The Book of All Skies by Greg Egan

Author:Greg Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 2021-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

The visitor to the house stood before them, placed his fist on his sternum, and said, “Jo plen Lados.”

“What’s he doing?” Imogen asked Del.

“I have no idea.”

Their host copied the gesture, and said, “Jo plen Halem.”

The visitor regarded them encouragingly.

“It could just be their names,” Del guessed. She put her fist against her chest and said, “Jo plen Del.” Imogen seemed unconvinced, but she offered her own name. The visitor – Lados? – was pleased, so they’d either deduced his true intentions, or convinced him that they’d learned some other lesson entirely.

He turned to Del and uttered a string of syllables that ended with a fair approximation of her name. She gazed back at him apologetically; he tried again, speaking more slowly. “Sere makom lemere pedra, Del.”

Del supposed it was a simple greeting; she repeated the sounds as best she could, substituting “Lados.” Lados rewarded her with a smile that couldn’t quite hide his gritted teeth, and he insisted on another few rounds of refinement before moving on to his other pupil.

When Imogen had mastered the phrase to Lados’s satisfaction, she turned to Del and whispered, “What have we done to deserve this torture?”

“We need to learn their language,” Del insisted. “It’s the only way we’ll get anywhere.”

Imogen said, “I’m willing to do hard labor in exchange for food and board. Do I really need to talk to anyone, to dig a ditch? They can just point me in the right direction and mime an appropriate shoveling action.”

“Do you ever want to go home?”

“You think they’re going to build a bridge for us, if we just ask them nicely?”

Del didn’t reply; put so bluntly, the notion seemed preposterous. But until they understood much more about this society, they had no way of knowing whether it would require a struggle a thousand times greater than Montano had faced, or whether a better guide to their prospects was the spectacular diminution of effort involved in traveling from land to land.

Lados led them patiently through several more phrases, with Halem helping out when the lesson required two speakers, as well as supplying props from around the dining room as examples of various colors and food groups. Del hoped she was at least beginning to get an ear for the sound of the language; however impatient she was to acquire a meaningful vocabulary and understand the grammar, without the shortcuts she’d been accustomed to as a student back in Apasa – a second, shared language that her teachers could use to sneak extra information into her head – everything would depend on the clarity of this one, phonetic means of exchange.

Eventually, Lados deferred to Imogen’s increasingly undisguised misery and gave them a rest. Halem handed them some fruit to eat, without asking them to name it first, and the four of them sat and chatted in their own tongues with their fellow native speakers.

“That’s the most exhausting thing I’ve done since we left home,” Imogen declared.

Del hoped this was intentional hyperbole. “It’s like using a muscle.

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