The Sigman's Significance

So far, Poul Anderson's The Byworlder has been less about human-Sigman interactions and more about human interactions caused by the Sigman's mere presence.

The Theontologists have come to believe that the Sigman, an alien from Sigma Draconis, is "...a direct manifestation of God..." (I, p. 8) They chant, dance, kneel and prostrate when the Sigman's ship rises:

"Hail...Ave...Om..." (ibid.) etc.

The Chinese and Americans try to gain a military advantage from their contacts with the Sigman. As one part of this endeavour, they try to keep the science secret. (Bad idea. Read James Blish's They Shall Have Stars where every new discovery is automatically labelled secret.) The Chinese even try to have the American expert, Yvonne, assassinated. Such short termism! The whole of humanity stands to gain yet their response is try to kill the woman who has made the breakthrough in Sigman communication.

Skip cuts short a just-commenced relationship and travels across the US, seeking contact with the President or someone else highly placed. He has an idea about the Sigman but, in order to do anything about his idea, he must first deal with his fellow human beings. 

In Anderson's "A Chapter of Revelation," there is not an alien visitation but a literal miracle yet still lobbyists and interest groups try to use even a miraculous event not to learn the Message but to push their own preconceived messages. We imagine God asking Himself, "Why do I bother?" But do we agree that this is how humanity would respond to an extra-terrestrial visitation or to a supernatural revelation?

Sigman: Body And Mind

The Byworlder.

I have searched this blog for previous references to the Sigman but do not seem to have referred to one of its most interesting features. Every cell in the Sigman's body makes direct, extremely sensitive, contact with the environment. Air and water pass freely between its moving protective shells. With four stalked eyes and maybe other extensible organs, the Sigman continually experiences the external world with an intensity that would make human experience seem like sensory deprivation. Furthermore, its cells might also carry nerve impulses so that:

"'Maybe the Sigman thinks as well as senses with its entire body.'" (IX, p. 84)

Slower but deeper thoughts based on louder, more colourful, more intense sensations and perceptions? Right.

(I think that one version of the Marvel Comics character, Tony Stark/Iron Man, had a body that was all brain.)

Communicating With The Sigman

Poul Anderson, The Byworlder, IV.

Position, gesture and possibly voluntary odours may be more important than sound;

sounds, from vibrating tympani, are only partly reproducible by a synthesizer;

the language simultaneously uses hundreds of frequencies and amplitudes;

communication may involve many concepts at once or deal with aspects of reality that human beings treat one piece at a time;

the Sigman speaks and possibly thinks more slowly than human beings;

attempts to synthesize his sounds have been annoying or even painful to him;

human drawings and alphabet have been too ugly;

constructing an artificial language manageable and comprehensible by both species failed;

Yvonne uses a computer to devise a language that obeys the harmony rules detectable in the Sigman's speech;

at last, the Sigman responds positively.

Internet And International Stability

The Byworlder.

Chapter II ends when Yvonne passes:

"...inboard to confront the Sigman." (p. 21)

However, when we turn the page, Chapter III returns us to Skip in the Theontologist adobe village back on Earth. Suspense.

Chapter II presented several data of which we will note four. First, every encounter with the Sigman:

"...is fully recorded in every feasible way and put on the open data lines." (p. 15)

Thus, Earth has the Internet in a novel published in 1971. We knew it was coming. My name for it was "Cencom": Central Computer.

Secondly, Americans, Europeans, Russians and Chinese regularly send their representatives to try to converse with the Sigman. The Terrestrial powers are no longer at daggers drawn. There is some global stability and arms control.

Thirdly, Yvonne, American, feels that a pattern is emerging from her contacts with the Sigman. She might be on the verge of a breakthrough. This puts her in the same camp as Skip who thought that he had realized something. No doubt these two characters will come together.

Fourthly:

"Traffic Control's computers steered [Yvonne's] car out of town..." (ibid.)

Standard stuff in an Andersonian future.

POVs And A Realization

The Byworlder.

Chapter I is narrated entirely from the point of view (pov) of Skip and ends when he has an Andersonian moment of realization. A spacecraft from Sigma Draconis is orbiting in the Solar System. Puzzled by the continued failure of scientists and politicians to establish communication with the Sigman, as the single extra-solar alien in the spacecraft is called, Skip speculates about the Sigman's motivations, then suddenly stops speaking:

"'If -'" (p. 14)

His mouth falls open, he drops his fork and yells - all the signs of an Andersonian moment. We know that we will have to wait to learn what his realization is, especially since this is the end of a chapter and the following chapter introduces a new character in a new setting.

I have read The Byworlder at least twice before but cannot remember what Skip's realization is. Is it that the Sigman's motivations might be not scientific but artistic - what with Skip being an artistic kind of guy?

The opening passage of Chapter II begins with the pov of Yvonne Canter:

"...Yvonne Canter reflected." (p. 15)

"That's what they think, Yvonne told herself." (ibid.)

- but inexplicably changes pov:

"Almeida doubted Yvonne had had any bed partner in life except her husband..." (p. 17)

A double space between paragraphs immediately before:

"Almeida studied her." (p. 16)

- should have been used to mark the change of povs.

A double space on p. 17 does mark the return to Yvonne's pov and also a change of scene because she is now in space approaching the Sigman's vessel.

The Sigman

OK. That last post quoted an example of characteristically flamboyant Andersonian characterization from The Long Way Home. Now let's get down with summarizing the description of the physically nauseating alien "Sigman" in Andersion's The Byworlder (London, 1974):

a 3 meter long, 130 centimeter wide, spongy black, flexible ellipsoid, covered by three layers of golden-brown plates independently mounted on muscular stalks, permanently glistening with moisture and excreted slime, occasionally revealing the black inner sponginess when the Sigman stretches;

four legs near the middle, two arms at each end, four claws each surrounded by six tentacle fingers, several tendrils with sensors including four eyes;

no front or back;

claws macerate food, then hold it against the spongy surface of the sheathed arms where digestive juices break it down until it is absorbed up the arms;

a booming voice from vibrating tympani;

many human observers are physically sickened.

Like Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers, a laudable attempt to envisage a non-human alien, although not one that we would like to meet. I have yet to reread far enough to learn anything about Sigman psychology.

The Sigman II

See The Sigman.

Maybe the Sigman does not divide into conscious and unconscious? Maybe he has full self-knowledge and understanding with no conflict between instinct and reason and therefore no inexplicable motivations? No psychological or social alienation? No social class conflict? Full social cooperation and creativity? UnFallen in terms of Christian theology? No greed, hate, delusion or wrong action in Buddhist terminology?

I have just read elsewhere an inspiring passage about inspiration as the creative union of the conscious with the unconscious. Imagine not merely reading about that or experiencing it once in a life-time but all the time. In a comic strip written by Alan Moore, an Olympian deity says that, when human beings make love, there is a moment at the end when they experience life the way gods experience it all the time.

The Sigman's Spaceship

Poul Anderson, The Byworlder, XIII.

The Sigman's spaceship seems to be an organism with its own thermonuclear source of energy and nourishment drawn "...from the gas and stones of space." (p. 150) I think that the intergalactic spaceship in Julian May's Pleiocene Exile was an organism?

Wastes, dropped on the sometimes rippling deck, are absorbed and returned to the ship's internal ecology. The machines that produce food for the Sigman and his human passengers are controlled not by touch but by waving hands in patterns guided by projected, easily read visual displays. The food is possibly assembled from atoms by hydromagnetic fields. With practice, Yvonne develops both known and unknown foods.

Passageways can be made to bulge, forming adjustable rooms where furniture and flower-like decorations can be grown from the decks. The passengers stand in a great sphere that reproduces the external view:

"Stars in their myriads glittered winter-keen, the Milky Way cataracted around heaven, the far small sun burned within a pearly lens of zodiacal light." (p. 151)

They approach Mars.

Grand Tour

In Poul Anderson's The Byworlder (London, 1974), the extra-solar visitor and his three human passengers make an aesthetic (not scientific) Grand Tour of the Solar System. Thus, they experience, first, the alien spaceship which is like:

"...a plant-animal symbiosis, drawing energy from its private thermonuclear sun, nourishment from the gas and stones of space." (pp. 149-150)

The ever-changing interior contains:

rich, strange odours;

complex patterns of resonant, sibilant tones;

 
alternating breezes and calm, dimness and brightness;

rippling, waste-absorbing decks;

 
labyrinthine corridors;

passages expandable as rooms with temporarily grown furniture.

Outside the ship, the travellers see:

the "...hundred different umbers and rust-reds..." of Mars (p. 151);
"Jupiter, imperial world...," described in a poetic paragraph (p. 156);
the "...gigantic rainbows..." of Saturn's rings seen from below (p. 163);
Mercury, "...crags and craters under a black sky...pools of molten metal..." (p. 172);
"Sunward of Mercury...an unutterable white splendour..." (p. 174);
"(...[the Sigman] found Venus as unattractive at close quarters as men did.)" (p. 166)

The Sigmans have neither waged wars nor polluted their environment. The visiting Sigman seems to assume that humanity is as innocent as the few other races with atomic power that it has encountered. Has it found only innocent races because others have destroyed themselves? How will Sigman technology affect human society? I have yet to reread to the end of the novel...

Poul Anderson's Non-Humanoid Aliens

The Reardonite in "the Pirate" in the Psychotechnic History.

Rax in A Circus Of Hells in the Technic History.

The Baburites in "Esau" and Mirkheim in the Technic History.

The Dreamer in "Flight to Forever."

The Sigman in The Byworlder.

Baburites and Sigmans chew food with their claws. Baburites dissolve it in a pouch and suck it through a snout whereas Sigmans ingest it up an arm. Sigmans face both ways and have no front or back. Poul Anderson designed them to be physically disgusting to human beings. Read his description and see what I mean.

Communication with the Sigman failed for three years but then Yvonne made a breakthrough because she realized that human scientists had been synthesizing sounds that were unpleasant or even painful for the Sigman.

Knowledge Of Knowledge Of

"Science" means (Latin) knowledge.
"Theology" means (Greek) knowledge of (Greek) God.
"Scientology" means (Latin) knowledge of (Greek) knowledge!
"Theontology," coined by Poul Anderson in The Byworlder (London, 1974, p. 5), would mean what? (Greek) knowledge of (Latin) knowledge of (Greek) God?

Theontologists seek the divine through diverse sub-cults of Spirits, Jesus, Brahma, Amida Butsu, Snake or Oracle. If I were being brought up in a Theontologist community, then I would want to practice in a Zen cult but otherwise let's just stick with Zen as taught by a Buddhist lineage.

The Byworlder introduces a genuinely non-humanoid extra-solar alien, the Sigman (plural: Sigmans), who has entered Earth orbit after approaching the Solar System in a Bussard ramjet from the direction of Sigma Draconis. An entire page is necessary to describe this creature. The way he moves is fairly sickening and that comes through in the description. The problem of devising a mutually comprehensible pidgin language is also recounted in the necessary detail.

The Chinese rulers who have to cooperate with the Americans and others in communicating with the Sigman are absurdly sure, first, that they represent "the people" and, secondly, that, if they get the chance to tell the alien the facts about American imperialism, then he will support the cause of the people. (Hopefully, he will indeed support the people, not their rulers.)

Terrestrial society has divided into sub-cultures. Our first viewpoint character belongs to a sub-culture that does not settle down and live in a house with a steady job but travels around, for example, by staying as a guest of Theontologists. However, far from being parasitical, he is a migrant worker with an amazing range of practical skills to offer. There is a, to Anderson readers, now familiar moment when, speculating about the Sigman's motives, he realizes something, breaks off with open mouth and yells but does not immediately divulge what he has realized. We have to read on.

The Byworlder, Chapter XII

Suddenly, events move quickly. Skip is on base, learning the results of Sigman studies, and is also being sent into space to learn how to move in free fall, while the FBI checks his background. He is a guest in Colonel Almeida's mountain cabin at weekends. (We expect Poul Anderson's heroes to get into space.)

Yvonne and Skip will be sent to the Sigman ship to try his scheme but what is it exactly - apart from somehow involving art? This is a familiar Andersonian realization but it is taking longer than usual to reveal itself to the reader.

Today, rain has halted our plan to walk in the Lake District so activities will be in and around Lancaster and should include more blogging later.

More Evolutionary Differences

In The Byworlder (London, 1974), Poul Anderson imagines an extra-terrestrial that is genuinely alien, both physically and psychologically. The Sigmans:

"...swam in an ocean of sense data and responded to nuances on almost the molecular level." (p. 161)

A single individual Sigman can make a slower than light interstellar journey and spend years exploring the Solar System because its many interacting subpersonalities are never isolated in the midst of the cosmos. Curiosity, which is thought to have called forth intelligence in human beings, is a lesser motivation for Sigmans because their sensory apparatus already makes them fully open to, and intensely aware of, their environment. However, within this wealth of perception, they might have been driven to find, then make, "...harmonious conditions of life." (ibid.) Harmony is an aesthetic value.

Scientific method has two outcomes: knowledge and elegant resolutions of apparent chaos. Human beings and Sigmans value both of these outcomes but human beings emphasize knowledge where Sigmans emphasize elegance, an aesthetic criterion that prevents them from either waging war or polluting their environment, even when scientific discoveries have made possible potentially destructive technology. Anderson did imagine some man-like aliens but this is not one of them. From cells to soul, Sigmans are dissimilar.

This novel, set in the early twenty first century, was originally serialized in 1971, thirty years before 2001. Yvonne asks Skip:

"'Do you remember the turn of the century?'" (p. 165)

Readers can now answer, "Yes!" However, Yvonne goes on to contrast the optimism of the new millennium with the new hope offered by contact with the Sigman:

"'This is the same. Only it's not a youthful illusion now, it's real. It's forever!'" (p. 166)

Man

Writers can play various tricks with the ambiguities of the word, "man."  Consider the following juxtapositions:

Man and Nature

Man and God

Man and Machine

Man and Woman

Suddenly, "Man" means male human beings, not human beings. 

In Between Time and Timbuktu, Neil Armstrong's first words on the Moon are mercilessly parodied and, as part of this, they are attributed not to Armstrong but to "Man."

Succeeding Superman, several subsequent superheroes were called "-man" or, of course, "Woman." Alan Moore has a character misremember the Flash as "Flashman," who, of course, is the villain of Tom Brown's Schooldays and the central character of sequels by another author. Also in Moore's Watchmen, after the superhero, Ozymandias, has publicly unmasked and revealed his secret identity, a reporter reflects on this revelation by referring to Adrian Veidt as "Ozyman-" but then breaking off mid-word, thus effectively inventing a new superhero name. The superheroes had banded together as "Minutemen," despite the "Watchmen" of the title. (And a later superhero, Doctor Manhattan, had been a watchmaker.) (My emphases.)

All of this is a long-winded way of leading back to the fact that Poul Anderson plays with "-man" in The Byworlder. An alien comes from the direction of Sigma Draconis and therefore is called "the Sigman," plural: "Sigmans," not "Sigmen." Presumably, another Sigman could come and might play a more prominent role on Earth but, whatever s/he did, s/he would not be a man from Sig.

Terrestrial Art

Poul Anderson, The Byworlder, XII, pp. 140-141.

Skip shows the Sigman:

a Mondrian pattern
a Japanese torii gate
Chinese calligraphy
Durer

Michelangelo
Velasquez
Rembrandt
Corot
Motonobu
Lung-Mien
Persian miniatures
Lascaux bison

a Hindu cup
a Grecian vase
a Polynesian war club
an African mask
an Aztec skull carved in crystal
a Russian icon
Nefertiti's head
Aphrodite
Nike
Rodin
Brancusi

Milles
Nielsen
parks
gardens
noble houses
temples
cottages
palaces
bowers
castles
tombs

He had intuited that the Sigman was an artist in search of beauty.

Ahasuerus The Wanderer

The Wandering Jew is mentioned in Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, a novel about immortals. I said here that I knew of three other fictional references to this legendary figure, one in sf and two in comics. In fact, as David Birr commented, there is a further reference in another work by Anderson:

"...the humans took to calling the Sigman Ahasuerus."
-Poul Anderson, The Byworlder, XIII, p. 154.

They do not know whether the Sigmans attach a sound to an individual. Yvonne guesses that instead they reproduce an entire identity "'...in a cluster of symbolic acts...'" (p. 155) However:

"...Ahasuerus the Wanderer quickly learned to utter a special sound that meant a particular guest." (ibid.)

Communication has been established. The Sigman came to learn about art but does he come to understand the significance of the name that his passengers have bestowed on him?

For other blog references to the Wandering Jew, see here (scroll down).

Three Future Histories, Another Action Scene And Self-Driving Cars

Later in the evening, I turn to non-Andersonian reading or rereading but find it difficult to keep focused on Frank Herbert's Children of Dune. Herbert either is unaware of or just ignores the need to control narrative points of view. His characters connive for power and influence in an interstellar empire without conveying any sense of life in that empire. By contrast, we do receive some impression of how people live on Hermes, Dennitza, Imhotep, Daedalus and, to a lesser extent, Terra in Poul Anderson's Technic History. The Technic History gives us everything that Foundation and Dune should have given us but it has not yet been filmed.

Meanwhile, rereading Anderson's The Byworlder, there is a second action scene. This time, Yvonne is kidnapped and Skip goes to extraordinary lengths to assist the FBI's rescue job. As I said before, what we have had so far is mostly not human-Sigman interactions but human interactions caused by the Sigman's presence.

The cars in this fictional future are not aircars as we have come to expect but are self-driving. In Yvonne's car:

"...the pilot opened fuel cells to maximum..." (II, p.15)

"...pilot..." makes us think of aircraft but here it means the gadget driving the car.

"Pilot set, the car hummed into motion." (X, p. 99)

"An auto purred by. Skip shouted and waved. The man inside was watching television and didn't notice." (XI, p. 102)

Watching television? Sure. The car is a self-mover, a true auto-mobile.

The End

We approach the end of this month and also the end of Poul Anderson's The Byworlder. I do not remember how this narrative ends but have gathered the gist of it by rereading earlier blog posts. We will reread to the very end on May Day.

Morals? Human conflict continues and remains extremely destructive even when humanity is offered extra-solar beauty and knowledge. I would say, "knowledge and beauty," but the Sigman's priorities are the reverse. Skip and Yvonne are Americans. Should their country gain the superior technology from Sigma Draconis? Would Americans be more trustworthy with it than the Chinese? It is easy to say, "Yes." Trustworthy to whom? Would the Americans use superior technology not in their own strategic, economic and military interests but purely in the widest possible interests of everyone on Earth? How many Americans will respond, "Why should they?"

In Poul Anderson's universe of discourse, important decisions are made not by states but by individuals so what will Skip and Yvonne decide to do with the spaceship that they have inherited from the Sigman?

Skip And Yvonne?

The Byworlder.

The Tuatha de Danaan Keeper caravan are restoring the land around Lake Tahoe, distributing soil,  planting trees and bushes and reintroducing wildlife, as well as decontaminating the Lake itself. (III, p. 27) The windows of the chief's headquarters shack are "...filled with a mountain." (VII, p. 64) and:

"A breeze gusted through, bearing odors of pine, noises of machinery." (ibid.)

Three senses: the view through the window, odours and noises. The odours remind us of the natural environment that is being restored while the noises remind us of the work that is being done to restore it. Succinct.

Chief Keogh is trying to arrange for Skip to meet Dr. Yvonne Canter. Her idea about communication with the Sigman apparently ties in with Skip's. Plot lines converge as they were going to have to. Will Skip leave Earth and meet the Sigman? I do not remember exactly.

The Sigman

Poul Anderson, The Byworlder, IX, pp. 98-100.

Permeable cells absorb air and vapor and directly excrete wastes. Claws break down solid food so that the juices can seep up the arms. The unspecialized cells might also carry nerve impulses. The Sigman might not only sense but also think with its entire body. With slower thoughts but enormous sensory input, it might also think more profoundly than human beings. We are quicker but shallower whereas:

"'...it's ponderous but profound.'" (p. 100)

Anderson has imagined not only a different shape of body but also a different chemistry and biology generating a different kind of intelligence and mentality.

Rereading, I have encountered passages discussed five years ago:

Mural
Maury Station