Rosetta

by Dave Stern

  Lately, she’d been thinking about that seminar a lot. About the first day of class, when Doctor Teodoro had walked in punctually at 9:00 A.M., ramrod-straight (a military bearing, Hoshi knew now, that came from Teodoro’s own career aboard one of the earliest Starfleet survey vessels, where the then Ensign Linda Teodoro had served as both linguist and armory officer), and brought the display screen on the far wall of the room to life, and typed in:

  Universal Translator = Impossible

  before sitting down in her chair at the far end of the long, oval table her students were gathered at.

  Hoshi remembered looking at the screen, looking around the table at her classmates (Bei Quajong, Donal Rafferty, Jerome Hegler, Simone Tam, whom she’d spent more time with over the last few months than her own family) for their reactions, and then looking back at Doctor Teodoro, who sat back in her chair, stone-faced.

  Hoshi couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Neither, apparently, could anyone else. No one said a word.

  “Okay, linguists. ‘Seminar.’ ” Teodoro looked around the table. “The word means what?”

  “Small group of people meeting to exchange ideas,” Donal shot back.

  “Right. And that right there,” she nodded toward the board, “that’s my idea. What’s yours, Mister Rafferty?”

  “I think you’re right.”

  Teodoro shook her head. “First day of class, and you’re kissing my ass already?”

  Hoshi stifled a laugh. Donal blushed.

  “No, sir. Ma’am.”

  “Doctor is fine here. In this context. So why do you think I’m right?”

  “Structure. Chomsky says—”

  “Ah.” Teodoro held up a hand. “Your own words.”

  Donal nodded. “Human language is a function of species-specific brain structure. Grammars are phenotypical expressions of underlying genealogical…”

  Teodoro shook her head again. “Mister Rafferty. Class. We won’t be talking like textbooks in here, all right? Everyday language. Pretend I’m a politician. Or an admiral.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Not funny,” Teodoro said. “These are complex concepts. You have to be able to make them understandable to the layman—to the people who you’ll be working with, and asking to support your research. And if you are lucky enough to be out there—out in the field—”

  She nodded up, in the direction of space, at the same time focusing her attention on Bei, whose desire to serve “out there” was already a running joke among her classmates and apparently the Institute’s faculty as well.

  “—you’ll have to explain why polarizing the hull in the face of an alien vessel that’s just charged weapons is likely to be seen as an offensive action. Are we clear on that?”

  Nods around the table.

  “Good. So Mister Rafferty…would you like to continue?”

  Donal did. He did pretty well at laying out Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, which had floored Hoshi the first time she encountered it, when she understood that what the man was saying was that human language was an innate capability, like a dog’s sense of smell or a bat’s ability to echolocate. It wasn’t learned; it came naturally. And what followed from that…

  “So is everyone with Mister Rafferty?” Teodoro asked. “We all—humans—can learn each other’s languages because they’re all basically the same. They’ve been the same since we climbed down from the trees. Stone Age language, and our language—things, actions, modifiers. There’s no difference in form whatsoever. There’s been no evolution of language from then to now. But an alien language…that’s going to be like nothing we’ve ever encountered in our lives.”

  She looked around the room again, and waited.

  “We all agree, then?” She pointed at the board. “Universal Translator equals Impossibility?”

  “No. I don’t agree.” That was Jerry. “We’ve already got a good start on a Universal Translator. There are over sixty alien languages in the database already.”

  “Those come courtesy of the Vulcans. Besides—is that a translator, or a giant dictionary?”

  “Practically speaking—does it matter?”

  Hoshi cleared her throat and spoke for the first time.

  “We haven’t really encountered any aliens yet,” she said.

  Teodoro swiveled in her chair to face her. “Ah. Ms. Sato, yes? Go ahead.”

  “Vulcans, the people from Alpha Centauri, the Rigelians—for our purposes, they are us. Bipeds, toolmakers—”

  “The Preservers,” Max said.

  “Legend,” Teodoro said dismissively. “Not backed up by biology. But Ms. Sato’s point is still a valid one. What is going to happen when we meet up with an alien race that doesn’t have two arms and two legs, and doesn’t think like we do, doesn’t organize concepts the way we do? Maybe it doesn’t even use speech. What then? How can we put its vocabulary into a computer?”

  There was a long silence then.

  “We can’t,” Hoshi said finally.

  “That’s right. We can’t.” Teodoro looked around the table once more, meeting the gaze of every student before rising from her chair and walking to the board.

  “It’s impossible. A Universal Translator is impossible,” she said, touching the screen with her forefinger. “That’s one starting point for all our discussions this semester, people. Here’s the other.”

  She returned to her seat then, typed something very quickly, and punched in a key. The display changed to read:

  Universal Translator = Necessity

  And at last, Teodoro smiled.

  “So as you all can see, we have our work cut out for us.”

  Which turned out to be an understatement if ever there was one. By the end of the semester, Hoshi and the class had mastered not just the work of pioneering human linguists like Chomsky and Pinker, Weisler and Feinstein, but the Vulcan theorists as well. They’d also successfully translated more than two dozen additional alien languages (rough data supplied courtesy of some of the more adventurous Starfleet—and civilian—explorers). And yet…

  By the end of the semester, Hoshi, like everyone else in the class—like Teodoro herself, too, Hoshi suspected—remained torn. Was a true Universal Translator possible? What they had now was nothing more than a giant dictionary, as Teodoro had pointed out. And there were limits to that dictionary’s effectiveness. Limits she and Enterprise had just smacked into pretty hard: The nonrepeating signal. The fifty-seven coded pulses.

  And again, despite the here and now she found herself in, her present circumstances, which included any number of races standing right in front of her, races whose languages she could and should be attempting to incorporate into the UT’s database, Hoshi’s thoughts went back to that alien signal, and the ship that had broadcast it. To the aspect of the situation she found most puzzling—and perhaps most troubling—of all.

  Enterprise’s scans of the alien vessel had detected half a dozen humanoids aboard, working in a Minshara-class atmosphere. The scans weren’t as detailed, as precise as T’Pol would have liked, but for Hoshi’s purposes they were more than enough. The aliens were bipeds: two arms, two legs, gross anatomical structures very similar to those displayed by most other humanoid races Enterprise had encountered in her travels so far. Close to human—close as, say, Ambassador Quirsh over there. The LMUs—language meaning units, the base concepts that most bipeds shared, I, me, you, eat, sleep, etc.—should have been similar as well. So the language should have been relatively easy to translate. And yet it wasn’t.

  Or maybe it was. Maybe the real problem was her, or rather, what the Xindi did to her. To her brain. Maybe all that mucking around in there had messed things up, and now she’d never be the same again. Maybe she should give Carstairs a crack at the alien signal. Maybe he’d have better luck.

  Maybe she should just go back to Earth, teach grade-school Japanese for a living. Write a book about her experiences: My Years In Space.

  She could call it Toward a U
niversal Translator: Alien Grammars and the Limits of Hoshi Sato.

  The UT beeped. It had just finished translating the language of the yellow-skinned man yelling at Prian, Hoshi saw. Well, at least all her programming efforts weren’t fouled up. She studied the display.

  The yellow-skinned man’s name, she learned, was Aloran, his race was the H’ratoi, he was in fact their ambassador to the Thelasians, they were part of the Confederacy, obviously, perhaps the most important member race next to the Thelasians (at least in the ambassador’s opinion), and they’d just lost contact with two more of their ships, and what was Sen going to do about it? When could they speak to the governor, where was he? Why was he avoiding them again?

  Prian waved his hands helplessly.

  “What do you have?”

  Malcolm was leaning over her shoulder.

  “He,” Hoshi said, indicating Aloran, “wants to know where Sen is. His race has been a member in good standing of the Confederacy for a long, long time. Practically forever. They deserve special consideration. He deserves special consideration. Why hasn’t Sen met with him? Doesn’t the governor value their contributions to the Confederacy? And so on, and so on, and so forth.” She shrugged. “And you?”

  “Doing a little eavesdropping.” Reed nodded behind him, in the direction of the Captain and Ambassador Quirsh, who were still going at it, having moved away from the larger mass of people crowded near the front of the Assembly Hall and taken up position in one of the aisles a few rows back. “Found out a few things. Some you might be interested in.”

  “Oh?”

  Reed nodded. “The Andorians have been attacked twice. First time, the ship was heavily damaged, currently being repaired by the Thelasians, for what—if I heard correctly—is a ridiculously exorbitant fee.”

  “No surprise there.”

  “No indeed. The second attack occurred two weeks ago. This time, the Andorians weren’t so lucky.” His expression turned grave. “Sixty-nine out of the seventy people killed. Ship destroyed. The dead included the entire trade legation, which explains how a nincompoop like Quirsh became ambassador.”

  She nodded.

  “The lone survivor, by the way? Her.”

  He pointed in Quirsh’s direction, toward an Andorian female standing by herself, apart from the others. Tall, thin, intense-looking, radiating—though Hoshi couldn’t quite say how—a “do not disturb, don’t mess with me” air.

  “First Technician Theera,” Malcolm said.

  “Technician?” Hoshi shok her head. “She looks more like a security officer than a technician.”

  Malcolm turned to her and frowned.

  “No offense intended,” Hoshi said quickly.

  Reed smiled. “None taken.”

  “She just has that air about her…”

  “She’s a linguist, actually,” Malcolm said.

  “What?” Hoshi raised her eyebrows in surprise.

  He nodded. “Yes. And if I heard right, she’s managed to translate a portion of the alien signal.”

  Hoshi’s jaw dropped.

  At that instant, the murmuring around her trebled in intensity, then turned into a full-fledged roar. The crowd surged forward.

  She turned, and saw that Governor Sen had entered the Trade Assembly.

  Eight

  The governor paused in his tracks, taken aback for a second by the noise.

  The bodyguards closed ranks around him.

  Roia tied into the security system and alerted him to the number of mercenaries in the hall—fourteen—whose ID chips marked them as experts in unarmed combat and thus as potential threats to his safety, at the same time giving him their approximate locations. Sen fixed those locations in his mind as he took in the entirety of the hall before him—the delegates and soldiers and merchants and pilots and ambassadors crowded together in the aisles, pressing forward toward him, shouting out his name and various epithets in any number of languages.

  The governor sighed, and almost turned right back around.

  God, he loathed democracy.

  All this meaningless, extraneous ceremony and chatter. A significant waste of time, devoted to—what? Really, what was the point? Why pretend that everyone was entitled to an equal vote, that everyone’s opinion deserved equal weight, that decisions should be made by majority rule? What nonsense. That wasn’t the way the world worked. Individuals made decisions; deliberative bodies…deliberated. He hated the hypocrisy displayed by some of the Confederacy’s newest members, the ambassadors and trade legates who insisted on ratifying every decree coming from his office, every new tariff and/or fee he tried to impose. Had they spent a lifetime working in the Guilds, learning the mechanisms of the marketplace, knowing how to read the subtle signs pointing toward commodity shortfalls or surpluses? No. Did they know which races needed coddling, compromise, and which responded only to force, or the threat of punitive financial action? No. Should their assessments, then, of relevant situations, of crisis points, hold equal weight to his?

  The suggestion was ridiculous. Laughable. Clearly, they had no business telling him how to run the Confederacy. He would certainly never dream of interfering in, say, the Szegedy’s internal political situation; he didn’t know the historical background behind those conflicts, anymore than he knew how to make Maszakian breakfast stew. It was not his area of expertise, so he deferred to those who knew better. Let them do their jobs. As he should be deferred to so that he could do his. Deferred to without the need for this ceremonial nonsense—deferred to completely and immediately so that quick, decisive action could be taken. That was how things got done.

  People would know that, Sen thought, if they bothered to study history—if they were able to look at it dispassionately, free of idealistic, ideological bias. Great civilizations, great accomplishments arose from the doings and actions of individuals. It was true here on Procyron, it was true on H’ratoi Prime, it was true all across the galaxy. True even on a relative backwater like Earth, whose history he’d been reading up on last evening, again courtesy of the Teff-Langer Conglomerate. Was there ever a better example of one individual triggering change through his own, ungoverned initiative than the young king Alexander? The melding of cultures he’d brought about? Not in Sen’s opinion. Earth, in fact, was full of such figures, Green and Gandhi, Mao and Madison, Julius Caesar and yes, even Jonathan Archer, whose list of accomplishments at such a relatively young age was practically Alexandrian.

  Sen’s eyes swept the hall now until he found the human captain, in conversation with a blue-skinned alien—an Andorian. That was right; the two races were relative neighbors, at the moment arguing about something. Arguing quite vociferously, in fact; the Andorian’s body language indicated potential violence. Should he have the guards intervene before the conflict escalated? It wouldn’t do to have the captain damaged; the price would quite likely go down if he was damaged. Although perhaps, Sen thought, he was misreading the signals.

  “Roia,” he subvocalized. “Humans and Andorians. Summarize relations.”

  She did so. Sen was surprised to learn that despite what he was seeing, the two races had just entered into a tentative alliance. What was more, Archer had played a pivotal role in shaping that arrangement. Another accomplishment for the history books by the young captain. Considering what Sen had planned for Archer, though…

  It was more than likely the Earthman’s last.

  “Governor?”

  Sen found himself looking directly into the face of one of his bodyguards. Kuda. The captain of the troop.

  “Of course,” he said smoothly, realizing at once that the man had been standing there for some time, waiting for Sen to move forward. “Go.”

  Kuda nodded, and spun on his heel and strode forward, followed by his troop, who were all tied in directly (through the security network) to Kuda’s central processing system, and so moved in direct lockstep with their leader, clearing (none-too-gently) a path for Sen to the stage. The governor climbed the short flight of s
teps onto it, nodding to Prian as he did so, who acknowledged the governor with a grateful smile. Sen saw the H’ratoi massed all around his assistant; those people simply would not accept the slightest loss on any of their shipments, a trait that the trader in Sen admired as much as the governor in him abhorred.

  Sen raised his hands in the air, palms faced forward, and the crowd quieted.

  “Thank you all for coming. Please—be seated. And forgive the delay…”

  “Do you have news of our ships?”

  Sen looked down and saw that same H’ratoi, the one who’d been harassing Prian, their ambassador—Aloran (unprompted, Roia quickly provided his name)—staring up at him. His first instinct was to order the man ejected from the hall. In the old days of the Confederacy, the glory days, no one would have dared to even exhale loudly when the first governor was speaking, and if they had presumed to interrupt, they would more than likely have been thrown not just from the hall but from the top of the building and none present would have lifted a finger in protest. But, of course, these weren’t the old days anymore, and the H’ratoi were not only one of the Confederacy’s oldest (and most important) members but supplied a significant portion of the manpower and equipment necessary for the protection of the trade routes. H’ratoi—even ones as bothersome as the ambassador—had to be tolerated. In the name of defense. In the name of democracy.

  Sen favored the man with a slight smile.

  “Ambassador. If you’ll allow me to briefly…”

  “Do you have news?” the ambassador repeated, cutting Sen off, glaring up at the governor with impatience.

  It was all Sen could do not to stride off the podium and throttle him.

  “Yes,” Sen said, in as level a tone as he could manage.

  “And…”

  “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. We have confirmation of the attack.”

  The hall erupted again. Voices shouted for details, voices shouted in anger, eyes glared at Sen and at the uniformed generals—the Defense Council—assembled at the side of the podium. The Pfau delegate behind Aloran punched the air with her fist, and yelled something incomprehensible. Behind her, the Palisan representatives huddled together and shook their heads vociferously. A few rows back, and to the governor’s right, the Conani shouted Sen’s name, demanding to be recognized, to be allowed to speak.