Lost In Translation

by Edward Willett

  He glanced down at her, mouth quirking in a smile. “What?”

  “It must have been tough for you—first human Translator—going through your Final Exam and First Translation. You didn’t have someone who’d been there before, like I do.” She gave his arm a squeeze. “You’ve been like a big brother to me, Jim. I really appreciate it.”

  His smile faded and he looked away from her. “It wasn’t so bad. There’d been one-sided Translations with humans. They knew it wouldn’t kill us.”

  “Weren’t you at least a little bit scared?” Kathryn asked. Because I am, she added silently. There have been a dozen human Translators since Jim, and I’m still scared.

  “No,” Jim said. “I wasn’t a little bit scared. I was bloody well terrified.” He stopped. “Here we are. Open!”

  The dark gray wall in front of them split apart, admitting them into Jim’s quarters, a quintet of rooms: kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, office, and the general-purpose room into which the door opened. Kathryn stopped in the doorway and stared open-mouthed at a table draped in pristine white, the glitter of crystal and silver, the soft glow of tall red candles, the fragrant red flowers (roses, the name came to her from somewhere) in a slender white vase . . . and a long-necked bottle cooling in a silver bucket of ice beside the table. “Jim—” Kathryn’s throat closed off. “Jim, I—” She had to shrug and finally laugh. “I’m speechless!”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Jim said. “Allow me, Lady Kathryn.”

  He escorted her to one of the two chairs at the table and seated her with a flourish that made her laugh again, feeling like she was in one of the historical romances currently the rage in the entertainment chips they got from Earth. She’d always thought they were pretty silly. Now she wasn’t so sure. “But how—”

  “This assignment I just finished was to Earth—”

  “You said you were going to Orris,” Kathryn said accusingly.

  “Security,” Jim said. “The whole thing’s tied up with this Fairholm mess. Anyway, since I was on our beloved homeworld, I slipped away from the conference for a day when I wasn’t needed and took the liberty of picking up a few things the Guild has unaccountably failed to import for us.”

  “Just for me?” Kathryn couldn’t believe it. “That’s—incredible!”

  “For you—and for me, too.” He pulled the open bottle from its bed of ice and poured two glasses full of a golden liquid that bubbled and sparkled, catching the light of the candles.

  “For you?” Kathryn breathed. Champagne—it had to be champagne. She’d never tasted it, never even seen it outside of entertainment vids.

  “It gave me an excuse to pry you away from the computer—something I haven’t been able to do since you started your final training this year. In other words,” he handed her one of the glasses, “it has given me the pleasure of your company.” She took the chill glass from him, and feeling more than ever like she’d fallen out of real life, clinked it against his, and sipped the pale liquid.

  It tasted nothing at all like she’d imagined, and the bubbles seemed to race up into her nose and explode there, tickling, but leaving behind a sharp warmth. She closed her eyes and sipped again, and the sensation repeated itself. “Mmmmm . . . no wonder they drink this for special occasions.”

  “They also smash it against the bows of ships about to launch on their maiden voyages, which makes it doubly appropriate, since tomorrow you, fair maiden, will be launched on your new life as a Translator.”

  Kathryn opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Why, Jim, I never knew you were a romantic at heart.”

  Jim’s eyes caught and held hers, glints of candlelight in them. “Far more romantic than you would ever think, probably,” he said softly. Kathryn felt heat rise to her cheeks, and looked away, carefully setting down the champagne.

  After a moment’s silence, Jim said, “I’ll get dinner,” and went into the kitchen.

  “How did your assignment go?” Kathryn called after him, by way of changing the strange, charged mood that had gripped the room—and her. “Or should I ask?”

  “My assignment was simply to Translate, which I did successfully,” Jim said. “Careful how you phrase things, Trainee.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You mean, how did the diplomatic mission of which I was a part go?” Jim came back into the room carrying a covered dish. “Depends on who you ask. Certain people on S’sinndikk and Earth were undoubtedly very pleased. The Commonwealth diplomats, however, were not.” He set the dish on the table. “No compromises. Earth insists it was on Fairholm first. S’sinndikk claims the same. Both have computer records to support their positions. And meantime, the rest of the Seven Races are taking sides. It was not a particularly pleasant assignment, passing barely-veiled insults from side to side. I’m glad to be back.” He paused, his hand on the dish, and smiled at her, teeth flashing white in his dark brown face. “Espe cially glad to be back with you.” His eyes looked into hers, and again she felt that strange, electric tension, mingling with the warmth of the champagne in her brain. This time she didn’t look away; Jim did, lifting the lid from the dish and releasing a swirl of steam and mouth-watering, spicy fragrance. “A delicacy of Earth: fettuccini Alfredo. Allow me to serve.”

  The food tasted every bit as strange and wonderful as it smelled; as strange and wonderful as Kathryn felt. She and Jim ate in near silence, but every time she looked up, there were his dark, liquid eyes, somehow drawing her in. It wasn’t her empathic ability—he was as blank to her as ever—but something new. Something—exciting.

  When the dinner ended, Jim held out his hand to her. His fingers, warm and dry, touched hers, and she gasped with the sudden shock of being able to read him at last, of being able to read the strength of his desire for her, desire that found an echo in her and resonated with a force that dissolved the distance between their minds, and, within moments, between their bodies.

  Kathryn woke slowly, and stretched languidly, then looked up at the ceiling, pale blue instead of her own bedroom’s gray, and sat abruptly upright. Daylight flooded the room through the lightubes from the surface far above. Kathryn scrambled out of bed and reached for her clothes.

  Jim rolled over and blinked at her. “Katy, what—”

  Kathryn ignored him. “Computer, what time is it?”

  “0514,” the computer answered promptly.

  Kathryn stopped with her skirt in her hand. “0514?”

  “Now 0515,” replied the computer.

  Jim levered himself up on one elbow and grinned at her. “You’ve got two hours before you need to get up,” he said. “And the computer wouldn’t have let you oversleep. I programmed it last night.”

  “You—” Kathryn turned toward the bed. “When?”

  Jim’s grin slipped a little. “When? Well—I don’t remember. Sometime before we slept.”

  “You didn’t really have a chance, did you?” Kathryn resumed dressing. “You programmed the computer to wake me, here, before you ever came to get me last night, didn’t you?”

  “Does it matter?” Jim wasn’t grinning at all, anymore.

  “It matters. You seduced me.”

  “I didn’t force you to do anything you didn’t want to.”

  “Oh, no?” Kathryn pulled on her blouse, sat down on the bed, and reached for her boots. “You know, I’ve never been able to read you before when we touched. How come the barriers came down just then, Jim? And just what is your rating on the projective scale?”

  “Katy—”

  “I’ve got to go.” She stood up, fully dressed, and marched to the bedroom door. “I can still get in a couple of hours of study—”

  She heard Jim scramble out of the bed as she entered the dining room, where the congealed remains of the previous night’s dinner didn’t look nearly as romantic as it had by candlelight, white tablecloth or not. She almost made it to the front door before he grabbed her arm and spun her around.

  “Katy, you can’
t mean that. You can’t really think I’d use my ability to—that’s like saying I raped you!”

  Kathryn opened her mouth, then closed it again. “No,” she said. “No, I wouldn’t go that far. But you helped things along, didn’t you?”

  “So what?” Jim sounded angry. “So what? Katy, I’ve been attracted to you for years, but you’ve—well, you said it last night. You’ve always seen me as your big brother. So I decided to change that. I wanted you to look at me differently, Katy. I wanted you to see me as a man, not the boy you grew up with. So I pulled out all the stops, last night, and it worked. You were attracted to me, I could feel it—so I let you feel my attraction to you. And we did something about it. Why are you angry? You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it!”

  “I—” Kathryn began, then stopped. No, she couldn’t honestly say that. It had been—wonderful. More than she had ever imagined, watching the couples in the entertainment vids. The empathic overtones alone . . . so why was she angry?

  She looked at Jim, and realized something. He might be standing naked in front of her, but his mind and emotions were fully clothed. She couldn’t read him. She hadn’t been able to since she got up. He’d gotten what he wanted, and then closed her out again. Her anger flared anew, and when he flinched, she knew he felt it, and let it burn even hotter. “Put on some clothes,” she snapped. “Or go back to bed. Frankly, I don’t care which.” She swept out, and the door closed behind her.

  On the walk back to her own quarters, she reached inside herself and tried to quiet her emotions. Today was the most important day of her life. She couldn’t afford to be less than perfectly centered. She couldn’t let thoughts of Jim—who’d known what day this was and had still—

  She cut off that train of thought as quickly as it formed. She would not think about Jim Ornawka. Not until this day was over.

  Today, all her thoughts had to be on the Exam: the Exam, and First Translation.

  Eight hours later, Kathryn stood in the circular Guildheart, the star-filled chamber where she had been brought upon her arrival in the Guildhall ten years before. The Guild Council member for each race formed a semicircle around her. Above them, slowly turning in the random air currents of the Hall, filled today with Earth-normal atmosphere, hung a sphere within a pyramid within a cube, all of gold set with diamond chips that reflected the torchlight in thousands of firefly sparkles: torchlight, because Translation could only take place in an environment shielded from electromagnetic interference, and artificial lighting put out far too much of it.

  “Candidate Bircher, you have successfully completed your training and answered the questions put to you by the Guild Councilors. Are you ready to take the Oath of the Guild?” Karak’s squeaky, dolphinlike voice filled the chamber with echoes. Today he didn’t speak a human language at all, but the lingua franca of the Guild, which the Hasshingu-Issk had invented long ago and humans had dubbed Guildtalk. With it, humans, Hasshingu-Issk, Ithkarites, and S’sinn could usually make themselves understood to each other. Kathryn faced Karak’s aquarium and looked squarely into his round, dead-black eyes, close behind the thick glass.

  “I am, Guildmaster Karak,” she said in the same language.

  “Then state it.”

  No repeat-after-me; candidates were expected to know their oath long before they took it—know every word and every ramification that two centuries of Guild experience had brought to light. Much of the Final Exam had centered on exactly that. Kathryn took a deep breath, and continued to face Karak, remembering the day he had taken her from the orphanage, and the day these same Councilors had brought her back from the despairing depths of bondcut. “I renounce all ties to my home planet and species,” she said clearly. “I am no longer human, but Translator. I belong to no race, but am kin to all, and I serve the good of all, without bias or prejudice. I surrender my will freely, that others may speak through me. I make this Oath in the presence of Seven Races, and by all that they honor.”

  Kathryn bowed to Karak, who bowed back, the tentacles around his beaked face weaving a slow pattern. She turned to the aquarium next to his, filled with a thicker, darker liquid. Dimly visible, a four-metre sluglike body pulsated dreamily. Kathryn repeated her oath to the Swampworlder, though only Full Translation could have made it understandable, then turned to the next Councilor, a single Aza drone, wings humming, and spoke to it, and through it to all the thousands of members of its Swarm, although the Aza, being deaf, couldn’t understand Guildtalk either—they (it?) communicated by chemical signals.

  Next came the mated trio of winged, child-sized Orrisian “elves” who together were the Orrisian representative on the Council. They understood Guildtalk, she’d been told, but could not reproduce the sounds necessary to speak it: their own speech consisted of ultrasonic chirps.

  Then—for a moment her voice faltered. Ten meters away, at the very edge of the Guildheart, but still too close, a brown-furred S’sinn rested on his padded wooden shikk. Kathryn stiffened her resolve and spoke her oath again, but without looking directly at him.

  Behind her—she turned and faced Jim, but fought down the tide of memory and repeated the oath once more. He wasn’t a Councilor, of course—no human had yet progressed that far in the Guild—but as the first human Translator, he often served as the human representative at First Translations. He bowed gravely to her when she finished.

  Finally she turned to the final Councilor, the man-high, reptilian Hasshingu-Issk. Two of them stood there, but she spoke her oath to the one wearing the bright green armband of a Master, vivid against his black scales; the other wore the blue of a medic.

  “. . . by all that they honor,” Kathryn finished, a little hoarsely.

  “We have heard your oath,” Karak said. “Now demonstrate your resolve. Begin First Translation.”

  While the Hasshingu-Issk Master watched with unblinking, slit-pupiled yellow eyes, the medic wheeled forward a metal container. Opening it released a sharp, salty smell that mingled with the reptilian’s own sulfurous scent, stinging Kathryn’s nostrils.

  She looked down, knowing what she would see, but still flinching: the slowly-writhing, ropy gray mass nestled in the pink nutrient fluid inside the tank set off ancient primate “snake!” alarms. But mere squeamishness wouldn’t keep Kathryn from this climax of her training. At the medic’s nod, she lowered her hand firmly into the case, and just as she had forced herself as a child to watch the needle of a doctor’s syringe pierce her skin, she kept her eyes on the squirming creature that looped itself wetly around her fingers.

  At first nothing happened. But slowly a tingling spread through her hand, which grew peculiarly heavy; and, as the minutes passed in a silence broken only by the thudding of her own heart, the mass of tissue in the case diminished. The tingling moved up her arm, into her shoulder, like an internal itch she could not scratch, but she held perfectly still, though silent tears ran down her cheeks. The Councilors watched impassively, thick solemnity the only emotion she could read from them.

  Just when she thought she couldn’t stand the horrible crawling under her skin one minute longer, it stopped.

  She lifted her hand from the empty container, and sound rumbled around the room as each Witness confirmed that Kathryn had freely accepted the Swampworlder-invented universal nervous system interface, the engineered lifeform that humans called “The Beast.” To her right, Jim said, “Amen.”

  Kathryn felt vaguely disappointed. An alien creature nestled within her, its tendrils infiltrating her entire nervous system, and so far all she’d felt was an unscratchable itch.

  But now the Master came forward. He opened a small case of bluish metal, revealing two very different syringes and a coil of silvery cord. The Master took out the smaller syringe and proffered it to Kathryn, who accepted it from his claws, embarrassed by her trembling fingers. Then the Master took out the other syringe, and plunged its dagger-sized needle into his thigh, his eyes never wavering from Kathryn’s face. Kathryn, only too aware of the fea
r she was broadcasting to the Council, put her own syringe against her bare upper arm and pulled the trigger.

  A sharp pain, and the liquid surged into her bloodstream. She felt only a faint warmth, but knew that inside her chemicals were programming The Beast, preparing it and her for—

  This. The Master uncoiled the silvery cord and touched one end to a matching patch behind his barely visible ear. It clung there as he held out the other end to her.

  Kathryn knew some Guild trainees backed out even at this point. Many, like the Hasshingu-Issk medic, served faithfully in non-Translation duties. To withdraw would not shame her; it would simply prove she wasn’t suited to be a Translator. You needed utter confidence in yourself to survive First Translation unscathed. Doubt could be fatal . . .

  Breathing a prayer to God, who at the moment she very much wanted to believe in, Kathryn took the cord and touched it to the interface that had been surgically implanted behind her own ear a month earlier.

  Humans talked of sex as the joining of two people. But the night before, the union she had enjoyed with Jim, even with all its empathic overtones, had been nothing compared to this!

  She had never been to the Hasshingu-Issk homeworld, but in an instant it surrounded her in all its sun-drenched beauty. She rolled on a baking-hot rock with her mate, fought in the Arena of God for the glory of the Toothed One, ripped out the throat of a magnificent ikisss she had chased for kilometers across a lava plain. She knew the names of the Five Moons of the Gods and the Seven Cities of the Dead; she shed her skin and burrowed in ecstasy in the cooling mud; she understood why imperfect hatchlings had to be eaten and knew that she could explain that custom to the weakling races who called it barbaric, if only she could . . .