Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  “Maybe that’s why they seem to set such a high store by lace,” Toni finally said when the spectacle was over.

  Sam nodded. “I’ve thought of that too.”

  She took a sip of the tea, sweet and hot with a flavor that reminded her subtly of ginger, and leaned back in her chair, pulling her sweater tighter around her. The night grew cold quickly, even though it was early fall and Edaru was in the temperate zone.

  “What have you learned about the role of women since you’ve been here?” Toni asked.

  “Well, since they will only talk to the men of Edaru, it’s a bit difficult finding out anything. But they don’t live in harems, that’s for sure.”

  “Harems” was Repnik’s term for the houses of women, although the residents could come and go as they pleased and the houses were off-limits for men completely, as far as the first contact team could determine.

  She laughed, briefly and without humor. “I wonder what bit him.”

  Sam was quiet so long, she turned to look at him. In the flickering light of the oil lamp, his face was shadowed, his expression thoughtful. They had a generator and solar batteries for electricity in Contact House One and Two, but they tried to keep use of their own technology to a minimum.

  “I don’t think he ever had a life,” Sam finally said. “Most people are retired by the time they reach the age of one hundred. But look at Rep-nik—what would he retire to? His reputation spans the known universe, but it’s all he’s got. There’s no prestige in hanging out on a vacation planet, and I doubt if he knows how to have fun.”

  His generous interpretation of Repnik’s behavior made her feel vaguely guilty. “True. But I still get the feeling he’s got something against women.”

  “Could be. I heard he went through a messy divorce a few years back—his ex-wife was spreading nasty rumors about him. I’m glad I’m not the woman working under him.”

  “Bad choice of words, Sam.”

  He smiled. “Guilty as charged.”

  Mejan “music” from a house down the hill drifted up to them, an odd swooshing sound without melody which reminded Toni of nothing so much as the water lapping the shore. Some native insects punctuated the rhythm with a “zish-zish, zish-zish” percussion, but there were no evening bird sounds. According to Jackson Gates, the only native life forms of the planet were aquatic, amphibian, reptilian or arthropod. There were no flying creatures on Christmas at all—and thus no word for “fly” in the Mejan language. Since the arrival of the xenoteam, the term “elugay velazh naished” (move in the air) had come into use.

  It was impossible for contact to leave a culture the way it was before. Leaving native culture untouched was an article of belief with AIRA, but it was also a myth.

  Toni finished her tea and put down her mug. “It’s occurred to me that Rep-nik is perhaps being led astray by the fact that Christmas is a seeded planet. Most of the other languages he worked on were of non-human species.”

  “Led astray how?”

  “Well, when they look so much like us, you expect them to be like us too. Language, social structures, the whole bit.” “It’s a possibility. Just don’t tell him that.”

  “I’ll try. But I have a problem with authority, especially when it’s wrong.”

  Sam chuckled. “I don’t think Repnik is serious about the harems, though. It’s just his idea of a joke.”

  “Yeah, but there are also some odd things about the language which don’t seem to go along with his analysis. Grammatical gender for example. Repnik refers to them as masculine and feminine, but they don’t match up very well with biological sex. If he’s right, then ‘pirate’ and even ‘warrior’ are both feminine nouns.”

  “I don’t have any problem with that.”

  Toni pursed her lips, pretending to be offended. “But I do.”

  “I probably get them wrong all the time anyway.”

  “Don’t you use your AI?” Like herself, Sam had a wrist unit. AI implants had been restricted decades ago because they led to such a high percentage of personality disorders.

  He shrugged. “I don’t always remember to consult it. Usually only when I don’t know a word.”

  “And there’s no guarantee the word will be in the dictionary yet or even that the AI will give you the right word for the context, even if it is.”

  “Exactly.”

  Toni gazed out at the night sky. Stars flickered above the horizon, but where the rings had been, the sky was black except for the shepherd moons. Below, the bay of Edaru was calm, the houses nestled close to the water, windows now lit by candlelight or oil lamps. She wondered where the green-eyed driver was, wondered what the Mejan executed people for, wondered if she would get a chance to work on the women’s language.

  She repressed the temptation to sigh and got up. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to the contact house. I need to talk to Ainsworth before he returns to the ship.”

  7

  The legend of the little lace-maker

  Recorded 30.09.157 (local AIC date) by Landra Saleh, sociologist, first contact team, SGR 132-3 (Christmas/Kailazh).

  As long as she could remember, Zhaykair had only one dream—to become the greatest maker of lace the Mejan had ever known. All young girls are taught the basics of crocheting, but Zhaykair did not want to stop at that. She begged the women of her village to show her their techniques with knots, the patterns they created, and she quickly found the most talented lace-maker among them. Saymel did not belong to Zhaykair’s house, but the families reached an agreement, and the little girl was allowed to learn from Saymel, although the job of Zhaykair’s house was raising cattle.

  But before she had seen nine summers (note: approximately thirteen standard years—L.S.), Zhaykair had learned all Saymel had to teach her. She begged her clan to allow her to go to the city of Edaru, where the greatest lace-makers of the Mejan lived. Her mothers and fathers did not want to send her away, but Saymel, who could best judge the talent of the young girl, persuaded them to inquire if the house of Mihkal would be willing to train her.

  The elders sent a messenger to the Mihkal with samples of Zhaykair’s work. They had feared being ridiculed for their presumption, but the messenger returned with an elder of the house of Mihkal to personally escort Zhaykair to the great city of Edaru.

  Zhaykair soon learned all the Mihkal clan could teach her. Her lace was in such great demand, and there were so many who wanted to learn from her, that she could soon found her own house. Her works now grace the walls of all the greatest families of the Mejan.

  8

  “If Repnik refuses to allow you to work on the women’s language, I’m not sure what I can do to help,” Ainsworth said.

  “Then why did you send for me?” Toni was only marginally aware of the cool night air against her skin as their open carriage headed for the AIC landing base. If she hadn’t returned to the contact house with Sam, she would have missed Ainsworth completely. A deliberate move on his part, she suspected now.

  “I thought I could bring him around,” the Captain said now.

  “Can’t you order him?”

  “I don’t think that would be wise. With a little diplomacy, you can still persuade him. In the long run, he will have to see that he needs you to collect more data.”

  Toni rubbed her temples. The headache she’d first felt coming on during the introductions in the common house had returned with a vengeance. “He’ll probably try to use remote probes.”

  “He already has. But since none of us are allowed in the women’s houses, they can’t be placed properly. We’ve tried three close to entrances and have lost them all.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “One was painted over, one was stepped on and one was swept from a windowsill and ended in the trash.”

  Despite everything, she had to smile to herself.

  They pulled up next to the temporary landing base, and the light from the stars and the moons was replaced by aggressive artificial light. Ainsw
orth patted her knee in a grandfatherly way. “Chin up, Donato. Do your work and do it well, and Repnik will recognize that you can be of use to him. We’ll get that unknown language deciphered, and you will be a part of it. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Maybe everyone was right and she was just overreacting to Repnik’s reluctance to let her work on the women’s language. It was certainly nothing new for AIRA researchers to feel threatened by others working in the same field and jealously defensive of their own area of expertise. Toni had seen it before, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Her first day on Christmas was not ending well.

  At least she’d had the sunset.

  The Captain got out of the carriage and waved at her as the driver turned it around and headed back into town.

  When they were nearing the city again, Toni leaned forward, propping her arms on the leather-covered seat in front of her. The driver was the same one they’d had this morning. Strange that she’d been so fixated on Ainsworth and her own problems that she hadn’t even noticed.

  He glanced over his shoulder at her and smiled but said nothing.

  Toni took the initiative. “Sha bo sham.”

  “Sha bo sham, tajan.” The planes of his face were a mosaic of shadow and moonlight, beautiful and unfamiliar.

  “Ona esh eden bonshani Toni rezh tajan, al?” Me you call Toni not mother, yes?

  He laughed and shook his head in the gesture of affirmative, like a nod in Toni’s native culture. “Bonlami desh an. Tay esh am eladesh bon-shani Kislan.” Honored am I. And you me will call Kislan.

  She smiled and offered her hand as she would have in her own culture. He transferred the reins to one hand, then took her own hand gently and pressed it to his forehead. His skin was warm and dry. She couldn’t see his smoky green eyes in the starlight, but she could imagine them. When he released her hand, she could have sworn it was with reluctance.

  Perhaps the day was not ending so badly after all.

  The women of Anash’s family, the house of Ishel, were gentle but deter-mined—they would not allow Toni to learn Alnar ag Eshmaled from them, “the language of the house,” until she promised not to teach it to any men. Which of course was impossible. The point of research funded by AIRA was for it to be published and made accessible to everyone in the known galaxy. There were laws against restricting access to data on the basis of sex. Access to data could be restricted on the basis of security clearance perhaps, but not on the basis of sex.

  “Bodesh fadani eshukan alnar ag eshmaled,” Anash said, her expression sympathetic. No man may speak the language of the house. Permission-particle-tense-marker-present for female addressee verb negative-marker-subject object: with the mind of a linguist, Toni broke down the parts of the sentence, trying to figure out whether the women favored different sentence structures than the men.

  So they weren’t going to speak their language with her. She had spent her first two days setting up house and getting her bearings, and now that she finally had an appointment with some of the women of the planet, she learned that Repnik was right—she wouldn’t be able to do the job she had come here to do.

  But at least they had welcomed her into the women’s house and were less careful with her than with the men of the contact team. With the camera in her AI, she had recorded Anash and Thuyene speaking in their own language several times. She felt a little bad about the duplicity—she’d never had to learn a language by stealth before—but if she was going to do the job she’d been hired for, she didn’t have a choice. And when it came right down to it, AIRA never asked anyone’s permission to send out the probes used in the first stages of deciphering a new language. Stealth always played a role.

  But what a dilemma. The Allied Interstellar Research Association was required to make their knowledge of new worlds public. Not to mention that Toni would only be able to make her reputation as a xenolinguist if she could publish the results of her research. Perhaps they could work out some kind of compromise with AIRA that would make it possible for her to study the women’s language anyway.

  “May I still visit this house?” Toni asked in the men’s language.

  Anash smiled. “We are happy to welcome the woman from the sky. And perhaps you can teach us the language you speak, just as the men of the sky teach the men of the people.”

  “Why is it that you will speak with the men of Edaru and not with the men of the first contact team?”

  The smile vanished from Anash’s face. “They are offensive.” In the Mejan language it was more like “exhibit a state of offensiveness,” a verb used for descriptive purposes, but it was nonetheless different from the verb “to offend,” which connoted an individual action.

  “What have they done?” Toni asked.

  The older woman’s face seemed to close up. “They speak before they are spoken to.”

  Was that all it was? The men of the contact team had offended the Mejan sense of propriety? “So men of a strange house may not speak to a woman without permission?”

  “They may not. That intimacy is only granted within families.”

  How simple it was after all: someone had merely made the mistake of not asking the right questions. She had read stories of contact teams that had suffered similar misunderstandings from just such a mistake. But how was anyone supposed to know which questions to ask when dealing with an utterly alien culture? It was no wonder the same mistakes were made over and over again.

  Besides, their team had the excuse of having lost their sociologist early into the mission.

  Toni rose and lifted the back of her hand to her forehead. “I will come again tomorrow at the same time, if that is convenient.”

  “I will send word.”

  Toni started to nod—and then caught herself and shook her head.

  Visiting an unfamiliar world was exhausting business.

  9

  DG: sci.lang.xeno.talk

  Subject: We aren’t redundant yet (was Why I do what I do)

  From: A.Donato@aira.org

  Local AIC date: 21.10.157

 

  Okay, I’ll explain it again, even though I’ve been through this so many times on the DGs it makes my head spin.

  No, we can’t just analyze a couple of vids made by a drone and come up with a language. Even with all the sophisticated equipment for recording and analysis which we now possess, at some stage in deciphering an alien tongue we’re still dependent on the old point and repeat method. The human element of interaction, of trial and error, remains a necessary part of xenolinguistics. IMNSHO, the main reason for this is that analyzing an alien language, figuring out the parts of speech and the rules at work (which is the really tough part, and not simple vocabulary), is more than just “deciphering”—a very unfortunate word choice, when it comes right down to it. “Deciphering” implies that language is like a code, that there is a one-to-one correspondence between words, a myth which supports the illusion that all you have to do is substitute one word for another to come up with meaning. Language imperialists are the worst sinners in this respect, folks with a native tongue with pretensions towards being a diplomatic language, like English, French or Xtoylegh.

  People who have never learned a foreign language, who have always relied on the translation modules in their AIs to do a less-than-perfect job for them, often can’t conceive how difficult this “deciphering” can be, with no dictionaries and no grammar books. An element you think at first is a noun could be a verb. Something interpreted as an indefinite article could very well be a case or time marking. You have no idea where the declensions go, no idea if the subject of the verb comes first or last or perhaps in the middle of the verb itself.

  No linguistics AI ever built has been idiosyncratic enough to deal satisfactorily with the illogical aspects of language. Data analysis can tell you how often an element repeats itself and in which context, it can make educated guesses about what a particular linguistic element
might mean, but the breakthroughs come from intuition and hunches.

  AIs have been able to pass the Turing test for two centuries now, but they still can’t pass the test of an unknown language.

  10

  As she left the women’s house, Kislan was coming down the street in the direction of the docks. “Sha bo sham, Kislan.”

  “Sha bo sham, Toni.” He pronounced her name with a big grin and a curious emphasis on the second syllable. After three days planetside, she was beginning to see him with different eyes. She recognized now that the colors braided into his hair signified that by birth he was a member of the same family as Councilor Lanrhel himself, and he had “married” into the house of Ishel, one of the most important merchant clans in the city of Edaru. It seemed the council of Edaru had sent a very distinguished young man as transportation for their guests.

  And he was part of some kind of big communal marriage.

  “Where are you off to?” she asked in Mejan.

  “The offices of Ishel near the wharves. A ship has returned after an attack by pirates and we must assess the damage.” “Are pirates a problem around here?”

  Kislan shook his head in the affirmative. “It is especially bad in the east.”

  They stood in the street awkwardly for a moment, and then Kislan asked, “Where do you go now? May I walk with you?” “Don’t you have to get to work?”

  He shrugged. That at least was the same gesture she was used to. “There is always time for conversation and company.”

  Toni grinned. “I’m on my way back to the contact house.”

  Kislan turned around and fell into step next to her. She asked him about his work and he asked her about hers, and it occurred to her how odd it was that this particular social interaction was so much like what she had grown up with and seen on four planets now.

  Talking and laughing, they arrived at the contact house in much less subjective time than it had taken Toni to get to the house of Anash—and it was uphill. After they said their goodbyes, she watched Kislan stride down to the wharves, starting to worry about her own peace of mind.