The Dying Cycle, Ch. 3, Original Work
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labingiChapter 1, Notes, and Acknowledgements
Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Learning English
Ghanior did not like to admit, even to himself, how afraid he was. What frightened him was nothing more than physical pain, the banal intruder into his higher consciousness. An Ash'torian soldier should not operate in that domain, like an animal. A man who had nothing but duty left had no right to balk at performing his duty. But he was tired of hurting. He had hurt from the moment his ship had Walked through, and even though the ship had been programmed to follow the current and Ghanior's own Jana band had been minimally active, Jana had kicked him in the gut as always. And since he'd Walked to Ishan's house, he hadn't thrown off the pain behind his eyes. And now he had to hook his head into this damn machine.
In the waning afternoon, he sat in the dust and ate half a sandwich, torn between hunger and the virtual certainty he'd throw up when this language printer stuck into his nervous system. He welcomed the wilted leaves and soggy bread and overprocessed meat-like product. Good food would only have made him remember the possibility of relaxation.
Ishan and Mei paced up and down like spiders weaving a web from the central axis of the ship, testing the range of his makeshift diffractor. He kept pulling his eyes forcibly off Ishan. He looked so young, so not very different from the boy who'd fallen into Jana all those years ago. A decade ago he'd returned (like a dream), like a ghost... like the long-fleeing brother. Even the cut of the long, black hair he let fall around his shoulders was the same. Ghanior planted his eyes on the ship.
In the back of his mind, he was both proud and angry that he'd thrown together the shield in a matter of hours. It was a technology that had baffled his home planet for millennia, only because the anti-techs had made it impossible to study.
Ishan sat beside him. "Well, it works from the road, which is 90 percent of the battle. Once you're down thirty feet or so, it looks, well, like some big gray object being hidden by a diffraction shield, but I don't think many people will come down here." He gazed up at the roadside. "I need to find another place to park my car though." Ghanior finished his half sandwich. "I could park at the Po," mused Ishan. "We're only ten minutes walk from there."
Ghanior glanced at Mei, standing by the ship, arms crossed, a picture of impatience.
"Do you want to do the language thing tomorrow when we're fresh?" asked Ishan in direct contradiction to Mei's face.
"Let's get it over with." Ghanior stood, aware of his capitulation to the fear. Waiting to be fresher was a sound idea. But he couldn't.
It came to Ghanior embarrassingly late that some of his distress was Ishan's, a different kind of fear seeping into his thoughts. Raw. A fear of loss of self. Ghanior shut his mind up tight; his own fear was enough to manage.
"We'll take a print of you first," he told Ishan. "It will be quick." He tried not to see the stiffness in Ishan's face when Ghanior planted him in a seat and placed the neural net around his head. "I'm going to suspend you in a force shell for just about ten seconds. That's to keep you absolutely still while the pattern's run. You won't be able to breathe, so get ready to hold your breath."
A gray eye flashed on him.
"Ready?"
"Don't ask me silly questions."
Ghanior initiated the scan. Ishan froze like a static frame. Ten seconds later, there was a soft beep, and he gasped and sat forward, the neural net still floating in place.
"Are you all right?" asked Ghanior.
Ishan sat up and brushed his hair back. "Yes," he said with surprise. "Being immobilized was slightly terrifying but besides that, it was nothing."
"It's just making a copy of your neural pathways. It doesn't change your brain at all." He sighed. That's my adventure.
He glanced at Mei, sitting just two feet from them, with an attentive impatience.
"Now to trace the pathways takes about five minutes."
"Without breathing?" said Ishan.
"Which means the force shell doesn't cover my face, which means slightly more mobility. Therefore," he pulled out the apparatus, "they suggest a double restraint." He arranged his head in the firm helmet that extended from its wall compartment and set the neural net to float above it. "Ishan, use the blue knob to tighten it down until the screen shows blue. Thanks. Now, I can't see the screen from here, but everything's pre-programmed. So if you will press 'start.'"
"On the screen itself?"
"Yes."
"Ready?"
Ghanior grinned--or grimaced as much as the helmet would let him.
Then, Ishan must have pressed the command because the world exploded. Lights streaked before his eyes. Spasms pierced his neck and back--or they would be spasms if he could move. He felt no language, no instantaneous knowledge. After a few seconds, all he could conceive of was plasma-hot electric streaks shooting through his body.
There was some break in time and stabbing pains were joined--or blunted--by delirium: shapes, sounds, a vague impression of mathematics. He had a problem to solve: it involved tearing off a length of tape and dividing the figures. Voices echoed in the museum. The people came and went, talking. The phone's shrill ring made his inner ear thrum, and his eye was about to fall out of his head.
***
He lay on the hard ground. Gray. His skin burned, and everything shouted.
***
He slept in shouting and woke to shouting. Someone--Ishan shouted something. All the words came out deformed. The lights baked him.
***
He awoke to a spilting--splitting pain behind his eyes. Shooting pain when he tried to move. His neck would not obey him. He lay motionless on something bedlike. The noises in his head still rioted.
He lay a long time in a yellow-gray light with the noises like ants in a frenzy. Dimly, he began to fear that the language print had malformed-functioned. He tried to think of something in words, and realized at once that he had been doing so all along, but they came out twisted:
mal--malf--something--func.
With different meanings for the same thing--no--different things, no, words--different words for the same thing meaning.
Languages jumbled. The noise wouldn't stop.
***
He woke in the dark to a spilting--splitting pain, same plain--pain, very tiresome. By sheer force of will, he turned onto his side.
Something moved beside him. His hurt his eyes to try to track the movement.
"How are you feeling?" asked Ishan in some language; he had no idea which one.
He couldn't form an answer. His throat wouldn't obey. The pain swamping his head intensified.
"Can you understand me? Can you tell me with your mind?"
No. Opening/closing mental walls--that sort of concentration was out of the question. He managed some sort of grunt.
Ishan sat up on an elbow maybe.
"You've been out for two days. I almost took you to the hospital."
Some time passed during which Ghanior tried to gather up something to say. Ishan said some things too, but all Ghanior heard was the museum noise.
"Hurst. Hurst. Hurts," he managed finally in some language.
"I wager so," said Ishan.
Tapanayn. He was fairly sure.
"Can you understand English now?"
"Is that Inksh?" he asked in (fairly sure) Tapanayn.
"Yes."
"Yesh."
"Well, that's something." Ishan sat up and clicked on a lamp, which made Ghanior hate him. "Let me get you some water. I got some down you yesterday, but you still must be pretty dehydrated." Tap--Tapa--? "Would you like a Blockit?"
For all the good it would do. "Yesh."
***
The view out Sheric's--Ishan's big picture window pleased him. The sky was stone, hard and changeless blue. Trees and rooftops cut into it like mural tiles. Its bright reality reminded him of--
No, but rather of Senarna in childhood flower flashes. On Perdita, his full name had been Ghanior from Senarna, an odd, correct misnomer. He had been born there, in the seaside planetary capital but lived there only till age two before moving to the Space Program base with his mother. At six, he'd been inducted into the Jana Program on the island of Zerin. Thereafter, Senarna, the nearest mainland city, had been a weekend haven. Here was Ghanior at ten, running down white sidewalks to the bookshops in hopes of finding another text from Aejdar; Ghanior at fourteen in the green night lamps, dance hall hopping (with Ishan), amped by the press of people, the electric magnified boom of the city-bands, the Ghanior who had lost his virginity in Senarna in the alley behind that dance hall whose name he couldn't remember, up against the wall with Jessa. Right now, the recollection left him very tired.
He lay back in his chair. He marinated in the sun, conscious again of the throbbing behind his right eye. Of the all things his mind conjured up about Senarna, sun was not one of them: tarnished white buildings, flower gardens, fog. This town, Ishan's town, had more the flavor of R'Aej, on the Tiers--he could try not to think of it, but it returned. Something about that land, too, had always reminded him of Senarna, though the buildings where sandblasted pale brown, the gardens stiffer, water poor. The Tiers' glassware accents left it rainbowed in the sun: the flowers of R'Aej. "It reminds me of home," 'Ebbi had said in reference to the weather.
Ishan came in. His voice hurt Ghanior's ears. He talked about how Mat (id est Mei) was fiddling around with the ship.
"He won't be able to turn anything on," said Ghanior.
"He won't what?"
After a moment of confusion, it struck Ghanior he'd answered in Ash'torian. "He can't switch it on without authorization," he articulated carefully in Tapanayn.
His brain hurt. Even in the privacy of his thoughts, the new language jangled, even thinking of 'Eb--of the Tiers, English words intruded on Ash'torian and Tapanayn for Senarna and... he couldn't slow it up. It made him cling to each thought like a drowning man, and he wondered suddenly if this was how Ishan felt beset by his many dreams. They'd grown too old, he and Ishan, neurons stretched like springs till they deformed and went limp. Pieces of brain blown away. It was time he died. The thought was not new. Nor was it helpful, so he put it down.
Ishan had said something else. But by the time Ghanior realized it, Ishan had gone.
***
"How long till you're up?" Mat--Mei... Mat asked him at breakfast, in Tapanayn.
"I'm up now." Ghanior contemplated jam on his toast and decided against it: too adventurous as of yet.
"I mean till we go back to work."
Ghanior pressed a hand over aching eyes.
"Lay off," said Ishan in English.
"A couple more days," guessed Ghanior in Tapanayn. "If by 'go back to work,' you mean starting to analyze entry data from the ship. But don't put a timeline on this, Mat. This is a problem to investigate, not a procedure to implement." He was proud of himself for stringing all those words together.
Mei grabbed an orange and started peeling idly. "So I want it faster. Then, what can I do to help?"
"The very best thing you can do is try to remember everything: about yourself, about your Walk here. Any Walk you've made. Remember the details. Make observations."
"Okay," said Mat in English (everyone said "okay" in English) and took his orange to the door. "I'll come back tomorrow," he said and went out.
"At least he's proactive now," said Ishan.
"Single-minded."
"You don't say?"
Ghanior mused. "It's a failing of the Pey." That led him into a political train of thought that demanded a lot of energy to no immediate purpose. He rested his head in his hands again and made himself put it aside.
***
That afternoon, while Ishan was at work, Ghanior strolled to town; Wilyemtun was its name. The day had turned warm and marginally humid, pleasant verging on overripe. At the outskirts of town, insects critched in fallow fields spotted with white and lavender. Too much traffic and no shoulder on the main road, the only road Ghanior had found for walking to town, but that was small price for the fresh air to soothe his headache. He wore one of Ishan's t-shirts, white, to beat off the heat.
In the two days since he'd returned to relative coherence, he'd discovered a great deal about the language imprint. As specified, it bestowed mostly passive knowledge. He could now understand most things he heard in English, unless they were spoken very fast or involved a lot of context he couldn't follow. He could form English sentences in his mind at least as complex as Mat's. But speaking tangled up his tongue. Neural pathways to govern the movements of his mouth could not be written instantly. As with any new exercise, new sounds demanded practice. Of course, being imprinted from Ishan's brain, he would never understand the language like a native, much less speak it. But that was an advantage: attempting to disguise his foreignness would rapidly expose him as a liar.
A car roared past him, gusting dirt in its wake, and at the same moment, a bird of prey arced silently across the field. If he had been a religious man, in the manner of the Shonac, he'd have seen a portent in that juxtaposition. It contained a thought, but he couldn't read it.
What surprised him was the dislocation he felt when these new words washed over him. The randomness was no different from a baby's absorbing patterns of sound. But Ghanior had been thrust young into a matrix of education. He could make a good guess at the etymology of almost every Tapanayn word and a large part of Ash'torian. Language was a history, a system. But every English word was unmoored from its referent. He looked at the field, and knew the plants were called "grass"; the word made him think of dry rustlings in the wind, yet it connected to nothing; it had no home.
'Eblia would have found all this fascinating. This experience immersed him so thoroughly in her world that, at some point, he had given up on driving her out of his thoughts. Everywhere around him her voice (in Ash'torian) uttered linguistic observations, infecting him with a curiosity that was more hers than his.
When he'd mentioned his sense of dislocation to Ishan, Ishan had said, "Actually English is a fascinating language historically. It's constructed out of influences from several different languages." He pulled out a small, dog-eared book. "You might enjoy this."
Ghanior took and stared at a cover illustrated with numerous glyphs. "I can't read English. The imprint only writes spoken language."
Ishan stared for a moment, then laughed. "Well, you'd better start learning then. It's not a hard writing system--well, it is and isn't. It has a simple alphabet very close to the Vunizh letters--in sound value, not appearance. The tricky part is that a lot of the spellings are highly idiosyncratic due to various historical accretions."
"You like language," said Ghanior, unaccountably taken aback.
"I guess I do." Ishan got out a piece of paper and a pencil. "It's solid," he added after a moment.
And then Ghanior knew why he hadn't liked that revelation. It was the sort of thing 'Eblia would say.
***
By the time he reached town, his headache was worse; he could picture blood vessels stretched taut around his cranium, a classic sign of dehydration. Not bringing water was an amateur's mistake. It suggested fatigue, which, despite Mei's complaints, meant he'd been right to place the work on standby. Though instinct told him to plunge on, experience had taught him not to begrudge time spent optimizing the components of the system, including himself.
For now, he prioritized finding water or an establishment that sold beverages. Here again, the town reminded him of Senarna but now on the more intimate level of the street: like so much of Senarna, it was worn down: sidewalks chipped, signs faded, some windows boarded shut. Unlike Senarna, it showed no signs of painstaking architectural design. The shops were boxes, the streets a grid, interspersed with the occasional winding offshoot. Despite the decay, the town displayed a healthy bustle. People walked purposefully along most every street. Most shops were open, stocked, and doing business. Amid talk and laugher and an occasional shout, there were no sounds of violence or sense of danger.
He decided to try a store that showed fruit through the window. He found it small and cramped and apparently devoted to nothing but fruit.
"Hello. Can I help you find something?" said a plump, cheerful woman when he wandered past her station.
"Hello. Yes," said Ghanior with brutal slowness. "Do you shell--sell drinks?"
"Oh sorry, we just do fresh fruit here. ¿Habla español?"
"No."
"Oh. Well, if you go down about a block on the left, there's Dos Lunas; they're a nice little mom and pop store." He noted, and was grateful, that she was speaking a little slowly. "Are you visiting?"
"Yes."
"Where are you from?"
"Estonia," said Ghanior as Ishan had suggested. You look like you could be from that part of the world, he'd said. And it's so obscure here that the odds of anyone knowing anything about it are extremely slim.
"Wow, I've never met anyone from Estonia before. We have some really great oranges in." She reached over and held up a citrus.
"Thank you. I will buy one." Ghanior took the small purse Ishan had given him from his pocket.
"Just one? That'll be a dollar. They're organic."
Ghanior thought that observation superfluous--unless they had a custom of selling decorative replicas of food. He thanked her and took his orange. It was very orange--and it was called an orange. He grinned happily.
***
"I went to a store called Two Moons," he remarked that evening. "Why call it that when they just have one moon?"
The question was fundamentally flippant, but Ishan stopped stirring the rice and stared. After a moment, he said, "Dos Lunas?" He went back to stirring. "It's a sign of the dream."
"How so?"
"Perdita has two moons. So it represents Perdita, or that I'm from Perdita or something."
Ghanior stopped chopping the tomato and studied his profile. "You remember the two moons?"
"No... I've always known the two moons meant me. But I--I never thought, until now. Right now, I just knew."
"Do remember what they're called?"
"Tori and... something. No."
"Olay. That's all right. That's good. Your memory's coming back."
"Is it good?"
Ghanior had no immediate answer for that. They went on preparing dinner in silence.
"Mat wanted to come by," said Ishan presently. "I told him to hold off; you'd be getting to work in earnest tomorrow. He drives me buggy," he added in English.
"Thanks," said Ghanior, unsure what else to say.
"I think I'll spend the night at his place though."
Ghanior smiled. "Even though he drivess--drives you buddy--buggy?"
"I need to talk to him."
They sat down to eat. Rice and vegetables in chicken broth with squash and salad, all subtly seasoned. Ghanior tried to remember if Ishan had been this creative a cook before. But his childhood memories had nothing to offer, and after that, the two of them had scarcely been in the same room.
"Our time brief," said Ghanior in Ash'torian. At first, he'd said it from force of habit; now he said to remember his gods.
Ishan eyed him and after a while said, "So you picked up Spanish from me too?"
"Spanish?"
"It's the first language I started to learn here, though I've let it slide. 'Dos Lunas'?"
"That's Spanish?"
Ishan laughed. "That thing copied all my language knowledge, didn't it?"
"I--yes, I think so." Ghanior hadn't thought about it much since all their other languages they already had in common--or so he'd assumed.
Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Learning English
Ghanior did not like to admit, even to himself, how afraid he was. What frightened him was nothing more than physical pain, the banal intruder into his higher consciousness. An Ash'torian soldier should not operate in that domain, like an animal. A man who had nothing but duty left had no right to balk at performing his duty. But he was tired of hurting. He had hurt from the moment his ship had Walked through, and even though the ship had been programmed to follow the current and Ghanior's own Jana band had been minimally active, Jana had kicked him in the gut as always. And since he'd Walked to Ishan's house, he hadn't thrown off the pain behind his eyes. And now he had to hook his head into this damn machine.
In the waning afternoon, he sat in the dust and ate half a sandwich, torn between hunger and the virtual certainty he'd throw up when this language printer stuck into his nervous system. He welcomed the wilted leaves and soggy bread and overprocessed meat-like product. Good food would only have made him remember the possibility of relaxation.
Ishan and Mei paced up and down like spiders weaving a web from the central axis of the ship, testing the range of his makeshift diffractor. He kept pulling his eyes forcibly off Ishan. He looked so young, so not very different from the boy who'd fallen into Jana all those years ago. A decade ago he'd returned (like a dream), like a ghost... like the long-fleeing brother. Even the cut of the long, black hair he let fall around his shoulders was the same. Ghanior planted his eyes on the ship.
In the back of his mind, he was both proud and angry that he'd thrown together the shield in a matter of hours. It was a technology that had baffled his home planet for millennia, only because the anti-techs had made it impossible to study.
Ishan sat beside him. "Well, it works from the road, which is 90 percent of the battle. Once you're down thirty feet or so, it looks, well, like some big gray object being hidden by a diffraction shield, but I don't think many people will come down here." He gazed up at the roadside. "I need to find another place to park my car though." Ghanior finished his half sandwich. "I could park at the Po," mused Ishan. "We're only ten minutes walk from there."
Ghanior glanced at Mei, standing by the ship, arms crossed, a picture of impatience.
"Do you want to do the language thing tomorrow when we're fresh?" asked Ishan in direct contradiction to Mei's face.
"Let's get it over with." Ghanior stood, aware of his capitulation to the fear. Waiting to be fresher was a sound idea. But he couldn't.
It came to Ghanior embarrassingly late that some of his distress was Ishan's, a different kind of fear seeping into his thoughts. Raw. A fear of loss of self. Ghanior shut his mind up tight; his own fear was enough to manage.
"We'll take a print of you first," he told Ishan. "It will be quick." He tried not to see the stiffness in Ishan's face when Ghanior planted him in a seat and placed the neural net around his head. "I'm going to suspend you in a force shell for just about ten seconds. That's to keep you absolutely still while the pattern's run. You won't be able to breathe, so get ready to hold your breath."
A gray eye flashed on him.
"Ready?"
"Don't ask me silly questions."
Ghanior initiated the scan. Ishan froze like a static frame. Ten seconds later, there was a soft beep, and he gasped and sat forward, the neural net still floating in place.
"Are you all right?" asked Ghanior.
Ishan sat up and brushed his hair back. "Yes," he said with surprise. "Being immobilized was slightly terrifying but besides that, it was nothing."
"It's just making a copy of your neural pathways. It doesn't change your brain at all." He sighed. That's my adventure.
He glanced at Mei, sitting just two feet from them, with an attentive impatience.
"Now to trace the pathways takes about five minutes."
"Without breathing?" said Ishan.
"Which means the force shell doesn't cover my face, which means slightly more mobility. Therefore," he pulled out the apparatus, "they suggest a double restraint." He arranged his head in the firm helmet that extended from its wall compartment and set the neural net to float above it. "Ishan, use the blue knob to tighten it down until the screen shows blue. Thanks. Now, I can't see the screen from here, but everything's pre-programmed. So if you will press 'start.'"
"On the screen itself?"
"Yes."
"Ready?"
Ghanior grinned--or grimaced as much as the helmet would let him.
Then, Ishan must have pressed the command because the world exploded. Lights streaked before his eyes. Spasms pierced his neck and back--or they would be spasms if he could move. He felt no language, no instantaneous knowledge. After a few seconds, all he could conceive of was plasma-hot electric streaks shooting through his body.
There was some break in time and stabbing pains were joined--or blunted--by delirium: shapes, sounds, a vague impression of mathematics. He had a problem to solve: it involved tearing off a length of tape and dividing the figures. Voices echoed in the museum. The people came and went, talking. The phone's shrill ring made his inner ear thrum, and his eye was about to fall out of his head.
***
He lay on the hard ground. Gray. His skin burned, and everything shouted.
***
He slept in shouting and woke to shouting. Someone--Ishan shouted something. All the words came out deformed. The lights baked him.
***
He awoke to a spilting--splitting pain behind his eyes. Shooting pain when he tried to move. His neck would not obey him. He lay motionless on something bedlike. The noises in his head still rioted.
He lay a long time in a yellow-gray light with the noises like ants in a frenzy. Dimly, he began to fear that the language print had malformed-functioned. He tried to think of something in words, and realized at once that he had been doing so all along, but they came out twisted:
mal--malf--something--func.
With different meanings for the same thing--no--different things, no, words--different words for the same thing meaning.
Languages jumbled. The noise wouldn't stop.
***
He woke in the dark to a spilting--splitting pain, same plain--pain, very tiresome. By sheer force of will, he turned onto his side.
Something moved beside him. His hurt his eyes to try to track the movement.
"How are you feeling?" asked Ishan in some language; he had no idea which one.
He couldn't form an answer. His throat wouldn't obey. The pain swamping his head intensified.
"Can you understand me? Can you tell me with your mind?"
No. Opening/closing mental walls--that sort of concentration was out of the question. He managed some sort of grunt.
Ishan sat up on an elbow maybe.
"You've been out for two days. I almost took you to the hospital."
Some time passed during which Ghanior tried to gather up something to say. Ishan said some things too, but all Ghanior heard was the museum noise.
"Hurst. Hurst. Hurts," he managed finally in some language.
"I wager so," said Ishan.
Tapanayn. He was fairly sure.
"Can you understand English now?"
"Is that Inksh?" he asked in (fairly sure) Tapanayn.
"Yes."
"Yesh."
"Well, that's something." Ishan sat up and clicked on a lamp, which made Ghanior hate him. "Let me get you some water. I got some down you yesterday, but you still must be pretty dehydrated." Tap--Tapa--? "Would you like a Blockit?"
For all the good it would do. "Yesh."
***
The view out Sheric's--Ishan's big picture window pleased him. The sky was stone, hard and changeless blue. Trees and rooftops cut into it like mural tiles. Its bright reality reminded him of--
No, but rather of Senarna in childhood flower flashes. On Perdita, his full name had been Ghanior from Senarna, an odd, correct misnomer. He had been born there, in the seaside planetary capital but lived there only till age two before moving to the Space Program base with his mother. At six, he'd been inducted into the Jana Program on the island of Zerin. Thereafter, Senarna, the nearest mainland city, had been a weekend haven. Here was Ghanior at ten, running down white sidewalks to the bookshops in hopes of finding another text from Aejdar; Ghanior at fourteen in the green night lamps, dance hall hopping (with Ishan), amped by the press of people, the electric magnified boom of the city-bands, the Ghanior who had lost his virginity in Senarna in the alley behind that dance hall whose name he couldn't remember, up against the wall with Jessa. Right now, the recollection left him very tired.
He lay back in his chair. He marinated in the sun, conscious again of the throbbing behind his right eye. Of the all things his mind conjured up about Senarna, sun was not one of them: tarnished white buildings, flower gardens, fog. This town, Ishan's town, had more the flavor of R'Aej, on the Tiers--he could try not to think of it, but it returned. Something about that land, too, had always reminded him of Senarna, though the buildings where sandblasted pale brown, the gardens stiffer, water poor. The Tiers' glassware accents left it rainbowed in the sun: the flowers of R'Aej. "It reminds me of home," 'Ebbi had said in reference to the weather.
Ishan came in. His voice hurt Ghanior's ears. He talked about how Mat (id est Mei) was fiddling around with the ship.
"He won't be able to turn anything on," said Ghanior.
"He won't what?"
After a moment of confusion, it struck Ghanior he'd answered in Ash'torian. "He can't switch it on without authorization," he articulated carefully in Tapanayn.
His brain hurt. Even in the privacy of his thoughts, the new language jangled, even thinking of 'Eb--of the Tiers, English words intruded on Ash'torian and Tapanayn for Senarna and... he couldn't slow it up. It made him cling to each thought like a drowning man, and he wondered suddenly if this was how Ishan felt beset by his many dreams. They'd grown too old, he and Ishan, neurons stretched like springs till they deformed and went limp. Pieces of brain blown away. It was time he died. The thought was not new. Nor was it helpful, so he put it down.
Ishan had said something else. But by the time Ghanior realized it, Ishan had gone.
***
"How long till you're up?" Mat--Mei... Mat asked him at breakfast, in Tapanayn.
"I'm up now." Ghanior contemplated jam on his toast and decided against it: too adventurous as of yet.
"I mean till we go back to work."
Ghanior pressed a hand over aching eyes.
"Lay off," said Ishan in English.
"A couple more days," guessed Ghanior in Tapanayn. "If by 'go back to work,' you mean starting to analyze entry data from the ship. But don't put a timeline on this, Mat. This is a problem to investigate, not a procedure to implement." He was proud of himself for stringing all those words together.
Mei grabbed an orange and started peeling idly. "So I want it faster. Then, what can I do to help?"
"The very best thing you can do is try to remember everything: about yourself, about your Walk here. Any Walk you've made. Remember the details. Make observations."
"Okay," said Mat in English (everyone said "okay" in English) and took his orange to the door. "I'll come back tomorrow," he said and went out.
"At least he's proactive now," said Ishan.
"Single-minded."
"You don't say?"
Ghanior mused. "It's a failing of the Pey." That led him into a political train of thought that demanded a lot of energy to no immediate purpose. He rested his head in his hands again and made himself put it aside.
***
That afternoon, while Ishan was at work, Ghanior strolled to town; Wilyemtun was its name. The day had turned warm and marginally humid, pleasant verging on overripe. At the outskirts of town, insects critched in fallow fields spotted with white and lavender. Too much traffic and no shoulder on the main road, the only road Ghanior had found for walking to town, but that was small price for the fresh air to soothe his headache. He wore one of Ishan's t-shirts, white, to beat off the heat.
In the two days since he'd returned to relative coherence, he'd discovered a great deal about the language imprint. As specified, it bestowed mostly passive knowledge. He could now understand most things he heard in English, unless they were spoken very fast or involved a lot of context he couldn't follow. He could form English sentences in his mind at least as complex as Mat's. But speaking tangled up his tongue. Neural pathways to govern the movements of his mouth could not be written instantly. As with any new exercise, new sounds demanded practice. Of course, being imprinted from Ishan's brain, he would never understand the language like a native, much less speak it. But that was an advantage: attempting to disguise his foreignness would rapidly expose him as a liar.
A car roared past him, gusting dirt in its wake, and at the same moment, a bird of prey arced silently across the field. If he had been a religious man, in the manner of the Shonac, he'd have seen a portent in that juxtaposition. It contained a thought, but he couldn't read it.
What surprised him was the dislocation he felt when these new words washed over him. The randomness was no different from a baby's absorbing patterns of sound. But Ghanior had been thrust young into a matrix of education. He could make a good guess at the etymology of almost every Tapanayn word and a large part of Ash'torian. Language was a history, a system. But every English word was unmoored from its referent. He looked at the field, and knew the plants were called "grass"; the word made him think of dry rustlings in the wind, yet it connected to nothing; it had no home.
'Eblia would have found all this fascinating. This experience immersed him so thoroughly in her world that, at some point, he had given up on driving her out of his thoughts. Everywhere around him her voice (in Ash'torian) uttered linguistic observations, infecting him with a curiosity that was more hers than his.
When he'd mentioned his sense of dislocation to Ishan, Ishan had said, "Actually English is a fascinating language historically. It's constructed out of influences from several different languages." He pulled out a small, dog-eared book. "You might enjoy this."
Ghanior took and stared at a cover illustrated with numerous glyphs. "I can't read English. The imprint only writes spoken language."
Ishan stared for a moment, then laughed. "Well, you'd better start learning then. It's not a hard writing system--well, it is and isn't. It has a simple alphabet very close to the Vunizh letters--in sound value, not appearance. The tricky part is that a lot of the spellings are highly idiosyncratic due to various historical accretions."
"You like language," said Ghanior, unaccountably taken aback.
"I guess I do." Ishan got out a piece of paper and a pencil. "It's solid," he added after a moment.
And then Ghanior knew why he hadn't liked that revelation. It was the sort of thing 'Eblia would say.
***
By the time he reached town, his headache was worse; he could picture blood vessels stretched taut around his cranium, a classic sign of dehydration. Not bringing water was an amateur's mistake. It suggested fatigue, which, despite Mei's complaints, meant he'd been right to place the work on standby. Though instinct told him to plunge on, experience had taught him not to begrudge time spent optimizing the components of the system, including himself.
For now, he prioritized finding water or an establishment that sold beverages. Here again, the town reminded him of Senarna but now on the more intimate level of the street: like so much of Senarna, it was worn down: sidewalks chipped, signs faded, some windows boarded shut. Unlike Senarna, it showed no signs of painstaking architectural design. The shops were boxes, the streets a grid, interspersed with the occasional winding offshoot. Despite the decay, the town displayed a healthy bustle. People walked purposefully along most every street. Most shops were open, stocked, and doing business. Amid talk and laugher and an occasional shout, there were no sounds of violence or sense of danger.
He decided to try a store that showed fruit through the window. He found it small and cramped and apparently devoted to nothing but fruit.
"Hello. Can I help you find something?" said a plump, cheerful woman when he wandered past her station.
"Hello. Yes," said Ghanior with brutal slowness. "Do you shell--sell drinks?"
"Oh sorry, we just do fresh fruit here. ¿Habla español?"
"No."
"Oh. Well, if you go down about a block on the left, there's Dos Lunas; they're a nice little mom and pop store." He noted, and was grateful, that she was speaking a little slowly. "Are you visiting?"
"Yes."
"Where are you from?"
"Estonia," said Ghanior as Ishan had suggested. You look like you could be from that part of the world, he'd said. And it's so obscure here that the odds of anyone knowing anything about it are extremely slim.
"Wow, I've never met anyone from Estonia before. We have some really great oranges in." She reached over and held up a citrus.
"Thank you. I will buy one." Ghanior took the small purse Ishan had given him from his pocket.
"Just one? That'll be a dollar. They're organic."
Ghanior thought that observation superfluous--unless they had a custom of selling decorative replicas of food. He thanked her and took his orange. It was very orange--and it was called an orange. He grinned happily.
***
"I went to a store called Two Moons," he remarked that evening. "Why call it that when they just have one moon?"
The question was fundamentally flippant, but Ishan stopped stirring the rice and stared. After a moment, he said, "Dos Lunas?" He went back to stirring. "It's a sign of the dream."
"How so?"
"Perdita has two moons. So it represents Perdita, or that I'm from Perdita or something."
Ghanior stopped chopping the tomato and studied his profile. "You remember the two moons?"
"No... I've always known the two moons meant me. But I--I never thought, until now. Right now, I just knew."
"Do remember what they're called?"
"Tori and... something. No."
"Olay. That's all right. That's good. Your memory's coming back."
"Is it good?"
Ghanior had no immediate answer for that. They went on preparing dinner in silence.
"Mat wanted to come by," said Ishan presently. "I told him to hold off; you'd be getting to work in earnest tomorrow. He drives me buggy," he added in English.
"Thanks," said Ghanior, unsure what else to say.
"I think I'll spend the night at his place though."
Ghanior smiled. "Even though he drivess--drives you buddy--buggy?"
"I need to talk to him."
They sat down to eat. Rice and vegetables in chicken broth with squash and salad, all subtly seasoned. Ghanior tried to remember if Ishan had been this creative a cook before. But his childhood memories had nothing to offer, and after that, the two of them had scarcely been in the same room.
"Our time brief," said Ghanior in Ash'torian. At first, he'd said it from force of habit; now he said to remember his gods.
Ishan eyed him and after a while said, "So you picked up Spanish from me too?"
"Spanish?"
"It's the first language I started to learn here, though I've let it slide. 'Dos Lunas'?"
"That's Spanish?"
Ishan laughed. "That thing copied all my language knowledge, didn't it?"
"I--yes, I think so." Ghanior hadn't thought about it much since all their other languages they already had in common--or so he'd assumed.
