Strange New Worlds X

by Dean Wesley Smith

Archer looked at her once again, and Hoshi was reassured by her sense that he was conveying patience as best he could. “Everyone on Enterprise knows you’ll be able to figure this out eventually. We’ve been sending out the same message since we got here, too, and they obviously haven’t been able to figure it out, either.” He smiled. “It’s Tuesday. Why don’t you give Movie Night a try? I think there’s a comedy on, so it should be packed.”

  Hoshi considered this for a moment. Her first instinct was to turn the captain down and tell him she needed to get back to work on the translation—but if enlightenment wasn’t coming to her now, she didn’t see what was going to happen in the next few hours to change that. Captain Archer had also known her longer than anyone else on the ship, so in her eyes, an offer of a little escapism coming from him made more sense than it would from anyone else.

  She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. “I’m going to the movies.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Travis leaned in his seat toward Hoshi and answered, “He’s getting everyone in the city to enjoy life the way he’s enjoying it.”

  “So … he’s just allowed to interrupt the parade and take over?”

  “That’s the whole point—they put the rules aside and just have fun.”

  Hoshi was still confused, but the people around them in the mess hall were beginning to look annoyed at their conversation, so she dropped the matter. She had taken the captain’s advice in earnest and was honestly trying to take her mind off the language problem, but she couldn’t quite let go and enjoy the movie on its own merits.

  Movie Night was usually a fun diversion for her in the course of their normal exploration, even if she found that the movies tended to blend together after a while, and it was sometimes hard to relate to how popular culture worked almost two hundred years ago. She could break down the use of colloquial language easily enough, as the slang in this particular movie hadn’t thrown her off, except for a song earlier on which had featured an odd combination of English and German.

  Hoshi cut off her own train of thought at that point, rolling her eyes at the realization that her mind had never left that linguistic mode at all.

  While everyone else around her seemed to be enjoying the dance sequence which had erupted onscreen, all she could think about in that moment was that the main characters were supposed to be from Chicago, but sounded to her like they were from New York. In one case, an argument could also be made for Ohio—

  She stopped herself again. This was ridiculous.

  Absorbed in her analysis of their accents, Hoshi had completely lost track of what was going on in the movie itself. She knew there was someone going after the three main characters, and he was the focus of the scene before her now, but she couldn’t even remember his name. She glanced over at Travis, who was clearly more engrossed in what was going on than she was, and considered asking him to fill her in on what had happened, but it would probably only serve to further annoy the rest of the audience around her. She might as well be working back in her quarters.

  “I’m too distracted,” she finally whispered to him. “I’m just going to go.”

  Travis looked a little disappointed at that, but he nodded quietly. Hoshi got up and shuffled past the other crewmembers in her row as quietly as she could before heading out of the mess hall into the corridor.

  Her thoughts were back on the translation problem before the door had even closed behind her, so she failed to register T’Pol’s presence as the science officer headed towards her from down the hallway.

  “Ensign Sato.”

  Hoshi stopped in her tracks, having been brought back into the moment by the sound of her own name. “Good evening, Sub-commander. If you’re heading for the movie, you’re pretty late.”

  T’Pol shook her head. “That is not my destination, Ensign.” Quickly changing the subject, she asked, “Has there been any further progress on the alien transmission?”

  It was Hoshi’s turn to shake her head. “I’m at the same point I was the last time you saw me.” Hoshi understood why she’d been asked about this so often lately, but she was rapidly running out of different ways to give the same answer every time the question came up.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Ensign. Your outburst on the bridge seemed to indicate you were frustrated.”

  Hoshi took that to be T’Pol’s version of offering her sympathies and gave her a brief smile in response. “Thank you, Sub-commander. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get back to work on that tonight.”

  “Of course.”

  With that, Hoshi continued on her way back to her quarters. As she approached the turbolift doors, however, a comm panel nearby interrupted her thoughts once again. “Archer to Ensign Sato.”

  Hoshi made her way over to the panel. “Ensign Sato here. Go ahead.”

  “I need you on the bridge, Hoshi. I’m afraid we have a new problem.”

  “What is it?”

  “The transmission has stopped.”

  Captain Archer stood in the situation room along with T’Pol, Hoshi, and Lieutenant Reed. The main console screen in front of them featured a readout of the various scans taken since they’d entered this system, and the smaller screen in front of Hoshi showed a series of phonetic symbols representing the “text” of the transmission that had previously been directed at Enterprise.

  “The transmission ceased approximately one hour ago,” T’Pol explained, indicating its origin point on the main readout. “Since we do not know why this urban center served as the source of the transmission, it is even less clear why they would choose to stop now.”

  “We haven’t been offering them much in return,” said Archer. Turning to Reed, he asked, “Have they made any other moves toward us?”

  Reed shook his head. “They’ve taken no hostile action since first detecting Enterprise as it entered this system, and that hasn’t changed. We know they have spacecraft in orbit around their planet, but we’re not even sure they’re capable of ending something out this far. It’s impossible to find that out without moving closer to the planet.”

  “We can’t take that chance right now,” said Archer. He gave Hoshi a hopeful look as he asked, “Any further progress on the transmissions we already had?”

  Hoshi was almost heartbroken at having to reply in the negative, and there was a note of defeat in her voice as she said, “I’m still working on it.” She tried to put a positive spin on events. “The fact that they’ve stopped transmitting doesn’t affect things much right now—we still have the recordings, and they’ve just been repeating the same short message all along.” Glancing at Reed, she added, “Since we can’t move closer, we haven’t been able to pick up most of the specific transmissions they’ve been sending amongst themselves. We know they’re talking, but as it is, this is a very small linguistic sample to work from.”

  Archer seemed to take a moment to consider that information before continuing. “We all want to make first contact with this species, but the way things are going, that might not be possible. I’d hate to leave them behind, but they’ve apparently stopped trying, and we can’t wait here forever hoping for something to change.”

  Hoshi felt stung by that last comment, even if Archer hadn’t meant for it to be directed at her personally. “I’m sure I’ll have something soon,” she said.

  “I hope so,” said Archer. “I’ll give you another twenty-four hours to work on it. If you can’t find a way to break the language barrier for us to talk to these people before then, I’m going to order Enterprise to move on.”

  With that, everyone returned to their bridge stations, leaving Hoshi alone with her phonetic symbols—and her growing sense of guilt.

  Hoshi sat in her quarters, staring at the screen in front of her—a list of greetings in a variety of Terran and alien languages. Standard Latin and Cyrillic letters sat alongside the more cursive alphabets of Arabic and Hindi, Chinese ideograms and Japanese syllabaries, and the almost melodic writing style used o
n Vulcan. All of these varied forms of communication were familiar and comfortable to Hoshi, and she’d hoped that having reminders of them at her disposal would jog her memory, triggering whatever crucial step her mind had not yet taken.

  When she’d taught exolinguistics, learning to say “hello” had been an obvious starting point, but having dozens of examples in front of her now did nothing to lead her any closer to the answers she sought. The padds and textbooks all around her had also proven virtually worthless, serving only to demonstrate how futile Hoshi’s “gift” was in the face of this newest challenge.

  She could still see Professor Turner talking to her about her facility with new languages, back when she had been a student taking her first exolinguistics courses. Hoshi could remember Turner telling her how important it was that she could decipher the way people communicate so easily, as the miracle of language had allowed even species as fundamentally different as humans and Vulcans to find common ground in the face of adversity over the past century. She wondered what Turner would have to say now, given that it really would take a miracle to bridge the gap between herself and this nameless species which had finally managed to truly stump her.

  Hoshi had been stumped once before in the course of their mission—but on Risa, it hadn’t gotten in the way of communication. There had been no consequences to encountering that one particularly difficult language, and attempting to learn it in just a couple of days had had certain … side benefits. The clock was ticking in a much more serious way this time, however, and Hoshi was all too aware of how much was at stake.

  She just knew that she was close, somehow, which was perhaps the most frustrating part of all.

  The key to translating the alien transmission felt like it was at the very edges of Hoshi’s mind, continuing to elude her at every turn and taunting her for not having the answers. As far as she could tell, this should be more or less the same as any of the standard greetings they’d received from other worlds, but something about this message was just different. Not a lot, but just enough to keep her guessing.

  Everyone on the ship had been understanding with her, but she knew all they wanted now was to get on with this first contact, and she was the only thing standing in their way. Deciphering this language—her deciphering this language—would be the difference between really learning about an unknown culture, and possibly making a new friend in this stretch of space, or simply leaving the system with nothing more than dry, lifeless data filling up Enterprise’s computer banks.

  If that were to happen, she didn’t know how she would able to justify staying on the ship.

  Hoshi looked past her screen at a deck of cards sitting on the table, then grabbed it and absentmindedly started shuffling, reminding herself that it stood for all the reasons why she shouldn’t even be on this mission. Being on Enterprise now was a fluke—the Starfleet equivalent of being dealt winning cards on her second hand. She had been on the ship, along with everyone else, for barely a year, and as far as she knew, she was still on probation—she was just lucky enough that her ace in the hole was that she was considered a prodigy. Without that….

  She had started to deal an imaginary poker hand, but was now simply laying cards down one by one. Eight, six, nine, four, each of a different suit … random numbers that could form patterns if you only knew the rules—full house, straight, flush. This civilization had given her cards without a guidebook, and she was about to lose all her chips because of it.

  Hoshi drew another card and put it on the table. The Queen of Hearts.

  Off with my head.

  Early the next morning, Hoshi sat alone at a table in the mess hall, looking down at her padd, containing an array of notes from the linguistic database which she was using for reference; her breakfast, the fuel her mind and body so desperately needed after staying up most of the night; and the Universal Translator—which was quickly becoming her archnemesis.

  Feeling battle-weary, she picked up the UT once again and spoke into it. “Planet,” she said. It beeped and chirped, but provided no alien word back to her.

  “Greetings,” she said to it, being careful to slowly enunciate the word. The UT offered the same ineffectual response as it had before.

  “Hello,” she said, almost plaintively.

  “Hello.”

  Hoshi blinked at the device, but then looked up to see that it was Lieutenant Reed who had responded to her. He and Trip were standing in front of her table, trays in their hands.

  “Mind if we join you?” asked Trip.

  “Go ahead,” said Hoshi, “but I’m not sure I’m going to be very good company right now.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Trip, as the two of them sat down. “In fact, Malcolm and I were just talking about what a tough time you must be having.”

  Hoshi allowed herself a brief smile. “Thanks,” she said. “It’s not easy having a deadline like this hanging over your head.” She quickly took note of the time—less than twelve hours before the captain’s self-imposed hour of departure.

  Reed indicated the Universal Translator, which was still in her hand. “How is everything coming along?”

  “It’s not,” she said. “I keep tweaking the phonetic processor, but none of my ideas seem to make any difference. The UT just doesn’t want to figure this one out.”

  Neither of them had much to offer in response to that, but Reed endeavoured to make a relevant comment. “It’s hard when you don’t have a … Rosetta Stone to help you along.”

  “One of those would be great right now,” said Hoshi, letting out a light, sardonic laugh. “The trouble is, nothing I’ve been able to gather about this language says that it should be difficult. It sounds pretty straightforward, in fact, but it’s like they’re not saying anything we’d expect them to say.”

  “Shouldn’t they be saying something simple like … ‘Hi there?’” asked Trip.

  “Exactly,” said Hoshi, nodding. “Or, ‘Who are you?’ or even, ‘Get out of here.’ When you get an initial piece of communication from a group of people, you rely on the idea that they’re not going to stray too far from your expectations. I’m out of luck if this transmission says something like, ‘Where’s my sandwich?’”

  “I suppose there are a lot of potential variables to consider,” said Reed.

  Hoshi took the opening to vent her linguistic frustrations. “Almost too many to count. For one thing, I have no idea what any of the inflections in their speech might mean. Even within a single language, there are so many cultural implications-like knowing that you’re from England, Malcolm, and you’re from Florida, Trip. We can all understand each other, but that’s not going to be so obvious from an alien perspective. Just think of it in reverse, and that’s the problem with pronunciation in a nutshell.”

  There was an awkward moment of silence as Reed and Trip each struggled to find something to say. Finally, Trip began, “Well, I guess when you only have one speaker of a brand new language—”

  “See, that’s the thing about a new language, especially an alien language,” said Hoshi, now fully engaged in lecture mode. “You don’t have the proper background to understand where its syntax comes from, how it fits into a family of languages to form its present structure. Even with the Romulans, I was reminded of Vulcan protolanguages, so I had those language trees to draw upon, but with something like this, it’s a blank slate. You don’t necessarily need that sort of context to figure out semantics on a basic level, but I’ve always thought that a healthy grounding in taxonomy will save you a lot of time down the road in defining the right grammatical typology.”

  Reed blinked.

  Trip blinked.

  Hoshi sighed. She wasn’t getting anywhere.

  The two men were now staring at Hoshi blankly, forks held in their hands over their respective breakfasts, while Hoshi’s own food was all but ignored in front of her. Reed and Trip had that glazed look in their eyes that she recognized immediately, as she had seen it in some of her students b
ack at the university—the look of utter cluelessness.

  “Umm, never mind,” she said, feeling more defeated than ever.

  Trip took a couple of quick bites from his breakfast before getting up. Reed followed suit. “Listen,” said Trip, “you clearly have a handle on what you’re talking about, but I’m lost when it comes to linguistics. It’s just not my strong suit.”

  Reed’s expression seemed to indicate that he felt the same way, but he still tried to be encouraging. “I’m sure you’ll figure this out in time.”

  Having admitted defeat in their attempt to understand what Hoshi was going through, Reed and Trip retreated as subtly as they could from the mess hall, passing Phlox on their way out. Hoshi put her head in her hands.

  Phlox went up to Hoshi’s table and began to greet her in Denobulan, but Hoshi held up one hand without looking up. “Please, Doctor. I’m not sure I can take another alien language right now.”

  “All right,” he said. “May I at least sit down?”

  At this, Hoshi looked up. “If you’re willing to take the chance.”

  Phlox smiled and sat down immediately, but his expression quickly turned to one of concern. “This linguistic conundrum seems to be causing you a great deal of stress.”

  Hoshi glanced at the door where Reed and Trip had exited moments ago. “I doubt you’re interested in hearing the details.”

  “I’d be delighted, actually,” said Phlox. “Besides, a new perspective on the problem might be helpful for you.”

  “I’m not sure there are any more perspectives on the problem,” said Hoshi, thinking of the lecture she’d just given. “I’ve already tried everything I can think of. I’ve used transformational models, Geissler variations, generative grammar, and every kind of phrase structure theory I’m familiar with. It’s just not working.”

  The fact that Phlox, like Reed and Trip before him, probably had no idea what Hoshi was referring to no longer seemed to bother her—or Phlox himself, from all appearances, as he seemed no more perturbed than before. “Why hasn’t the Universal Translator been more helpful to you?” he asked, sincerely. Hoshi was still a little skeptical that Phlox actually wanted her to elaborate, but she answered his question anyway.