Chiang, Ted - 72 Letters

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Seventy-Two Letters

by Ted Chiang

Originally published in Vanishing Acts, ed. Ellen Datlow.

Published in hardcover by Tor Books, July 2000; trade paperback, July 2001.

When he was a child, Robert’s favorite toy was a simple one, a clay doll that could do

nothing but walk forward. While his parents entertained their guests in the garden outside,

discussing Victoria’s ascension to the throne or the Chartist reforms, Robert would follow

the doll as it marched down the corridors of the family home, turning it around corners or

back where it came from. The doll didn’t obey commands or exhibit any sense at all; if it

met a wall, the diminutive clay figure would keep marching until it gradually mashed its

arms and legs into misshapen flippers. Sometimes Robert would let it do that, strictly for

his own amusement. Once the doll’s limbs were thoroughly distorted, he’d pick the toy up

and pull the name out, stopping its motion in mid-stride. Then he’d knead the body back

into a smooth lump, flatten it out into a plank, and cut out a different figure: a body with

one leg crooked, or longer than the other. He would stick the name back into it, and the

doll would promptly topple over and push itself around in a little circle.

It wasn’t the sculpting that Robert enjoyed; it was mapping out the limits of the name. He

liked to see how much variation he could impart to the body before the name could no

longer animate it. To save time with the sculpting, he rarely added decorative details; he

refined the bodies only as was needed to test the name.

Another of his dolls walked on four legs. The body was a nice one, a finely detailed

porcelain horse, but Robert was more interested in experimenting with its name. This name

obeyed commands to start and stop and knew enough to avoid obstacles, and Robert tried

inserting it into bodies of his own making. But this name had more exacting body

requirements, and he was never able to form a clay body it could animate. He formed the

legs separately and then attached them to the body, but he wasn’t able to blend the seams

smooth enough; the name didn’t recognize the body as a single continuous piece.

He scrutinized the names themselves, looking for some simple substitutions that might

distinguish two-leggedness from four- leggedness, or make the body obey simple

commands. But the names looked entirely different; on each scrap of parchment were

inscribed seventy-two tiny Hebrew letters, arranged in twelve rows of six, and so far as he

could tell, the order of the letters was utterly random.

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* * *

Robert Stratton and his fourth form classmates sat quietly as Master Trevelyan paced

between the rows of desks.

"Langdale, what is the doctrine of names?"

"All things are reflections of God, and, um, all--"

"Spare us your bumbling. Thorburn, can you tell us the doctrine of names?"

"As all things are reflections of God, so are all names reflections of the divine name."

"And what is an object’s true name?"

"That name which reflects the divine name in the same manner as the object reflects God."

"And what is the action of a true name?"

"To endow its object with a reflection of divine power."

"Correct. Halliwell, what is the doctrine of signatures?"

The natural philosophy lesson continued until noon, but because it was a Saturday, there

was no instruction for the rest of the day. Master Trevelyan dismissed the class, and the

boys of Cheltenham school dispersed.

After stopping at the dormitory, Robert met his friend Lionel at the border of school

grounds. "So the wait’s over? Today’s the day?" Robert asked.

"I said it was, didn’t I?"

"Let’s go, then." The pair set off to walk the mile and a half to Lionel’s home.

During his first year at Cheltenham, Robert had known Lionel hardly at all; Lionel was one

of the day-boys, and Robert, like all the boarders, regarded them with suspicion. Then,

purely by chance, Robert ran into him while on holiday, during a visit to the British

Museum. Robert loved the Museum: the frail mummies and immense sarcophagi; the

stuffed platypus and pickled mermaid; the wall bristling with elephant tusks and moose

antlers and unicorn horns. That particular day he was at the display of elemental sprites: he

was reading the card explaining the salamander’s absence when he suddenly recognized

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Lionel, standing right next to him, peering at the undine in its jar. Conversation revealed

their shared interest in the sciences, and the two became fast friends.

As they walked down the road, they kicked a large pebble back and forth between them.

Lionel gave the pebble a kick, and laughed as it skittered between Robert’s ankles. "I

couldn’t wait to get out of there," he said. "I think one more doctrine would have been

more than I could bear."

"Why do they even bother calling it natural philosophy?" said Robert. "Just admit it’s

another theology lesson and be done with it." The two of them had recently purchased A

Boy’s Guide to Nomenclature, which informed them that nomenclators no longer spoke in

terms of God or the divine name. Instead, current thinking held that there was a lexical

universe as well as a physical one, and bringing an object together with a compatible name

caused the latent potentialities of both to be realized. Nor was there a single "true name"

for a given object: depending on its precise shape, a body might be compatible with several

names, known as its "euonyms," and conversely a simple name might tolerate significant

variations in body shape, as his childhood marching doll had demonstrated.

When they reached Lionel’s home, they promised the cook they would be in for dinner

shortly and headed to the garden out back. Lionel had converted a tool shed in his family’s

garden into a laboratory, which he used to conduct experiments. Normally Robert came by

on a regular basis, but recently Lionel had been working on an experiment that he was

keeping secret. Only now was he ready to show Robert his results. Lionel had Robert wait

outside while he entered first, and then let him enter.

A long shelf ran along every wall of the shed, crowded with racks of vials, stoppered

bottles of green glass, and assorted rocks and mineral specimens. A table decorated with

stains and scorch marks dominated the cramped space, and it supported the apparatus for

Lionel’s latest experiment: a cucurbit clamped in a stand so that its bottom rested in a basin

full of water, which in turn sat on a tripod above a lit oil lamp. A mercury thermometer

was also fixed in the basin.

"Take a look," said Lionel.

Robert leaned over to inspect the cucurbit’s contents. At first it appeared to be nothing

more than foam, a dollop of suds that might have dripped off a pint of stout. But as he

looked closer, he realized that what he thought were bubbles were actually the interstices

of a glistening latticework. The froth consisted of homunculi: tiny seminal foetuses. Their

bodies were transparent individually, but collectively their bulbous heads and strand-like

limbs adhered to form a pale, dense foam.

"So you wanked off into a jar and kept the spunk warm?" he asked, and Lionel shoved

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him. Robert laughed and raised his hands in a placating gesture. "No, honestly, it’s a

wonder. How’d you do it?"

Mollified, Lionel said, "It’s a real balancing act. You have to keep the temperature just

right, of course, but if you want them to grow, you also have to keep just the right mix of

nutrients. Too thin a mix, and they starve. Too rich, and they get over lively and start

fighting with each other."

"You’re having me on."

"It’s the truth; look it up if you don’t believe me. Battles amongst sperm are what cause

monstrosities to be born. If an injured foetus is the one that makes it to the egg, the baby

that’s born is deformed."

"I thought that was because of a fright the mother had when she was carrying." Robert

could just make out the minuscule squirmings of the individual foetuses. He realized that

the froth was ever so slowly roiling as a result of their collective motions.

"That’s only for some kinds, like ones that are all hairy or covered in blotches. Babies that

don’t have arms or legs, or have misshapen ones, they’re the ones that got caught in a fight

back when they were sperm. That’s why you can’t provide too rich a broth, especially if

they haven’t any place to go: they get in a frenzy. You can lose all of them pretty quick

that way."

"How long can you keep them growing?"

"Probably not much longer," said Lionel. "It’s hard to keep them alive if they haven’t

reached an egg. I read about one in France that was grown till it was the size of a fist, and

they had the best equipment available. I just wanted was to see if I could do it at all."

Robert stared at the foam, remembering the doctrine of preformation that Master

Trevelyan had drilled into them: all living things had been created at the same time, long

ago, and births today were merely enlargements of the previously imperceptible. Although

they appeared newly created, these homunculi were countless years old; for all of human

history they had lain nested within generations of their ancestors, waiting for their turn to

be born.

In fact, it wasn’t just them who had waited; he himself must have done the same thing

prior to his birth. If his father were to do this experiment, the tiny figures Robert saw

would be his unborn brothers and sisters. He knew they were insensible until reaching an

egg, but he wondered what thoughts they’d have if they weren’t. He imagined the

sensation of his body, every bone and organ soft and clear as gelatin, sticking to those of

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myriad identical siblings. What would it be like, looking through transparent eyelids,

realizing the mountain in the distance was actually a person, recognizing it as his brother?

What if he knew he’d become as massive and solid as that colossus, if only he could reach

an egg? It was no wonder they fought.

* * *

Robert Stratton went on to read nomenclature at Cambridge’s Trinity College. There he

studied kabbalistic texts written centuries before, when nomenclators were still called

ba’alei shem and automata were called golem, texts that laid the foundation for the science

of names: the Sefer Yezirah, Eleazar of Worms’ Sodei Razayya, Abulafia’s Hayyei ha-

Olam ha-Ba. Then he studied the alchemical treatises that placed the techniques of

alphabetic manipulation in a broader philosophical and mathematical context: Llull’s Ars

Magna, Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica.

He learned that every name was a combination of several epithets, each designating a

specific trait or capability. Epithets were generated by compiling all the words that

described the desired trait: cognates and etymons, from languages both living and extinct.

By selectively substituting and permuting letters, one could distill from those words their

common essence, which was the epithet for that trait. In certain instances, epithets could be

used as the bases for triangulation, allowing one to derive epithets for traits undescribed in

any language. The entire process relied on intuition as much as formulae; the ability to

choose the best letter permutations was an unteachable skill.

He studied the modern techniques of nominal integration and factorization, the former

being the means by which a set of epithets--pithy and evocative--were commingled into

the seemingly random string of letters that made up a name, the latter by which a name

was decomposed into its constituent epithets. Not every method of integration had a

matching factorization technique: a powerful name might be refactored to yield a set of

epithets different from those used to generate it, and those epithets were often useful for

that reason. Some names resisted refactorization, and nomenclators strove to develop new

techniques to penetrate their secrets.

Nomenclature was undergoing something of a revolution during this time. There had long

been two classes of names: those for animating a body, and those functioning as amulets.

Health amulets were worn as protection from injury or illness, while others rendered a

house resistant to fire or a ship less likely to founder at sea. Of late, however, the

distinction between these categories of names was becoming blurred, with exciting results.

The nascent science of thermodynamics, which established the interconvertibility of heat

and work, had recently explained how automata gained their motive power by absorbing

heat from their surroundings. Using this improved understanding of heat, a Namenmeister

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Chiang, Ted - 72 Letters

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