3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  Saugus was a good planet for hurrying. The weather here in the foothills was cool and crisp, the gravity was only about .85 standard, and the air held a little more oxygen than human beings had evolved to breathe. The clock in the classroom said 0929 when she stepped through the door. She grinned to herself. Being late on the first day didn't make a prof look good.

  She got to the podium just as the clock clicked to 0930. "Good morning. I'm Dr. Logan," she said—she didn't believe in wasting time. "This is Middle English 217: Twentieth-century Science Fiction." Someone got up and left in a hurry. In the wrong room, Jennifer thought. Other students tittered.

  "Can you all hear me?" Jennifer asked. Everyone nodded, even the students in the back of the hall. The miking was all right, then. Her voice was so light and breathy that it needed all the help it could get.

  "All right. This course is part language, part literature. As you'll have noticed when you were registering, beginning and intermediate Middle English are prerequisites. Don't forget, the documents we'll be reading are a thousand years old. If you think you'll be able to get through them with just your everyday Spanglish, or even with an ordinary translation program, you can think again."

  Someone else, a girl this time, walked out the door shaking her head. Jennifer felt the eyes of the rest of the class upon her. Most students muttered their notes into recorders with hush-mikes. A few stroked typers or scribbled on paper in the ancient fashion; in every class, she'd found people who remembered better when they wrote things down.

  A couple of male students hadn't started taking notes at all. She could tell what was in their minds as well as if she were telepathic. It annoyed her. No only were they boys by her reckoning, but she'd been places and faced challenges they could hardly imagine. She knew they didn't care what she'd done. To them, she was only an attractively shaped piece of meat. That annoyed her even more.

  She sighed to herself and went on, "That's not to say you won't find words—a lot of words—that look familiar. A lot of Spanglish vocabulary can be traced back to roots in Middle English. That's especially true of Middle English science fiction. Many, in fact most, of our modern terms relating to spaceflight come from those first coined by science-fiction writers. Remarkably, most of those coinages were made before the technology for actual spaceflight existed. I want you to think for a moment of the implications of that, and to think about the leap of imagination those writers were taking."

  Some of them made the mental effort, she saw. She knew they were doomed to failure. Imagining what humanity had been like before spaceflight was as hard for them as willing oneself into the mind of an ancient Sumerian would have been for an ordinary citizen of the twentieth century.

  She held up a sheet of paper. "I want to talk about the books we'll be reading this semester," she said. The back door to the lecture hall opened. She frowned. This was one of the times she wished she had a deep, booming voice. She hated latecomers interrupting her when she'd already started lecturing. She began, "I hope you'll be on time for our next—" but stopped with the complaint only half-spoken. The new students were not human.

  The whole room grew quiet when the three of them walked in. They were dark blue and on the shaggy side. The door was more than two meters high, but they had to stoop to get under the lintel. The door was more than a meter wide, but they had to turn sideways to go through it. Their faces had short muzzles and impressive teeth.

  "What species are they?" a student in the front row asked the fellow next to her. He shrugged and shook his head. Likely neither of them had ever been off Saugus before, Jennifer thought.

  She knew the aliens' race. Of all the places she would never have expected to meet Foitani, though, a Middle English class on a human-settled planet of no particular importance to anyone ten light-years away came close to topping the list. Maybe, she thought, they were looking for the engineering department instead. She called, "How may I help you, Foitani?"

  The three big blue creatures cocked their heads to one side, listening to the translators each wore. One of them answered, speaking softly in his own rumbling language. His translator turned the words to Spanglish. "Apologies for tardiness, honored instructor. We concede the fault is ours; we will yield any forfeit your customs require."

  "We will," the other two echoed.

  "No—forfeits—are necessary," Jennifer said faintly. "May I direct you to the class you are seeking?"

  The Foitan who had spoken first bared his teeth—or possibly hers; the differences between Foitani sexes did not show on the outside. Jennifer knew the gesture was the Foitani equivalent of a frown, but it made the alien look as if he intended to take a bite out of someone. She wished for the trader's stunner she seldom wore any more. The Foitan said, "Have we interpreted your symbology inaccurately? This hall is not for the teaching of Middle English two-one-seven?"

  "You're enrolled in my class?" Jennifer heard herself squeaking, but couldn't help it. It wouldn't matter anyhow; translators were fine for meaning, but they filtered out tone of voice.

  "So we ought to be," the Foitan answered, his own translator sounding grave as usual. "Our funds were accepted, our names inscribed in your computer banks. I am Thegun Thegun Nug; here beside me stand Aissur Aissur Rus and Dargnil Dargnil Lin."

  Jennifer shoved notes aside. "Enrollment," she muttered. The list appeared on the screen set into the top of the podium. Sure enough, the three Foitani were on it. Human names came in such bewildering variety that she hadn't especially noticed theirs. "Very well," she said, "sit down—if you have the reading knowledge of Middle English this course requires."

  The Foitani sat. They weren't so much bigger than the average human as to make human furniture impossible for them—just enough bigger to be intimidating, Jennifer thought. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "We will meet the language requirements of the course, honored instructor. We are Foitani, after all. We are practiced in dealing with languages far more ancient and different from modern speech than your Middle English."

  She knew that was true. "Very well," she said again, and began talking about the books she would be assigning. Never had she had such perfect attention from students on the first day of class. After the ostentatious if somber politeness of the Foitani, it was as if all her human students feared they would be torn limb from limb if they got out of line.

  Because she didn't have to pause even once, she got through all the material she'd planned to present in spite of the delay the Foitani had caused. Only after the three big aliens left the hall did the rest of the people there start chattering among themselves. Even then, their voices were low, subdued.

  Jennifer went back to her office to see how the campus computers were doing on a couple of her pet research projects. The new printouts had some important data, but didn't interest her as much as they should have: With three Foitani—Foitani!—enrolled in her course, she had trouble getting excited about revised charts of de Camp's use of the colon rather than the comma to introduce quotations, or on a fresh stemma tracing the spread of the word "thutter" from Anderson to writers of the next generation like Stirling and Iverson.

  After lunch, she taught one course in modern Spanglish literature and another in composition, neither of which excited her very much but both of which helped pay her half of the rent for the apartment she shared with Ali Bakhtiar. She told herself she would have gone through them without much thought no matter what; with three Foitani in her morning class to think about, she knew she wasn't giving the afternoon sessions her full attention.

  When she got back to the apartment, Bakhtiar was already there. His last class—he taught imaging, both tape and film—got out half an hour before hers. All she wanted to do was exclaim about the Foitani. He listened, bemused, for several minutes; she was not usually the sort to gush. At last, he held up a hand. "Wait one second, please. Why are you so excited about having these three aliens in your class?"

  "That's what I was telling you," Jennifer said. "They're Foitani."

/>   "So I'd gathered," he answered with a wry quirk of that eyebrow. Sometimes she thought he practiced in a mirror, but she'd never caught him at it. "But who are the Foitani?"

  She stared at him. "You really don't know?"

  "Why should I?" he asked reasonably. "How many species of aliens do we know? Several hundred without hyperdrive, several dozen with it. That's on top of Allah only knows how many human-settled worlds. So why should I remember anything in particular about this one bunch?"

  Jennifer knew he was right—humanity had spread too widely, learned too many things, for any one person to keep track of more than a tiny fraction of all there was to know. But somehow Bakhtiar's complete ignorance of the Foitani badly irked her. She wanted to exclaim over them and have him exclaim right back. How could he do that if he had no idea why she was exclaiming in the first place?

  He saw something was wrong; after all, he had lived with her for a year. Spreading his hands to placate her, he said, "Tell me about them, then, if they're that important."

  "Well, for one thing, we've only known they aren't extinct for about the past fifty years," Jennifer said. "They used to rule a big empire in toward the galactic center, a good many thousand years ago. Then they started fighting among themselves; I don't think anybody knows why. They kept right on doing it, too, till they'd wrecked just about all the worlds they lived on."

  "Wait a minute." A light came on in Bakhtiar's eyes. "Didn't they run a holovid special on that three or four years ago? Secret of the lost race, or something like that? I remember watching it, but I'd forgotten the name of the race."

  "I suppose they may have," Jennifer said. Three or four years ago, she'd been dickering with the Atheters over the price of omphoth ivory. "But yes, those were the Foitani. Are the Foitani," she corrected herself.

  "Why have they enrolled in your Middle English class? What do they think they're going to get out of it?"

  "I haven't the slightest idea," Jennifer said. "Of course, I don't know what about a third of my human students are going to get out of the class either, except for four units of credit."

  Several years of trading missions among the stars had let her forget the time-serving students, the ones who took a course because they needed to fill a breadth requirement or because it happened to fit their schedules. The ones she'd remembered were the ones like herself, who enrolled in classes to learn something and worked hard at everything, for pride's sake if for no other reason. Saugus Central University had plenty of those. Unfortunately, it had plenty of the other sort, too, as she'd found to her dismay.

  Ali Bakhtiar said, "Well, it's nice you had something out of the ordinary to liven up your day. Let's go have dinner, shall we?"

  "Foitani in a Middle English class is more than something out of the ordinary," Jennifer said. But Bakhtiar was already walking into the kitchen and didn't hear her—the apartment wasn't miked. Glaring at his back, Jennifer followed him.

  She wanted to talk more about the aliens after dinner, but he turned on a battleball game and was lost to the world for the next couple of hours. Battleball required the biggest, strongest bruisers humanity produced. The Foitani, Jennifer suspected, could have torn most of them in half without working up a sweat—assuming Foitani sweated in the first place.

  She didn't care about battleball one way or the other. She sometimes watched because Ali liked it so much; it gave them something to do together out of bed. Tonight she didn't feel like making the effort. She went into the bedroom to work on the computer for a while.

  When she found herself yawning, she shut down the machine. She needed a few seconds to return from the distant past's exciting imagined future to her own thoroughly mundane present. Somehow hardly anyone in Middle English science fiction ever got bored or had to go to the bathroom at an inconvenient time or worried about her credit balance.

  As she went off to the bathroom, Jennifer reflected that her own credit balance was in pretty good shape. Thanks to the omphoth ivory, she had a good deal more to her name than if she'd landed the first academic job she'd tried for. And she had no business being bored, not with three Foitani to wonder about.

  She hoped the Foitani would get around to explaining just what they were doing in a Middle English course. She didn't know enough about their customs to risk asking straight out, but she'd die of curiosity if they kept quiet all semester.

  She spat toothpaste foam into the sink. In the front room, Ali Bakhtiar yelled, "Reload and spin, fool, before he gets you!" The battleball game was in the last five minutes, then. Jennifer made a sour face. If Ali thought battleball more interesting than the Foitani, that was his problem.

  Even when she got into bed, the big blue aliens would not leave her mind. Thegun Thegun Nug, Aissur Aissur Rus, and—what was the third one's name? Dargnil Dargnil Lin, that was it. She wondered if they were males or females. She thought of them as males, but that was only because they were large and had deep voices: anthropocentric thinking, the worst mistake a trader could make.

  But she wasn't a trader any more. She was doing what she'd trained to do—what she'd always wanted to do, she told herself firmly.

  Ali Bakhtiar came to bed a few minutes later. Her back was to him. She breathed deeply and steadily. He stroked her hair and slid his hand down to the curve of her hip. Most of the time, she enjoyed making love with him. Tonight, though, she was still annoyed at him for not caring more about the Foitani. She kept on pretending to be asleep. If Bakhtiar tightened that hand so she'd have to notice it, he'd get all the fight he wanted and then some.

  He didn't. He took it away, muttered something grumpy under his breath that she didn't quite catch—just as well, too, she thought—and rolled onto his stomach. Moments later, he was snoring. As if to punish herself for feigning sleep, Jennifer lay awake for the next hour and a half.

  * * *

  The Foitani pulled their weight in the Middle English class. However they did it, they stayed up with the reading. They were certainly more familiar with human customs than Jennifer was with theirs; they asked good, sensible questions and seldom needed anything explained more than once.

  Little by little, they started becoming individuals to Jennifer. Thegun Thegun Nug seemed to be senior to the other two; they deferred to him and let him speak first. Aissur Aissur Rus thought for himself. His interpretations of what he'd read were most apt to be off-base, but also most apt to be interesting and original. Dargnil Dargnil Lin, by contrast, was conservative: steady, sound, not likely to go far from the beaten path but perfectly reliable on it. The studies all three of them turned in were among the better ones she got from the class. No doubt they'd linked their translator programs with the printer, but humans whose first language wasn't Spanglish did that, too.

  Jennifer spent the first couple of weeks in the course on stories that dealt with alien contact. Experience had taught her that students enjoyed the theme, enjoyed seeing how wildly wrong most ancient speculation was. That some writers came within shouting distance of what the future really looked like also piqued their interest.

  "Remember, science fiction wasn't supposed to be prophesy," she said. "Trying to foretell—to guess—the future is a much older set of thought processes. Science fiction was different. Science fiction was a literature of extrapolation, of taking something—some social trend, some new technology, even some ideology—that existed in the writer's time and pushing it farther and harder than it had yet gone, to see what the world would look like then.

  "Of course, a lot of it became trivial even within a few years after it was written. Social trends, especially, changed so fast that they rarely lasted long enough to be carried to the extremes writers imagined. As humans have always been, in the twentieth century they were sometimes radical, sometimes reactionary, sometimes sexually permissive, sometimes repressive. They'd go through two or three of these cycles in a person's lifetime, as we do today.

  "Some writers, though, chose harder questions to ask: how humanity would fit into a c
ommunity of intelligent beings, some quite different from us; how we should treat each other under changed circumstances; what the relationship between government and individual should be. That's why writers like Anderson, Brin, and Heinlein can still make us think today, even though the worlds they imagined didn't come true."

  Somebody stuck up a hand. "Why are the videos from that time at an intellectual level so much lower than the books?"

  "That's a good question," Jennifer said approvingly. "The answer has to do with the economics of book and video distribution back then. Books made money with much smaller audiences than videos did, so they could target small segments—in the case of science fiction, generally the better-educated section—of the population, and present sophisticated ideas to them. Videos needed mass appeal. They borrowed the exotic settings and adventure of written science fiction, but seldom attempted to deal with serious issues."

  "Another question, please, honored professor?"

  "Yes, go ahead, Aissur Aissur Rus." Jennifer was always curious to hear what the Foitani would ask. Aissur Aissur Rus had a special knack for coming up with interesting questions.

  He did not disappoint her now. "Honored professor, I taste the intellectual quality of the authors you mention, which is indeed praiseworthy. Yet others—Sturgeon, Le Guin—seem to write more pleasingly. Which carries the greater weight?" His bearlike ears twitched. Jennifer thought that meant he was pleased with himself.