CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
After days of scant contact with the other humans — polite but distant greetings that made it clear they didn’t have time to waste with an ignorant old woman — Ofelia noticed that she had become real to them again. She wasn’t sure she liked it. She suspected it meant that they were finishing up their contact work, as they called it, and getting ready to “make a final determination” (the team leader’s phrase) about her, and the colony, and the creatures.
The change began with slightly warmer greetings when they saw her, politely asking how she was, how her garden prospered. The tall woman commented on a necklace Ofelia had made. The stocky man told her he had discovered that Bluecloak was a minstrel or entertainer, a singer. The younger woman began hanging around Ofelia without saying much, just like a pesky child. Ofelia noticed that she had pilfered a necklace to wear, and that she left too many of her shirt buttons undone. After a few days of hovering that nearly drove Ofelia to rudeness, she actually began a conversation. She asked how Ofelia had taught the creatures to speak.
Ofelia explained, as well as she could. She had tried to teach them as she had taught babies — human babies, she repeated, though Bilong didn’t know about the others.
“That’s not how you teach a language,” the woman said. “I know you probably thought you taught your children to talk, but human children don’t have to be taught — they just learn.” Bilong was trying to be polite. Ofelia could tell that, just as she could tell that the woman was treating her with exaggerated patience, as if she were a naughty child. She herself tried not to resent the rudeness which was not intended.
“Some do,” Ofelia conceded. Most, probably. But had any mother ever been able to resist teaching? “All of them,” Bilong said, emphasizing it, “—all human children learn to talk on their own, because they’re designed to speak human language.”
Ofelia wished she could remember how to do what she had done for so many years, remove herself from the talk and let it pass by, but it was impossible to put that chicken back in the egg. “Sara’s child,” she heard herself saying, even as the old, cautious voice implored her to keep quiet. “It couldn’t talk, no matter what.”
“I meant normal children,” the woman said, less patiently “But these are aliens, Ofelia — I can call you Ofelia, can’t I?”
A girl from this neighborhood has no business getting a swelled head, her father had said. Pride goes before damnation, someone had said. The tall stalk asks for the knife. You are nothing. “Sera Ofelia,” she said, with the least emphasis.
“Oh — Sarah? I’m sorry; I thought you were called Ofelia.” The woman seemed confused, but willing. Her accent, Ofelia realized, meant that she could not hear the difference between the name Sara and the title Sera. Nor had she paid attention when the stocky man addressed her correctly as Sera Falfurrias. Ofelia did not enlighten her. She waited, hoping her face would remember the bland expressions that had kept her out of trouble before.
“Sarah,” the linguist said. “Let me explain about alien languages.” Ofelia waited in silence, but her mind crackled with comments. “They aren’t like human languages,” the linguist went on. Oh really? Did she think Ofelia hadn’t noticed? “Since their biological nature is different, the very structure of their brains — if we can call them brains, which is doubtful — determines a different structure of language.” Ofelia repressed a snort with difficulty: Whatever the brain had to do with language, some of the messages would have to be the same. I’m hungry, feed me. I’m hurt, comfort me. Come here. Go away. OUCH. Do it again. What is that and how does it work?
“They may not intend any of the same meanings,” the linguist said, completing the picture of an idiot. Prudence lost out; she had been too long free to speak her mind, if only to herself. “They have to say some of the same things,” she said. “If they’re hungry. If they hurt.”
The younger woman’s eyebrows went up. “Well… there are a few nearly universal messages. But those are least interesting; even a non-language species may have vocalizations associated with hunger or pain. Besides, in the languages we know, these aren’t expressed the same way. The goetiae, for instance, actually say ‘my sap dries’ when they mean I’m hungry,’ and in one dialect of your language—” The linguist said “your language” as if it were particularly silly. “—the South Naryan, I think it is, no one ever says ‘I hurt’ — they always use the form ‘it pains me.’”
Ofelia rubbed her foot a little backwards and forwards on the ground, reminding herself of that reality. She had never heard of the goetiae — were they aliens? — but she had had an aunt who was South Naryan, and she knew perfectly well that her aunt said “I hurt myself’ when she fell over something. Did this linguist say “I hurt” when she had a backache? Or did she say, more sensibly, “My back hurts”? She thought of a question she could ask.
“How many alien languages do you know?”
The woman flushed. “Well… actually… not any. Not truly alien, that is. No ones ever found one. This will be the first.” As if Ofelia had said what she was thinking, the linguist hurried on. “Of course, we practiced with computer generated languages. The neural modelers created alien networks, and we practiced with the languages they generated.”
Ofelia kept her face blank. She understood what that meant: they had created machines that talked machine languages, and from this they thought they had learned how to understand alien languages. Stupid. Machines would not think like aliens, but like machines. The creatures were not machines — very far from it.
But the linguist was leaning closer, confiding now, as if Ofelia were a favorite aunt or grandmother. She did not want to be Bilong’s mother, or her grand-mother. She had done with these roles, with being a good child, a good wife, a good mother. She had put seventy-odd years into it; she had worked hard at it; now she wanted to be that Ofelia who painted and carved and sang in an old cracked voice with strange creatures and their stranger music. The role the creatures had given her was more than enough. “It’s all this tension,” the linguist was saying. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—” Then don’t, Ofelia thought. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it. “—but you’re wise, even if you don’t have an education.” The arrogance in that almost yanked a reply from her, but she managed to squeeze it back. Wise even if she had no education? What did wisdom have to do with education? Besides, she had an education; she had spent hours studying, nights and early mornings studying, long before this child was born. This… this chit of a girl who hadn’t known how to repair the pumps, who had blithely walked between a cow and her calf.
“The thing is,” the girl went on, in happy unawareness of Ofelia’s thoughts, “they don’t like each other and never have. So they’re using me as an excuse. One says I’m flirting, and the other one says I’m not flirting, and—” “Are you flirting?” Ofelia asked. She thought so; why else wear that perfume? Why else swing her ripe young body back and forth like fruit on a vine, every motion declaring her readiness to be picked and eaten?
“Of course not.” A flounce, an outraged glance. Just like Linda, who had always denied with her mouth while proclaiming with her hips. But this was not Linda. “Well… maybe. But not seriously, you know. It’s not like your culture, you know.” Again that gentle condescension. “We don’t have the same rules—” As if human biology would shift aside for her convenience, as if men were not animals born to respond to smells and motions. “I do rather like one of them, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t know it. But that’s not really flirting.”
“Do you have sex with him?” Ofelia asked. The girl flushed and scowled,