contradiction, but then he remembered that Father was listening, and he knew that Father would make him figure out a resolution to the contradiction by himself. “So learning a language is harder than knowing one.”
“There is no limit to the number of ways of making language that a human brain can know, but since language acquisition takes time, even for young children, there is a definite limit to the number of languages that can be learned.”
“What about vocabulary? How did I know the words to use when I talked
to those ancient people who were watching the battle outside the city?”
“They were supplied to you by the stimulant field as you needed them, according to the meaning you were attempting to express.”
“This field can read my mind?”
“It evaluates the conversation and makes available to you the full range of vocabulary needed to achieve communication between you and the other person, with words made more available according to their likelihood of being needed for the topic at hand.”
Rigg was fascinated by the idea that an invisible field could anticipate the words he would need. But he must not let himself be distracted by his intense curiosity about these phenomenal machines. Instead, he forced himself to get back to the subject at hand. Whatever that was, or should be—he didn’t even know what it was important for him to think about.
“The humans from Earth. They built this ship, so all these machines and fields and all, they created them.”
“Yes.”
“So how can I guess what they’ve gone on and created in the eleven thousand years since—”
“Ram says to tell you that you’re being stupid.”
“Eleven years, not eleven thousand,” said Rigg, catching his error at once. “This ship arrived here eleven thousand years ago, but it left Earth only eleven years ago. So their technology won’t have advanced all that much over what you have here.”
“That might lead you to false assumptions. They did not supply this ship with all the technology they knew. They equipped us only with the technology that they believed we’d need.”
“So they have machines that you don’t have.”
“Including weapons,” said the voice.
“But why would they think they need weapons if they think we only arrived here eleven years ago?”
“We don’t know whether they were able to detect the temporal displacement,” said the voice. “They might think they’re coming to face a version of humanity that has had more than eleven thousand years of technological development since the two branches diverged.”
“Are they right? Is there any wallfold that maintained this level of technology? Or surpassed it?”