City of Ruins du-2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  A woman emerges. She holds herself rigidly. She’s wearing an environmental suit without a helmet, but an environmental suit unlike any I’ve ever seen. It’s more like a membrane than a suit, and beneath it, I can see a black uniform—or what I’m imagining to be a black uniform.

  Her gaze meets mine, and she holds it as she comes down those stairs. She’s already figured out that I’m in charge, and she’s coming directly for me.

  “Boss,” Rea says, sounding nervous.

  I signal him to remain quiet with my right hand. In fact, I hope my entire team got that signal. I want to be the one doing the talking here. I should have told them that.

  Behind the woman comes an entire group of people. Men, women of varying heights and appearances. Some are spacer thin, but some aren’t. Some look like they were raised in real gravity.

  I wonder how that’s possible, given what I’ve heard about Dignity Vessels. Then I have to remind myself: everything I’ve heard might be wrong.

  The group lines up in front of us, two deep, with the woman who came first only a few meters from me. She’s taller, and looks stronger. She’s also younger. Her eyes are dark brown, her chin raised slightly.

  Her posture is military.

  Finally, a woman emerges not wearing an environmental suit. She’s wearing a black uniform with gold decorations down the sleeves and along the shoulders. Her hair is red, her skin unlined, her bones large and strong from being raised in gravity.

  The door closes behind her. She’s the one who walks up to me.

  She nods and says something completely incomprehensible.

  I’ve done this a few times before, usually on a space station, usually in a bar where someone else can identify the language and save me from myself.

  But I’m here alone with my team, and all of my people who can understand various languages don’t have the damn genetic marker.

  “I’m the boss of this crew,” I say. “We’re explorers. We didn’t expect to find your ship. Is this your base?”

  The woman tilts her head slightly, and I can tell from the expression in her eyes that she doesn’t understand me any more than I understand her.

  She nods at me, holds up a band as if to say, Let’s try this again, then taps herself. She makes four distinct sounds.

  Then she points to me.

  I don’t say anything, not yet.

  She repeats the gesture and the sounds.

  Her name and/or her rank. Her identification, at any rate.

  I tap myself. “Boss.”

  She repeats that. Then taps herself a third time, and repeats the four sounds.

  I say them. She smiles. Communication of a sort.

  She glances at the rest of my team, then says something very slowly. I don’t understand a word of it, but I make sure I’m recording it all. Maybe someone back at the hotel will understand.

  I shrug, and feel someone near my side.

  Al-Nasir has joined us. I glance at his hands, worried about his laser pistol. It remains in its holster.

  “I think I understand them, Boss,” he says.

  How can he, when I don’t?

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “I had fifteen years of linguistics in school,” he says. “We went backward, looking at the way Standard evolved. I think she’s speaking a variation of it.”

  “Give it a shot,” I say.

  She’s watching us closely, as if she’s trying to understand.

  He nods at her, then extends his hand toward her and repeats those four syllables.

  She nods.

  Then he taps himself and says, “Fahd Al-Nasir.”

  She repeats his name. Then she says very clearly, “Boss,” and I jump.

  “Yes,” I say.

  She looks at me sharply. She seems to understand yes.

  “Yes?” she repeats, but her emphasis is odd.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Good,” Al-Nasir says, but he says it oddly, almost unrecognizably. “You speak Standard.”

  His inflection is weird.

  She frowns at him and says something in return.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “You’ll have to translate for me,” I say.

  “I think she said, You’re speaking Standard?”

  “You think?” I ask.

  “I think,” he says, looking at me.

  She’s watching closely.

  Al-Nasir taps himself again. “I am Fahd Al-Nasir.” Then he puts his hand on my arm. “And she is my boss.”

  The woman’s eyes light up. “Boss,” she says just as clearly. “Title?”

  At least, I think that’s what she says. Al-Nasir seems to understand it that way, too.

  “Yes,” he says, and gives me a sideways glance. He’s not going to explain that it’s also what everyone calls me. Probably too confusing anyway.

  He looks at her, then at the ship. “Are you the boss?”

  “No,” she says.

  Even I understand that. So there’s someone else in charge.

  “May we speak to your boss?” Al-Nasir asks.

  She says something in response. Al-Nasir repeats the question. She slows down what she says. At least, I think it’s the same thing she said. I don’t have a facility with language. Clearly, Al-Nasir does.

  He repeats the question a third time, and this time she says, simply, “No.”

  My heart sinks. “Do they want us to leave?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says testily. “I can barely understand her as it is.”

  “Try this,” I say. “Tell her we’re recording the conversation. Tell her that we’ll find someone to translate her message if she just repeats it a few times.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, “with my magical ability to speak a variation of Standard I’ve never heard before.”

  She’s looking at us.

  I sigh. I hold up my hands and say, “We would like to figure out a way to communicate. Does anyone on your ship speak Standard?”

  She answers me. Al-Nasir says softly, “She says she is speaking Standard.”

  “Let me try again,” I say to her, ignoring Al-Nasir. “Does anyone on the ship speak the version of Standard that I know?”

  “No,” she says. I swear she’s understanding more and more as the conversation goes on.

  “We would like to have some kind of dialogue. Is there a way we can do that?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says. Then she says something else rapidly. I don’t understand any of it. Al-Nasir doesn’t seem to, either.

  She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small device. It looks official. I watch as she clicks it on and off. My heart soars for a moment.

  She’s recording us, too. She’ll work on our language, just like we’ll work on hers.

  She puts the device back in her pocket. Then she reaches toward me, slowly, and carefully takes my hand. On my arm is my wrist guide. She taps it, and says one word slowly.

  Al-Nasir repeats it. It sounds almost familiar.

  She smiles at him. Her smile is lovely. “Yes,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says, and they nod at each other.

  Then she looks at her team, says something in a different tone, and they file back up those stairs into the ship, leaving us standing outside. As the last woman goes inside, the stairs disappear.

  “What was that?” I ask Al-Nasir.

  “I think she wants us back tomorrow at the same time.”

  “You think?” I ask.

  “You saw her,” he snaps. “What do you think?”

  I smile at him. I’m suddenly giddy. We just met people from a Dignity Vessel. In uniform. And they seem official.

  It’s like a dream.

  “What do I think?” I say, grinning like an idiot, glad no one can see it under the mask. “I hope to hell you’re right.”

  ~ * ~

  FIFTY-TWO

  Coop wanted to run to the airlock and find out exactly what had happ
ened, but he knew better. He waited on the bridge and watched the outsiders.

  The woman gazed wistfully at the Ivoire’s door. Then she nodded to her people. She put a hand on the arm of the man who had done much of the speaking and talked to him for a moment.

  The three who had their pistols out holstered them. And then the group headed to the door.

  The woman looked at the consoles, stopped, and held up a hand. She stared at the far console again, the one showing that space station. Coop frowned. She knew something about that, or it disturbed her in some way. Coop couldn’t tell which it was, and he wasn’t going to know, not for a while.

  The others looked at her; she tilted her head slightly, as if she were saying something self-deprecating, and then they left the repair room.

  He wondered if he would have stayed. Would he have investigated those consoles as the woman was clearly tempted to do? Or would he leave, worried about what the people on the ship were thinking?

  He didn’t know, partly because he didn’t know what their mission was. If the outsiders hadn’t known what the room was, or what the ship was, they might have stayed. Or maybe not. Maybe they were worried about a greater force, the clear military bent of the people on the ship.

  “Captain?” Perkins spoke from behind him. “Do you want me to brief the entire bridge crew?”

  Coop turned. A few nanobits glistened in her hair. A few more rested on her sleeves and shoulders.

  “Just me,” he said, and led her into the conference room. He kept the screens off. He pulled out a chair for her, so that she would be comfortable as they spoke, but she didn’t sit down.

  Instead, she paced, filled with an energy he hadn’t seen in her before.

  He didn’t sit, either.

  “I captured a lot of their speech patterns,” she said. “They spoke to each other quite a bit, and I captured that, which is good.”

  Coop had forgotten this about her. Perkins never gave a report in a linear manner.

  “They don’t speak Standard, then,” he said.

  She paused and looked at him. Then she gave him a rueful smile. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. You weren’t listening in. I’m not sure what they speak. It sounded familiar when the woman started talking to us, but I couldn’t understand her. I thought at first that she was speaking Standard, but pronouncing it differently, so differently that I had trouble processing it. Then I realized that the words sounded familiar but weren’t familiar.”

  “Which means what?” Coop asked.

  “Which means they might be speaking a mangled form of Standard or some kind of pidgin language. It might also be a related language with similar sounds. I already have the computer working on it, and I expect to have results before our next meeting with them, which I’m hoping will be tomorrow.”

  “Did you set that up with them?”

  She shrugged. “As best I could. They seemed pretty startled by us. They seemed even more shocked that we had trouble communicating.”

  He wasn’t surprised. He had encountered many different languages on his travels, some of which were so different that it took months to get as far as Perkins had gotten today. Basic introductions were difficult, and from what he saw, she had gotten through those.

  “Did you understand anything they said?” he asked.

  “I think so, but I’m not sure.”

  Coop frowned. She had never given him that response before. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s that soundlike thing I mentioned,” Perkins said. “I gave the woman my name. The woman did the same thing, but I think she gave me her rank.’

  “Which is?”

  “She’s their leader.”

  “That’s clear,” Coop said.

  “But I’m not sure that’s what she said,” Perkins said. “I thought we were doing pretty well. I said my name, she responded with her title, and then I asked her where we were. The man stepped forward and introduced himself.

  “I noticed that,” Coop said.

  “His name sounded very different. She spoke a one-syllable word, short and curt. His name was smooth, filled with ‘ah’ sounds that blended into one another. I couldn’t tell how many syllables he used, and I’m not sure, when I repeated it back, whether or not I said it right.”

  She clasped her hands behind her back and walked alongside the table, talking to herself as much as to him.

  “Names are tricky,” she said. “Because they work off several traditions. Names often have a family history and go through time, all the way back to the beginning of the family. If you do a family tree, you might find that name runs through hundreds of generations. If, of course, you can trace the family back that far.”

  “You think that’s the case with his name?” Coop wasn’t sure how she got that from the short conversation.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Names are the trickiest part of language because names aren’t fixed. You’re the captain. You’re Captain Cooper. You’re Jonathon Cooper. And you’re Coop. You might also be Captain Coop Cooper—”

  “I get your point,” he said dryly.

  “And Coop is a word. Captain is a title, a name, and a rank. Jonathon is one of the oldest names we have, going all the way back to Earth, and Earth documents centuries before space flight use that name.”

  “I see,” he said, trying to move her along. “How is this tied to the woman?”

  “I think the man introduced himself. And then, I think he said ‘she’s our leader.’ But he might also have just given me her name. I don’t know. What I understood is this. Imagine if you were her. You tapped herself, and said ‘Captain.’ I repeated it, not quite understanding, and gave my name. Then the man came over and introduced himself, followed by, ‘And he’s our captain.’ Or he might have said, ‘and he’s captain,’ and that was a name, not a title.”

  “All right.” Coop reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, to calm the pacing. It didn’t work. She didn’t look up. “I want you to consult with Mae.”

  “I plan to,” Perkins said. “I’m going to get as much help on this as possible because so far as I can tell, time is of the essence, right?”

  He looked at her, feeling the irony.

  “Yes,” he said. And considering that she knew that, considering how the meeting went, he asked, “Why did you leave after less than half an hour?”

  First contacts could go as long as six hours, if the linguists and diplomats felt they were making progress.

  Perkins looked at him, a frown creasing her brow. “The name thing. I got so confused that I wasn’t sure what I was doing. If I was truly misunderstanding everything, then I was just making the situation worse.”

  He had never heard her say anything like that before. Perkins had been his most fearless linguist, one Mae worried about because she was afraid that Perkins might inject a misunderstanding into a conversation, due to arrogance.

  “You’re thinking of the Quurzod, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “If someone like Mae can make a mistake that big, one that would lead to them firing on us, imagine what I can do here.”

  Coop shook his head. “What happened with the Quurzod was much more complicated than translations gone wrong. When we get back to the Fleet, I’m going to talk with the command center. I think the Xenth set us up. I think the error occurred long before Mae and her team embedded themselves in that Quurzod village.”

  “But you don’t know, do you, sir?” Perkins said, suddenly sounding formal.

  “I know enough to know that the problem was not with the linguists,” he said. “The problem was with the diplomats. We’re not even to that stage here. I need you to talk with the outsiders. I need you to figure out who the outsiders are.”

  “So we can get back to the Fleet,” Perkins said.

  “So that we can try,” he said.

  He sighed for a moment, thinking of all the difficulties he had left behind. If he never returned to the Fleet, they would move on, and the problems with the Quurzod would evolve in
to a full-scale war, one he could actually prevent. Tiny details, important details.

  He felt a sudden urgency, and then tamped it down. He couldn’t focus on that. He had to think of his own crew, his own timeline, his own future.

  “When do you think I can talk to them?” he asked.

  Perkins looked at him, surprise all over her face. He had never before asked to speak to a first contact before the language issues were sorted out.

  But this wasn’t about the language. It wasn’t even, really, about a proper first contact. If things worked out right, he would never see these people again

  “Sir,” she said, speaking slowly, as if to keep her surprise under control, “this could take weeks.”

  “Not if the language is related.”

  She bit her lip and tilted her head in an acknowledgment that could mean yes or could mean no.

  Finally she said with a firmness she had never used before, “I said I’m guessing.”

  He felt a touch of color warm his cheeks. He had vowed he wasn’t going to let the crew know about his impatience, and then he had revealed it to Perkins. “The sooner we can question them about substantive things, the better off we are.”

  “I know, sir,” she said, “but it’s better to understand them than to guess, don’t you think?”

  He nodded, reluctantly. He wanted that conversation, and he wanted it soon. Just like he wanted the ship repaired. Just like he wanted to know when they were.

  “Good work,” he said to Perkins. “Let me know when you have enough of the language to act as a translator.” “I will, sir,” she said.

  I hope it’s soon, he almost said, but didn’t. I really, really hope it’s soon.

  ~ * ~

  FIFTY-THREE

  We don’t have linguists; we have historians and archeologists, and they have studied languages only so that they can understand the things that they find. I want a linguist, because my historians and archeologists disagree about what they’ve heard.