Looking Through Lace Page 3

  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 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.

  #

  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 Councillor 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.

  “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. She watched Kislan stride back down to the wharves, starting to worry about her own peace of mind.

  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 sat down on 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. “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 on 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.”

  “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’re an assistant here.”

  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 if Repnik saw her as an assistant, she was an assistant. “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 befroe she could say anything else she would regret. 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 leave 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, and 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 some rounded vowel sounds which were absent in the men’s, something like the German Umlaut or the Scandinavian “ø.” There were a couple of words which sounded familiar, however.

  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 in front of her on the desk. 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 shudithunföslodi larasethal segumshuyethunrhünem kasemalandaryk.

  Athneshalathun rhün semehfarkari zhamdentakh.

  The last reco
gnized unit of meaning looked like a plural. Plural was formed in the men’s language by adding the prefix “zham-” to the noun, and 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 it at least 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 pairs of words 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?

  When she had gotten home, Toni had felt 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.

  She went to work with a smile.

  #

  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 thus discovered 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.

  #

  She’d had approximately three hours of sleep when her mobile unit buzzed the next morning. She 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 replied, 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 and Toni pushed the covers back and got up, rubbing her eyes. Nights were simply too short on Christmas, especially when you didn’t go to bed until the sun started to come up.

  Leather togs on and coffee down, 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 much more tedious than it ever had before. Toni loved words enough that even constructing the necessary databases had always held a certain fascination. 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 automatic analysis had made, consulting the central AI on her decisions, and creating links to grammatical variations and 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 if there was a difference between “rodela” and “fashar” — 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.

  “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. He looked offended, but Toni had only been pointing out a minor weakness, common in early linguistic analysis of new languages. Man, was he touchy. She would have to tread carefully. “I’ve been tagging synonyms where we don’t have any information on the kinds of situations where one word or the other would be more appropriate. Would you like to ask the Mejan about them or should I?”

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

  “Certainly, sir.”

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

  “But —”

  “Tomorrow, Donato.”

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

  “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 facing her. “That’s right, I wanted to ask you about that, 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. Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’m starting to get the feeling 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?”

  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. I could ask then if we could meet outside of the women’s house sometime and you could join us.”

  “Maybe you should 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 one to Toni. Her 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 she’d have to give up her surreptitious recordings in the women’s house for the day, but helping Sam would be worth it. She felt as if she had given him a present, he was so happy when she told him.

  The day of their appointment, they walked together down the hill to the center of town, Toni sporting a new leather cape she had 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. She examined the stands they passed. Most of the vendors they saw were men, but occasionally a lone woman sat next to the bins of fruits and vegetables or the 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. Perhaps now that they had started asking the right questions, they could learn something more of the rules governing intersexual relations.