Triad. Sheila Finch
It seemed suddenly very important to stay. She rebelled against Madel’s decision. “I insist on staying.”
“The shelter’s not completed,” Zion said. “You can see for yourself, LangSpec. There’s no provision for sleeping quarters for more than one yet.”
He was right. It wouldn’t work.
“Settled, then.” Madel stood. “Up we go.”
Gia let the others load the shuttle, overcome by a drowsiness that sapped the strength from her limbs in a way the normal after-effects of the drugs never did. After a while, Madel helped her stand, and guided her across the clearing to the ramp of Mosquito. She set her foot on it and paused.
“Go on,” Madel urged.
She glanced at the clearing and the circle of dark trees that defined it, now bathed in sunshine. There was no sign of the Ents. She touched the beads around her neck and the rune-like carvings burned under her fingertips.
“At least the time wasn’t totally wasted,” Dori said, her eyes on Gia’s beads.
From the bottom of the ramp, Zion said, “I wonder if we can afford the price?”
Unexpectedly, the wound on her hand began to throb.
CHAPTER FIVE
Day Five
Gia to CenCom:
I feel so guilty.
If I hadn’t totally forgotten everything I’d been taught about caution, especially in the preliminary stages of contact, and especially when the Ents appear to be primates, this would never have happened. I think growing up in the Survivor settlement, learning two cultures at once, gave me a false sense of being able to handle anything.
I’ll never get rid of Taos, much as I hate to remember it. It’s in my blood. Ros saw to that. And here I am, grappling with it again. I don’t want to think about it any more. It’s much too painful. I want to let it go.
Digression: If you hadn’t ordered me to keep this record, CenCom, I wouldn’t do it. And I wonder—what could you do to me if I don’t?
I remember going to school in Geneva for the first time, just after Ros told me what she’d done to me. It was my constant fear you’d find out and dismiss me. I was terrified of speaking to anyone in case they noticed I was different. I thought they could tell somehow. Every time I heard the jokes about primis I felt sick: How many primis does it take to fly a ship? Eight thousand six hundred forty-one. It takes that many just to hold it up.
I’ll never forget my room in the third of those identical, symmetrically shaped white buildings on the slopes above the lake. How alien they seemed after the jumble of the Survivor pueblo in Taos. But how beautiful to me! In winter, when it snowed, you could barely see the dormitories unless you knew where to look. Our window looked out over the ice to where your headquarters were buried in the snow on the opposite shore.
Then came the day about half a year after my last visit to Ros in Taos. I’d left in such anger I’d forgotten I was supposed to have injections. The sudden appearance of blood terrified me. I remember my roommate had chosen that day to shave her head completely and oil her skull, a style that was popular with CenCom Techs—it’d been my ambition to be one, before Ros told me the truth about myself. I couldn’t tell my roommate what had happened and we parted on bad terms. I spent the rest of the night looking for a girl I’d known in Shanghai who’d become a professional Host Mother. She told me what to do.
Why am I remembering all this now?
I got used to being lonely. I put all my energies into being the very best in my studies. And you gave me the highest possible job rating as a result, for ability, dedication, problem solving. But you gave me a low average for emotional stability, CenCom. So I suppose you knew all along.
Ros wrote to me a couple of times. She could’ve used her Arti to communicate instantly, like everybody else, but she chose to write. It didn’t matter. I didn’t reply.
I realized a while ago that I’ll never see her again. I’d be a liar if I said that thought doesn’t affect me at all. She was very good to me. But I still can’t reconcile myself to what she did. How could she even think of it, much less—
Would I have felt better if he hadn’t been a Survivor—a primi? Would it have been different if he’d been just another male, even if he wasn’t someone you’d selected as a donor, CenCom? I don’t know any more. Sometimes I wish I’d communicated with Ros, just once. She believed what she’d done was right.
I will not think of this.
Back to work: Reality is different from what you’re led to expect. I was taught that a lingster making first contact is supposed to record enough language samples that the computer can isolate recurring patterns of stress, juncture, and pitch. Next you classify the phonemes and allophones into categories in terms of their distribution. That’s micro-linguistics.
After that, my teachers said, you compose a descriptive grammar—because the difference between the language of animals and that of intelligent beings is that with the latter there’s always a grammatical pattern underlying everything, a frame onto which speakers fit whatever they need to say, substituting parts as they go along, creatively inventing sentences they’ve never heard, based on the patterns. Then we move on to the morphemes and the meanings that exist on the metalinguistic level.
They made it sound so easy: First record, then analyze, then describe, then communicate. And in the lab practice we did, this atomistic model worked. I was good at it too. Even the two dolphin tutors we had seemed impressed.
But that was at the Academy in Geneva. When you’re in the field, you need to work holistically.
I’m tempted to think Nteko arranged his accident so that he wouldn’t have to return to grapple with this monster. Or perhaps I’m not as good as I thought, and Nteko would’ve had the problem solved by now.
Update: From my two trips, I’ve recorded at least twenty standard hours of language samples, and I’ve sat up late two nights in a row studying HANA’s analysis of them. Some things had emerged before, of course. For instance, Nteko had identified the morpheme Omareemee as the name the Ents gave their world. But that might be in question, for I’ve got another that could mean the same thing: Nemileemee. Okay—most languages possess a few morphemes that are obviously identified with other morphemes in meaning, but show no phonetic connection. This is replacement, along the lines of Inglis go/went. But it’s never a simple substitution, so I can’t assume this is either. I’ve identified fifteen separate morphemes so far for rain, and apart from such concepts as shower, drizzle, downpour, HANA can’t assign semantic differences to them which we could perceive.
CenCom, you told me to report on anything that was bothering me—my state of inner equilibrium, you called it. Well, this is bothering me: there’s a problem with the language that’s masking something else. I can sense it.
For one thing, the language appears to be deficient in tense systems. Even Level I, Inglis, has one past tense. But HANA hasn’t found any method yet in Omareemeean (I think I’ll call it that) for indicating time. And HANA’s found only one pronoun so far, which means both I and we, and possibly also you and they.
As for what this may indicate, I’m not ready to speculate yet. I don’t have anywhere near enough samples. And I might be missing something obvious. I wish I’d done more work with the aural/informational-signal systems of animals back on Earth for the sake of contrast.
Not much to go on just yet.
The universe is made up of shimmering, swarming particles, and what we call reality is only a way of seeing patterns. There may be an infinity of possible patterns, but there surely can’t be too many rules about how to construct them.
The Ents are a little species, hardly taller than ten-year-old children, and with the same air of childish innocence—something to do with their softness and their large eyes,