Six Scifi Stories (14 page)

*****

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Universal Language

 

A Science Fiction Novel

 
By Robert T. Jeschonek

 
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Corporal Jalila bint Farooq bin Abdul Al-Fulani had had this nightmare before.

She was on the surface of an alien world with her captain and crewmates from the
Ibn Battuta
. They all turned to her for help, for understanding. Lives depended on her making sense of an alien language she'd never heard before, which should not have been a big deal, because alien linguistics was her specialty...

...but she found herself drowning in a sea of gibberish.

A tide of babble washed over her, a wave of seemingly disconnected sounds from a mob of creatures. Billions of phonemes, the smallest units of language, crashed together, mixing with millions of clicks and lip-smacks that could themselves be part of a language or just random biological noise.

The tide swelled and swirled and Jalila felt herself going under. Again and again, she grabbed at the current but could never make sense of it.

The display on the Voicebox interpreter device she carried blinked with indecipherable nonsense.

She had had this nightmare before. The only problem was, this time, she was wide awake.

Jalila's heart raced. She looked around at the crowd of beings who surrounded her, sleek-furred and slender like otters, and a chill shot down her spine.

Then, she felt Major al-Aziz touch her arm.

"Jalila?" He stared at her with his piercing green eyes, voice laden with concern.

She took a deep breath and gathered herself up.
Enough of this
.

She was on the surface of the planet Vox with Major al-Aziz and Colonel Farouk. The three of them had landed an hour ago in a scout barque jettisoned from the deep space exploration ship
Ibn Battuta
(named after the renowned Old Earth Arab explorer and scholar). It was up to them to warn the inhabitants of Vox about an approaching invasion fleet...the same fleet that had crippled and cast adrift the
Ibn Battuta
.

So it was time to start acting like a professional. Jalila had to forget her fears and nightmares. She had to forget that the stakes were so high, with so many lives in the balance.

And she had to forget that this was her final mission as linguist on the
Ibn Battuta
.

Jalila was being drummed out of the service. In fact, she would have been drummed out and sent home by now if the
Ibn Battuta
had not encountered the invasion fleet.

It was all because she'd mistranslated a message two weeks ago and gotten someone killed--a diplomat negotiating the end of a civil war on planet Pyrrhus VII. Jalila had made a mistake translating the complex Pyrrhic language, leading both sides in the war to believe the diplomat was working against them. They'd killed him, and the armistice had collapsed.

So here was Jalila, career over, confidence shot...and her shipmates needed her one more time. Somehow, she had to pull herself together and get the job done. All she really wanted to do was go home and languish in disgrace, but she had to hang on by her fingernails and do this one last thing.

Nodding to al-Aziz, Jalila smoothed the light gray jumpsuit uniform over her slender hips. She tucked her shoulder-length black hair behind her ears, then took a deep breath and turned to the crowd.

"Quiet!" she shouted, as loud as she could, her voice rising over the tumult.

She got her message across. Suddenly, the chaos of noise and chatter subsided. The gleaming black pearl eyes of the dozens of Vox in the city square all slid around to focus on her.

Jalila cleared her throat and took a step forward, fixing her attention on a single brown-furred being. "Hi." She mustered a smile.

The brown-furred Vox rattled off a stream of incomprehensible syllables, at the same time gesturing, clicking, and smacking at a furious pace.

For a moment, Jalila listened and watched the Vox's four-clawed hands flutter and weave. Then, she closed her eyes, blocking out the movement and letting the flurry of sounds rush through her.

Pared down from dozens of voices to one, reduced further from sound and motion to sound alone, the communication seemed less overwhelmingly chaotic. As Jalila absorbed it, she realized it could be simplified even further.

Opening her eyes, she interrupted the Vox by raising both hands, palms flattened toward him. "Only this," she said slowly, pointing to her lips.

Then, pronouncing each letter with slowness and clarity, she recited the Arabic alphabet. She hoped the Vox would get the idea: she wanted to hear
pulmonic
sounds only, those created with an air stream from the lungs...sounds like the vowels and consonants of the alphabet. All the clicking and smacking was getting in the way.

When she was done, she raised her hands toward the Vox, palms up, indicating it was his turn. (She guessed the Vox was a male because it was bulkier and had a deeper voice than others in the crowd.)

Message received
. This time, the Vox's speech was slower and free of clicks and smacks. Finally, Jalila could pick out distinct syllables arranged in patterns. She had isolated a spoken language, one using pulmonic vowels and consonants alone.

Not that the other sounds and hand signs weren't part of a language themselves. Jalila was sure they were, which had been the problem. The pulmonic syllables formed one language. The clicks and smacks comprised a second language. A third language consisted of hand signs.

The Vox people had three different languages, she realized, and they used them all at once. They carried on three conversations at the same time, or one conversation with three levels.

No wonder Jalila and the Voicebox had been stumped. Neither was wired to process so much simultaneous multilingual input.

As the Vox spoke, Jalila's Voicebox took in everything, identifying repeated patterns and relationships between sounds...comparing them to language models in its database...constructing a rudimentary vocabulary and a framework of syntax on which to hang it.

Before long, the chicken scratch on the Voicebox's display became readable output--lines of text representing the alien's words, printed phonetically, laid out alongside an Arabic translation of those words.

At about the same time that the Voicebox kicked in, Jalila started to put it together herself. Her heart beat fast, this time with the familiar thrill of making sense of what had once seemed an indecipherable puzzle.

Listening and studying the Voicebox display for a few moments more, she collected her thoughts. Touching keys on the device, she accessed the newly created vocabulary database for the Vox tongue, clarifying the choice of words she would use.

Then, she interrupted the brown-furred creature (who seemed willing and able to carry on an endless monologue) and rattled off a sentence.

The Vox reared back, the whiskers on his stubby snout twitching. He gestured excitedly, then caught himself and clasped his hands together to stop the movement. Again speaking slowly, without the static of clicks and smacks, he released a few clear words; then he waved, beckoning for Jalila and the others to follow him. The assembled crowd parted to make way.

Jalila turned to Major al-Aziz and Colonel Farouk and repeated the Vox's gesture, waving for them to follow. "I think we're finally getting somewhere."

"What did you say to him?" said Major al-Aziz.

"'Take us to your leader,'" said Jalila.

 

*****

As Jalila, al-Aziz, and Farouk followed their guide through the Vox city, she again felt chills run down her spine...but this time, the chills were inspired by awe, not fear. Though Jalila had seen the wonders of many worlds as part of the
Ibn Battuta
's crew, she had never in her life seen anything as beautiful as this.

It was a see-through city made of pastel stained glass.

"This is beautiful." Her voice was a whisper...but the Voicebox caught it and translated for the brown-furred Vox at her side.

In return, the Vox, whose name was Nalo, whispered back at her. "
Mazeesh
."

Jalila smiled and nodded with understanding.
Mazeesh
meant "beautiful." She was making progress.

Returning her attention to the scenery around her, she let herself be overwhelmed by how
mazeesh
it all was. Towers scaled remarkable heights--some squared, some cylindrical, some spiraling into feathery clouds. Vast castles straddled block after city block, turrets shooting sky high. There were domes and cones and pyramids, spheres and cubes. All of it was connected from ground level to highest spire by a filigree of crisscrossing strands, a web of tubing laced around and over and through every structure.

And every tube, every wall, every surface was transparent and flowing with pastel color. Pale yellows and blues and reds and greens and violets swirled and rippled like the clouds on a gas giant planet, mixing and pulsing...never obscuring the perfect view of what lay behind them. Jalila could see right into every room and tube, could see fur-covered citizens in motion and at rest and staring right back out at her. Even more, because the floors and ceilings and walls and furnishings were all transparent, she could see through one building and into the next, could look all the way up through every level of every tower.

It was at once breathtaking and disconcerting to see such a city of people stacked to the heights and strung all around, all seemingly floating, supported only by whorls and bands and streams of color.

Jalila felt like she was floating, too, and not just because she was caught up in the spectacular surroundings. Thanks to the low gravity on Vox, she weighed only half what she did on New Mecca or onboard the
Ibn Battuta
. She felt airy and light on her feet, as if at any moment she could push off from the ground and rise up to glide and pirouette among the filigree and spires.

According to Farouk, the science specialist, it was the light gravity that made the city possible, enabling such fragile, lofty structures to stand. The chief building material was a light polymer with electrostatic properties that produced the colorful tints. Even stretched into impossibly thin sheets, its high tensile strength supported amazing weight...but on New Mecca, at twice the gravity, it would have shattered under a far smaller load.

As Jalila stepped lightly down crystalline walkways, her body lit with shifting pastel colors cast by sunbeams poured through rainbow walls, she was glad she wasn't on New Mecca. She was glad she'd come to Vox on this one last mission and had the chance to experience such wonders.

Alongside her, Nalo chattered away, but Jalila didn't pay much attention. Behind her, a growing mob of similarly vocal Vox generated a rising clamor, but she didn't listen.

For once, she was all eyes, not ears.

 

*****

When Nalo led the team into one of the soaring towers, Jalila gazed upward...and realized that her view was unobstructed by even the tinted, transparent walls and ceilings that honeycombed other buildings. She could see all the way from ground level to the distant pinnacle, seemingly a mile above. It was all one vast cathedral, walled in light and color, lined with a ring of slender, glassy pillars that corkscrewed into the heavenly heights.

As Jalila peered up into the otherworldly steeple, she half expected to see a host of angels drift downward, so she was startled when she noticed faraway figures descending from the upper reaches. At first, they were so distant that they were little more than specks, but even then, Jalila could see that they were acrobatically inclined. The five figures moved fast, zipping down the slender pillars, leaping from one pillar to another at high altitudes with perfect ease and grace.
 

As the figures drew closer, she realized they were Vox, and they were climbing down headfirst, like squirrels descending tree trunks. They scurried downward fearlessly, skinny bodies twisting around the corkscrew pillars, making heart-stopping dives from pole to pole with no more visible effort than kids playing on monkey bars.

Jalila's shipmates craned their necks to watch the spectacle. Major al-Aziz whistled softly in amazement. Stern Colonel Farouk said nothing, which was no surprise, but there wasn't a peep out of Nalo or the mob who had followed them into the tower, either. If even the chatterbox locals maintained a respectful silence here, Jalila supposed the team was indeed in the presence of some kind of leadership.

Leaping and zipping down the pillars, the five acrobatic Vox closed the distance from the pinnacle in a twinkling. As they approached, Jalila could make out differences in their coloration: two had black fur, one silver, one gold, and one red. Like all Vox, they wore no clothing, though their fur coats were daubed with colorful designs on the scalp, back, and belly--circles, spirals, triangles, and starbursts in white and green and pink and black, whatever color showed up best on their coats.

The five Vox dropped further, then stopped a few yards overhead. They twined themselves around the pillars and hung there, peering down at the visitors with gleaming opal eyes.

Jalila was so dazzled by the wonders she had been witnessing, it took a moment for her to remember she had a job to do. When al-Aziz cleared his throat, she snapped back to reality and activated the Voicebox.

"Jalila," said al-Aziz. "Ask our friend here," and he indicated the brown-furred guide, "if these are the leaders of the Vox."

Touching keys, Jalila found the words she was looking for, then turned to Nalo and repeated the question in his language. Whiskers twitching, the brown-furred
otter-like being answered, speaking slowly and without clicks and smacks for her benefit.

Jalila watched the translation on her device, though she had picked up enough of the language to get the gist of what he had said. "Nalo says they are planetary ministers, and the red one is Regent Ieria. You should speak to her."

"Anything else I should know?" al-Aziz combed his fingers through his thick brown hair and looked up at the red-furred Vox wrapped around one of the pillars.

"Use her title when addressing her," said Jalila. "Don't talk with your hands. I'll take care of the rest."

al-Aziz nodded and stepped forward, turning his attention to the regent. Jalila posted herself alongside him, raising the Voicebox so its pickups could best catch the words of the Vox leader.

Clasping his hands behind him, al-Aziz spoke to the red-furred Vox. "Regent. I am Major al-Aziz of the starcraft
Ibn Battuta
."

Jalila read the translation from the Voicebox's display, taking care to speak loudly and clearly enough for the leaders to hear and understand. Though the Voicebox could have broadcast the audio itself, Jalila felt more comfortable doing the talking in this delicate situation. She was paranoid about making a mistake like on Pyrrhus VII and didn't want to rely too much on anyone or anything but herself.

al-Aziz nodded at Jalila. "This is my translator, Corporal Jalila Al-Fulani."

Jalila told Regent Ieria what al-Aziz had said, then smiled and bowed.

The red-furred Vox stared down at them, blinking her black pearl eyes...then fired off a storm of syllables, clicks, smacks, and gestures that baffled Jalila and the Voicebox alike.

Fortunately, Nalo came to the rescue. Appearing at Jalila's side, he let loose a sequence of chatter, noises, and hand signs of his own, directed at Ieria. It must have been an explanation of Jalila's conversational limitations, for when Ieria spoke again, it was without gestures or non-pulmonic sounds. The Voicebox resumed normal function, displaying its conversion of the leader's speech.

"
Welcome
," Jalila read from the screen to al-Aziz. "
What brings you to Vox?
"

al-Aziz considered his next words carefully. "A fleet of vessels is headed toward your world. Many ships, heavily armed."

Jalila translated, then delivered Ieria's response. "
Your ships?
"

"No," said al-Aziz. "We don't know who they are...but we know they are hostile. They disabled our own ship, the
Ibn Battuta
, and left it for dead."

Jalila translated. She was startled when the gold-furred Vox minister flung himself onto Ieria's pillar, interjecting his own streak of chatter. Apparently, the minister had caught on to the need for conversational simplicity, for his speech, though quick-fire, was free of extraneous sounds.

"The other Vox called you a liar," translated Jalila. "He says this is a distraction to hide your own dishonest intentions."

"Our only intention is to warn you," said al-Aziz. "We can provide you with the coordinates of the invasion fleet, and all the data we have on it." Casting his green eyes upward, he gazed into the dazzling heights of the tower. "Your world is filled with beauty. We will do everything in our power to help you preserve it."