I woke up all tensed up and frozen, heart racing.
A nightmare about being in open space. Already fading. I didn’t move. Something was wrong. Was it time to get up? No; the bedroom lights came on by themselves when Hexacorallia’s violet shift started. They weren’t on. But there was some light, from the other side of the room, where the three historians were talking quietly, looking at a small metal box.
What were they doing in the middle of the night?
“Whole thing dead,” Hali said. “And not a single safety tripped. Not even 41-3.”
“Really?” Tima asked. “I tripped 41-3 three times just getting it into the case.”
“Well, the field is more gentle than your big clumsy hands, because here it’s intact.”
“And you’re sure all the data’s wiped?” Plia asked.
“Look at it, dead all the way through. Like my hand. Do not go sticking body parts in there, it’s awful.”
“We already knew it would be,” Tima said. “Okay, this is useful. It has to be one of the safeties, so if we’ve got all of them still working, that’s a great start. We can move forward with this if we have to.”
“Move forward with this?” Plia asked. “Tima, we could’ve done this part at home. Nobody’s going to accept this as anything unless we can get the big guy’s notes.”
I must have moved, because all three of them looked over at me.
“Taya?” Plia asked. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah. Nightmare.” I rubbed at my eyes.
“About the external?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, sweetie.” She glared at Hali. “I knew we shouldn’t have taken you so young.”
“Kids younger than me do externals on this ship all the time,” I said, suddenly feeling defensive. “I’m fine. What are you guys doing?”
“One of our data drives is wiped,” Tima said, without any hesitation. “Some kind of internal fault, but none of the safety mechanisms triggered. We’re trying to see if we can recover anything.”
That made sense, but it didn’t really match what they’d been talking about. “Was it important?”
“Important, yes,” Plia said. “Irreplaceable, no. It’s a bunch of stuff that we need to look up on the Dish, but we can just get someone back home to resend us the data.”
That made sense, Plia kept lots of backups of everything. But if it wasn’t a problem, why were they trying so hard to recover it? In the middle of the night? While whispering to each other?
“Who’s the big man?” I asked.
“One of the First Crew,” Hali said. “A guy named Denish Calhurn. In Tinera’s diary, she gives a lot of her crewmates nicknames. She’d call him the big man sometimes.”
The three of them were quiet. Waiting for me to talk. Wow, they were bad liars. I mean, they might not even be lying, really; the big man probably was Denish Calhurn, and maybe the drive did have important data on it. But they were definitely hiding stuff.
So. The big question:
Did I care about this?
Not really. But the secrets were starting to get annoying. The whole untethered heart thing was probably super boring, but if I knew about it then at least half-hearing them talk about it secretly would be less distracting. I’d been wondering, recently, if this was a history thing at all. Maybe they were spies, like in a story, and the Untethered Heart was some kind of plot to start a coup on a ship or find important secrets about the Dragonseye colony bid or something. But I’d decided that that couldn’t be true right away. Plia was a real actual historian, and the way she talked with the others, they had to be, too. Normal people didn’t spend three hours debating whether some engineer who died a hundred years ago had a silly nickname or whether another engineer who hated him just made the nickname up after he died.
Besides, if they were doing something important or dangerous, they would be way better at keeping it secret. They wouldn’t have brought me along on their secret mission. They wouldn’t keep making untethered heart jokes with each other. And they wouldn’t be doing important mission stuff while whispering to each other really suspiciously in a bedroom with me where I might wake up at any moment. There were clearly a lot of people (and maybe treegraves) that they didn’t want to know what they were doing, but they were way too lazy about secrecy for any of that to be important. I didn’t need to care about this.
But maybe if I just let them explain the untethered heart to me properly. I wouldn’t have to keep getting distracted trying to figure out why they were being weird.
I told myself to ask about all of this later, when we were on Starlight. Not here. I’d been told not to mention the untethered heart on Hexacorallia. Also, I didn’t want a history lecture right now. I wanted more sleep.
“Okay,” I said, and turned away from them. They went back to work. I went back to sleep.
I got a reply from Tikka a few days later. The treegrave told me about it while I was with the historians in HEX-46’s zero pull garden. The garden was as weird as I expected, being mostly vines growing through nets and grids lining the walls and bent into pretty shapes.
“An audio message or a written message?” I asked the treegrave.
“Audio.”
“Can you lay it, please?”
It did.
“Hello! Joy to Tikka from Taya intent to message. Intrigue to Tikka from message. Hope to Tikka for joy to Taya. Tikka to work, no change. Tikka to life, no change. Comfort to Fari from message! Joy to Fari from growth to plants. Dragonseye shorter shorter!”
Well. Those were words.
They must have made more sense to the historians than to me, though, because Tima was suddenly looking very smug. “Well, Hali. What do you make of that?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Hali said tiredly. “You’re extrapolating on almost no information.”
“Well your response tells me that you obviously reached the same conclusion, so it’s some information.”
“Just because we both leapt to a ridiculous conclusion based on nothing doesn’t mean that the conclusion is right.”
I recognised this kind of banter. They’d been having one of their pointless little debates, and something in my message had proved Hali wrong. “Isn’t that what you guys always do?” I asked. “Decide big stuff with almost no evidence?”
Plia laughed. “Dragged by my little sister! She’s not wrong, our casual conversations are not rigorous.”
“So this one fits right in, in terms of our usual rigor,” Tima grinned. “Wouldn’t you agree, Hali?”
“What is it?” I asked. “What did Tikka say that’s so important?” I still couldn’t figure out what she’d even said.
“Yeah,” Tima taunted. “What did she say, resident linguist?”
Hali, seeming to realise that this wouldn’t stop until he actually admitted defeat, sighed. “It’s not what she said, it’s how she said it,” he told me. “Do you know what ‘grammar’ is?”
“Uh, that’s like, picking the right words and stuff?”
“Well, yes, I suppose you could describe it like that. Word order and conjugation – I mean, the um… the form of a specific word, I guess? – are important to say what you mean. ‘Plia took a necklace from Tima’ and ‘Tima took a necklace from Plia’ have the same words in them, but the order changes the meaning. But different languages use different word orders. The word order used in fleet standard isn’t the same as the word order used in Texan or Lunari. Judging by your message, it isn’t the same as the word order used in the capuchin language, either – it sounds like the Stalwart just translated Tikka’s exact words and sent it without properly translating the grammar.”
I nodded impatiently. That was obvious, Even I’d figured that much out. “Why does it matter that their grammar is different?”
“Yeah,” Tima said smugly. “Why does it matter that their grammar is different, linguist?”
Hali looked like he wanted to argue for a second, but just rolled his eyes good naturedly and kept explaining. “It doesn’t. It probably has interesting historical implications, but none of us know enough about the creation of the capuchins to have any kind of robust theory on – ”
“Don’t change the topic!”
“What matters,” Hali said with another eyeroll, “is that their computer didn’t translate the message properly. There’s no reason they couldn’t. Everyone I spoke to on the Stalwart was bilingual, and certainly the treegrave would have to be and could have translated the message properly.”
“Do you think they did it on purpose?” I asked. “To make it so I couldn’t understand her?” Oh, maybe; that would be just like them, wouldn’t it? Whatever they were hiding –
“Definitely not,” Hali said, and I sagged a bit. “If they wanted to censor your communication, they could’ve just not delivered the message. Or if they were worried you’d keep pushing, they could’ve just forbidden Tikka from talking about certain stuff. There’s no reason to make the message extra confusing. No; they probably did that because they just didn’t really think about it. The most likely explanation is that this is how they normally translate capuchin speech.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, like I said, everyone there seems to be bilingual. So they probably don’t translate it very often. I’d venture a guess that the software they used is for children who haven’t learned to speak Capuchin yet, and they don’t translate the grammar on purpose, so that the kids can get used to the grammar of the second language that they’re expected to learn.”
“So the fact that they used that for a message sent off-ship means…?” Tima prompted, grinning, and even Plia was grinning now. The historians loved watching each other admit to being wrong about something.
“The fact that they used that for this message,” Hali admitted with a sigh, shoulders sagging as much as they could in zero pull, “means that the capuchins don’t usually send messages off-ship to foreigners. If they did, then they’d be used to translating them properly. The fact that they just pushed this through their half-translation software instead of using better software or getting their treegrave to translate it means that smooth translation just isn’t a thing that occurred to them in the moment. The capuchins keep to themselves and their own ship not just physically, but socially.”
“Ha!” Tima said. “Like I always said.”
“It’s flimsy evidence,” Hali said. “There could be other reasons.”
“Name one! Name one other reason!”
“Maybe this Tikka girl is just kind of a brat.”
“… Okay, yeah, that is one possible reason.”
I didn’t think that the capuchins not talking to other ships was that weird. I hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone on other ships before leaving the Courageous, so if they never left their ship… but then, all of them not wanting to? Humans made friends on other ships all the time. Maybe it meant something. Maybe it was just a difference between us; maybe capuchins just naturally weren’t as interested in that kind of things as humans. I’d probably find out, if I kept talking to Tikka.
If I could make any sense of anything she actually said.
Derin Edala 