Lost In Translation

by Edward Willett

  “Translations have been canceled for less.”

  “But not this one?”

  “Of course not.” Though it would serve that arrogant S’sinn female right. Unfortunately, far more was at stake here than just some minnow-sized trade deal. Negotiations had to go ahead. As Akkanndikk, of course, had known. “You did well, Jarrikk,” Karak said, and meant it; the young S’sinn had kept his head and the honor of the Guild and not retreated to his species’ usual near-superstitious reverence of the Supreme Flight Leader. Although it sounded like Kitillikk certainly didn’t reverence her, come to think of it. Perhaps attitudes had changed since Karak had last Translated with a S’sinn. They had been very new to the Commonwealth all those decades ago . . .

  Maybe Kitillikk’s right, he thought. The Commonwealth is corrupting the S’sinn. They’re learning politics.

  Jarrikk still watched him. “Thank you for your report, Translator,” Karak said. “Nothing has changed. Translation proceeds as planned tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Guildmaster.” Jarrikk’s image vanished.

  Whereupon Karak immediately turned to another long-established dimspace communication link, and waited impatiently for a response. Impatience did no good; Karak thought he could have swum to Ithkar and back before his call was accepted, and the screen finally blinked, then filled with the grizzled muzzle of a S’sinn Jarrikk would have recognized at once, having just faced her in her own hall: Supreme Flight Leader Akkanndikk.

  The long delay in contacting her had served one useful purpose: Karak, with a day-tenth’s worth of deep-water meditation, had regained his usual level of calm. “I do not understand what you hoped to gain by calling Jarrikk to you,” he said. “You could have upset his mental balance to the point where he would be useless. And there is no backup plan, should this one fail.”

  “I was willing to accept your judgment concerning the human,” Akkanndikk said, “but not concerning one of my people.”

  “I have been S’sinn,” Karak said. “And human, and Orrisian, and all the other races. That’s what it means to be a Translator.”

  “Perhaps. I confess I do not fully understand what that means. But whether you have been S’sinn or not, you are not S’sinn now. More particularly, you are not Supreme Flight Leader of the S’sinn, chosen by the Hunter of Worlds to guide and protect the People. I had to judge Jarrikk myself.”

  “Even if it meant risking everything.”

  “Not making that judgment would have been just as great a risk.”

  Karak understood her point of view. Understanding alien points of view was also what it meant to be a Translator. That didn’t mean he had to like them. “I wish you had consulted me first.”

  “It was not a matter for offworlders.”

  Karak relinquished the argument. He’d never change the mind of a stubborn old predator like Akkanndikk with mere words. “What’s done is done. In any event, I understand you confirmed my judgment.”

  “Jarrikk is suitable,” Akkanndikk said. “I trust him.”

  “Then everything is ready.”

  “The humans are here. The Great Hall is prepared.”

  Karak wove his upper manipulators into the sign for completion—not that Akkanndikk would know that. “Then it is in the tentacles of the Great Swimmer.”

  “The Hunter of Worlds holds all in His claws,” Akkanndikk replied, and cut the connection.

  “Not a very comforting image,” Karak murmured, and swam away.

  Chapter 10

  And so, the next day, they came together: Translator Kathryn Bircher of Earth and Translator Jarrikk of the S’sinn. Before the dais in the Great Hall of the Flock, before the Supreme Flight Leader, as Matthews and Kitillikk and a thousand S’sinn looked on, they Linked, souls and memories bared to each other in the blink of an eye, their doubts overcome and absorbed. Together they fought their way back to selfhood, turned outward, and stood back to back as one unit, Kathryn/Jarrikk, facing their respective delegates.

  “Begin,” they said in unison.

  Akkanndikk, as host of the conference, spoke first. She reeled off a long list of grievances dating back to the war. Kathryn saw, heard, and understood through Jarrikk’s eyes and ears, and faced the humans with a sneer in her voice and a challenge in her stance, the closest human equivalents to the haughty contempt of the S’sinn leader.

  Matthews responded with his own list, from the original S’sinn attack on the human colony on Kikks‘sarr—no mention of Jarrikk’s murdered flightmates—to “this most recent outrage of landing colonists on a world already inhabited by humans”—no mention that the two colonization attempts occurred simultaneously.

  Charge and counter-charge flew, perfectly communicated by Kathryn and Jarrikk. Locked in the unity of Translation, they felt no emotion of their own. All that changed when, four hours after Translation began, the timed-release antidote to the Programming kicked in and severed the Link.

  Both of them staggered a little, feeling for a moment as if half of themselves had suddenly died. Kathryn took a deep breath, pulled the Link free, and stopped Matthews in mid-speech. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ambassador, but this session is ended.”

  Matthews glared at her, glared at the S’sinn, then bowed stiffly, gathered his papers, and led his aides off the platform and out of the hall, footsteps clattering. Akkanndikk and her Left and Right Wing stalked off in the other direction, showing their contempt by staying on the ground, although Kathryn knew Matthews would never understand that unless she told him. Since she knew from Jarrikk’s memories that Akkanndikk’s contempt was mostly feigned for domestic consumption, she wouldn’t tell him. She shivered, chilled through and bone-weary, and rubbed her throbbing temples. “I love being a Translator,” she muttered.

  Jarrikk cocked his head at her. She felt his own weariness and a concern that warmed her. “Sleep well, friend,” she said in Guildtalk. “Until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” he replied. “Fly safely in this night’s dreams.” He closed and locked his case and trudged after his Supreme Flight Leader—but Kathryn knew that he stayed on the ground not from contempt, but because of that tragic childhood contact with humans.

  She picked up her own case and turned to go; then stopped, feeling the red gaze of the hundreds of watching S’sinn and the weight of their massed emotions. Instinct urged her to run for the distant exit, but mindful of the Guild’s reputation, she walked slowly and deliberately across the space-black floor.

  “Translator,” Matthews greeted her coldly when she entered the windowless human quarters. Another deliberate insult, implying they were prisoners or animals; another bit of information she wouldn’t tell Matthews. Her duty was to Translate and provide any other assistance she could toward the success of the negotiations; telling Matthews the S’sinn were insulting him didn’t seem likely to be helpful.

  Of course, that didn’t stop him from insulting her, in his own oblique fashion. “I see I needed to have no fear about the veracity of your Translation; it seemed obvious enough that you had great sympathy for the S’sinn point of view. No doubt you’ve learned to look at the issue from both sides in that alien-run Guildhall of yours.”

  Kathryn sighed. He wasn’t the first client to mistake accurate Translation for some bias on the part of the Translator. She’d been taught that such confusion was the sign of excellent Translation. She didn’t feel like explaining that to Matthews. So what if he thought of her as a traitor? She thought of him as an idiot. “I have indeed, Ambassador. A trait I’ve always assumed would also be useful in a diplomat. Perhaps I was wrong.” She smiled inwardly at the flash of outrage that elicited; she would have smiled more if it had also raised at least a tinge of guilt. “I believe I’ll retire to my room for the rest of the evening. If you could see that supper is delivered there . . . ?”

  “Of course, Translator,” Matthews said in his most formal voice. “No doubt you will sleep well after this day’s work.”

  “No doubt I will, Ambassador. Until tom
orrow, then.”

  “Good night.”

  Supper, provided by the S’sinn, proved palatable enough: a kind of thick meaty stew and odd vegetables which combined the texture of packing foam with a strong, yeasty taste. Kathryn downed every bite, “eating for two,” as the joke among the human Translators went; the symbiote, too, required nourishment.

  But when she settled into bed, sleep eluded her; her mind kept running over what she had seen in Jarrikk’s memories. He had as much reason to hate humans as she had to hate the S’sinn. Today both had Linked, for the first time, with the creatures of their nightmares, and overcome those nightmares to work together: proof, if only those they were Translating for could see it, that humans and S’sinn need not be enemies.

  But the blind fools couldn’t see it, or didn’t want to. To most of the S’sinn, like Jarrikk’s old Flight Leader Kitillikk, the humans were brutal child-killers, and to most of humanity, like Matthews, the S’sinn were hideous batlike monsters, and neither could wait to rid the galaxy of the other.

  Kathryn’s nightmares that night were of burning flesh and broken wings.

  Jarrikk stood by the high arches of his ground-floor apartment in another wing of the Great Hall, looking up at the constellations of S’sinndikk, constellations he had learned in the broodhall on a planet where S’sinndikk’s sun itself was barely visible in the night sky. Most of them were named after the near-mythical Hunters and Flight Leaders of the days before the S’sinn knew the stars were other suns and thought of them as the eyes of the great black beasts that accompanied the Hunter of Worlds on his midnight rides across the heavens. S’sinn heroes had always been warriors and Hunters. And now, it seemed, his people wanted a new war to create a whole new crop of heroes.

  Maybe they can rename the constellations after them—if there’s anybody left to look up, Jarrikk thought.

  Surprised by his own bitterness, he stepped back from the arch and returned to the warmth of his sleeping pit, curling in among the pillows, automatically forming himself into the one position in which his damaged wing did not ache. He’d discovered something that day, when he Linked with the young human female. Rather than what made humans so different, he’d discovered how much alike they were: two races with violent pasts, only recently expanding into the galaxy and still carrying the baggage of their pre-space history with them.

  He’d discovered something else: that humans were not a faceless mass of wingless murderers, but individuals. He’d met many through Kathryn’s memories, but most of all, he’d met her—and uncovered the wound of her loss, a wound as deep and crippling as his own.

  He’d thought it hard, with his history, to make the Link with a human. Knowing what he did now, he thought he’d had the easier part of the arrangement.

  He sighed and closed his eyes. It would be a lot harder for Kitillikk and the other S’sinn who wanted war to hate humans if he could somehow share what he had learned. It was a lot easier to hate a race than an individual.

  In Kathryn’s case, he couldn’t do it at all.

  The walk across the black basalt floor between the blood-red pillars wasn’t any easier or any warmer the following morning. Kathryn covered a yawn with one hand and flexed her other shoulder. After a night of reliving Jarrikk’s childhood terrors, she not only felt exhausted, she felt pain in body parts she didn’t even have. No other Link had ever affected her this deeply.

  Then again, few Translators brought to the experience emotions as deep as those she and Jarrikk had shared. She yawned again. Just as well; otherwise, Translators would spend all their time between Translations trying to catch up on sleep.

  “You seem tired, Translator Bircher,” Ambassador Matthews said from behind her. “I’m sorry you found it harder to sleep than you supposed.”

  “I slept fine, Ambassador,” Kathryn snapped. “Bad dreams.”

  “I’m not surprised,” one of Matthews’ aides muttered, glancing up at the massed S’sinn watching them approach the dais. “All these bats are enough to give anyone nightmares. Not to mention the stench. It’s like a zoo . . .”

  “My nightmares weren’t about the S’sinn,” Kathryn said sweetly. “They were all about humans.”

  “Quiet,” Matthews ordered. “They’ll hear us.”

  Kathryn forbore telling him that S’sinn hearing was so keen everyone in the hall had heard everything they’d said since they’d entered.

  Jarrikk stepped forward to meet her, spreading his wings, as she climbed onto the dais. She opened her arms in the best approximation of the S’sinn greeting she could manage, being one set of limbs short, then extended her hand in the human greeting, trusting Jarrikk to remember the custom from her memories. He hesitated, then held out his clawed right hand. She shook it firmly, his leathery palm warm against hers, his claws pressing lightly against the back of her hand and the fur on the back of his hand tickling her fingers.

  Today neither of them hesitated to Link. In fact, she eagerly took her syringe and stabbed it into her arm. Jarrikk’s was the only friendly presence she could sense in the entire room, and that included the three humans behind her.

  After a brief rush of fresh memories from their respective evenings, Jarrikk/Kathryn faced their delegates again. “Begin.”

  If anything, this second session was worse. Neither side offered any compromise on Fairholm/Kisradikk; the entire four hours passed in useless reiteration of claims already made and demands already rejected. The S’sinn demanded humans withdraw from the planet; humans demanded the same of the S’sinn. Stalemate.

  Except that, unlike a stalemate in chess, this stalemate would end nothing; it would only precipitate a far nastier game. And when Kathryn severed the Link at the end of the session, her stomach churned as the realization hit home that the next morning there would be only one thing to Translate: the human declaration of war on the S’sinn—war, which had slain her parents and so many others on both sides; war, which had crippled Jarrikk. She felt his own dismay, but aside from a faint echo of that dismay in Akkanndikk, any other peace-loving feelings were lost in the tidal wave of avid hatred from all sides.

  It seemed that only she and Jarrikk truly wanted the negotiations to succeed, but though they were right in the middle of those negotiations, crucial to them, in fact, they were in the worst position of all to influence them. Neither carried any weight with their respective delegates; had effectively denied the possibility by emphasizing so strongly that Translators served the Guild and the Commonwealth, and could not Translate falsely. They could do nothing; nothing but Translate the end of the . . .

  Kathryn froze, the silvery cord of the Link dangling in her hand, her mouth suddenly bone-dry. The idea that had just come to her, unbidden, would violate her Oath. It could mean expulsion from the Guild, loss of a second family . . .

  . . . but it might just stop a war.

  She touched Jarrikk’s wing before he could leave the dais. He turned his ruby eyes on her, and she sensed his puzzlement. “We need to talk in private,” she murmured in Guildtalk. “Where . . . ?”

  For a moment he regarded her, puzzlement growing; then he flicked his ears forward and back, and said, “My quarters. This way.”

  As they crossed the floor together the hostility of the gathered S’sinn increased tenfold, and buried faintly within it, like a hint of vinegar in a spicy food, she felt the humans’ hostility as well. In fact, she felt like a mouse at an owl convention, but she kept her even pace. Jarrikk couldn’t move any faster anyway.

  He led her through a ten-meter-high arch into a long hall with smaller arches leading off at three levels. They passed through the third ground-floor portal on the right into a high-ceilinged, airy room with enormous, glassless windows opening onto the gardens outside the Hall of the Flock. Rough-woven tapestries hung from the other three walls above padded shikks of polished, multicolored woods, and a sweet-smelling bluish vapor rose from a censer over the Guild-standard computer terminal.

  “It’s beautiful,�
�� Kathryn said.

  “Thank you.”

  As she moved around the room, afraid to speak her thoughts, now that the moment had come, Jarrikk watched her with the natural stillness of a waiting predator. What if he reported her to the Guild, had her removed?

  Then war would come, and she would have lost nothing. The Guild would die with the Commonwealth.

  Hesitantly, she began.

  Despite all he now knew about Kathryn Bircher, despite all he had shared with her, the sight of a human in his quarters, among his familiar objects, troubled Jarrikk deeply. Echoes of the hate he’d thought he’d buried, at least where Kathryn was concerned, rang in distant corners of his mind. He clamped down on his emotions forcefully: he couldn’t have Kathryn sensing those ghosts from his past. He didn’t want to wake the ghosts from her own.

  Though perhaps they were already awake. He sensed unease from her; unease and distress, but also strange exhilaration, determination, and maybe even fear. Intrigued, he listened closely as she finally began to speak. “We work well together.”

  No argument there. Surprise that it should be so, maybe, but no argument. “Agreed.”

  “Our negotiators do not.”

  No argument there, either. He’d seen more amicable negotiations between mating-frenzied jarrbukks. Whatever Akkanndikk’s true feelings about the possibility of war were, she had set them aside to play directly to public opinion. He didn’t know why that disappointed him; he’d thought he was past looking for heroes, except among the constellations. “True.”

  “They do not want peace.”

  He agreed, of course he agreed, but that simple statement took them winging into unstable air. Guild rules strictly forbade Translators to discuss ongoing negotiations between themselves. But he had to know where she was going . . . “Also true,” he said after a moment.

  “So—we need new negotiators.”