Omnilingual

  Produced by Susan Skinner, Greg Weeks and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from "Astounding Science Fiction," February,1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed.

  OMNILINGUAL

  _To translate writings, you need a key to the code--and if the last writer of Martian died forty thousand years before the first writer of Earth was born ... how could the Martian be translated...?_

  BY H. BEAM PIPER

  Illustrated by Freas

  * * * * *

  Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper sky. The windhad shifted since noon, while she had been inside, and the dust stormthat was sweeping the high deserts to the east was now blowing out overSyrtis. The sun, magnified by the haze, was a gorgeous magenta ball, aslarge as the sun of Terra, at which she could look directly. Tonight,some of that dust would come sifting down from the upper atmosphere toadd another film to what had been burying the city for the last fiftythousand years.

  The red loess lay over everything, covering the streets and the openspaces of park and plaza, hiding the small houses that had been crushedand pressed flat under it and the rubble that had come down from thetall buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had toppled outward.Here, where she stood, the ancient streets were a hundred to a hundredand fifty feet below the surface; the breach they had made in the wallof the building behind her had opened into the sixth story. She couldlook down on the cluster of prefabricated huts and sheds, on thebrush-grown flat that had been the waterfront when this place had been aseaport on the ocean that was now Syrtis Depression; already, the brightmetal was thinly coated with red dust. She thought, again, of whatclearing this city would mean, in terms of time and labor, of people andsupplies and equipment brought across fifty million miles of space.They'd have to use machinery; there was no other way it could be done.Bulldozers and power shovels and draglines; they were fast, but theywere rough and indiscriminate. She remembered the digs around Harappaand Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, and the careful, patient nativelaborers--the painstaking foremen, the pickmen and spademen, the longfiles of basketmen carrying away the earth. Slow and primitive as thecivilization whose ruins they were uncovering, yes, but she could counton the fingers of one hand the times one of her pickmen had damaged avaluable object in the ground. If it hadn't been for the underpaid anduncomplaining native laborer, archaeology would still be back whereWincklemann had found it. But on Mars there was no native labor; thelast Martian had died five hundred centuries ago.

  Something started banging like a machine gun, four or five hundred yardsto her left. A solenoid jack-hammer; Tony Lattimer must have decidedwhich building he wanted to break into next. She became conscious, then,of the awkward weight of her equipment, and began redistributing it,shifting the straps of her oxy-tank pack, slinging the camera from oneshoulder and the board and drafting tools from the other, gathering thenotebooks and sketchbooks under her left arm. She started walking downthe road, over hillocks of buried rubble, around snags of wall juttingup out of the loess, past buildings still standing, some of them alreadybreached and explored, and across the brush-grown flat to the huts.

  * * * * *

  There were ten people in the main office room of Hut One when sheentered. As soon as she had disposed of her oxygen equipment, she lit acigarette, her first since noon, then looked from one to another ofthem. Old Selim von Ohlmhorst, the Turco-German, one of her two fellowarchaeologists, sitting at the end of the long table against the fartherwall, smoking his big curved pipe and going through a looseleafnotebook. The girl ordnance officer, Sachiko Koremitsu, between twodroplights at the other end of the table, her head bent over her work.Colonel Hubert Penrose, the Space Force CO, and Captain Field, theintelligence officer, listening to the report of one of the airdynepilots, returned from his afternoon survey flight. A couple of girllieutenants from Signals, going over the script of the evening telecast,to be transmitted to the _Cyrano_, on orbit five thousand miles offplanet and relayed from thence to Terra via Lunar. Sid Chamberlain, theTrans-Space News Service man, was with them. Like Selim and herself, hewas a civilian; he was advertising the fact with a white shirt and asleeveless blue sweater. And Major Lindemann, the engineer officer, andone of his assistants, arguing over some plans on a drafting board. Shehoped, drawing a pint of hot water to wash her hands and sponge off herface, that they were doing something about the pipeline.

  She started to carry the notebooks and sketchbooks over to where Selimvon Ohlmhorst was sitting, and then, as she always did, she turned asideand stopped to watch Sachiko. The Japanese girl was restoring what hadbeen a book, fifty thousand years ago; her eyes were masked by abinocular loup, the black headband invisible against her glossy blackhair, and she was picking delicately at the crumbled page with ahair-fine wire set in a handle of copper tubing. Finally, loosening aparticle as tiny as a snowflake, she grasped it with tweezers, placed iton the sheet of transparent plastic on which she was reconstructing thepage, and set it with a mist of fixative from a little spraygun. It wasa sheer joy to watch her; every movement was as graceful and precise asthough done to music after being rehearsed a hundred times.

  "Hello, Martha. It isn't cocktail-time yet, is it?" The girl at thetable spoke without raising her head, almost without moving her lips, asthough she were afraid that the slightest breath would disturb the flakystuff in front of her.

  "No, it's only fifteen-thirty. I finished my work, over there. I didn'tfind any more books, if that's good news for you."

  Sachiko took off the loup and leaned back in her chair, her palms cuppedover her eyes.

  "No, I like doing this. I call it micro-jigsaw puzzles. This book, here,really is a mess. Selim found it lying open, with some heavy stuff ontop of it; the pages were simply crushed." She hesitated briefly. "Ifonly it would mean something, after I did it."

  There could be a faintly critical overtone to that. As she replied,Martha realized that she was being defensive.

  "It will, some day. Look how long it took to read Egyptianhieroglyphics, even after they had the Rosetta Stone."

  Sachiko smiled. "Yes. I know. But they did have the Rosetta Stone."

  "And we don't. There is no Rosetta Stone, not anywhere on Mars. A wholerace, a whole species, died while the first Cro-Magnon cave-artist wasdaubing pictures of reindeer and bison, and across fifty thousand yearsand fifty million miles there was no bridge of understanding.

  "We'll find one. There must be something, somewhere, that will give usthe meaning of a few words, and we'll use them to pry meaning out ofmore words, and so on. We may not live to learn this language, but we'llmake a start, and some day somebody will."

  Sachiko took her hands from her eyes, being careful not to look towardthe unshaded light, and smiled again. This time Martha was sure that itwas not the Japanese smile of politeness, but the universally humansmile of friendship.

  "I hope so, Martha: really I do. It would be wonderful for you to be thefirst to do it, and it would be wonderful for all of us to be able toread what these people wrote. It would really bring this dead city tolife again." The smile faded slowly. "But it seems so hopeless."

  "You haven't found any more pictures?"

  Sachiko shook her head. Not that it would have meant much if she had.They had found hundreds of pictures with captions; they had never beenable to establish a positive relationship between any pictured objectand any printed word. Neither of them said anything more, and after amoment Sachiko replaced the loup and bent her head forward over thebook.

  * * * * *

  Selim von Ohlmhorst looked up from his notebook, taking his pipe out ofhis mouth.

  "Everything finished, over there?" he asked, releasing a puff of smoke.

  "Such as it was." She laid the notebooks and sketches on the table."Captain Gicquel's started airsealing the building from the fifth floordown, with an entrance on the sixth; he'll start putting in oxygengenerators as soon as that's done. I have everything cleared up wherehe'll be working."

  Colonel Penrose looked up quickly, as though making a mental note toattend to something later. Then he returned his attention to the pilot,who was pointing something out on a map.

  Von Ohlmhorst nodded. "There wasn't much to it, at that," he agreed. "Doyou know which building Tony has decided to enter next?"

  "The tall one with the conical thing like a candle extinguisher on top,I