"Before I answer, Aissur Aissur Rus, may I ask a question in return?" Jennifer said. He waved a hand back and forth in front of his face. She knew that meant yes. She went on, "How have you learned Middle English well enough to have a feel for its style?" Not many human undergrads, even with computer aids, developed that kind of sensitivity to a language not their own.
Aissur Aissur Rus said, "To prepare us for this class, honored professor, our people used a Middle English/Spanglish program, a Spanglish/Raptic program—Rapti, you should know, is a world that once lay at the edge of Foitani space—and finally one from Raptic into our own tongue. Eventually our machines acquired sufficient vocabulary and context cues to abandon the two intermediate programs; they began to read directly from Middle English into our speech. From that point, it was not hard for us to learn Middle English directly."
"I see," Jennifer said slowly. And indeed she did see how, but not why. What good was ancient science fiction to the Foitani? She almost asked straight out. Before she did, though, she felt she had to deal with Aissur Aissur Rus's question. "In their own time, the writers you named—and some others like them—were often very highly esteemed indeed, exactly because they were such fine stylists. And to say they did not address serious issues is not true, either. But they are less often read now because their concerns are not as relevant to us today as those of other authors. Do you see?"
"Yes, I taste the distinction you are cooking, but I am not sure it is valid," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Again I ask, which carries the greater weight, abstract artistic excellence or utility?"
"That is a question humans have asked for as long as they have examined their own art," Jennifer said with a smile. "No one has ever come up with a definitive answer."
"Questions have answers," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said reprovingly.
"That may be so, but often only on a case-by-case basis—and with something as subjective as artistic elegance, one man's answer is another man's error," Jennifer said.
"Before the Suicide Wars, the Great Ones would have known." Even through the translator's flat tones, Dargnil Dargnil Lin sounded sure of that.
"If the Great Ones were as great as that, why did they fight the Suicide Wars?" Aissur Aissur Rus asked. Jennifer did not think the remark had been meant for the class to hear, but the translator sent it forth all the same.
Thegun Thegun Nug said, "Enough. We interrupt the discourse of the honored professor." All three Foitani visibly composed themselves to listen. Jennifer found she had no choice but to go on with her lecture. One day, she told herself, I will ask my questions of them. It would not be that day, though.
"It's so frustrating," she said to Ali Bakhtiar when she got home from her last class. "They're good in class. They're very good. But what are they doing there?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," Bakhtiar answered, as he had every time she raised the issue. Now his patience showed signs of wearing thin. "I wouldn't lose sleep over it, either. If they want to spend good money to hear you talk about your musty old books, that's their problem, not yours."
"Musty old books? Problem?" Jennifer didn't know where to start being indignant at all that.
"You look silly standing there with your mouth hanging open," Bakhtiar said.
If she'd had her stunner on her belt, she would have given him a dose big enough to keep him out the rest of the night—and maybe for the week after that. Her mouth was open, she realized. She shut it. She wasn't indignant any more; she was furious. Usually anger made her come to pieces. Now she knew what she had to do. When she spoke again, her voice was even tinier than usual. "I'll start looking for my own apartment."
Ali Bakhtiar stared at her. "Don't do that!" he said in alarm. She watched his face, the way his eyes moved up and down her. The alarm wasn't for her, at least not the part of her that dwelt behind her eyes. It was concern that he wouldn't be able to sleep with her any more. As if to prove it, he reached out to take her in his arms.
She took one step back, then another. He followed. "You leave me be," she said. She hated her voice for quavering. Her eyes filled with angry tears. She hated them even more.
"You're just upset," Bakhtiar said smoothly. "If it'll make you feel better, I'll apologize. Come here, Jennifer; it's all right." He put his hands on her shoulders.
A moment later he reeled away, right hand clutching left wrist. Jennifer hoped she hadn't broken it. She'd never needed unarmed combat on any of the worlds she'd visited, but all traders learned it, to protect themselves from aliens and humans both. Now she was using it for the first time, not a five-minute walk from the peaceful campus where she'd wanted to spend her days in quiet research. She'd already learned life didn't always work out the way one thought it would.
She walked past Ali Bakhtiar to the phone. He flinched back from her as if she'd suddenly sprouted fangs and talons; his eyes said he'd never seen her before. Maybe he hadn't, not really—maybe all he'd paid attention to was the small, shapely body, the blond hair that fell to the small of her back, the blue eyes and clear features. She started getting angry all over again.
She keyed the number of a friend, a colleague in the dead languages department a few years older than she. "Ella? It's Jennifer. Is there any chance I could sleep on your couch for a few days? I've had a fight with my boyfriend and I'll be moving out of here as soon as I can."
"I don't see any reason why not," Ella Metchnikova answered, her almost baritone contralto booming in Jennifer's ear. "Come on over."
"Thank you, Ella dear. I will." Jennifer hung up, threw some books, disks, and papers into an attaché case, then tossed the case, a change of clothes, and her toothbrush into a blue plastic shopping bag. She paused at the door to look back at Ali Bakhtiar. "I'll be out of here just as quick as I can get a place. If you mess with my things, even a little bit, I won't hit you in the wrist next time. I promise you that."
Then she had an afterthought. She went past Bakhtiar again, this time into the bedroom. It spoiled her grand exit, but she did not care for melodrama in her own life anyhow. She found her stunner and dropped it into the bag, too. One more trip by her lover—her former lover, she amended to herself—and she was gone.
Ella Metchnikova lived only a few blocks away. Her apartment building—and her apartment—were nearly clones of the one in which Jennifer had lived; the same construction company must have put up both of them.
Ella was large and blustery. She hugged Jennifer when she came in, kissing her on each cheek. "You have my sympathy, if you want it," she said. "More likely you think you're well rid of him, and if you think that, you're probably right. Let me give you something more practical instead." She took a glass from the refrigerator and handed it to Jennifer.
Jennifer sipped cautiously. Ella had handed her glasses before. Sometimes they were tasty, sometimes anything but—one of Ella's hobbies were reconstructing drinks nobody had drunk for hundreds of years. There were often good reasons why nobody had drunk them for hundreds of years.
This one wasn't bad—smooth, a little sweet, not alcoholic enough to scorch her throat or make her eyes water. As she was supposed to, she asked, "What's it called?"
"A Harvey Wallbanger," Ella said. "Orange juice, ethanol, and a liqueur called Galliano that I just found a bottle of last week. I thought it was long since extinct, but somebody still makes it. Can't imagine why. It's death by itself—think of high-proof sugar syrup with yellow food coloring. But it is good for something, you see."
"Yes, so it is." Jennifer took a larger sip, then another one. Warmth spread from her stomach. "Thanks for taking me in on short notice."
"On no notice, you mean." Ella laughed. A moment later, the laugh got louder. "I didn't know anybody on this planet could blush."
Jennifer's cheeks only grew hotter. "I can't help it if I'm fair."
"I know you can't. I can't help laughing about it, either. Have you had dinner?"
Jennifer let Ella mother her. It took her mind off the sudden crash of her relat
ionship with Bakhtiar and off the hideous nuisance of moving—although her trader training would come in handy there, for she was used to packing quickly and thoroughly. Her trader training kept coming in handy all sorts of ways, something she'd certainly not expected when she signed up as an apprentice. All she'd wanted was something out of the ordinary on her resumé.
After dinner, she accessed the realty data net to see what sort of apartment she could find. The results of the search annoyed her: with the semester well begun, the units nearest the campus were full up. "Nothing closer than three kilometers," she complained.
"Maybe I ought to take that one," Ella said, looking over her shoulder. "You could have this place. I need the exercise more than you do." She sighed. "No, it wouldn't do. Knowing me, I'd take the shuttle in instead of walking. Oh, well."
Still grumbling, Jennifer electronically arranged to move into the nearest apartment she'd found, though she put in a withdrawal option in case something closer to the university opened up before she took possession of the new place. She'd enjoyed walking to work. She could afford the penalty she'd have to pay if she used the option.
"When does it come vacant, three days from now?" Ella asked.
"That's right. I hope I won't be too much a bother till then," Jennifer said. She'd already started thinking about what she could give Ella to repay her kindness.
"Tonight's not a problem, and neither is tomorrow. But the day, or rather the night after that—well, I'd invited Xavier over, and . . . you know what I mean," Ella said.
"Oh, yes," Jennifer said quickly. Ella and Xavier had been lovers for a long time. Jennifer didn't know how long, but it was longer than she'd been on Saugus. "I'll find someplace else to be, even if I have to sleep in the office that one night. It has a couch, of sorts; that wouldn't be too bad, really. And I'll be going into the new place the next day, so I won't cramp you any more after that."
"You're sweet, Jennifer. Sometimes I think you're too sweet for your own good. That's why you surprised me when you said you were breaking up with Ali. What touched that off, if you don't mind my asking?"
Jennifer started to explain about the Foitani. Before she'd gone three sentences, she ran into the same wall of incomprehension with Ella that had driven her out of the arms of Ali Bakhtiar. Even though humans had spread over several thousand light-years, most of them, if they traveled at all, went from one human-settled planet to another and had only sketchy dealings—if any—with the many other species who shared the galaxy with them. Ella knew a lot more about ancient distilling techniques than she did about the Foitani.
When Jennifer was done, her friend shrugged and said, "It doesn't seem like much of a reason to me, but you know best how you feel. And it sounds like something else would have happened if this hadn't."
"I suppose so," Jennifer said. "I guess I knew I was more or less marking time with Ali." She ruefully shook her head. "I hadn't expected to get my nose rubbed in it this way, though."
"You never do," Ella said. "I remember this fellow I was seeing about ten years ago . . ." The tale that followed went on for some time and was more lurid than the fiction Jennifer was used to reading.
When she tried to sleep in Ella's front room, Jennifer tossed and turned. She was still upset. Moreover, the couch was harder and narrower than her big bed. The room wasn't as dark as her bedroom, and the noises of ground traffic outside were louder. Someone in an apartment across the courtyard had a clock that chimed the hours. She listened to it announce midnight, then, a year or so later, one o'clock. Finally she slept.
Ella's alarm screamed like a banshee—worse than an Atheter, Jennifer thought fuzzily as her panic at the hideous noise faded and she realized what it was. Ella was either a serious sleeper or selectively deaf, because the clock squalled on and on until at last she yelled for it to shut up.
Jennifer winced at her red-tracked eyes after she got out of the shower. She felt as if she had a hangover, without even the remembered pleasure of getting drunk the night before. Moving as if underwater, she dressed in her one clean outfit—making a mental note to wash the shirt and skirt she'd worn yesterday—dove into a cup of coffee, gulped down a fruit bar, and headed for the university.
The caffeine and the thought of the material she was going to present made her more lively by the time her Middle English class rolled around. She was beginning a new unit today, which also pleased her; she felt as if she was turning over a whole new leaf in her life. That absurd jingle left her chuckling to herself as she strode into the lecture hall.
The chuckles disappeared before she reached the podium. She fixed the class with as steely a gaze as she could muster—not very steely, she knew down deep, but she did her best. In what she hoped was a stern voice, she demanded, "Who hasn't kept up with the reading for today?"
A few luckless souls, lazy and honest at the same time, raised their hands. "You'll have to do better than that," she told them. "You knew when you enrolled—you certainly knew when you saw the syllabus—your work load would be heavy here. You have to stay with the lectures if you expect to get full benefit from the course."
Thegun Thegun Nug and the other two Foitani had kept their big, thick-fingered hands down. Jennifer was sure it wasn't because they didn't want to admit they'd fallen behind. She almost used them as an example, to say to the rest of the class, See, if they can keep up, you ought to be able to. Only the thought that they might not want to be singled out held her back.
She said, "We're not going to look at imaginary aliens for a while. Instead, we'll consider science fiction's examination of a problem that was pressing for several generations: the risk that mankind would annihilate itself over local disputes on Earth before it acquired the technology to get off the planet."
All three Foitani sat straighter in their slight, too-small chairs. She thought of the history of their race and shivered a little: a species didn't have to be planet-bound to do a pretty fair job of annihilating itself.
"For those of you who did read the lesson," she went on, "we'll discuss A Canticle for Leibowitz first. Ever since it was written, many people have named it the best science fiction novel of all time. The section I want to examine now is the middle one, the one called 'Fiat Lux.'"
"What is the meaning of this heading?" Aissur Aissur Rus asked. "Our translator program broke down on it, making obscure references to ancient wheeled conveyances and soaps. This does not seem appropriate to the content of the book."
"It sure doesn't." Jennifer wondered how any program could come up with anything so farfetched. "Maybe the problem is that the heading isn't in Middle English but rather Latin, a still older human speech. 'Fiat Lux' means 'let there be light.'"
"Ah." That wasn't Aissur Aissur Rus; it was a human student. Several others also made notes. Jennifer silently sighed. Lazy, she thought. They should have had no trouble accessing the meaning of the phrase. Not only was Latin still used liturgically, it was an important ancestral tongue to Spanglish.
"'Fiat Lux' is particularly interesting for its blend of historical analogy and extrapolation," she said. "The role of the church in the piece is based on what the church actually did after the collapse of the Roman civilization earlier in Earth's history; the Romans, by the way, were the people who used Latin.
"But the civilization which Miller envisioned collapsing after nuclear war was his own, which had already become highly dependent on technology. As civilization restored itself, as it began to discover once more how the world worked, it also began to discover that it was in fact rediscovering, was only finding out what its ancestors had already known. Miller effectively paints into his book the intellectual turmoil this realization would create—"
Jennifer stopped there. She hadn't intended to, but one glance at the Foitani would have distracted anybody. They weren't making a racket, they weren't even jumping up and down, but they had come to full alert for the first time in her presence. When a large creature—three large creatures—with spiky ears and good teet
h comes to full alert in a human's presence, the human comes alert, too. Three million years of biological programming was screaming Wolves! in her ears.
She needed only a moment to collect herself. Thanks to her time as a trader, she knew how to break free from the prejudice of shape. A small part of her mind noted that she was thanking her time as a trader rather often these days. That annoyed her, all the more so as she'd wished she was on a nice, quiet university campus while it was going on.
She said, "Is there a question?" Her voice was still light, but steady enough.
She'd expected the Foitani to be bursting with questions. They surprised her. They started when she spoke to them, then looked at each other, as if she'd caught them picking their noses—if doing that was bad Foitani manners.
Finally Thegun Thegun Nug said, "No, no questions at this time, honored professor. We were merely interested in the analogies between the world this author draws and the experiences of our own people."
"Very well, I'll go on," Jennifer said. The translator's tone was as bland as ever, but she knew she'd heard a lie just the same—or at least, not all of the truth. Something more than interest in analogies had stirred up the Foitani there. But if they didn't care to talk about it with a human, what could she do?
Distractedly, she got through the rest of the day's presentation. The discussion was less lively than she'd hoped, not least because the Foitani had stopped taking part. They paid close attention to everything she and the humans students said, though: their ears kept twitching. Maybe that was a reaction they couldn't control.
When Jennifer got back to Ella's apartment, she wanted to talk about the aliens' extraordinary reaction to A Canticle for Leibowitz. Ella didn't want to listen. Ella was planning tomorrow's extravaganza with Xavier and wanted to talk about that. Jennifer, who was sick of men in general and Ali Bakhtiar in particular, made a poor audience.
After she and her friend discovered they weren't going to communicate that evening no matter how hard they tried, Jennifer began playing with the computer and de Camp's colons again. She wondered if some of the works where commas appeared instead were the work of overzealous copy editors. Offhand, she couldn't think of a single twentieth-century author who had a good word to say for copy editors.
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