Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  But when she entered the main office of the contact house, she had other things to worry about.

  “I hope you will remember to remain professional, Donato,” Repnik said.

  Toni resisted the urge to retort sharply and leaned against the edge of a table. There were no AIRA regulations forbidding personnel from taking a walk with one of the natives—or even sleeping with one, as long as the laws of the planet were not broken.

  She ignored the implied criticism. “Kislan was telling me about how they lost a ship to pirates. What do we know about these pirates?”

  “Not much,” Sam said. “Ainsworth wants to do some additional surveillance of the eastern coast.”

  “How did your meeting with Anash go?” Repnik asked.

  She took a deep breath. “They won’t speak their language with me until I promise no men will ever learn it.”

  Repnik shrugged. “I told you your presence here was unnecessary.”

  Didn’t he even have any intellectual curiosity left, any desire to figure out the puzzle? Whether he resented her presence or not, if he still had a scientific bone left in his body he would be taking advantage of having her here.

  She stood and began to pace. “Wouldn’t it be possible to work out a deal with AIRA? Something that would allow us to reach an agreement with the women about their language? If Alnar ag Eshmaled had a special status, then only certain researchers would have access to the information.”

  “You mean, women researchers.” Toni stopped pacing.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Which would mean I, the head of this contact team, would be barred from working on the women’s language.”

  She barely registered the minor victory of Repnik now referring to Alnar ag Eshmaled as a language. She had painted herself into a very hazardous corner. “I was only thinking of how we could keep from offending the women of this planet.”

  “And how you could get all the credit for our findings.”

  “I didn’t—”

  Repnik stepped in front of her, his arms crossed in front of his chest. “I would suggest that you try to remember that you are an assistant in this team. Nothing more.”

  Toni didn’t answer for a moment. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the way she remembered the description of her assignment to Christmas. But it had named her “second” team xenolinguist. Which meant that if Repnik saw her as an assistant, she was an assistant, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. “Yes, sir. Anything else?”

  “Tomorrow morning I would like you to work on compiling a more extensive dictionary with the material we have collected in the last several weeks.”

  “Certainly, sir.” She picked her bag up off the floor and left Contact House One for the peace and safety of Contact House Two before she could say anything she would regret later.

  How could she have been so stupid? In terms of her career, it would have been smarter to suggest using her visits to install surveillance devices, even if that would have been questionable within the framework of AIRA regulations. But of course Repnik would never agree to a strategy that would allow her to work on one of the languages of Kailazh exclusively.

  When would she learn?

  Toni pushed open the door of her house, slipped off her jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Well, she was not about to break the laws of her host planet, Repnik or no Repnik, so before she hooked her mobile AI into her desk console, she set up a firewall to keep the men on the team from learning the women’s language by accessing her notes.

  Once her privacy was established, she told the unit to replay the women’s conversation. The sounds of their voices echoed through the small house while she got herself something to eat.

  “Index mark one,” she said after the first short conversation was over, and her system skipped ahead to the next conversation. The first thing she noticed was that the women’s language had a number of rounded vowel sounds which were absent in the men’s, something like the German Umlaut or the Scandinavian “ø.” At the same time, however, there were quite a few words which sounded familiar.

  She finished the bread and cheese and tea and wiped her mouth on a napkin. “System, print a transcript of the replayed conversations using the spelling system developed by Repnik, and run a comparison with the material already collected on the men’s language.”

  “Any desired emphasis?”

  “Possible cognates, parallel grammatical structures, inflections.”

  While the computer worked, she laid out the printed sheet of paper on the desk in front of her. Sometimes she found it easier to work in hard copy than with a projection or on a screen. Doodling with a pencil or pen on paper between the lines could help her to see new connections, possibilities too far-fetched for the computer to take into consideration—but exactly what was needed for dealing with an arbitrary, illogical human system like language.

  The transcript was little more than a jumble of letters. Before the initial analysis, the computer only added spaces at very obvious pauses between phonemes.

  Pencil in hand, Toni gazed at the first two lines, the hodgepodge of consonants and vowels.

  Tün shudithunfôslodi larasethal segumshuyethun rhünem kasem alandaryk.

  Athneshalathun rhün semehfarkari zhamdentakh.

  The last recognized unit of meaning looked like a plural. Plural was formed in the men’s language by adding the prefix “zham-” to the noun. There was no telling if those particular sounds were the same in the women’s language, or even if the plural was built the same, but at least it gave her a place to start.

  There was a faint warning beep, and the computer announced in its business-like male voice, “Initial analysis complete.”

  Toni looked up. “Give me the possible cognates. Output, screen.” A series of word pairs replaced an image of the landscape of Neubrandenburg.

  Dentakh - tendag.

  But why would the women be discussing pirates in the middle of a conversation about languages? Was the cognate the computer had come up with correct? And if it was, what did it mean?

  After she’d returned home from Contact House One, Toni had begun to feel another stress headache coming on—but now it had disappeared completely and without drugs.

  She had a puzzle to solve.

  “Print out the results of the analysis,” she said, pulling her chair closer to the table holding the console. Toni went to work with a smile.

  11

  From: Preliminary Report on Alnar ag Eshmaled, secondary language of Kailazh (Christmas). Compiled 28.11.157 (local AIC date) by Dr. Antonia Donato, second xenolinguist, Allied Interstellar Research Association first contact team. (Draft)

  “The men’s and women’s languages of Kailazh (Christmas) are obviously related. While this does not completely rule out an artificially constructed secret language, as has been observed in various cultures among classes wanting to maintain independence from a ruling class, the consistency in the phonetic differences between the cognates discovered so far seems to indicate a natural linguistic development. A further argument against a constructed language could be seen in sounds used in the women’s language which are nonexistent in the men’s language.

  Interestingly enough, the women’s language appears to have the more formal grammar of the two, with at least two additional cases for articles (dative and genitive?), as well as a third form for the second person singular, all of which are unknown in Alnar ag Ledar. To confirm this, however, much more material will need to be collected.

  12

  She’d had approximately three hours of sleep, when her mobile unit buzzed the next morning. Toni burrowed out from under the pile of blankets and switched on audio. She didn’t want anyone seeing her just yet.

  “Yes?” she said and snuggled back into her warm nest of covers.

  Repnik’s voice drifted over to her, and she grimaced. “Donato, do you realize what time it is?”

  “No. I still don’t have the display set up,” she repli
ed, trying to keep the sleep out of her voice. “And I must have forgotten to set my unit to wake me last night. Sorry.”

  An impatient “hmpf” came from her system. “Jump lag or no jump lag, I’d like you over here, now.”

  The connection ended abruptly. Toni pushed the covers back and got up, rubbing her eyes. Nights were simply too short on Christmas—espe-cially for someone who had forgotten to go to bed until the sun started coming up.

  Leather togs on and coffee downed, she was soon back at Contact House One, keying in and correcting terms in the preliminary version of the dictionary. After giving her his instructions, Repnik had left with Sam for a tour of the tannery outside of town, where they would ask questions and collect data and make discoveries. Like usual, Gates and Moshofski were already out looking at boulders and bushes and beasts. While she was left with drudgery.

  It was funny how something she had done regularly for the last five years now seemed so much more tedious than it ever had before. Toni loved words enough that even constructing the necessary databases had always held a certain fascination for her—on her previous jobs. Besides, it was a means to an end, a preliminary step on the ladder to becoming a first contact xenolinguist working on her own language.

  Now it was a step down.

  She spent the morning checking and correcting new dictionary entries that the automatic analysis had made, consulting the central AI on her decisions, and creating links to grammatical variations, as well as audio and visual files, where available. And all that on only three hours of sleep.

  “Fashar,” the computer announced. “Lace, the lace. Feminine. Irregular noun. Indefinite form fasharu.”

  Toni did a search for “rodela,” another word for lace in the Mejan language, and then added links between the words. Under the entry “fashar,” she keyed in, “See also ‘rodela’ (lace) and ‘rodeli’ (to create lace or crochet).” She would have to ask Anash what precisely the difference was between “rodela” and “fashar,” if any—as yet, nothing was noted in their materials.

  Outside the door of the lab, she heard the sound of voices. Sam and Repnik returning from field work. Having fun.

  “Fashela,” the computer announced. “Celebrate. Verb, regular.”

  “That’s the attitude,” Toni muttered.

  The door opened, and Repnik entered, followed by Sam, who looked a little sheepish. Getting chummy with the top of the totem pole.

  Repnik sauntered over to her desk. “How is our dictionary coming along?” he asked in that perky voice bosses had when they were happy in the knowledge that they were surrounded by slaves. And were particularly pleased in the status of the slave before them.

  “I’m up to the ‘f’s now in checking entries and adding cross references. Our material is a little thin on specific definitions, though.”

  The faint smile on his face thinned out and disappeared. “It is, is it?”

  He looked offended for some reason. Toni had only been pointing out a minor weakness, common in early linguistic analysis of new languages, certainly not something to get irritated about. Man, was he touchy. She would have to tread even more carefully.

  She drew a deep breath. “I’ve been tagging synonyms where we don’t have any contextual information. We need to know more about the kinds of situations where one word or the other would be most appropriate. Would you like to ask the Mejan about the synonyms, or should I?”

  “Make a note of it,” Repnik said shortly.

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “I have another meeting with Councilor Lanrhel. I’ll see you both again tomorrow.”

  “But—”

  “Tomorrow, Donato.”

  When he was gone, Toni joined Sam next to the small holo well set up in the lab, where he was viewing a scene of what looked like a festival.

  She touched his elbow. “I learned something the other day in the women’s house that you might find interesting.”

  “Bookmark and quit,” Sam said to the holo projector before he swiv-eled around on his chair to face her. “That’s right, I wanted to ask you about that meeting, but you left pretty abruptly yesterday.”

  Toni pulled over a chair and straddled it, leaning her forearms on the back. “I know. I should have stuck around, but our boss is really getting to me. Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’m starting to get the feeling that Repnik wants to make me quit.”

  Sam shook his head. “You are overreacting. Your suggestion yesterday, logical as it was, was practically calculated to make him feel threatened. Just give him some time to get used to you.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “So, what did you find out for me?”

  Toni chuckled. “Right. Anash told me yesterday that there’s no specific taboo on women speaking with strange men. The reason they won’t speak with the men of our team is because they offend them by speaking before they are spoken to.”

  Sam’s eyes lit up. “Really?”

  She nodded. “Do you know if you’re guilty of offensive behavior yet?”

  “I don’t think so. When I got here, Repnik told me there was a taboo against strangers speaking with Mejan women at all, so I didn’t even try. Wow. This changes everything.”

  “Yup. I wanted to get together with Anash and Thuyene again this afternoon. Since you’re not one of the offensive ones, I could ask if we could meet outside of the women’s house sometime, at a neutral location where you could join us.”

  “That would be great if you could organize it!” Sam said, his dark eyes alight with enthusiasm. “But maybe you can find out first how I am supposed to conduct myself.”

  “The young one with the hair of night and eyes like a likish?” Anash asked. A likish was one of the native amphibian creatures of Kailazh, with both legs and fins and a nostril/gill arrangement on its back which reminded Toni vaguely of whales. She had yet to see a likish, but she had seen pictures, and she could appreciate the simile.

  Not having adjectives, Alnar ag Ledar could be quite colorful, if the speaker chose some other way to describe something than using the attribute verbs.

  “Al,” Toni said. Yes.

  Anash gazed at her with a speculative expression—or at least what looked like it to Toni. Anash’s eyes were slightly narrowed, her head tilted to one side, and her lips one step away from being pursed. “That one has not himself offended any of the women of Edaru,” the older woman finally said. “You say he is a specialist in understanding the ways of a people?”

  “Yes. He has replaced Landra Saleh, who I believe you met before she became ill.”

  “Then we will meet with him two days from now in the common house.”

  That would mean Toni would temporarily have to give up her surreptitious recordings in the women’s house—but helping Sam would be worth it.

  And when she told Sam the women had agreed to meet with him, his reaction more than made up for it. He was so enthusiastic, she felt as if she’d given him a present.

  The day of their appointment, they walked together down the hill to the center of town, Toni sporting a new leather cape she’d purchased for a couple of ingots of iron from the string she wore around her neck. Iron was much more precious on Kailazh than gold.

  As they wandered through the streets of the city, she examined the stands they passed. Most of the vendors they saw were men, but occasionally a lone woman sat next to bins of fruits and vegetables or shelves of polished plates and bowls made from the shells of oversized bugs. Such a female vendor would have to deal with male customers alone, some of whom would necessarily be strangers. Toni wondered what the protocols for such transactions might be. Perhaps now that they had started asking the right questions, they could discover something more about the rules governing relations between the sexes on Kailazh.

  She did her best to act naturally on this alien world, but often she felt like a circus animal. People peered out of their windows at them as they passed, and children ran up to them, giggling and pointing and staring, or hid be
hind their mothers’ or fathers’ legs. It hadn’t been any different on Admetos, but the beings staring after her there had looked like ants. As a result, it had been easier for her to ignore their behavior. But these were people, at least in a more visceral way for Toni, since she was a hominid herself.

  It would take some time getting used to.

  “From what you’ve learned since you arrived, do you know when one of those ceremonial gifts of lace is appropriate?” Toni asked Sam.

  “No. But it seems to be something only given by women. We aren’t on sure enough ground yet to start messing with symbolic gestures.”

  Toni gave a playful snort of disgust. “You’ve already been here two weeks! What have you been doing in all that time?”

  Sam chuckled. “I may not trust myself with symbols, but I’m pretty sure we could bring Anash a bottle of that lovely dessert wine that Edaru is famous for. Have you tried it yet?”

  “I’m still trying to stick mostly to foods I’m familiar with. I don’t want to end up offworld like your predecessor.”

  “Well, once you feel daring enough, take my word for it, it’s an experience you don’t want to miss. And according to Jackson, the fruit kithiu which they use to make denzhar is descended from plain old Terran grapes.”

  “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Where’s the nearest wine dealer?”

  The merchant was a man, so Toni didn’t have a chance to see what the interaction would be between Sam and a female merchant. They paid with a small bead each from the strings of precious metals they wore around their necks, and arrived at the common house just as Kislan was helping Anash and Thuyene out of an open carriage.

  To her surprise, Toni felt a pang of something resembling jealousy. These two women both belonged to Kislan’s family, and while Anash was probably old enough to be his mother, Thuyene wasn’t much more than Toni’s age; probably less biologically on this world without age treatments. Her glossy reddish-brown hair hung in a single thick braid to her waist, laced with threads the colors of her birth clan and her chosen clan. Her amber eyes were full of life and intelligence. And Kislan was in some kind of group marriage arrangement with her. Did he hold her hand a little longer than that of Anash? Or was her feverish, human-male-deprived imagination just taking her for a ride?