Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  He raised the back of his hand to his forehead, and she returned the gesture. “Sha bo sham, Kislan.”

  “Sha bo sham, Toni.”

  Her name in his language sounded slower, more formal, less messy, the “o” rounded and full, the syllables distinct and clear. She wondered what “Antonia” would sound like on his lips. She’d never liked the name, but she thought she might if he said it.

  “How do you greet a friend in your language, someone you are close to?” Toni asked.

  “Sha bo foda,” he said. “Dum gozhung ‘sha.’” Or simply “sha.”

  “Can we use ‘fo’ and ‘foda’ with each other?” she asked, offering her hand in the gesture of her homeworld.

  He nodded, the negative on Kailazh, ignoring her hand. He didn’t want to use the informal “you” form with her. He wouldn’t take her hand anymore either, although he took Thuyene’s when he was only leaving for an afternoon. But then, Thuyene was one of his wives, and she most certainly was not. She leaned her hip on the railing, gazing at the gray-green sea below the dark gray sky. There was no reason to feel hurt and every reason to feel relief. He was a part of the Ishel family, and she still didn’t understand the way loyalty was regarded in these complex relationship webs. Definitely not something to get messed up with.

  Tears began to collect at the corners of her eyes, and she wiped them away angrily. To her surprise, Kislan turned her to him and took her chin in one hand.

  “Tell me,” he said. The Mejan very rarely used the command form, and there was something shocking about it. It startled Toni into more honesty than she had intended.

  “This is all so difficult.”

  He shook his head slowly and she gave a humorless laugh. Then her intellectual knowledge managed to seep through her emotional reaction. He wasn’t disagreeing with her.

  She twisted her face out of his hand and turned around to grip the railing at the top of the sea wall. A pair of arms encased in soft leather came around her and a pair of hands with their strange, wonderful webbing settled on hers. “You don’t understand. It is not allowed for us to speak so with each other.”

  His chest was wide and hard against her back, welcome and strong. She had the unrelated, illogical thought that he probably had the high lung capacity of most of the Mejan, and wondered how long he could stay underwater comfortably.

  “Al,” Toni said, yes, unsure what exactly she was saying “yes” to.

  Then there were a pair of lips, soft and warm, against the back of her neck, and it was too late to consider anything. She was in way over her head, infatuated with a man who had about a dozen official lovers.

  His arm moved around her shoulders and he steered her away from the railing along the sea wall, away from the city. “It hurts me to see you weep. I would keep you from being alone.”

  To their left, the stone walls of the nearest buildings were painted in bright colors, colors to make the heart glad, shades of yellow and red and sea green.

  She pulled herself together and dried her cheeks with the back of her hand. “It’s no good. We barely understand each other.”

  “You speak our language very well.”

  “It’s more than that. Our ways differ so much, when you say one thing, I understand another. We can’t help but see each other through the patterns we know from the cultures we grew up with. Like looking through lace—the view isn’t clear, the patterns get in the way.”

  Kislan shook his head—affirmation, she reminded herself. “Yes, I see. But I would never hurt you, Toni.”

  “Ah, but you do. I know it’s not deliberate, but just by being a man who lives by the rules of the Mejan, you hurt me.”

  He shook his head again. “It has to do with the relationship between men and women in the culture where you come from?”

  “Yes.” Toni didn’t trust herself with gestures.

  They had nearly reached the end of the sea wall, and there were no buildings here anymore. Kislan took her hand in his own webbed one.

  “You would want to have me for yourself?” Kislan asked. “Like the sister in the legend of how the moons got into the sky?”

  “It is the way things are done in the world I come from,” Toni said defensively.

  He smiled at her. “That is a story that lives in my heart.” She stopped, surprised. “I thought it was meant to show the People how not to behave, a lesson.”

  Kislan laughed out loud. “Have you no stories in your culture that are meant to teach but tempt instead?”

  Of course they did. Human nature was stubborn and contrary, and no matter what the culture, there would always be those who would rebel, who would see something different in the stories than what was intended. Even in a relatively peaceful, conformist society like that of the Mejan.

  “Yes, there are some similarities.”

  They leaned against the railing and looked out at the harbor of Edaru, at the graceful, “primitive” ships swaying with the waves. The sea was unquiet, the sky still heavy.

  Kislan let his shoulder rest against hers. “Although I know nothing about the worlds on the stars, I can understand a little how you cannot always make sense of our way of doing things. The People live all along the coast here, and the rule of the house is the same for all. But the pirates beyond the waters of the world and on the islands to the east live by rules hard for us to understand.”

  “What rules do they live by?”

  “They have no houses and no loyalty. They buy and sell not only goods but also zhamgodenta.”

  That was a term Toni had not yet heard. “What does ‘godenta’ mean?”

  “That is a word for a person who is bought and sold.”

  Slavery. Sam had been right.

  15

  From: Mejan creation myth

  Recorded 01.10.157 (local AIC date) by Landra Saleh, sociologist, first contact team, SGR 132-3 (Christmas/Kailazh).

  The war between the Kishudiu and the Tusalis lasted so many years and cost so many lives, there were no longer any women alive who had not known a life without war. Soon there were no longer any men left at all.

  The women of the Kishudiu and the Tusalis looked around them at the destruction of their homes, saw that there was nothing left to save and no enemies left to fight. Together, they took the last ships and fled by sea.

  After sailing for almost as many days as the war had years, they came to a beautiful bay on the other side of the world, a haven of peace, a jewel. Edaru.

  16

  Jackson Gates and Irving Moshofski were already there when Toni returned to Contact House One. Two pairs of dark eyes and one pair of gray turned to her in unison when she entered the lab.

  “This is unprecedented,” Jackson said.

  “I hope so,” Toni said. “But since this is the only first contact team I’ve ever been on, my experience is a bit limited.”

  The men smiled, and the atmosphere became a shade less heavy.

  “One of us will have to be here in the lab at all times in case the Pen-thesilea makes contact,” Moshofski said. “I checked the systems, and there doesn’t seem to be a way for any of us to override Repnik’s commands.”

  “So we have to wait until Ainsworth can do it,” Toni said.

  The other three nodded.

  “I was beginning to wonder what Repnik was up to,” Jackson said quietly. “He made a point of telling me you were having an affair with the young man who acted as your chauffeur from the landing base.”

  Toni swallowed. “I—no—I’m attracted to him, but, I—no.” Then through her embarrassment she picked up on a detail of what he had said. “You mean Kislan wasn’t your chauffeur when you first arrived?”

  “No. We had a much older man driving us.”

  “Hm. Was he also a member of the ruling clans?”

  “I don’t remember offhand the colors he wore in his hair, but I don’t think so.”

  “Interesting.” So why had they sent her Kislan?

  There was little else
they could do without being able to contact the Penthesilea, so they said goodnight to each other and sought out their separate quarters.

  With all of the day’s upheavals, Toni had almost forgotten the recording she’d made in the morning, and she returned to the work she loved, relieved that she had something to take her mind off Repnik’s irrational behavior.

  The conversations she’d caught were a goldmine—or an iron mine, from the Mejan point of view. And it wasn’t just the long exchange between Thuyene and Anash or the snippets from the other women in the Ishel family. The discoveries started when she began to study the unknown qualifier Anash had used when speaking to her. After analyzing the recordings of the women’s language for similar occurrences of “kasem,” she was almost certain it was a possessive pronoun.

  Both the possessive and the genitive were unknown in the men’s lan-guage—the linguistic forms for ownership.

  Toni leaned back in her chair and regarded the notes she’d made in hard copy, the circles and question marks and lines and arrows. So what did she have? She had phonetic differences which seemed to indicate that the men’s language had evolved out of the women’s language and not the other way around. She had a gendered language in which the genders of the nouns didn’t match up with gendered forms of address. She had warriors being named in one breath with pirates and pirates being named in one breath with language. She had a language spoken by men and named after the sea— and the sea was associated with the mother. She had grammatical cases that didn’t exist in the men’s language, a pairing which normally would lead her to conclude that the “secondary language” was the formalized, written language. If you looked at Vulgar Latin and Italian or any other of the common spoken languages in the European Middle Ages on Earth, it was the written language which had maintained the wealth of cases, while the romance languages which evolved out of it dispensed with much of that.

  But the Mejan had no written language, because they had no system of writing.

  She also had a boss who was doing his utmost to keep them from learning too much about the culture of the women.

  And she had a man with eyes the color of a stormy green sea. A man who was married to about a dozen women at once.

  Most of what she had were complications and questions. Where were the answers?

  The next morning, Toni found Kislan on the docks, speaking with a captain of one of the ships belonging to his family. It probably would have been more logical to seek out Anash, but Toni didn’t feel very logical.

  Besides, her boss had pretty much forbidden her from speaking with the women of Christmas without his permission. Which she suspected meant never.

  When he saw her striding his way, Kislan’s eyes lit up, and her gut tightened in response. She touched her forehead with the back of her hand. “Sha bo dam,” she said, using the plural second person. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

  Kislan nodded denial. “We are expecting a shipment of leather goods, and I merely wanted to see if it had arrived.” He introduced Toni to the captain, Zhoran. She noted the threads braided into his hair, saw that he too wore the colors of both Lanrhel’s family and the Ishel, and she looked at him more closely. His coloring was lighter than Kislan’s, and he was obviously older, his golden-brown hair showing the first signs of gray at the temples. The bone structure of his face was very similar, though. She wondered if they were brothers.

  Toni touched Kislan’s elbow briefly. “May I speak with you alone?”

  He shook his head. “Let us go to the office.”

  Toni followed him a short distance down a street leading away from the docks—away from the busy, noisy scene, much like that of any center for trade and travel. Despite the presence of horses and carriages, despite the color of the vegetation on the hills and the scent of the air, it reminded her a little of the many transit stations between wormhole tunnels that she had passed through on her travels between worlds. It looked nothing alike, but there was an energy level, an atmosphere, which was much the same, despite the different details.

  Kislan had a small office in the rambling administration building of his family’s trading business. On a table in the center of the room stood a counting machine similar to an abacus, and against one wall was a heavy door with a lock, the first lock Toni had even seen on Kailazh. But no desk. Without any system of writing, there was apparently no need for a desk.

  When the door was closed behind her, Kislan pulled her into his arms and held her tightly. “Time has crawled by since you left me yesterday,” he murmured into her hair.

  The words and the arms felt incredibly good, but Toni couldn’t allow herself to get involved with him—especially when she still didn’t know whether fooling around outside the house was a sin or not. To judge by the legends she was familiar with, trying to monopolize a sexual partner was definitely a sin. Which was enough of a problem all by itself, seeing as she had no experience in sharing.

  She slowly disentangled herself from Kislan’s embrace. “I didn’t seek you out for this. I wanted to ask you about something I don’t understand, something that might help me understand more.”

  “Yes?”

  “In your creation myth, all the men are killed in the war between the Kishudiu and the Tusalis. But how could the women have started a new society without men? Is there any explanation in the myth for that?”

  Kislan shrugged. “What explanation is needed? Yes, all of the men died; the warriors, zhamhainyanar, but that is not everyone.”

  “‘Hainyan’? I don’t know that word yet. What does it mean?”

  “‘Hainyan’ is the word for the man when a man and a woman are together as a family.”

  “But I thought that was ‘maishal’?”

  “No, no. ‘Hainyan’ is an old word. For the way it used to be. Much as you told us about the ways in the land you come from.” He seemed to be both repelled and fascinated by the thought, and Toni remembered how he and Anash and Thuyene could only understand the marriages of Terran and Martian culture in terms of possession.

  If Toni was right, and “yanaru” was the word for woman in Alnar ag Eshmaled, then the root of “hain-yan” could be “over-woman.”

  A husband—like on the world she came from.

  “But that still doesn’t explain how the Mejan came to be,” she said.

  “They made their slaves their husbands.” This time he used the word “maishal.”

  Toni stared at him. The women had owned the men when they first came here. Their language had possessive cases, the men’s language—the language which had evolved from the dialect of the slaves?—did not. And the pirates to the east, the men who kept slaves—was the word for pirate perhaps the original word for men in the women’s language?

  That would explain why Toni had thought they’d been discussing “pirates” when she asked if she could learn their language.

  Suddenly things started coming together for her like a landslide. And she was almost certain Repnik had figured it out—which was why he was doing his best to hinder their research.

  Because he couldn’t be chief linguist on a planet where the chief language was a women’s language.

  Then the thought occurred to her: what had really happened to Landra Saleh?

  She pushed away from Kislan. “I must speak with Repnik.”

  “Why?”

  “I think I know now why he was trying to forbid me from talking to the women.”

  “He did that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how can he have the authority? Authority belongs to the mother.” Tandarish derdesh kanezha tajanar. He used the attitude particle “der-” for “a fact that cannot be denied.”

  Toni stared at him, her mind racing. Authority belongs to the mother. Tandarish - tajanar. “Tan” and “tajan” could well have the same root, which would mean the authority of the mother was even embedded in the word itself.

  She pulled a notebook and pen out of her shoulder bag, sat down on one
of the chairs, and began jotting down the possible cognates with the women’s language, along with the old word for husband. And slave. She was trying to come up with a cognate for the first half of the word “godent” when Kislan interrupted her.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, sitting down in the chair next to her and peering over her shoulder.

  She didn’t have any words for writing in his language, so she tried to describe it. “I have an idea about the Language of the People, and I wanted to make the symbols for the words in my language before I forget.”

  “I have seen the men of the contact team do this before, but I thought it was something like painting.” He laughed out loud. “I did not understand, none of us did. Among us, the men are not responsible for making dalonesh.”

  Toni wasn’t familiar with the last word. “What does ‘dalonesh’ mean?”

  Kislan shrugged. “Events, history, business—anything that should be passed on.”

  Records. He was speaking of records.

  But in order to have records, you had to have a written language.

  “Rodela,” Toni murmured to herself. They had been even more dense than she’d suspected. The crocheting the women did during the meetings she’d attended was writing, making the records of important assemblies, and who knew what else.

  “Yes,” Kislan said, his voice thoughtful. “You mean, among the people from the sky both men and women learn rodela?”

  Both men and women learn crocheting, Toni’s brain translated for her stubbornly, and she had to laugh.

  Kislan started away, and she laid a hand on his forearm. “I am sorry, I meant no offense. Repnik had translated ‘rodela’ with a word for a hobby practiced mostly by women on the world where he comes from. The answer to your question is: yes, on the worlds I know, Earth, Mars, Jyuruk and Admetos, we all learn writing, men and women both.”

  “I have often thought it would be good to know, but men are not regarded as masculine if they learn rodela. It is not taught to us.”

  Men are not regarded as masculine if they learn crocheting. Certainly not. That fit very well into the mindset the first contact team had brought with them to Christmas. But they were not talking about crocheting, they were talking about the power of passing on knowledge through the written word. In order for people of her cultural background to understand Kislan’s statement, more than “rodela” would have to be changed. To get at the underlying attitude, the gender of the words would have to be changed as well: Women are not regarded as feminine if they learn writing.