Collingdale was present when Juan Gomez admitted to an infraction within an hour of converting to the new system. Juan explained himself in Goompah, and Collingdale couldn’t follow. Something to do with Shelley. The penalty was mild, a requirement to do an extra translation from one of the Brackel Library texts. A heroic poem, Judy explained.
Collingdale tried to restrict himself to Goompah in the presence of the Kulp. He was making progress, and he enjoyed impressing his young wards. They never ceased looking surprised, and he began to suspect they didn’t have a high opinion of his intellectual abilities, or, for that matter, of those of the Upper Strata in general. “Too locked in to their mental habits to be taken seriously,” Judy said with a perfectly straight face. “Except you of course.”
“Of course.”
“It is a problem,” she said. “People live longer all the time, but they still freeze up pretty early. Flexibility goes at thirty.”
“You really think so?”
“Lost mine last month.”
However that might have been, they called him in on that first full Goompah day and bestowed on him the Kordikai Award, named for an ancient Goompah philosopher famed for constructing what humans would have called the scientific method.
Had his support for them been tentative, that act alone would have won him over. They were the best people he’d ever worked with, young, enthusiastic, quick learners, and, perhaps, most important of all, they believed in what they were doing, saw themselves as the cavalry riding in to help an otherwise-doomed people. When the time came, when the cloud darkened the skies and frightened the wits out of the Goompahs, the Kulp would arrive, one for each of the eleven cities (by then they knew that the southernmost pair were a single political unit), their alienness hidden within Judy Sternberg’s exquisite disguises. They would go in, do a few high-tech magic tricks, claim the gods had sent them to warn of approaching disaster, and urge the inhabitants to clear out. Head for the high ground.
What could go wrong?
“Challa, Dr. Collingdale.” They shook his hand and told him they intended the Kordikai to become an annual award.
BUT SPEAKING GOOMPAH more or less full-time was one thing to talk about and something else to do. The breakfast is good. There’s a fruit bowl on the table. I am reading an interesting book. They had the lines down. And all quite effectively, except, of course, that they really needed to engage with native speakers. As things were, the conversation remained hopelessly superficial. It is nice out. Your shoes are untied. I am a little red pencil box.
“Pay-los, Dr. Collingdale.” Good-bye. See you around. Until next time.
And that’s what could go wrong. There would be all kinds of nuances that they were not going to pick up because there was no one to tell them where they were getting it wrong.
At dinnertime, he went into the dining room. Five of the Kulp were at a corner table. He wandered over and, in his measured Goompah, asked them how it was going.
It was going well.
Had they encountered any problems?
Boka, Ska Collingdale. Friend Collingdale. Mr. Collingdale. Acquaintance Collingdale. Who really knew?
BUT THEY’D LEARNED much since Digger and Kellie had penetrated the library.
The cities were significantly older than anyone had assumed. Their roots went back at least five thousand years. If that were so, how did one explain that they were still sitting on the isthmus? Why had they never expanded into the rest of their world? What had happened to them?
Prior to the foundation of the first city, which the Goompahs believed to be Sakmarung, the world had belonged to the gods. But they had retreated to the skies, and had left the isthmus, the Intigo, which was also their word for world, to the mortal beings, created by a mating between the sun and the two moons; between Taris, who warms the day; Zonia, who brightens the night; and the elusive Holen, who flees and laughs among the stars.
The Goompahs had started with a ménage à trois, and several of the experts suspected there was a connection with the tradition of multiple husbands and wives in each connubial group. Collingdale knew that mythology inevitably comes to reflect the aspirations and ideals of any society.
They’d acquired illustrations of eleven gods and goddesses, and it had not been hard to match them with the sculptured figures in the temple at Brackel. There were deities charged with providing food and wine, laughter and music, the seasons and the crops. They maintained the sea, saw to the tides, controlled the winds, maintained the cycle of the seasons. They blessed the births of new arrivals and eased the final pains of the dying.
Jason Holder pointed out to him that, although their duties were similar to those of earth-born deities, there was a subtle difference. The gods at home had given their bounty as a gift, and might withdraw it if they were miffed, or out of town, or jealous of another deity. The Intigo’s gods seemed to have a responsibility to make provision. It was not quixotic, but rather an obligation. It almost seemed as if the Goompahs were in charge.
Also significant, Holder continued, there was no god of war. And none of pestilence. “All of the deities represent positive forces,” Jason said. But he admitted he didn’t know what to make of that fact, except that the Goompahs seemed remarkably well adjusted.
The artwork from the library texts revealed much about how the Goompahs saw their gods. They did indeed embody majesty and power; but there was also a strong suggestion of compassion. One of the deities, Lykonda, daughter of the divine trio, had wings. And she always carried a torch. So they knew who welcomed mortals at the entrance to the temple. There was as yet no indication that the natives believed in an afterlife, but Jason predicted that, if they did, Lykonda would be on hand to welcome them to their reward.
The cities formed a league whose political outline was vague. But they had a common currency. And neither Judy’s people nor Hutch’s analysts back home found any mention of defense needs. Nor did the available Goompah history, sketchy though it may have been, indicate any kind of conflict that humans would have described as war. Ever.
Well, some intercity disagreements had sent mobs from one town to the outskirts of another, where they threw rocks or, in one celebrated incident, animal bladders filled with dyed water. There had been occasional fatalities, but nowhere was there a trace of the kind of mass organized violence that so marred human history.
There had even been a handful of armed encounters. But they’d been rare, and the numbers involved had been small. Collingdale could by no means claim to have a complete history of the Intigo. Still, this seemed to be a remarkably peaceful race. And a reading of their philosophers revealed a subtle and extraordinary code of ethics that compared favorably with the admonitions of the New Testament.
The Goompah world appeared to be limited to the isthmus and the areas immediately north and south. Their sailing vessels stayed in sight of land. There was no indication whether they’d developed the compass. They had apparently not penetrated more than a few thousand kilometers in any direction from home. They had not established colonies. They showed no expansionist tendencies whatever.
The Goompahs possessed some scientific and engineering ability. Judy’s team had found a book devoted to climatology. Most of its assertions were wrong, but it revealed an underlying assumption that climatic fluctuations had natural causes, and if one could assemble the correct equations and make valid observations, weather prediction would become possible.
Some among them suspected they lived on a sphere. No one knew how they’d figured that out, but a number of references to the Intigo described it as a globe. Occasionally the adjective world-circling was attached to ocean.
The team had recovered and partially translated thirty-six books from the Brackel Library. Of the thirty-six, thirteen could be described as poetry or drama. There was nothing one might call a novel, or even fiction. The rest were history, political science—their governments were republics of one form or another—and philosophy, which had been separate
d from the natural sciences, itself no small achievement.
THE UPPER STRATA made an effort to join in the spirit of things. They prepared lines and committed them to memory, so the common room filled up with Goompah chatter.
Challa this and Challa that.
Frank Bergen wished everyone mokar kappa. Good luck. Literally, happy stars. They could find no Goompah word for luck or fortune, so they’d improvised. Dangerous, but unavoidable.
When Wally offered a chocolate brownie to Ava, she had the opportunity to deliver her line: “Ocho baranara Si-kee.” I am in your debt.
Ava smiled, and Wally, fumbling pronunciation, replied that her blouse looked delicious.
Jerry Madden told Judy that he hoped she found success in all her endeavors, delivering the line from memory. And getting it right.
She replied that things were going quite well, thank you very much, and that his diction was excellent, rendering the last word in both Goompah and English.
Jerry beamed.
Elsewhere, Peggy got a suggestion from Harry Chin: “When stuck,” Harry told her, “you can fall back on karamoka tola kappa.”
Peggy tried it, beat it up a bit, and finally got it right.
“Excellent, Peg,” he said. “We may draft you into the unit.”
“Of course. And what does it mean?”
“ ‘May the stars always shine for you.’ ”
DINNER WAS SERVED with a Goompah menu, although the food was strictly terrestrial. While they ate, Alexandra, trying to use the language, told Collingdale something. But she butchered it, tried again, and threw up her hands. “You have a message from the DO,” she said, finally.
It was simply a status report. Hutchins had rounded up the assistance of a few more experts in a half dozen fields, and shown them the recordings and the texts from Lookout, and she was forwarding their comments. Her own covering remarks were short and to the point. You might especially want to pay attention to Childs’s observations on the arrangement of the statuary in the temple. Billings has interesting things to say about the recurrence of the number eleven, although there’s probably nothing to it. Pierce thinks he’s isolated a new referent for the dative case. Hope all’s well.
What struck him was that she said it all in Goompah. And got most of it right. Not bad for a bureaucrat. “Alexandra,” he told the captain, “the woman has something going for her.”
Much the same thing happened when the daily transmission came in from the Jenkins.
“David, we got another show for you last evening.” Digger did it in Goompah. Collingdale hadn’t known anybody on the Jenkins was making the effort.
Digger went on to explain they’d recorded a drama for which the al-Jahani already had the script. He smiled out of the screen, signaling that he understood quite well the value of that. An unparalleled chance to tie together the written and spoken versions of the language.
Magnificent, Digger, thought Collingdale.
“We’ve also relocated some of the pickups to Saniusar. They’re all designated, so you won’t have any problem sorting them out. Raw data is included with this package.
“One more thing. I’m trying to translate Antigone into Goompah. But we don’t seem to have the vocabulary. I don’t know how to say glorious, forbidden, fate, brooding, and a bunch more. I’ve included the words. If any of your people have time, I’d appreciate the help.”
Antigone?
Alexandra looked over at him, her forehead creased. “Why?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’ve no idea, but it sounds like a decent exercise.”
COLLINGDALE WAS IN the shower, preparing to call it a day, when Alexandra’s voice broke in with a general announcement: “Attention, please. This is the captain. We are going to jump back into sublight for a few hours. There is no problem, and no reason to be concerned. But we’ll be performing the maneuver in two minutes. Please get to a restraint.”
Two minutes? What the hell was going on? She sounded calm and reassuring, but that was what most alarmed Collingdale. This was an unscheduled stop, so obviously something was wrong.
“Everyone please find a harness and settle in.”
It struck him that it was probably almost the first back-to-back English sentences he’d heard all day.
“It’s nothing serious,” she said when he called.
“It’s an unscheduled jump, Alex. That sounds serious to me.”
“We’re only doing it as a precaution. Bill picked up an anomaly in the engines.”
“Which engines?”
“The Hazeltines. That’s why we’re making the jump. It’s routine. Anytime they so much as burp, we go back to sublight.”
“In case—”
“—In case there’s a problem. We don’t want to get stuck where no one can find us.”
“What kind of anomaly?”
“Rise in temperature. Power balances.”
He had no idea what that implied. “I thought the engines were shut off while we were in hyperspace.”
“Not really. They go into an inactive mode. And we run periodic systems checks.” She paused. “Actually, we’ve been getting some numbers we don’t like for the last week.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It may not be a problem. On the other hand, we rushed the al-Jahani into service. Maybe before it was ready.”
“We going to be okay?”
“Oh, sure. There’s no danger to anybody.”
“You’re sure?”
“Dave, if there were any risk whatever to the passengers, any risk, I’d shut her down and call for help. Now, get into your bunk. I have work to do.”
HYPERFLIGHT IS A disquieting experience, an apparently slow passage, at about ten knots, through unending fogbanks. For reasons he didn’t entirely understand, he had begun to think of his relationship with Mary in much the same way.
His communications with her had dropped off somewhat. His fault, really. Nothing new ever happened on the al-Jahani, other than the progress they were making understanding the Goompahs. At first he’d told her about that, but her replies suggested the stories about zhokas and temples and Goompah revels were not exactly at the center of her interests.
So now, at least, he had some real news to report. We are back out under the stars, he told her, and they look good. You don’t appreciate them when you see them every night.
He’d been cooped up for more than three months. It was already the longest nonstop flight he’d made, and it would be another half year before they arrived at Lookout. “All sense of movement is gone, though,” he said. “We’re at almost 1 percent of lightspeed, but we seem to be frozen in space.”
Becalmed in an endless sea.
One-third of the way to Lookout. He tried to say it aloud in Goompah, but he didn’t know how to express fractions. Or percentages. Did Goompahs have decimal points?
They must if they’d designed and built the temple.
And his mind ran on: How would you say jump engines in Goompah? Molly was jump. No reason he couldn’t use it as an adjective. And a machine, a mechanism, like the hand-cranked pump they used to get water into their plumbing system, was a kalottul. Hence molly kalottuls, literally jump machines. Without their molly kalottuls, how long would it take to get to Brackel?
It occurred to him that he was putting all this into the transmission. But it would scare her, even though he’d assured her there was no danger. Still, he went back and deleted it. He finished up, telling her they would be on their way again shortly. And that he missed her.
He didn’t tell her that he thought he was losing her. That he felt every mile of the void between them. Not the void as it was counted in light-years. But as in distant, remote, hidden.
The laughter was gone.
When he’d completed the transmission and sent it off, he went back to the problem he’d set himself. How long to travel to Lookout at current velocity?
They were still about eighteen hundred light-years away.
At one light-year per century.
Better have a good book ready.
Alexandra came back on-line: “Dave, you can tell your people we’re okay. Just running some tests now. We’ll be getting under way again within an hour.”
“We’re clear?”
“Well,” she said, “we’ve got some worn valves and a feeder line, and the clocks have gotten out of sync. We’ve checked the maintenance reports, and they never got to them in port.”
His first reaction was that heads would roll. And it must have shown when he told her that he hoped they’d be able to get to Lookout without any more problems.
“You can’t really blame the engineers, Dave. Everything was being rushed to get us out of there. Actually, it should have been okay for a couple more runs. But you can never really be sure. I’m talking about the valves and the feeder line now. The clocks we’ve already taken care of. And I’m replacing the line. The valves, though, are something else. Heavy work, in-port stuff. We can’t do much about them, except take it easy on them the rest of the way.”
“How do you take it easy on a jump engine?” he asked.
“You say nice things to it.”
“Alex, let me ask you again—”
“There’s no risk to the ship, David. These things are engineered so that at the first hint of a serious problem it jumps back into sublight and shuts itself down. Just as it did this morning.” Her voice changed, became subdued. “Whether we get to Lookout or not, that’s another story.”
LIBRARY ENTRY
“How far is the sky, Boomer?”
“It’s close enough to touch, Shalla.”
“Really? Marigold said it’s very far.”
“Only if you open your eyes.”
— The Goompah Show
Summer Special, All-Kids Network
June 21
chapter 23
On board the Heffernan.
Friday, June 27.
“ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY PICKING up inside the omega,” said Sky. It was getting close to the hedgehog.
“Estimated time fifty minutes,” said Bill. The rate of closure was just over 30 kph.
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