Chapter 6
Eventually, Holt turned up and extracted her. They took an elevator to ring level and walked through the reception floor. Holt led her through a side door and along a series of wood-panelled corridors.
“Sorry about the delay,” Holt said, “I was in a meeting.”
Arianne’s left eye twitched.
“That’s alright, I just wish I knew why I was here.” She said.
Arianne’s flats shuffled over the marble floor while Holt’s polished shoes clicked along.
Click-shush-click-shush.
“Do you know why I’m here?”
“Yes”
Click-SHUSH-click-SHUSH.
“Hey Holt”
“Yes?”
“Tell me why I’m here.”
“Oh, I see, sorry - I don’t maintain my conversation protocol with people your age. Oh, is there something in your eye?”
“It’s nothing.”
Arianne grinned a little, then squeezed her voice into whiny drawl.
“What we’ve got here … is a failure to communicate”
Holt looked confused.
“Um, I’m sorry?”
“You know” Arianne said, swaggering slightly and screwing up her face “Are you talkin’ to me?”
Holt was staring straight at her trying to work out whether she was trying to signal duress. Arianne frowned, but then Holt appeared to understand.
“Oh” he said, “You’re quoting from the Standard Culture Canon? Sorry, I grew up on the asteroid belt – it’s not part of the curriculum.”
“Really?” said Arianne in genuine wonder – she’d never met anyone who didn’t know 20th century film inside out. Indeed, she depended on it in order to be able to communicate.
The problem was that languages changed. Sounds shifted, words went in and out of fashion, grammar lost and gained rules and entirely new ways of expression were invented. The basic rule was that if you split up a group of people they would eventually be unable to communicate. Back on ancient Earth, this process hadn’t gotten too out of hand because cultures kept running into each other. Bits and pieces of language were adopted, elided or forgotten. Or wiped from existence along with their speakers, Arianne reminded herself.
As humans began to colonise other planets, all space-hell broke loose. No longer confined to the surface of a sphere, humans headed off in all directions. The vast distances of inter-stellar travel meant that a culture could drift through space for decades without bumping into another. Languages drifted, too. Worse, the effect of relativity meant that scouting parties sent off to find habitable worlds would arrive back a decade later to find that their mothership had undergone a thousand years of cultural evolution, and they could no longer be understood. It was thought that the perfection of chryosleep would help by freezing languages along with their speakers, but in fact eventually exacerbated things. An individual’s history was no longer closely tied to a culture’s history. A 20 year-old who had been alive for three hundred years found themselves trying to talk their great-great-great granddaughter who was in her 80s. An entire population along with all of their cultural norms could be sealed off from contact, only to re-appear again, unchanged, centuries later. Communities could freeze themselves, split up, and colonise planets at opposite ends of the galaxy with precisely the same language. However, sending a message from one to the other would take so long that it would be entirely incomprehensible to the receivers. Other groups would be unfrozen after decades and be pleasantly surprised to understand the language around them, only to discover that it was a retro fad that had come back around.
Needless to say, multi-timestream discontinuous inter-stellar civilisations really screwed up a lot of theories of cultural evolution. Linguists had long wondered whether languages reflected some shared biological biases, and were underlyingly built out of the same bits and pieces. There were even ideas that languages were all striving towards an ideal state. But twenty thousand years of human spacefaring later, linguists were still discovering new and bizarre ways people found to communicate. Basically, in order to socialise, people just made stuff up.
In ancient times, people trying to communicate across cultures would first rely on simple, universal concepts to ground the process of translation. Things like greetings, the sun and the moon, man and woman. However, this tended to work less well when one of the cultures lived on a planet with seventeen moons or, indeed, seventeen genders. The Standard Culture Canon helped bridge some of the gap by at least giving people cultural references in common. 20th and early 21st century films and TV had been chosen as the basis for the canon, since the media was of decent quality without having yet run into all the spacefaring problems. It also gave them something to talk about in the first place. The weather had done well in this capacity when humans still lived at its mercy, but tended to be less appropriate on asteroids without atmospheres or in climate-controlled biospheres. Several diplomatic missions had narrowly averted war by small talk about one’s favourite Monty Python sketch.
Although Hold didn’t look like the chatting type, Arianne decided to find out how a high-ranking military official attached to the Administration could not have seen Cool Hand Luke. In her teens she would have given anything to avoid having to watch another reboot of Battlestar Galactica.
“But how do you maintain common ground with people flitting in and out of chryo?”
“Oh” said Holt, slightly sheepishly, “there’s an artist on the belt that comes out of chryo for an hour a day and draws a topical cartoon that goes up on the local nets. The current artist has been going for over a thousand years now.”
“Huh” said Arianne, looking down at her shoes “but don’t you have a lot to catch up on when you come out of chryo?”
“There’s no need, you just start with the current day and pick things up from there. It’s more flexible than the Standard Culture Canon approach.”
“Oh?” backchannelled Arianne.
“Yeah – do you know any quotes about traxelling in cobodrefibs?”
“Hmm, good point. But aren’t you curious about the canon?”
“I’ve seen a few licks. Is it worth going through it all?”
Arianne shrugged.
“Some of it’s ok, but it’s mostly just terrible sequels after the third season of Firefly.”
Click-shush-click-shush.
“Anyway,” Holt said, “about why you’re here. We’re investigating Professor Golden’s murder, we need someone who knows the territory, but was out of the loop, so to speak.”
“What do you want to know? I can’t think of any motive. Could it be the Bloggeration?”
“They’re certainly opposed to CAFCA’s approach to research, but I assure you, Doctor Arianne, the rumours about their capabilities are exaggerated. They’re just a hyped-up commune.”
They passed through a set of double doors into a long corridor with windows set into the wall at intervals and were assaulted by a noise like a hundred faulty airlocks. There were people behind each window in small offices fiddling with bits of paper. Arianne saw one person catch a sheaf of paper sliding down a metal slide and place it to one side.
“What’s making all the noise?” asked Arianne.
“Hmm? Oh, the printers.”
Holt nodded to a blocky beige machine sitting in the corner of one of the offices. It appeared to be a torture device for paper. Ladders of paper were being fed into the machine through wheels with spokes and a silver box appeared to be systematically bruising each page with tiny black marks.
Holt noticed Arianne’s furrowed brow and smiled.
“I guess this is all new to you.”
“I was thinking the opposite. I think I saw something like this in a lick about the stone age. Why the hell is everything done on paper here?”
Holt smiled.
“CAFCA is the centre for all academic funding applications in the galaxy. Do you have any idea how many institu
tions and researchers want to get funding?”
“It it spaceloads? These people seem quite busy.”
“This floor can accept about five thousand applications a week.”
“This floor?”
Holt opened a door and they were outside. They were walking along a long balcony and over the rail Arianne could see a massive courtyard twenty stories below. On each side of the courtyard was a crenelated line of high office buildings. The opposite side of the courtyard was another massive glass and concrete building with more offices. Over the top of this was another courtyard, and then another. Courtyards extended into the distance and curved upward out of sight along the rim of the Hub. Here and there were high towers, domed buildings with bright blue rooves and vicious black structures that looked vaguely volcanic. Light was being thrown against the courtyard from above onto strange machines with brown bases and fractal green antennae.
“Spaceshitfuckloads!” said Arianne.
“Indeed. Basically everything you can see is the processing quarter - there are over 10 million people employed here. As it is, we can only process one millionth of the applications that come in. If applying was easy - say we allowed it to be done digitally - then we’d be completely overwhelmed. So we need some way to slow down the system.”
“Hence the printers?”
“Yes. Actually, those are for priority clients. Most low-level applications are printed by the applicants and sent here physically. For a lot of high-level grants, it’s quicker to have it printed here, then it only takes about a decade.”
“A decade to print?” said Arianne, “How long are applications these days?”
“The actual printing only takes a few minutes, but you have to buy shares in seedstock and wait for the trees to grow.”
“Trees?”
“Those green things down there. What do you think we make the paper from?”
“I dunno, can’t you just ship it in?”
“There’s basically nowehere else that grows trees suitable for paper on the scale that’s needed here. Over half of the Hub is dedicated to forestry and churns out 120 million tons of paper every Hubcycle. In fact, so much is printed here, adjacent offices have to have printers facing in opposite directions, or the collective momentum from the paper feeds would throw the Hub off course.”
They approached a window set into a wall where a thin young man was busy sorting paper. Holt stopped and swivelled towards Arianne.
“This is Professor Long’s office. His secretary will arrange things from here. I’ll see you after the meeting”
Holt made a curt salute.
“I’ll return.” And he winked.
It took Arianne a few moments to understand.
“Oh” she said “you mean I’ll be back.”
“Oops” Holt said “I never like cyborgs much anyway. Bye!”
“Bye.”
Arianne walked up to the window. She could see the printer to the left of the secretary churning away, spilling an application in concertinaed sheets into a small tray. A shiny metal gutter as wide as the paper ran from just below the tray, along the secretary’s desk behind the window to the far end of the room. The secretary looked up, saw Arianne and opened the window.
“Ix xydy tus, Oseorc?”
This was the bit that Arianne hated. Everyone up until now had been using Standard Academic Language so that, even though some of the sounds had changed, she could follow everything without a translator device. But now she would have to switch hers on.
The secretary was looking at her expectantly. A sheaf of paper detached itself from the printer and slid down the gutter past the window. Arianne had time to read the title (“A shocking new way of stabilising carbon nanostructures that you’ll wonder how you lived without”) before the application sailed right past the secretary and continued on to the end of the desk. Arianne watched in horror as it dropped into a paper shredder which began ripping it apart even as the ink was drying.
It would seem obvious that technology that translated languages should have become incredibly important. But, in fact, the history of the translation device, or TD, was more complicated.
As the humans of ancient Earth began to master inter-continental travel, the pace of change through contact increased, and the diversity of languages plummeted. Globalisation brought an increasing pressure to assimilate to one of the more influential languages. Entire nations would disavow their linguistic inheritance and swear allegiance to alien sounds, words and phrases.
(Another printed funding application whizzed past without the secretary blinking: “The one weird old tip for modelling extratropical cyclone development that companies don’t want you to know!”).
Things began to change at the beginning of the 21st century. Technology was sufficiently advanced and widespread that on-line TDs became feasible. These could recognise, transcribe and translate language in real time. Coupled with a speech synthesiser, they could also translate anything that the wearer said, allowing them to talk back.
This meant that, for instance, Arianne could have a conversation with the secretary by speaking Standard Academic Language and having it transmitted directly to the secretary’s earpiece in their own language. In fact, Arianne’s TD had already scanned the secretary’s utterance, cross-referenced it with an online database and translated it as meaning “Hello, how are you?”. That bit was easy.
(The printer spat out an application that slid into the paper shredder. Arianne was pretty sure she would be the only one to read its title, “10 reasons why transcranial magnetic stimulation research on space wolves will totally melt your heart”. The secretary was still waiting.)
When the first TDs became widespread, renowned linguist Jim Knox predicted that they would actually lead to an increase in language diversity. Now there was no need for people to abandon their small languages - they could just communicate through the TDs. In fact, Arianne could speak any language to the secretary and the TD would translate it appropriately, even her first language, which was only spoken by a handful of people in her home town. Indeed, without a pressure to conform, languages on Earth slowly drifted away from each other. Even the big languages started to fracture without its speakers noticing. There were even cases of members of the same family who eventually became unable to communicate without TDs.
However, as TDs began to sink into the human psyche, things began to change again. Everyone already knew that learning someone else’s language was difficult, hence the need for TDs. But it gradually became clear that being hard to learn was not necessarily a bad thing. As economic markets became increasingly globalised and cultures fractured, businesses found that they could no longer rely on desirable cultural identities to broker deals. Renewable technologies and global economic markets meant that brute wealth was no longer adequate. They needed to show to other companies and governments that they were dedicated investors. It turned out that language was an almost perfectly designed social currency. Digital implants with massive storage and online access meant that the ability to recall facts and figures was redundant. However, speaking another language required a complex on-line transformation of morphemes, words and grammar into culturally-tuned meaning. A mastery of someone’s language without a TD demonstrated an investment of time and a commitment to understand their values and ways of thinking. The diversification of languages brought about by the centuries of TD technology acted like a massive injection of capital, and soon companies were investing and trading in languages as much as in hard goods and services.
The street-cred of TDs changed, too. Needing to rely on a TD to interact with people in everyday life became a social stigma of poor education. Arianne could remember being laughed at in school because she had never encountered a language with kin-based morphosyntax before. There was a rush to show off how diverse one’s linguistic abilities were, with rich families sending their children to far-flung corners of the world to learn exoti
c languages as a form of future investment. It even became taboo to marry someone from the same linguistic background.
And so the role of TDs went from a central factor in human history to a secondary resource that was only used when necessary. Like coal or cocaine.
As “The 17 most embarrassing celebrity reactions to 20th century dissonant counterpoint compositions” flew past, Arianne felt another shortcoming of TDs more keenly. It was all very well knowing what someone was saying, but it told you very little about what they were trying to get you to do. For example, the secretary had asked “how are you?”. Even with an artificial mastery of phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics, Arianne still had no idea how the phrase was meant to be understood pragmatically. How should she respond? Would “I’m fine” be understood as meaning she was good, or would the secretary think she was hinting at deep personal trauma? Arianne could say “I’m feeling excellent!”, but this might be received as gloating or lying, given her clearly space-lagged appearance. Holt would probably interpret it as a genuine demand for a full update on his physical wellbeing, but the secretary might be disgusted at such intimate details, or take a literal response as a sign of stupidity. How long should she wait before responding? A quick reply could be interpreted as being earnest or not giving enough consideration. Did the secretary expect to be asked a question in return? What level of politeness was expected? Perhaps there was some kind of ceremonial bow that Arianne was failing to perform. Or maybe she was supposed to echo the question in song?
Of course, a linguist could spend some time observing the secretary and determine the cultural practices and rules that should determine her behaviour. This could be written up and placed online for people to access in real time. The idea was simple, but it just didn’t work in reality. First, since the communication systems of the galaxy were so different, linguists had a lot of trouble coming up with a universal way of describing them, meaning that not only would you have to buzz-through a lengthy thesis describing the assumptions and conceptual framework, you would inevitably be given several different answers and a space-tsunami of bitter dispute over terminology, theory, politics and the nature of the universe. Secondly, since research took such a long time to get funded and then be executed, documented and disseminate, the descriptions of how to behave would be totally outdated by the time they were available. And that was for simple things like how to say hello.
Arianne was suddenly aware that she had been staring silently at the secretary for over a minute now. Even by Phraxelroot-Onibytree standards - where taking a turn at talk was seen as a sign of weakness - this was pushing it. The secretary’s face had sunk from polite chirpiness to concern, boredom, despair and eventually blank terror.
“I love you!” Arianne blurted.
Amazingly, this appeared to be the correct response because the secretary’s face immediately brightened up.
“And I love you. Are you here to see Professor Long?”
The words came through her TD like welcome sunshine, just on top of the soft consonants of the secretary’s real speech.
“Oh, yes. Karen Arianne.”
The secretary looked at a pad of paper on his desk.
“OK, you can go in now - he should be free in eight months.”
Although Arianne had read a lot about cryosleep, and all the early side-effects had been ironed out, she was not quite ready to rush into another seamless transition machine.
“Thank you, but I think I’ll go for a walk first, if that’s ok. Can I go down to see the trees?”
“No problem. Just come and see me when you’re ready.”
The secretary smiled and Arianne felt the warmth of a well conducted conversation coming to a close. This had all gone very well.
“Thank you.”
Arianne smiled and they both stood there smiling for a moment before Arianne turned around with a slight wave and headed back towards the balcony. Just before she turned the corner, her earpiece, tuned for linguistic fieldwork, just managed to pick up and translate a muttered phrase from behind her.
“stupid bitch”