Event Horizon (Hellgate) (80 page)

“The written language was modified over four centuries ago,” Mark sighed as Travers and Marin frowned over the handies. “It had already been simplified from several earlier forms, and eventually we discontinued the extra layers of mark-up. See here, this word with the capitalization also has the equivalent of underscores and irregular superscripting – left and right of the letters here, obviously, since we write top-down, right-left. I just can’t remember what the mark-up means.”

“And I never knew,” Arlott confessed. “All I know of your language is derived from the samples we’ve been spoon-fed – works like the Jagreth text. And those,” he added, “are not in the ancestral script or syntax.”

“Why would we spoon-feed you an obsolete script and archaic spoken form?” Sherratt admonished. “If you ever translated them at all, you’d be speaking a language like –”

“Shakespeare,” Arlott guessed.

“Actually, more like Chaucer,” Sherratt judged. “You couldn’t have even held a conversation with a contemporary Resalq.”

“So, since you hoped to have us understand the language
like what she is spoke right now
,” Roy said, amused, “you fed us contemporary texts. You’ll understand when I tell you I’m stuck, Mark. Well and truly, unless you can point me at something like ‘Ancestral Resalq in Twelve Easy Lessons.’”

In answer, Mark dropped a hand on Kulich’s shoulder. “He’s standing right here. Midani learned to read before the language was simplified, and to him it’s only been a matter of months.”

Arlott’s eyes glittered as he drew a handy closer and turned it toward them. “Then I’m assuming you know what this means?”

“Is working maintaining reporting,” Midani said readily.

“It’s a maintenance report,” Roy said slowly. “Maintain, maintaining … maint
enance
. Hear the difference?”

“Yes, but no understanding,” Kulich said heavily.

“Well one’s the very –
brebandlal
. To maintain. To
be
maintaining.”

“Why you having two ways to saying?” Kulich sighed.

“That’s just how our language developed.” Arlott shoved both hands into the hip pockets of a pair of
kneeless
denims and surveyed the handies. “Any language grows organically …
cheris’endlal
… and it winds up as a mishmash. You know how tough Slingo is to learn, because it’s built out of so many different languages from Earth, and they’ve all been piled on top of each other, glued together – complicated by slang, and slurred with the accents of so many colonies. The end result is a highly expressive muddle, where there’s ten ways to say anything. The only thing,” he said grimly, “that everyone agrees on is the written form of the language … and this is our problem with the ancestral Resalq. This alphabet isn’t what we’re used to.”

The characters framed in the handies were much more elaborate, with annotations beneath, below and through many of the words. Travers could make nothing of them, and lifted a brow at Marin, but Curtis only shook his head. “We’ve seen ornamental scrolls written in this form,” he said slowly. “Mark has quite a collection of them at the house back on Saraine. But I never pretended to be able to read any of them.”

For the first time Midani Kulich was a jump ahead of them all. He picked up the big handy and scrolled through several samples. “What you wanting knowing?”

“What
do
we want
to
know,” Arlott said softly. “You remember.”

“I … forgetting. Forget. Forgot.” Kulich rolled the words on his tongue. “Too much ways be saying …
to say
. But this?” He gestured with the handy. “Is about engine, power coupler, fuel line, fuel pressure, pump being gone wrong. Needing replacing.”

“Okay. You can read it,” Roy breathed.

“Course, can do reading,” Kulich said reproachfully. “Doctor Sherratt also, only needing remembering
bestly
.”

“He only needs to remember better,” Arlott whispered. “Good, better, best, you remember.”

“Remember … better.
Better
,” Kulich repeated dutifully. “Me always to be thinking, good,
gooder
,
goodest
. Is being bad for learning.”

“So – jog my memory,” Sherratt invited. “The underscores, the superscripting.” He traced the words, pointing out what he meant. The lines and curves should make sense to Midani.

“Right side marks,” Kulich explained, “changing how to saying. Dots, lines left side being showing, is telling where two, three words joining up, making new word.”

“Damn, now I remember.” Mark actually chuckled. “There were six extra letters in the alphabet, each pronounced several ways. Underscores determined the pronunciation. And you know how the developing language rolled basic concepts and ideas together into explicit terms, though many of these words are also archaic – disused, or else the meaning has changed over the centuries. If I actually sound out the words, and rack my brains for our version of Shakespeareanisms, they start to make a kind of sense. I’d forgotten most of this! As I said, it’s just been so long.” He gave Kulich a nod of appreciation. “You’ve done good work. Dario and Tor say you’ve been invaluable.
Ulchenno
.”

“I glad,” Kulich said. “Got many-much be doing, always more job.”

“Oh, they’ll keep you busy,” Roy observed. “But as soon as you provided the key, Joss was able to make sense of this stuff.” He looked up over the handies at Travers, Marin and Vidal. “You guys’ll be at dinner, won’t you? Leon would give me the dumbed-down version later, but I thought I might go along myself. I’m no tech, so if the presentation starts to zip too far over my head, well, I’ll just slink away before I start to snore and embarrass myself.”

He returned to the handies then, and Mark’s memory had indeed begun to jog. He was
laboring
over the ancient texts but making sense of them, and engrossed. Travers looked at his chrono. “Twenty minutes,” he told Marin and Vidal. “You coming to dinner, Mick?”

“I’ll be there,” Vidal swore. “I might even try to eat.”

But food would be the last thing on anyone’s mind, Travers thought. The message from Dario Sherratt’s lab, not two hours before, was that his team was done. Everything they could coax from the
Ebrezjim
’s computer core was out, collated, translated. He, Tor and Midani had rarely ventured outside the lab since Lai’a transited the Orion Gate, and the data was ready for presentation.

Voices were already audible, carrying down the long passage leading aft from the crew lounge, where Dario and Tor were setting up a three-meter flatscreen. Tor was still unrolling it while Dario sorted datacubes, and as Mark and Midani drifted in they were dragooned at once. The screen clung to the bulkhead to the right of the two autochefs, and was already displaying the blue and gold phoenix logo of the Lai’a expedition. The colors were Daku; the blue background was a monochromatic image of the Rabelais Drift; the phoenix – a literal translation of the Resalq word ‘Lai’a’ was gold; in its right talon was an olive branch, in its left, a lightning bolt. The symbology was potent, and Travers approved.

“You need a hand there?” he offered as Tor and Midani began to fiddle with the audio.

“I think we’ve got it,” Tor mused, peering at ten speakers, each the size of his thumb, which had become muddled. “Put these four in the back there, will you, Neil? That should do it.”

With the audio configured and the ’chefs set up for dinner, all the presentation needed was an audience. They began to dribble in by twos and threes as Marin and Travers investigated the machine catering to humans. Midani Kulich was already eating. He was bigger even than the latter-day Resalq, with a metabolism to match, and he ate at least as much as Marin and Travers combined. He was spooning applesauce over a mound of calamari rings, with jalapeños and blueberries on one side and salt-pickled plums on the other. A liberal dash of marmalade on the calamari, a shake of wine vinegar on the
umeboshi
, and he was satisfied. Travers forewent comment as he fetched chardonnay for himself and a rich Jagrethean burgundy for Marin.

Two mess tables had been arranged in a vee formation, affording a good view of the flatscreen for all those who chose to be present. Not surprisingly, the only members of Bravo in attendance were Perlman and Fargo, who might have to fly Zunshu space, and Jim Fujioka, who had an engineer’s fascination for the Zunshu technology. Vaurien, Jazinsky, Shapiro and Kim were at one end of the assembly; Rusch, Vidal, Rabelais and Queneau were at the other, with Travers and Marin, Hubler and Rodman, Leon Sherratt and Roy Arlott, between. Of Tonio Teniko there was no sign, but Bill Grant drifted in as Dario began to drop cubes into the data socket. Mark had taken the big recliner beside the door, content to eat on his lap and set a wine glass precariously on the deck before him.

The linguist from Omaru still had the look of a pro surfer, with sun blond hair about the shoulders of a floral print shirt, and a shell necklace at his throat, as if there might be sand between his toes even now, even here, though he also wore a platinum chrono and the gelemerald rings indentifying him as a
pred’yche
. The spouse of a Resalq. He was still absorbed in the pair of handies, barely looking up to acknowledge the presence of the group. Travers craned his neck to see the screens and caught a glimpse of tangled characters. To him they meant nothing, but Arlott was actually reading now, while he tapped through a swift translation on the second handy. At least the technical terms did not seem to have changed too much across a millennium, and Travers said,

“I thought a computer would be able to translate in a fraction the time.”

“Hm? Oh, they can,” Roy admitted. “They already have, but that’s not going to help
me
learn this stuff. And there’s a lot more than maintenance records. Take a look at this.” He turned the source handy to show Travers a database image. “There on the right, that’s the ancient Resalq text. As we know, the written language has changed a lot, especially in the last couple of centuries since they started to live and work alongside humans. They pared down the extraneous letters, simplified the pronunciation, discontinued the old mark-up which indicated where several concepts had been merged into one new word. I’ve got it now – thank gods Midani was actually reading this stuff when he and Emil were trapped on Kjorin. For once we had it easy – when there’s no key it can take years to work a crack for a language, and you’ll always be unsure of a lot of it.”

Travers was still frowning at the wide handy, recognizing the ancestral Resalq even though individual words made no sense to him. But in the left of the same screen was a column of complete gibberish. He reached over, tapped it. “And what’s this?”

“This on the left,” Arlott murmured. “Well now. What indeed.”

To Travers’s eye, no matter how closely he looked, the left side of the screen seemed to be filled with smudged scribble, as if someone had tried to erase a notation made in permanent marker. “Okay,” he said slowly, “am I looking at an even older form of Resalq?”

Arlott’s blond brows rose. “No. We think this is almost certainly Zunshu notation. What else can it be? This is an archival image, pulled out of the
Ebrezjim
’s database. Someone was out there, somewhere, imaging
something
. What we have here is just a photograph, no clue as to who took it, or where, or why. But the linguist who wrote the Resalq text to the right here – well, he was still trying to work up a complete understanding of the Zunshu script. This is a tiny fragment.

“The Resalq text appears to be a literal translation, but unless our guy is guessing wildly, he’s using a key, or a codec, we haven’t found yet. This says something very like, ‘Caution: airlock likely to activate.’ The kind of thing you’d see printed on a bulkhead or hull, on a dock.” He set down the handies and sat back, head shaking in frustration. “If I had to crack the Zunshu notation … it’d take years, and I’d need about a thousand times more than you see in this fragment,
and
some common point of reference. Now, the Resalq linguist who broke trail ahead of me gives me a little bit of that reference, but – well, see this?” He zoomed on a small area of the Zunshu part of the screen. “These aren’t letters. I think they’re a mix of pictograms and ideograms.”

“Like the ancestral Chinese written language?” Marin wondered.