Omnilingual, Page 2
H. Beam Piper
think. I heard him drilling for the blasting shots over that way."
"Well, I hope it turns out to be one that was occupied up to the end."
The last one hadn't. It had been stripped of its contents and fittings,a piece of this and a bit of that, haphazardly, apparently over a longperiod of time, until it had been almost gutted. For centuries, as ithad died, this city had been consuming itself by a process ofauto-cannibalism. She said something to that effect.
"Yes. We always find that--except, of course, at places like Pompeii.Have you seen any of the other Roman cities in Italy?" he asked."Minturnae, for instance? First the inhabitants tore down this to repairthat, and then, after they had vacated the city, other people came alongand tore down what was left, and burned the stones for lime, or crushedthem to mend roads, till there was nothing left but the foundationtraces. That's where we are fortunate; this is one of the places wherethe Martian race perished, and there were no barbarians to come laterand destroy what they had left." He puffed slowly at his pipe. "Some ofthese days, Martha, we are going to break into one of these buildingsand find that it was one in which the last of these people died. Then wewill learn the story of the end of this civilization."
And if we learn to read their language, we'll learn the whole story, notjust the obituary. She hesitated, not putting the thought into words."We'll find that, sometime, Selim," she said, then looked at her watch."I'm going to get some more work done on my lists, before dinner."
For an instant, the old man's face stiffened in disapproval; he startedto say something, thought better of it, and put his pipe back into hismouth. The brief wrinkling around his mouth and the twitch of his whitemustache had been enough, however; she knew what he was thinking. Shewas wasting time and effort, he believed; time and effort belonging notto herself but to the expedition. He could be right, too, she realized.But he had to be wrong; there had to be a way to do it. She turned fromhim silently and went to her own packing-case seat, at the middle of thetable.
* * * * *
Photographs, and photostats of restored pages of books, and transcriptsof inscriptions, were piled in front of her, and the notebooks in whichshe was compiling her lists. She sat down, lighting a fresh cigarette,and reached over to a stack of unexamined material, taking off the topsheet. It was a photostat of what looked like the title page andcontents of some sort of a periodical. She remembered it; she had foundit herself, two days before, in a closet in the basement of the buildingshe had just finished examining.
She sat for a moment, looking at it. It was readable, in the sense thatshe had set up a purely arbitrary but consistently pronounceable systemof phonetic values for the letters. The long vertical symbols werevowels. There were only ten of them; not too many, allowing separatecharacters for long and short sounds. There were twenty of the shorthorizontal letters, which meant that sounds like -ng or -ch or -sh weresingle letters. The odds were millions to one against her system beinganything like the original sound of the language, but she had listedseveral thousand Martian words, and she could pronounce all of them.
And that was as far as it went. She could pronounce between three andfour thousand Martian words, and she couldn't assign a meaning to one ofthem. Selim von Ohlmhorst believed that she never would. So did TonyLattimer, and he was a great deal less reticent about saying so. So, shewas sure, did Sachiko Koremitsu. There were times, now and then, whenshe began to be afraid that they were right.
The letters on the page in front of her began squirming and dancing,slender vowels with fat little consonants. They did that, now, everynight in her dreams. And there were other dreams, in which she read themas easily as English; waking, she would try desperately and vainly toremember. She blinked, and looked away from the photostatted page; whenshe looked back, the letters were behaving themselves again. There werethree words at the top of the page, over-and-underlined, which seemed tobe the Martian method of capitalization. _Mastharnorvod TadavasSornhulva_. She pronounced them mentally, leafing through her notebooksto see if she had encountered them before, and in what contexts. Allthree were listed. In addition, _masthar_ was a fairly common word, andso was _norvod_, and so was _nor_, but _-vod_ was a suffix and nothingbut a suffix. _Davas_, was a word, too, and _ta-_ was a common prefix;_sorn_ and _hulva_ were both common words. This language, she had longago decided, must be something like German; when the Martians had neededa new word, they had just pasted a couple of existing words together. Itwould probably turn out to be a grammatical horror. Well, they hadpublished magazines, and one of them had been called _MastharnorvodTadavas Sornhulva_. She wondered if it had been something like the_Quarterly Archaeological Review_, or something more on the order of_Sexy Stories_.
A smaller line, under the title, was plainly the issue number and date;enough things had been found numbered in series to enable her toidentify the numerals and determine that a decimal system of numerationhad been used. This was the one thousand and seven hundred andfifty-fourth issue, for Doma, 14837; then Doma must be the name of oneof the Martian months. The word had turned up several times before. Shefound herself puffing furiously on her cigarette as she leafed throughnotebooks and piles of already examined material.
* * * * *
Sachiko was speaking to somebody, and a chair scraped at the end of thetable. She raised her head, to see a big man with red hair and a redface, in Space Force green, with the single star of a major on hisshoulder, sitting down. Ivan Fitzgerald, the medic. He was liftingweights from a book similar to the one the girl ordnance officer wasrestoring.
"Haven't had time, lately," he was saying, in reply to Sachiko'squestion. "The Finchley girl's still down with whatever it is she has,and it's something I haven't been able to diagnose yet. And I've beenchecking on bacteria cultures, and in what spare time I have, I've beendissecting specimens for Bill Chandler. Bill's finally found a mammal.Looks like a lizard, and it's only four inches long, but it's a realwarm-blooded, gamogenetic, placental, viviparous mammal. Burrows, andseems to live on what pass for insects here."
"Is there enough oxygen for anything like that?" Sachiko was asking.
"Seems to be, close to the ground." Fitzgerald got the headband of hisloup adjusted, and pulled it down over his eyes. "He found this thing ina ravine down on the sea bottom--Ha, this page seems to be intact; now,if I can get it out all in one piece--"
He went on talking inaudibly to himself, lifting the page a little at atime and sliding one of the transparent plastic sheets under it, workingwith minute delicacy. Not the delicacy of the Japanese girl's smallhands, moving like the paws of a cat washing her face, but like asteam-hammer cracking a peanut. Field archaeology requires a certaindelicacy of touch, too, but Martha watched the pair of them with enviousadmiration. Then she turned back to her own work, finishing the table ofcontents.
The next page was the beginning of the first article listed; many of thewords were unfamiliar. She had the impression that this must be somekind of scientific or technical journal; that could be because suchpublications made up the bulk of her own periodical reading. She doubtedif it were fiction; the paragraphs had a solid, factual look.
At length, Ivan Fitzgerald gave a short, explosive grunt.
"Ha! Got it!"
She looked up. He had detached the page and was cementing anotherplastic sheet onto it.
"Any pictures?" she asked.
"None on this side. Wait a moment." He turned the sheet. "None on thisside, either." He sprayed another sheet of plastic to sandwich the page,then picked up his pipe and relighted it.
"I get fun out of this, and it's good practice for my hands, so don'tthink I'm complaining," he said, "but, Martha, do you honestly thinkanybody's ever going to get anything out of this?"
Sachiko held up a scrap of the silicone plastic the Martians had usedfor paper with her tweezers. It was almost an inch square.
"Look; three whole words on this piece," she crowed. "Ivan, you took theeasy book."
&
nbsp; Fitzgerald wasn't being sidetracked. "This stuff's absolutelymeaningless," he continued. "It had a meaning fifty thousand years ago,when it was written, but it has none at all now."
She shook her head. "Meaning isn't something that evaporates with time,"she argued. "It has just as much meaning now as it ever had. We justhaven't learned how to decipher it."
"That seems like a pretty pointless distinction," Selim von Ohlmhorstjoined the conversation. "There no longer exists a means of decipheringit."
"We'll find one." She was speaking, she realized, more inself-encouragement than in controversy.
"How? From pictures and captions? We've found captioned pictures, andwhat have they given us?
"Well, I hope it turns out to be one that was occupied up to the end."
The last one hadn't. It had been stripped of its contents and fittings,a piece of this and a bit of that, haphazardly, apparently over a longperiod of time, until it had been almost gutted. For centuries, as ithad died, this city had been consuming itself by a process ofauto-cannibalism. She said something to that effect.
"Yes. We always find that--except, of course, at places like Pompeii.Have you seen any of the other Roman cities in Italy?" he asked."Minturnae, for instance? First the inhabitants tore down this to repairthat, and then, after they had vacated the city, other people came alongand tore down what was left, and burned the stones for lime, or crushedthem to mend roads, till there was nothing left but the foundationtraces. That's where we are fortunate; this is one of the places wherethe Martian race perished, and there were no barbarians to come laterand destroy what they had left." He puffed slowly at his pipe. "Some ofthese days, Martha, we are going to break into one of these buildingsand find that it was one in which the last of these people died. Then wewill learn the story of the end of this civilization."
And if we learn to read their language, we'll learn the whole story, notjust the obituary. She hesitated, not putting the thought into words."We'll find that, sometime, Selim," she said, then looked at her watch."I'm going to get some more work done on my lists, before dinner."
For an instant, the old man's face stiffened in disapproval; he startedto say something, thought better of it, and put his pipe back into hismouth. The brief wrinkling around his mouth and the twitch of his whitemustache had been enough, however; she knew what he was thinking. Shewas wasting time and effort, he believed; time and effort belonging notto herself but to the expedition. He could be right, too, she realized.But he had to be wrong; there had to be a way to do it. She turned fromhim silently and went to her own packing-case seat, at the middle of thetable.
* * * * *
Photographs, and photostats of restored pages of books, and transcriptsof inscriptions, were piled in front of her, and the notebooks in whichshe was compiling her lists. She sat down, lighting a fresh cigarette,and reached over to a stack of unexamined material, taking off the topsheet. It was a photostat of what looked like the title page andcontents of some sort of a periodical. She remembered it; she had foundit herself, two days before, in a closet in the basement of the buildingshe had just finished examining.
She sat for a moment, looking at it. It was readable, in the sense thatshe had set up a purely arbitrary but consistently pronounceable systemof phonetic values for the letters. The long vertical symbols werevowels. There were only ten of them; not too many, allowing separatecharacters for long and short sounds. There were twenty of the shorthorizontal letters, which meant that sounds like -ng or -ch or -sh weresingle letters. The odds were millions to one against her system beinganything like the original sound of the language, but she had listedseveral thousand Martian words, and she could pronounce all of them.
And that was as far as it went. She could pronounce between three andfour thousand Martian words, and she couldn't assign a meaning to one ofthem. Selim von Ohlmhorst believed that she never would. So did TonyLattimer, and he was a great deal less reticent about saying so. So, shewas sure, did Sachiko Koremitsu. There were times, now and then, whenshe began to be afraid that they were right.
The letters on the page in front of her began squirming and dancing,slender vowels with fat little consonants. They did that, now, everynight in her dreams. And there were other dreams, in which she read themas easily as English; waking, she would try desperately and vainly toremember. She blinked, and looked away from the photostatted page; whenshe looked back, the letters were behaving themselves again. There werethree words at the top of the page, over-and-underlined, which seemed tobe the Martian method of capitalization. _Mastharnorvod TadavasSornhulva_. She pronounced them mentally, leafing through her notebooksto see if she had encountered them before, and in what contexts. Allthree were listed. In addition, _masthar_ was a fairly common word, andso was _norvod_, and so was _nor_, but _-vod_ was a suffix and nothingbut a suffix. _Davas_, was a word, too, and _ta-_ was a common prefix;_sorn_ and _hulva_ were both common words. This language, she had longago decided, must be something like German; when the Martians had neededa new word, they had just pasted a couple of existing words together. Itwould probably turn out to be a grammatical horror. Well, they hadpublished magazines, and one of them had been called _MastharnorvodTadavas Sornhulva_. She wondered if it had been something like the_Quarterly Archaeological Review_, or something more on the order of_Sexy Stories_.
A smaller line, under the title, was plainly the issue number and date;enough things had been found numbered in series to enable her toidentify the numerals and determine that a decimal system of numerationhad been used. This was the one thousand and seven hundred andfifty-fourth issue, for Doma, 14837; then Doma must be the name of oneof the Martian months. The word had turned up several times before. Shefound herself puffing furiously on her cigarette as she leafed throughnotebooks and piles of already examined material.
* * * * *
Sachiko was speaking to somebody, and a chair scraped at the end of thetable. She raised her head, to see a big man with red hair and a redface, in Space Force green, with the single star of a major on hisshoulder, sitting down. Ivan Fitzgerald, the medic. He was liftingweights from a book similar to the one the girl ordnance officer wasrestoring.
"Haven't had time, lately," he was saying, in reply to Sachiko'squestion. "The Finchley girl's still down with whatever it is she has,and it's something I haven't been able to diagnose yet. And I've beenchecking on bacteria cultures, and in what spare time I have, I've beendissecting specimens for Bill Chandler. Bill's finally found a mammal.Looks like a lizard, and it's only four inches long, but it's a realwarm-blooded, gamogenetic, placental, viviparous mammal. Burrows, andseems to live on what pass for insects here."
"Is there enough oxygen for anything like that?" Sachiko was asking.
"Seems to be, close to the ground." Fitzgerald got the headband of hisloup adjusted, and pulled it down over his eyes. "He found this thing ina ravine down on the sea bottom--Ha, this page seems to be intact; now,if I can get it out all in one piece--"
He went on talking inaudibly to himself, lifting the page a little at atime and sliding one of the transparent plastic sheets under it, workingwith minute delicacy. Not the delicacy of the Japanese girl's smallhands, moving like the paws of a cat washing her face, but like asteam-hammer cracking a peanut. Field archaeology requires a certaindelicacy of touch, too, but Martha watched the pair of them with enviousadmiration. Then she turned back to her own work, finishing the table ofcontents.
The next page was the beginning of the first article listed; many of thewords were unfamiliar. She had the impression that this must be somekind of scientific or technical journal; that could be because suchpublications made up the bulk of her own periodical reading. She doubtedif it were fiction; the paragraphs had a solid, factual look.
At length, Ivan Fitzgerald gave a short, explosive grunt.
"Ha! Got it!"
She looked up. He had detached the page and was cementing anotherplastic sheet onto it.
"Any pictures?" she asked.
"None on this side. Wait a moment." He turned the sheet. "None on thisside, either." He sprayed another sheet of plastic to sandwich the page,then picked up his pipe and relighted it.
"I get fun out of this, and it's good practice for my hands, so don'tthink I'm complaining," he said, "but, Martha, do you honestly thinkanybody's ever going to get anything out of this?"
Sachiko held up a scrap of the silicone plastic the Martians had usedfor paper with her tweezers. It was almost an inch square.
"Look; three whole words on this piece," she crowed. "Ivan, you took theeasy book."
&
nbsp; Fitzgerald wasn't being sidetracked. "This stuff's absolutelymeaningless," he continued. "It had a meaning fifty thousand years ago,when it was written, but it has none at all now."
She shook her head. "Meaning isn't something that evaporates with time,"she argued. "It has just as much meaning now as it ever had. We justhaven't learned how to decipher it."
"That seems like a pretty pointless distinction," Selim von Ohlmhorstjoined the conversation. "There no longer exists a means of decipheringit."
"We'll find one." She was speaking, she realized, more inself-encouragement than in controversy.
"How? From pictures and captions? We've found captioned pictures, andwhat have they given us?
