by John Pelan
“Sanskrit?” I guessed.
She wrinkled her nose. “Nothing so passé, Claire. It's in Brahmi script, phonetic, with an interlinear for you. I need you to translate it.”
This was a new one on me. “Why me? You know I don't do Dravidian.” Her shoulders dropped, and she looked disappointed. She'd played this game with me before—most of the department had. She knew perfectly well what I was working on. In academia, you keep tabs on your neighbors, so that when the tenure-track appointments come available, you're ready to snap them up. That was probably why I was still just an instructor, with no real way to say no to Latour, the department head.
Not Aryan and not Dravidian. “Tocharian'”
This time she smiled. Patronizing, or pity? Probably both. “Ooh, closer,” she said. “Same area, the Taklimakan desert. I'm sure it predates the Aryan invaders, though. Bill Pinckney transcribed the syllables into IPA when I gave it to him a few months ago. He only just now got it back to me.” She flicked a glance across the hallway to Bill's office door, which was covered in clippings from The Nation and the limes Literary Supplement. “He swears he doesn't recognize the language, though he says the phoneme set is right for Tocharian. But you can decode it, right? With your computers?”
I sighed and pushed the folder back. “Jane, you need a cryp-tologist. I can give you a syntactic pattern analysis, if there's enough material for Alex P. to sort through. But Bill's our expert in Proto-Indo-European derivative languages, and if he couldn't parse it out…”
That sweet smile came back. “Maybe }our theory needs room for different ways of knowing, Claire.”
That's what she was up to.
I shoved my chair back, stood up, and picked up the folder. “Don't give me this postmodernist crap again, Jane,” I snapped, and held it out to her. “You can't conclude that just because our so-called poor benighted Western civilization doesn't have an immediate answer to every mystery, it's incapable of finding an answer at all. If human beings spoke the language, then as long as we find enough evidence, we can figure it out. Period. We may not know where Basque came from, or Finnish, but that doesn't mean they operate on a completely hypothetical system of logic.” I shook the folder toward her again. She didn't take it.
“Two theories. Both unproven.” She looked down, brushed at a fold in her skirt, then glanced up at me. “I'm just looking for evidence to fit mine.'
“But that's not the way to—”
“Thanks so much, Claire!” she announced before I had a chance to go on. “I really appreciate your input on this, however it turns out. Gotta go, though! Keep me posted!” She turned and walked away. I was left holding the folder.
Goddamn her.
I plopped back into my chair, sending it rolling backward, and ran straight into a box of audiocassettes, which fell over.
“Shit,” I said, and spiked the folder onto the floor. Pages spilled out across the carpet, along with a floppy disc.
I was beyond caring.
She had me over a barrel. On the one hand, if I couldn't translate the language, she'd hold it up as “evidence of a thought system unfettered by our binary-logic constraints.” And on the other, if I could, she'd doubtless find some passages to take out of context, explain as “holistic hermeneutics” (whatever that meant) in practice, and thereby skew the mind-set of everyone who read her v/ork thereafter. Either way, it meant a lot of work for me, and not toward anything I'd take any pride in having my name on. Computational linguists look at watertight reasoning as a mark of prestige, and having my name associated with an essay that spat in the face of formal logic could be a black mark on my career for years. I didn't have many papers published yet, and I knew Jane would take a perverse pleasure in giving me contribution credit on an article that would do nothing but discredit me in the eyes of the rest of my field. I didn't want to give her any grist for the mill but still, I didn't want to wimp out on the challenge, either.
About the only scrap of silver lining was that this would be perfect for testing Alex P.'s capabilities. I had designed it—the Advanced Lexical Processor—in lieu of a doctoral dissertation, testing the program using reams of data from generative and computational linguists. After three years of work, I had a piece of software that could analyze a passage from virtually any language in the world's major language families, identify its formal characteristics, determine the language of origin—and provide a detailed diagram of the passage, just by analyzing the ordering patterns of sounds, words, and parts of words. If all the vowels were nasalized, there was a good bel it was French; if most sentences placed a verb-inflected word at the end, chances were it was German; and so on. With about 92 percent accuracy. Maybe it wasn't the same thing as a program that could really comprehend human language, but it certainly looked like it so far. Still, all we had comprehensive data for was the Indo-European family. So if the language of the Pnakotic Manuscripts belonged to the Semitic family, or Sino-Japanese, or one of the dozen other families for which I only had partial analyses, it would be a crapshoot.
Hell, it was a crapshoot anyway. But the program might pinpoint a language for which I could track down a human translator. A reliable translator.
I swiveled my chair around to face the workstation kitty-corner to my desk, shuffled the printouts sitting on top of the keyboard into a more or less coherent stack, and added them to the stack already on top of the monitor. While it powered up, I chased down the disc that had fallen out of the folder and slipped it halfway into the floppy drive. The screen read:
DEC/Alpha Personal Workstation 500au
Digital UNIX rev4.0d
Copyright 1984-2000. All rights reserved.
#/alexp/>
I pushed the disc the rest of the way into the drive and hoped I wouldn't have to scan the entire document into a format that Alex P. could use.
#/alexp/> chdir floppy
#/alexp/floppy/> Is
Path: /alexp/floppy/
[.] [..] pnakotic.txt
799048 bytes free.
#/alexp/floppy/> vi pnakotic.txt
Score! Bill had done me a hell of a favor by translating the original phonetic script into the International Phonetic Alphabet, then copying the IPA material into a plain-text file. That was all Alex P. needed to begin tagging the Manuscripts into a file that it (or any other corpus-analysis program) could use to look for phonetic and morphological patterns. I closed the editor and exited back into the shell.
#/alexp/floppy/> chdir.
#/alexp/> ./alexp/process /floppy/pnakotic.txt
Advanced LEXical Processor vO.87a
Reading into memory… All text read.
Option?
I set it to perform as exhaustive an analysis as it could, marking recurring words and morphemes and attempting to identify any basic syntactic patterns. With 700 kilobytes of raw ASCII to work on, though, that would take a while —overnight, at least, even on a high-efficiency UNIX machine.
It occurred to me that we probably weren't the first to have run across this manuscript. I might not havs kept the closest eye on Jane's world-traveling, but I'd think the department would have made a bigger deal about it if she'd discovered an entirely new language artifact all by herself. If it had come from somewhere else, there had to be some previous information on it—journal articles, an announcement in one of the archaeology trade rags, the name of the discoverer, anything. Maybe someone who wanted to see the Manuscripts translated for their own sake, rather than to make some pseudophilosophical point.
So, off to the library it was. I rummaged briefly through the papers on the floor to find the first few pages of the Manuscripts, in case I needed to compare them to something from an article, and headed out.
It was about three in the afternoon when left the building. Outside it was hot and damp, the kind of sticky-humid that makes you feel like you're being squeezed dry to make the air even wetter. I could have gone straight to my car across the humanities quad, if I'd really wanted the air-conditi
oning, but I figured it'd be better not to lose my parking space. Instead I took the shadiest route I could find, under the cypress trees that grow in front of the steam tunnels in the little park next to the overhangs of the administration building. It was even wetter there, thanks to the fountains that fed into the sc reened-off tunnel openings, but green and cool. The mockingbirds that frequent the area have sounded like car alarms for as long as I could remember, but I noticed they were making a different call now.
It sounded a little like meep!
It's true what they say about libraries: You really can find everything you need if you look long enough. Sometimes “long enough” is as short as fifteen minutes. I didn't even have to check in Archived Journals to find a decent body of research on the Manuscripts, already in book form.
So much for revolutionary new discoveries.
A catalog search across the Georgia Library Exchange turned up four texts: one published in 1895, another in 1922, followed by a 1931 monograph and the most recent work in 1958. Only the 1922 edition was in our catalog, so I copied the titles of the others onto the back of the first page of the Manuscripts, filled out an interlibrary loan form at the circulation desk, and joined a crowd of students waiting for the elevator up to the humanities wing.
Once it arrived, we all squeezed in. Buttons lit up for every floor—not surprising—and I stayed wedged at the back, picking at the splintering fake-wood panels on the elevator wall, as the car creaked its way up all five stories. Finally it let the last of us out, and I headed for the stacks.
The book wasn't too hard to find. In a larger library, a tiny— almost paperback-sized—blue cloth-covered volume might have disappeared on the shelves, but here it stuck out in contrast to the glossy folio editions of Poststructuralism Today. I pulled it off the shelf and looked at the cover. The gold leaf was almost entirely chipped away, but I could still make out the title: The Pnakotic Manuscripts: A New Revised Study. I flipped it open, skimmed the table of contents, and checked out the introduction:
In the analyses of our collective mother-tongue, undertaken by notables such as Drs. Berthold Delbriick and Karl Brugmann, much attention has been given to the idioms of western Asia, namely the languages of India and its environs; but little study has been devoted to dialec:s native to farther Eastern climes. One such language, records of which are preserved on wood-and-palm-leaf tablets known as the Pnakotic Manuscripts, had been the object of extensive studies by Dr. J. T. Schwarzwalder, who in 189 5 compiled his Analysis of the Manuscript of the Pnakotoi. As I shall demonstrate, however, his characterization of the Manuscripts' language as an offshoot of Greek proves highly inadequate.…
In other words, it was a response. Not the sort of thing I wanted to start out with; it wasn't much good to me unless I had the original book for comparison. So I wasn't going to get a whole lot done today.
Before I closed the book, I flipped to the very back to check the withdrawal record. The little paper pocket was there, dingy and worn like the book itself. So was the withdrawal record. It had never been stamped.
So much for academic rigor, too.
I took the stairs down this time, checked I he book out at circulation, and went home early.
The sun is almost all the way down and I'm drenched with sweat from having walked so far. My parents are going to have my head for this, whether they believe I missed the bus or not. I could just kill }immy Esterhaus.
One more block to home, and then I can at least sit down. The streetlamps are coming on, turning the road and sidewalk hazy orange. Up the front walk of one of the houses, a pool of yellow light spills into the half-darkness: Somebody's front door is open.
My front door is open. And my parents are standing there waiting for me. With someone behind them.
“Where've you been, Claire?” my mother demands, arms crossed over her chest, as I blunder into the yard. This backpack is killing me. “Rebecca says she saw you go off with James Ester-haus this afternoon after school.”
Is that Jimmy in the front hallway, then? I can't see. “We didn't do anything!” I shout, jockeying with the straps of my bag to lift some of the pressure off my shoulders. “Jimmy came up to me at the bus stop and said there was something he had to talk to me about, but not in front of anyone, I don't know why. So he made me follow him out behind the gym, and he just stood there stuttering for, like, fifteen minutes, until he finally asked me if I wanted to go to some stupid homecoming dance with him. And I said I'd think about it 'cuz I knew I had to get to the bus, but when I got back it had already been and gone. None of the teachers would let me use the phone or anything, so I had to walk. But we didn't do anything!”
“Why not?” asks my dad, his thumbs hooked through his belt-loops. Is he kidding? He must be.
He's not smiling, though.
“We're worried about you, Claire,” my dad goes on. My back hurts so much. I don't want to be standing here any more. “It's not like a healthy teenage girl to be alone all the time. Rebecca's three years younger than you are and she's never had this sort of problem.” It's not her back there, is it?
“What are you talking about? I don't think Rebecca wants to sit at a lunch table all night watching all the other kids dance country-western while Jimmy Esterhaus talks about Star Trek, either.”
“Oh, Claire,” sighs my mother. “All we want is for you to have a normal, happy life. Would that really be so bad?”
“Mama, I'm tired. And I have a paper due next week. Can I please just come inside?”
She steps to one side, and for a moment there's that figure again, but it moves off behind her, and I can't make it out. But I take the opening and stumble up the front steps and through the door, sweat dripping into my eyes so I can barely see. My mother stops me in the foyer and rests a hand on my shoulder while I blink the salt away. “There'll be plenty of time for that,” I hear her say, sweet and reassuring. “But we've got a visitor here for you. Your dad was over reviewing Chief Harland s life-insurance policy this afternoon, and they thought it'd be so nice if you and Richard were to spend some time together. …”
I shake my head fast and my vision clears up. Richard Harland? Starting lineman Richard Harland, the guy who's taken out every dancer on the drill team—with all those things written about him on the girls' bathroom wall—is standing just behind my mother. And staring at her butt. Then he glances over at me with a weird sort of smile on his face, just as my mother says, “Why don't you take him up to your room while I get dinner ready?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Mom?” I start to backpedal, but her hand closes on the strap of my backpack. Fine. I shrug the damn thing off and let it fall, ducking forward past her and Richard Harland while she fights with my ton of books. Serves her right—he's the last kind of guy I'd want to hang around with.
An idea pops into my head: Find the basement. Let 'em all act nuts somewhere else. So I dash past the staircase and around to the other side, yank open the door beneath the second-floor stairs, and barrel down the wooden basement steps as fast as I can.
Sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy steps to the bottom—and this is definitely not my basement. Even before I leach the ground, I realize that, even if these are my family's old moving boxes and our gardening equipment, the walls are wrong: that greeny-gray rock (again?).
The moment I set foot on the floor, the furnace erupts into a giant pillar of orange flame. I flinch back against the wall, wrapping my arms around my head, and it takes me a second to realize that there's no heat.
“K'neseshti, kulayr,” says a voice—a voice I know.
I peer out from between my crossed arms. Two robed and bearded men stand to either side of a column of flame. The rest of the floor is empty now.
“Who are you?” I ask, glancing back at the stairs, which are now made of marble. “What's going on?”
One of the men spreads his hands, palms up. In every language I've ever heard of that means Don't ask me.
“Who are you? Can y
ou understand what I'm saying?” There's got to be a way to communicate with them. Sign language? Helpless, I gesture at myself, then back up the stairs, and look around and shrug my shoulders. Where am I? How did I get here?
A sorrowful look passes over the face of the one whose hands are open, and he opens his mouth as if to speak, but the other hisses“Nasht!” and glares at him. Then he turns, regards me for a long scornful moment, and waves a hand.
And then I woke up. Again.
Lucky for me, it was Friday, so I only had an early-morning intro linguistics lecture to give. I'd woken up from that weird dream around four-thirty A.M., then just stayed up and read a little more of The Pnakotic Manuscripts: A New Revised Study until it was time to shower and get ready for work. I purposely got to campus early, so I could drop by my office to find out what kind of headway Alex P. had made.
The hard drive was chattering away when I opened the door, so I turned on the monitor to see what was up. According to the progress bar on the bottom of the screen, it was only 67 percent done. That struck me as more than a little weird. It had had over eighteen hours to work on the problem already, on a powerful UNIX machine with nothing else running to eat up CPU cycles, and it was still only two-mirds of the way through? If this had been a language Alex P. had the rules for, a tagging operation for a file that size should have taken maybe ninety minutes at the outside. Even an unfamiliar language shouldn't have needed more than four or five hours; there are only so many ordering patterns a human knguage can take. Once Alex P. had figured out which pattern the Pnakotic Manuscripts followed, it should have been able to apply the rule set relatively quickly.
All things considered, it looked like I had a lot more programming to do before I could even think about taking Alex P. into beta-testing.
I switched the monitor back off, then cleared some student exams off the extra chair beside my desk so I could set my briefcase down. I rifled around in it for a while, looking for the papers I needed to hand back to my intro students, then realized I hadn't graded them yet. Damn Jane and her stupid agenda. At this rate, neither my undergrads nor I were going to learn anything this semester.
