Logorrhea

by John Klima

  “Sounds like a bit of a juggling act,” his mother said.

  “Mostly, it’s close to impossible,” he replied. “There’s so much diplomatic bartering involved that your newly discovered planetary system ends up with a nomenclature comprising a hundred different languages. It’s a mess.”

  “How do you decide which languages to use then?”

  “We cross-reference terrain, flora, fauna, weather types—a whole bunch of criteria—and derive the names from the things that we already have names for. The Lexicon provides a ballpark and we go with that. The races whose languages are used gain a little extra cultural clout in the world in question.” He sighed. “Which is why discovering a plant on Earth that resembles a species we have just named using a Peloquin language is a problem.”

  “Why?”

  “If we use the same nomenclature, it gives them the first non-human cultural claim on Earth.”

  “That doesn’t seem very fair. They don’t let people name the plants that are grown in their own gardens?”

  “Existing species are fine, they’ve already got names. And if contact had been yesterday, before we were adopted into the Bloc, we could have used any language we liked to name this thing. But on a Bloc world any newly discovered species has to be named using the Lexicon. And all of Earth’s living languages—English, Mandarin, Spanish, German, all the way down to Gaelic and Swahili, everything that’s taught in schools—are in the Lexicon. And they know this.”

  His mother looked shocked. “You think all of this is deliberate?” She whispered it as if she might be overheard.

  “I’d bet on it,” Calum muttered. “Of course we can’t prove that I didn’t bring back some germ with me from Ghessareen. That whole operation was such a mess that I’m not even certain of that myself. I’d be surprised if they don’t conveniently provide a very clear trail of evidence to prove it. So I’m afraid they’ve succeeded. There’s nothing we can do.”

  It was lunchtime when the call came through. Sneijder, who had smartened himself up in the intervening time, was back on the orbital. Calum recognized a canteen that had been turned into a makeshift hearing chamber. The Bloc representatives could be seen assembled in the background of the picture.

  Calum had set his phone up to take in both his and his mother’s deckchairs and the susurrating rust-silver tree that now overhung the corner of the garden.

  “Calum, you’ve had time to consult the Lexicon. The representatives are eager to hear your judgement,” Sneijder said. He fidgeted. “I should advise you that this call is being broadcast to the United Nations.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end didn’t. The fact that Calum hadn’t heard from Sneijder before this just meant that their hands were tied diplomatically as surely as they had been euonymically.

  Calum straightened himself in his chair. “Yes, indeed,” he said. He had spent the last few hours trawling all of the languages in the Lexicon for an alternative. Sneijder’s silence confirmed what he already knew. That there were none. There was a clear path of semblance and antecedence. No matter what tack he took, the Lexicon always brought him round to using the Peloquin naming.

  Calum looked squarely into the phone’s little screen. The human contingent looked nervous, the Peloquin looked eager—but then they always did. He had delivered naming judgements to similar groups many times, and while some of those occasions had been fraught with complicated layers of vested interests, he had never felt so personally responsible before. In this moment he decided that he’d had enough. He’d perform this one last naming and later he’d call Sneijder and resign. The job had so little to do with an ability with names that there had been little or no satisfaction in it for him for years.

  “Oh aye, that’s it is it? Loonging aboot, ye docksie pair, when I’m after my twaloors. What’s all this oancairy onywey?” Aunt Bella’s timing could not have been better. Calum’s mum sprang to her feet to turn the old woman around and fix her something to eat in the kitchen, but Bella had already covered the ground between them.

  “Calum, who is that woman?” It was Sneijder’s voice, but the phone’s screen was blocked by Bella’s stout frame. “I can’t make out a word she is saying.”

  “Aye, well?” Bella said, either ignoring or not hearing Sneijder. “Brian, son, you look awfy peelie-wallie. You maun be scunnered with all the palaiver that’s been ongaun the day.”

  Calum looked at Bella with wonder. That was the word. Scunnered.

  “Calum?”

  That was the euonym for the feeling he had been trying to name since Ghessareen. Scunnered. In fact, pure scunnered. He’d not heard that word in years. Like most Scots words, it was essentially dead in linguistic terms. The old language, a historical victim of wave after wave of cultural erosion, had been steadily supplanted over generations with Anglicisms, Americanisms, Euroisms and most recently the backwash of intergalactic contact. Only the eldest in the rural areas still used it, spoke it, thought in it. Calum had been steeped in the Lexicon so long he had almost forgotten it existed. A few of the words had been absorbed into English, but never having been ratified as an official language in its own right, the Scots tongue had never made it into the Lexicon.

  “Calum, if you can sort out the domestic business as soon as possible.” Sneijder didn’t try to hide the sarcasm. “The representatives are waiting.”

  Calum reached around Bella, spoke to the screen. “I’ll call you right back.” Then he took his elderly relative by the hand and led her gently to the knife tree.

  “Bella, how long have you lived around here?” he asked.

  “All my puff,” she replied, looked at him sidelong. “How?”

  Calum grinned. “I think you just might be about to save the planet,” he said. “See this here? We’re having a lot of trouble with it.” He indicated the tree. “What would you call it?” In your native language, that’s not in the Lexicon.

  She peered at the plant, slowly from its impenetrable roots right up to its branches and the deadly hanging blades of its leaves, twanged a steely twig with her finger. “Aye it’s a scunner for sure,” she declared at length. “You should howk it out and chuck it on the midden.”

  “A scunner, is it?” he asked, seeking confirmation.

  “Aye, a scunner right enough.” That said, Bella turned to Calum’s mother. “Now, Magret, I’m hauf stairved, here.”

  “A scunner it is then,” Calum said to himself, and picked up the phone. They weren’t going to be happy about the use of a local language not in the Lexicon. In fact they’d be arguing about the legality of it for years. And by the time they sorted it out it’d be someone else’s problem.

  Now he’d made the decision he knew it was the right one. And now the feeling was gone, he was aware that it’d been with him for a lot longer than he’d realized. Before coming home, before Ghessareen even. A long time…

  Scunnered.

  He knew there had been a word for it.

  * * *

  D•U•L•C•I•M•E•R

  dul·ci·mer 'del-se-mer

  noun

  : a stringed instrument of trapezoidal shape played with light hammers held in the hands

  * * *

  Singing of Mount Abora

  THEODORA GOSS

  A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, the blind instrument-maker known as Alem Das, or Alem the Master, made a dulcimer whose sound was sweeter, more passionate, and more filled with longing than any instrument that had ever been made. It was carved entirely from the wood of an almond tree that had grown in the garden of Al Meseret, that palace with a thousand rooms where the Empress Nasren had chosen to spend her widowhood. The doors of the palace were shaped like moons, its windows like stars. It was a palace of night, and every night the Empress walked through its thousand rooms, wearing the veil she had worn for her wedding to the Great Khan. If the cooks, who sometimes saw her wandering through the kitchen, had not known who she was, they would have mistaken her for a ghost. The dulcimer was strung
with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon, who wreaths his body around the slopes of Mount Abora. He can always be found there in the early morning, and that is when Alem Das approached him, walking up the path on the arm of his niece Kamora.

  “What do you want?” asked the dragon.

  “Your whiskers, luminous one,” said Alem Das.

  “My whiskers! You must be that instrument-maker. I’ve heard of you. You’re the reason my cousin, the River Dragon, no longer has spines along his back, and why my other cousin, the Phoenix, no longer has tail feathers. Why should I give you my whiskers?”

  “Because when I have made my dulcimer, my niece Kamora will come and play for you, and sing to you the secrets of your soul,” said Alem Das.

  “We dragons have no souls,” said the Cloud Dragon, wreathing himself around and around, like a cat.

  “You dragons are souls,” said Alem Das, and he asked his niece to sing one of the songs that she sang at night, to soothe the Empress Nasren. Kamora sang, and the Cloud Dragon stopped wreathing himself around and around. Instead, he lay at her feet, which disappeared into mist. When she was done, he said, “All right, instrument-maker. You may have my whiskers, but on one condition. First, your niece Kamora must marry me. And when you have made your dulcimer, she must sing to me every night the secrets of my soul.”

  Kamora knew how the Cloud Dragon looked at night, when he took the form of a man, so she said, “I will marry you, if my Empress allows it.” And that is my first song.

  You can’t imagine how cold Boston is in winter, not for someone from a considerably warmer climate. In my apartment, I sat as close as I could to the radiator, sometimes with my back against it. The library at the university was warmer, but the chairs were wooden and hard, so it was a compromise: the comforts of my apartment, where I had to wrap my fingers around incessant cups of chamomile tea to warm them, or the warmth and discomfort of the library. I had been born in Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia, and had been brought up in so many places that they seemed no place at all, Italy and France and Spain. Finally, I had come to cold, shining North America, where the universities, I told my mother, were the best in the world. And the best of the best universities were in Boston.

  My mother was beautiful. I should say rather that she was a beauty, for to her, beauty was not a quality but a state of being. Beauty was her art, her profession. I don’t mean that she was anything as vulgar as a model, or even an actress. No, she was simply beautiful, and so life gave her what it gives the beautiful: apartments in Italy, France, and Spain, and an airplane to travel between them, and a diamond called the Robin’s Egg, because it was as big as a robin’s egg, and as blue.

  “Oh, Sabra,” she would say to me, “what will we do about you? You look exactly like your father.” And it was true. In old photographs, I saw my nose, the bones of my cheeks and jaws, on a man who had not needed to be handsome, because he was rich. But his riches had not saved his life. Although he could have bought his way out of the revolution, he had remained loyal to the Emperor. He had died when his airplane was shot down, with the Emperor in it, just before crossing the border. This was after the Generals had taken power and the border had been closed. My mother and I were already on our way to Italy, with the Robin’s Egg in her brassiere. “Loyalty is nothing,” my mother would say. “If your father had been more sensible, he would still be with us. Loyalty is a breath. It is not worth the ring on my finger.”

  “But he had courage,” I said. “Did he not have courage?”

  “Courage, of course. He was, after all, my husband. But it is better to have diamonds.”

  Her beauty gave her ruthless practicality an indescribable charm.

  “You are like him, Sabra. Always with your head in the clouds. When are you going to get married? When are you going to live properly?” She thought it was foolish that I insisted on living on my stipend, but she approved of my studying literature, which was a decorative discipline. “That Samuel Coleridge whose poem you read to me,” she would say, “I am convinced he must have been a handsome man.”

  I insisted on providing for myself, and living in a city that was too cold for her, because it kept me from feeling the enchantment that she threw over everything around her. She was an enchantress without intention, as a spider gathers flies by instinct. One longed to be in her web. In her presence, one could not help loving her, without judgement. And I was proud of my independence, if of nothing else.

  Let me sing about the marriage of Kamora and the Cloud Dragon. Among all the maidens of the Empress Nasren, there was none so clever as Kamora. She knew every song that had ever been sung, since the world was made. When she sang, she could draw the nightingales into the Empress’s garden, where they would sit on the branches of the almond trees and sing accompaniment. Each night she followed the Empress through the thousand rooms of the palace, singing her songs. Only Kamora could soothe the Empress when Nasren sank down on the courtyard stones and wept into her hands with the wild abandon of a storm.

  On the night after Alem Das had visited the Cloud Dragon, Kamora said to the Empress, “Lady, whose face is as bright as the moon, there is nothing more wonderful in the world than serving you, except for marrying the one I love. And you know this is true, because you have known the delights of such a marriage.”

  The Empress, who sat in a chair that Alem Das had carved for her from the horns of Leviathan, stood suddenly, so that the chair fell back, and a figure of Noah broke off from one corner. “Kamora, would you too leave me, as the Great Khan left me to wander among the stars? Some night, it may be this night, he will come back to me. But until that night, you must not leave me!” And she stared at Kamora with eyes that were apprehensive, and a little mad.

  “Lady, whose eyes are as dark as the night,” said Kamora, in her most soothing voice, “you know that the Great Khan lies in his tomb on Mount Abora. You built it yourself of white marble, stone on stone, and before you placed the last stone, you kissed his lips. Do you think that your husband would leave the bed you made for him? You would not keep me from marrying the one I love.”

  The Empress turned and walked, out of that room and into another, and another, and through all the thousand rooms of the palace. Kamora followed her, not singing tonight, but silent. When the Empress had reached the last room of the palace, a pantry in which the head cook kept her rose-petal jam, she said, “Very well. You may marry your Cloud Dragon. Do not look surprised that I know whom you love. I am not so insensible as all that. But first, you must complete one task for me. When you have completed it, then you may marry whom you please.”

  “What is that task?” asked Kamora.

  “You must find me someone who amuses me more than you do.”

  It was Michael who introduced me to Coleridge. “Listen to this,” he said.

  “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve never read it before. I mean, I learned that in high school.”

  “Who is this Michael Cavuto you keep talking about?” asked my mother over the telephone. “Where does he come from?”

  “Ohio,” I said.

  She was as silent as though I had said, “The surface of the moon.”

  We were teaching assistants together, for a class on the Romantics. We read sentences to each other from our students’ papers. “A nightingale is a bird that comes out at night to which Keats has written an ode.” “William and his wife Dorothy lived together for many years until she died and left him lamenting.” “Coleridge smoked a lot of opium, which explains a lot.” We laughed, and marked our papers together, and one day, when we were both sitting in the library, making up essay questions for the final exam, we started talking about our families.

  “Yours is much more interesting than mine,” he told me. “I’d like to meet your mother.
”

  You never will, I told myself. I liked him, with his spiky hair that stood up although he was always trying to gel it down, the angular bones that made him look graceless, as though his joints were not quite knit together, and his humor. I did not want him, too, to fall hopelessly in love. For goodness’ sake, the woman was fifty-four. She was in Italy again, with a British rock star. He was twenty-seven. They had been together for two years. I could tell that she was already beginning to get bored.

  “There’s no one like Coleridge,” Michael had said. “You’ll see.”

  I have told you that Kamora was clever. Listen to how clever she was. She said to the Empress, “I will bring you what you ask for, but you must give me a month to find it, and a knapsack filled with bread and cheese and dried apricots, and a jar of honey.”

  “Very well,” said the Empress. “You shall have all these things, although I will miss you, Kamora. But at the end of that month you will return to me, won’t you?”

  “If at the end of that month I have not found someone who amuses you more than I do, then I will return to you, and remain with you as long as you wish,” said Kamora.

  The Empress said, “Now I can sleep, because I know you will remain with me forever.”

  The next day, Kamora put her knapsack on her back. “I wish you luck, I do,” said the head cook. “It can’t be easy, spending every night with Her Craziness upstairs. Though why you would want to marry a dragon is beyond me.”