City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “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

  C

  oop wanted to run to the airlock and find out exactly what had happened, 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 cons
idering 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 into 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

  W

  e 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.

  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.”