Cathedral by Michael Mangels (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

than their engine room. It would be nice to know why they’re here and what their fight with the other alien ship was all about.”

“Perhaps our guest will be able to tell us soon,” Shar said, nodding toward the alien, whose long and spindly body was splayed gingerly across two mess-hall chairs. “Though I don’t doubt that his people will wish to be on their way as soon as possible. But as Mr. Candlewood has pointed out—”

“Call me John,” Candlewood said.

Reminding himself once again of the human penchant for informality, Shar nodded and displayed his best synthetic smile. “As John has pointed out, Senkowski and Permenter wouldn’t be likely to decipher this language any more quickly than we can.”

“So we’ve got maybe an hour, tops, to do the impossible,” Bowers said. “Otherwise, our new friend goes home without helping us puzzle out the alien text. And whatever it has to say about that Oort cloud artifact.”

“We’re lucky he’s even still here,” Candlewood said. “If his own medical bay hadn’t been wrecked when his ship was attacked, he’d probably already be gone.”

“And if we fail to return him by the time the aliens are ready to leave,” Shar said, “we can’t rule out a hostile reaction on their part.”

“So we’re back where we started,” Candlewood said. “We may have a few phonemes, but we’ve still got no syntax or semantics. And no Rosetta stone to bail us out.”

Nodding, Shar recalled what he’d read about the Rosetta stone at Starfleet Academy. That artifact, discovered nearly six centuries ago in the Terran town of Rashid, bore inscriptions of identical texts in Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Only a prior knowledge of Demotic and Greek had allowed the stone’s translators to comprehend the enigmatic Egyptian picture language. Without the Rosetta stone, those obscure inscriptions might have remained unreadable, their authors’ voices forever stilled.

Shar surmised that whatever Rosetta stone the Gamma Quadrant might hold had spread itself across whole sectors ages ago by the slow process of inter-stellar cultural and linguistic diffusion. It would take all the processing power the Defiant’ s computer could muster to reconstruct those ancient language migration patterns—in effect sweeping up and reassembling the local Rosetta stone’s billions of metaphorical shards.

“Display the alien text,” Shar said.

Candlewood responded by giving the computer the appropriate command. A parade of large, cryptic characters, pictograms consisting of undulating lines, asymmetrical polygons, crosshatches, and intersecting and broken shapes, coalesced in the air above the table. There were no perceptible spaces between the symbols, nor anything resembling punctuation marks.

The alien’s deep, oil-drop eyes watched the lockstep march of the pictograms without any evident recognition.

Bowers cast a doubtful glance at Shar. “Think we’ll actually find out what he knows this time?”

“I believe,” Shar said, activating the translator, “that we have only one way to find out for certain.”

Shar discreetly angled the translator toward the alien, not eager to have his action mistaken for an attack. But the creature showed no sign of noticing, evidently engrossed in the parade of airborne text.

“Old, very, perceives me, self/ego,” came the translator’s melodious voice, the alien’s speech-surrogate. “Perceives me not old very merely. Indeed, but is oldoldold.”

Bowers startled Shar by suddenly launching into what appeared to be a brief victory dance. Candlewood grinned broadly, evidently expressing similar sentiments.

The text is not simply old, Shar thought, too intent on the unfolding mystery to join in his colleagues’ jubilation. The alien recognized it as very old.

“Maybe it’s his people’s equivalent of the Book of Genesis,” Candlewood said, his thoughts obviously moving along lines similar to Shar’s.

But Bowers didn’t look ready to celebrate just yet. “Remember, nobody here can read Genesis in the original Hebrew.”

“Perhaps he only needs some clarification,” Shar said, handing the translator off to Candlewood, then taking a padd from the table. He activated the padd’s display, which began mirroring the holographic text that still flowed past the alien’s rapt gaze. The padd tapped into the stream of data on syntax, phonology, and psycholinguistics now coursing back and forth between the translator and the main computer.

Parenthetical enclosures began to appear around certain regularly repeated groupings of symbols, isolating each such sequence inside an oval border. Shar recalled that the scholars who had interpreted the Rosetta stone’s hieroglyphs had referred to such markings as cartouches—discrete words or phrases, rendered in a language that might as well have been devised light-years away from Egypt.

These groupings of characters, of course, were no revelation to Shar—or to anyone else in the room, for that matter. The repetition of certain symbol strings was one of the first discoveries made during the initial computer analyses of the alien text. But absent a lexicon of any sort, these recurring character groupings had been utterly devoid of meaning.

Now, thanks to the newly enhanced translator, they at least had a potential means of interpreting the alien’s reactions to seeing those symbols.

Long minutes passed as the isolated strings of symbols continued scrolling past the alien’s watchful eyes, one after another. The alien sat impassively, saying nothing further.

Bowers’s wry comment finally broke the silence: “Looks like it’s all Greek to him after all.”

Shar’s certainty was finally beginning to fade in earnest. He could see no sign of recognition whatsoever on the creature’s face. Assuming, of course, that he was equipped to recognize such emotional cues in these beings, which he almost certainly wasn’t.

Suddenly, the alien spoke up, loudly. “Enti Leyza.”

The reconfigured translator, steeped as it currently was in quadrantwide linguistic comparisons, seemed to balk for a protracted moment. Shar typed a command into his padd, instructing it to display the translation of the alien’s utterance as text.

“Run the display in reverse,” Shar said, frowning at his recalcitrant padd. Candlewood moved the holographic text backward, very slowly.

“Enti Leyza!” The alien said as a particular cartouche hove back into view. He pointed toward it with a long, chitinous digit.

“Freeze it!” Shar said, then stared at the complex, symbol-strewn oval that was suddenly suspended motionless in midair.

“He recognizes that symbol,” Candlewood whispered. “There’s no doubt about