We’re sitting in the large room of my suite, which I’m beginning to hate. I had hoped we’d meet the crew of the Dignity Vessel, we’d talk, and we’d all learn something. I’d dreamed that I would be able to convince them to come back to the Nine Planets with us and see the other Dignity Vessels, help us figure out how to use them, and warn the Dignity Vessel crew about the Empire.
Of course, I knew that such a scenario was hopelessly naive, which is why I haven’t admitted it to anyone. But dreams can be such powerful things.
I was excited while we were in that large room, but I’m a bit wary now. Wary and exhausted. It’s clear to me that we have a lot of work ahead, and that work involves painstaking effort on both sides.
It also involves remaining on Vaycehn for several weeks, if not several months.
I have ordered Ilona to look at renting a house or an office for us, to cut down on expenses. She’s doubtful this can happen, simply because the Vaycehnese do not want us to have free rein in their city. No one from our team can get near the death hole site even now, and someone has been following a few of the historians.
We have to watch our step, and we have to be cautious about where and when we discuss the Dignity Vessel. We keep scanning our rooms to make sure no one is recording us here or watching us without our permission.
So far, we have found nothing, and for that, I am profoundly grateful.
I am not, however, grateful for the discussion we’re having over dinner.
The historians, archeologists, and scientists have listened to the recording I brought back of our first meeting. We all agree that the Dignity Vessel’s crew speaks a familiar-sounding language, and everyone has complimented Al-Nasir on his quick thinking below.
But no one knows, exactly, what to do about this language issue. Our scientists want to augment a language program that the Empire uses for strange dialects throughout the sector. Our archeologists want a written version of everything the Dignity Vessel crew says.
Only the historians seem comfortable with the spoken language.
“I’m guessing,” Dana Carmak says as she takes a slice of orange cake from the center of the table, “but I think that they’re speaking a language older than Old Earth Standard.”
She seems excited by this. Her color is up, making her seem abnormally red. Her strawberry curls tumble around her face, longer than they were when we got here, which tells me just how much time we’ve spent on Wyr already.
“How can you know that?” Lucretia Stone asks with more than a little condescension in her voice. “We haven’t seen the language.”
“We see it all the time,” Dana says. “The Dignity Vessels back home have it.”
I’m pleased that she calls our base home. My group has coalesced around that place and wants to return, which is a good thing. Some of my team is still uncomfortable with me, and with the mission. My speech a few days ago didn’t calm everyone. In fact, it made some of the team nervous.
“We have seen Old Earth Standard,” Stone says.
“There are some differences, which we attributed to the way the words were written in the Dignity Vessel,” Carmak says. “But I think now that they’re actually part of the evolution of the language.”
“Do we know the evolution of the language?” Mikk sounds a bit skeptical, although not as contemptuous as Stone. I realize that he’s actually interested, and trying to mask that interest like he always does, pretending to be the muscle instead of one of the brains.
“We know a lot,” Carmak says. “We know that Earth developed a language for diplomacy, but that language was not the main language spoken on the planet. Several other languages thrived there—how many we don’t know.”
She looks at Mikk as if to stave off that question.
“We know that the diplomatic language became the language of space, and eventually, that language became known as Standard. Standard has both evolved and codified. There are a thousand known dialects, some of which are simply older versions of Standard spoken in older parts of the known universe. I suspect if we had a way to get close to Earth we’d find people who would speak easily with the crew of this Dignity Vessel.”
“Supposition is not science,” Stone says.
“I’m not striving for science,” Carmak says. “I’m striving for understanding. The language is close enough that you, Fahd, were able to communicate with that woman.”
“I think I was communicating,” Al-Nasir says. “It felt that way at the time, but I do not know for certain. I worry about that.”
“We do the best we can,” I say, not really caring how the language evolved. “What I want to know is whether or not we can talk to these people.”
“Eventually,” Carmak says.
“How about soon?” I ask. “We don’t want them to leave before we talk to them about their ship.”
And stealth tech, and the room, and the death holes. I have so many questions. The problem is that even if we do have a grasp of the language, it’s the common parts of the language we share. The technical parts—how the machines work, what the black coating is—we might not be able to communicate about for a very long time.
“If you don’t mind,” Carmak says, “I’d like to work with Fahd. He’s got a facility for this language, and he might move quicker than everyone else.”
Meaning me.
“Simultaneous translation is not easy,” I say.
“We might be able to develop a program for that,” Bridge says. He’s been looking at the language, too. “That’ll take a few weeks at best, but it might help.”
“All right,” I say. “Fahd, when you’re not with us in that room, you’ll go with Dana, and the two of you will do your best to understand the language.”
“What about the rest of us?” Stone says. “We have language training.”
“It’s the spoken language I care about, Lucretia,” I say. “You can continue to work on the written language. If nothing else, we’ll write them notes. But it would be better if we can actually talk to them.”
She purses her lips, but it’s clear she understands me.
“Were you able to understand what they said today?” I ask Carmak.
“I think Fahd is right,” Carmak says. “They want to meet tomorrow.”
“Any reason they broke off the discussion today?” I ask. I’ve been thinking about it, and I haven’t come up with a reason.
“It sounded to me like they were confused,” Carmak says. “They kept asking your name.”
I feel my cheeks heat. “We didn’t use my name.”
“That’s the point, and the problem. If they know the word ‘Boss,’ then they’re not sure if the questions were asked and answered right. I think it’s probably best if Fahd is going to deal with them on a personal level. Unless you’re willing to use your real name…”
Carmak let her voice fade down, but I can hear the question in it. I don’t tell people my name, not because I’ve disavowed it, but because it doesn’t have much meaning for me. My parents gave me that name. More specifically, my father gave it to me. Before, I only told a select group of people my name. Now, I don’t bother.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll do my best not to confuse things.”
“I think you should keep getting information from all the equipment,” Stone says to me.
“I think you’re right,” I say. “Let’s hope they don’t take offense at that.”
“You’ll still bring your weapons in, right?” Bernadette Ivy asks. She opted not to return to the Business when no one else decided to go, but she still approaches everything around here with something akin to terror.
“We will,” I say, “but I don’t think the laser pistols will mean much. We saw a lot of people this afternoon, and to my eye, they all looked military. Which means that there are a lot more people on board that ship. We were outnumbered today in that room. We might be outnumbered in actuality by hundreds.”
Everyone stares at me, looking appalled.
The Six, in particular, have stricken looks on their faces.
“What if they decide to take us hostage?” Quinte asks.
“We can’t come in and rescue you,” Roderick says. He looks worried.
“If they take us, they take us,” I say. I have to be honest about this. “We don’t have the numbers to fight back. The rest of you will have to monitor us. If we don’t come out of that room within the scheduled time, then you wait a few days. If you still haven’t heard from us, then you follow the emergency evacuation plan.”
Stone and Mikk look at each other. If something happens to me, there will be a little battle for control of this group.
The rest of the group looks alarmed. I’m going to quell this current panic now.
“I don’t think we have a lot to worry about on that front,” I say. “They could have taken us any time in the previous two missions. Instead, they came out and tried to initiate a dialogue. They’re as curious about us as we are about them.”
“I doubt that,” Kersting says softly.
“If they’re anything like the Dignity Vessels of legend,” I say, “they get to know people before they make decisions about them. They’re trying to get to know us now. We’re not going to make any threatening moves. I suspect we’ll be fine.”
No one speaks for a moment. Then DeVries looks at me.
“Don’t you think something is off here?” he asks softly.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I mean, we’ve always heard about a fleet, but we’ve only found individual ships, and they’ve been old and ruined. Now we have an intact one. Do we even know this is the original crew? Or maybe these people are another group who have hijacked that ship, and don’t know how to work it.”
A chill runs down my back. I’ve been so excited to see a working Dignity Vessel that such a thought has never crossed my mind. And I’m usually enough of a pessimist to see problems like that.
“It’s a possibility,” I say. “But they can clearly operate in a stealth-tech field. So they have the genetic marker, at the very least.”
“Which means what, exactly?” Mikk asks. “Maybe they’re like your father, ruthless in picking their crew members, letting the ones without the marker die.”
“Maybe,” I say, “but I keep coming back to their military precision. Thieves usually don’t have that.”
“Neither do wreck divers,” says Tamaz with a grin.
He doesn’t know how accurate he is. I felt like a bumbling fool when I saw the care the ship’s crew used as they came down the stairs.
“We’ll figure this all out,” I say. “It’ll just take time.”
‘“Time,”‘ DeVries repeats, as if he didn’t want to hear that.
“Let’s just hope,” I say, trying to keep the group calm, “that the crew of that vessel is as patient as we are.”
“Who says we’re patient?” Kersting asks, and everyone laughs.
I laugh, too, but I really don’t find the comment funny. I’m not feeling patient. I’m not feeling patient at all.
~ * ~
CITY OF RUINS
FIFTY-FOUR
It took Perkins nearly two weeks to figure out the outsiders’ language with any kind of precision. During that time, the engineers repaired the anacapa and most of the weapons systems. Other repairs remained, but none to the major systems. Coop sifted through much of the information pulled from the repair room’s equipment, but he didn’t come up with any more information than his team was finding.
He repeatedly had communications contact Venice City, but didn’t get any response. He mapped the underground caverns around the repair room a second time. The entire complex was much bigger than it had been the month before.
And as the remaining sensors came back online, he had his team see what they could find on the surface.
There was a city in the narrow valley, just like there had been for decades. But the city was no longer in the same place. Instead, it was scattered along the mountainside, far away from the city center that Coop had visited several times.
All of these pieces of information didn’t add up to anything coherent, not yet, which made talking to the outsiders all the more imperative.
The number of outsiders never changed, and although Perkins asked the woman what their group was called, she never got an answer she understood.
Perkins was understanding more and more, however, partly because of the outsiders themselves. After a few days, the man showed an increasing ability to speak Perkins’s language. It took Perkins another day or two to understand him because the man mangled every single word he tried to say. It was almost as if he was familiar with the language in its written form, but hadn’t ever spoken it.
At least, that was Perkins’s hypothesis. Coop wasn’t so certain. If the outsiders could read Standard, then how come they hadn’t heeded the warnings written all over the floor in the repair room? How come they seemed surprised when the ship nearly crushed one of them?
Still, Coop wasn’t the linguist, and he had to rely on Perkins’s expertise to figure out what was going on. In less than two weeks, Perkins decided that the language the outsiders spoke was a form of Standard, but so changed by time and distance, as well as influence from other cultures, as to be practically unrecognizable.
The fact that the man could speak her language, though, didn’t bode well, as she told Coop in one of their briefings.
“Sir, I think all of this means that we speak an old and possibly forgotten form of their language. One that is no longer active, but lives only in archives.”
He felt a chill run through him. “How long does it take for a language to change like that?”
She shrugged. “There are instances of that happening within a few hundred years of no contact.”
“But?” he asked.
“But generally, it happens over many centuries. Five, six, seven hundred years or more.”
He stared at her. It was within the realm of possibility. They had gotten the ship to talk with the equipment in the repair room, but hadn’t gleaned any more information about the time factor. Some of the scientific tests had come back that the equipment itself had aged several hundred years, but, as the scientists said, some of that could have been due to the proximity of a working (and possibly malfunctioning) anacapa drive.
“They can’t be from the future of Venice City,” he said. “Their suits aren’t as evolved as ours.”
She shrugged. “They’re from our future somewhere. Somewhere they acquired our language. Then they lost touch with us, and the language changed, as languages do.”
“It’s time for me to talk to them,” he said. “Can you clearly translate for us?”
“If we do it in the Ivoire,” she said. “I need the computer and our linguistic team to back me up.”
He thought about that for a moment. He had always envisioned the meeting to take place inside the repair room. He hadn’t wanted the outsiders in his ship.
But he understood Perkins’s point. And he needed the information now more than he needed to protect the ship’s secrets.
Not that it had a lot of secrets from the outsiders. They had access to similar equipment in the repair room, and they clearly hadn’t understood that.
“All right,” Coop said. “Set up an appointment.”
“Yes, sir,” Perkins said.
“And I don’t want her whole team in here. Bring her and the man who speaks the language into the briefing room. You and I will talk to them.”
“All right, sir,” Perkins said, and looked relieved. Everyone on the Ivoire was nervous. Everyone wanted answers because, as Dix told Coop, they were making up worst-case scenarios the longer this went on.
Coop had been making up a few on his own.
Initially those scenarios had involved being stranded in Sector Base V forever, but now that the Ivoire was getting repaired, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Now he just had to figure out where he would take his crew, and when.
>
And for that, he needed to talk to the outsiders.
~ * ~
FIFTY-FIVE
We have been struggling against the language barrier for more than two weeks. Every day seems the same; we go below, go into the room, and separate. Al-Nasir walks to a small table that the Dignity Vessel crew set up on the second day, sits down, and talks to their lieutenant, doing his best to understand her while she does her best to understand him.
The rest of us scatter and look at the equipment. Only now, we each have someone from the Dignity Vessel shadowing us. They watch what we do, not that we’re doing much. We’re afraid to touch the consoles. We still don’t understand them.
I’ve been going to the console that sits below the image of our science station. I think I’ve got some of these images figured out. The consoles are tied to particular Dignity Vessels, and the vessel that my people are currently working on is intact enough to send this image to the room.
However, the ship isn’t working well enough to appear in the room itself. Or maybe I need to pull a lever or press a screen, which I have not done.
I have spent a lot of time near that console, taking images back to our scientists and engineers on the surface. My people there are working as hard as we are below. They’re trying to decipher the secrets of the language and the secrets of the room, trying to figure out the parts of the conversations that Al-Nasir is having with the lieutenant that he can’t entirely understand. It’s slow going, but Carmak and Stone both assure me he’s picking up the language quickly.
I have walked the length and breadth of the room, startled at its size. The minders have opened the doors in the back for me, and I am stunned by their emptiness. A gigantic room with shelves and storage. Suites of rooms behind another door that might have been quarters or a living space for the ship’s crews. And a door that opens onto what seems like nothing, but looked, after closer investigation, like a blocked tunnel.
I am intrigued and frustrated. I want to learn more, but everything I see raises more questions.
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