The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (40 page)

Perkins straightened her shoulders. “I won’t, sir.”

“Good,” he said, sending them out of the bridge. “And good luck.”

***

The communications array still wasn’t repaired. He wouldn’t be able to listen to any conversation that Perkins had with the outsiders, which was probably just as well. He’d listened to such negotiations before, and they had always confused him.

The tangle of languages made easy understanding difficult. Even if he could listen, he wasn’t sure he would. He didn’t want to let his perceptions get in the way of his linguist.

The team had just stepped out of the airlock when the exterior door opened. Coop felt his heart rate increase.

This was the dangerous moment—the moment when anything could happen. The outsiders could leave. They could feel threatened and attack.

But they did neither of those things.

They just froze at the doorway and stared at Rosetti’s team.

Then, slowly, the woman reached up and removed the helmet of her environmental suit.

Yash gasped. Coop glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “Problems?” he asked.

“We can handle this environment. What if they can’t?”

Coop shrugged. “She would know what they can and can’t handle.”

But he said no more. He had suspected the outsiders’ leader had forced her team to wear the suits out of an excess of caution. Her willingness to remove her helmet when she saw his crew convinced him he was right.

The woman wasn’t pretty. She was too thin, the kind of thinness he’d seen in professional spacers all over the known universe. Her cheeks were hollow, but her eyes were bright and filled with intelligence. He couldn’t adequately judge her age. Not young, but not old. Maybe his age, maybe not.

She spoke, and Coop instantly changed his mind about the tangle of languages. He would have given anything to hear this conversation.

Perkins stepped forward so that she stood a few feet in front of the three officers. Then she pressed her hands together and bowed, a greeting that the Fleet had learned was acceptable in most human cultures.

Perkins did not speak. Clearly, then, the language that the outsider woman had used wasn’t familiar to Perkins. Coop felt oddly disappointed, hoping that the woman and the other outsiders would be able to clear up the mystery quickly, easily, and with just a few words.

Clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

The outsider woman watched, shrugged, and then bobbed her head. Her companions didn’t move. Nor did they remove their helmets. Either she had ordered them to keep the helmets on, or they weren’t as courageous as she was.

Perkins tapped herself and spoke. The woman stared at her. Perkins made the same gesture and spoke again.

The woman nodded once, then tapped her own shoulder. She spoke.

Perkins frowned.

The woman repeated the gesture.

Perkins said something and the woman glanced at the people behind her.

A man removed his helmet. He was younger than Coop, slender but not thin like the woman, with dark hair and eyes that glittered. He spoke to the woman, and then looked at Perkins.

She opened her hands as if to say that she didn’t understand.

The man tapped his own shoulder, then spoke. Then he put a hand on the outsider woman’s shoulder and spoke again.

Perkins tilted her head, then talked for a good minute or more.

The man and woman looked relieved. Clearly they and Perkins had actually communicated. Perkins said something else, the others nodded, and then Perkins bowed again.

She signaled to the team that they were done, and they went back into the ship.

The man said something to the woman, but she shook her head. Then she ushered her team out of the repair room and back into the corridor.

The meeting was done.

***

Coop wanted to run to the airlock and find out exactly what had happened, but he knew better. He waited on the bridge until Perkins contacted him.

Then the two of them went into the briefing room.

She looked more excited than he had ever seen her. She had scrubbed down and changed out of her uniform, but she wore a less dressy version of it for her meeting with him.

“I captured a lot of their speech patterns,” she said. “They spoke to each other quite a bit, and I captured that, which is good.”

Coop had forgotten this about her. Perkins never gave a report in a linear manner.

“They don’t speak Standard, then,” he said.

She paused and looked at him. Then she gave him a rueful smile. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. You weren’t listening in. I’m not sure what they speak. It sounded familiar when the woman started talking to us, but I couldn’t understand her. I thought at first that she was speaking Standard, but pronouncing it differently, so differently that I had trouble processing it. Then I realized that the words sounded familiar but weren’t familiar.”

“Which means what?” Coop asked.

“Which means they might be speaking a mangled form of Standard or some kind of pidgin language. It might also be a related language with similar sounds. I already have the computer working on it, and I expect to have results before our next meeting with them, which I’m hoping will be tomorrow.”

“Did you set that up with them?”

She shrugged. “As best I could. They seemed pretty startled by us. They seemed even more shocked that we had trouble communicating.”

“Did you understand anything they said?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure.”

Coop frowned. She had never given him that response before. “What do you mean?”

“It’s that sound-like thing I mentioned,” Perkins said. “I gave the woman my name. The woman did the same thing, but I think she gave me her rank.”

“Which is?”

“She’s their leader.”

“That’s clear,” Coop said.

“But I’m not sure that’s what she said,” Perkins said. “I thought we were doing pretty well. I said my name, she responded with her title, and then I asked her where we were. The man stepped forward and introduced himself.”

“I noticed that,” Coop said.

“But his name sounded like an object,” she said. “In our language, his name means bridge. So the woman might have been giving me her name and it’s something other than a title. I got very confused at that point, which is why I called the meeting off. I wanted more information from the computer before I went farther.”

“All right,” Coop said. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he said, “When do you think I can talk to them?”

“Sir, this could take weeks.”

“Not if the language is related.”

“I said I’m guessing,” she said.

“I know,” he said, feeling a touch of color warm his cheeks. He had vowed he wasn’t going to let the crew know about his impatience, and then he revealed it to Perkins. “Sorry. The sooner we can question them about substantive things, the better off we are.”

“I know, sir,” she said, “but it’s better to understand them than to guess, don’t you think?”

He nodded, reluctantly. He wanted that conversation and he wanted it soon. Just like he wanted the ship repaired. Just like he wanted to know when they were.

“Good work,” he said to Perkins. “Let me know when you have enough of the language to act as a translator.”

“I will, sir,” she said. “And I’ll try to make it sooner rather than later.”

I hope so,
he almost said, but didn’t.
I really, really hope so.

***

It took Perkins nearly two weeks to figure out the outsiders’ language with any kind of precision. During that time, the engineers managed most of the major repairs on the ship. Coop sifted through much of the information pulled from the repair room’s equipment, but didn’t come up with any more information than his team was finding.

He repeatedly had communications contact Venice City, but didn’t get any response. As the sensors came back online, he mapped the underground caverns around the repair room. The entire complex was much bigger than it had been the month before.

And as the equipment got repaired, he had his team see what the sensors could find on the surface.

There was a city in the narrow valley, just like there had been for decades. But the city was no longer in the same place. Instead, it was scattered along the mountainside, far away from the city center that Coop had visited several times.

He knew that cities sprawled, but he had never seen one that abandoned its original site.

All of these pieces of information didn’t add up into anything coherent, not yet, which made talking to the outsiders all the more imperative.

The number of outsiders never changed, and although Perkins asked the woman what their group was called, she never got an answer she understood.

She was understanding more and more, however, partly because of the outsiders themselves. After a few days, one of the outsiders, the man who called himself Bridge showed an ability to speak Perkins’ language. It took Perkins another day or two to understand him because the man mangled every single word he tried to say. It was almost as if he was familiar with the language in its written form, but hadn’t ever spoken it.

At least, that was Perkins’ hypothesis. Coop wasn’t so certain. If the outsiders could read Standard, then how come they hadn’t heeded the warnings written all over the floor in the repair room? How come they seemed surprised when the ship nearly crushed one of them?

Still, Coop wasn’t the linguist, and he had to rely on Perkins’ expertise to figure out what was going on. In less than two weeks, Perkins decided that the language the outsiders spoke was a form of Standard, but so changed by time and distance, as well as influence from other cultures, as to be practically unrecognizable.

The fact that the man called Bridge could speak her language, though, didn’t bode well, as she told Coop in one of their briefings.

“Sir, I think all of this means that we speak an old and possibly forgotten form of their language. One that is no longer active, but lives only in archives.”

He felt a chill run through him, even though on some deep level, he expected her to say that.

“How long does it take for a language to change like that?”

She shrugged. “There are instances of that happening within a few hundred years of no contact.”

“But?” he asked.

“But generally, it happens over many centuries. Five, six, seven hundred years or more.”

He stared at her. It was within the realm of possibility. They had gotten the ship to talk with the equipment in the repair room, but hadn’t gleaned any more information about the time factor. Some of the scientific tests had come back that the equipment itself had aged several hundred years, but, as the scientists said, some of that could have been due to the proximity of a working (and possibly malfunctioning)
anacapa
drive.

“They can’t be from the future of Venice City,” he said. “Their suits aren’t as evolved as ours.”

She shrugged. “They’re from our future somewhere. Somewhere they acquired our language. Then they lost touch with us, and the language changed, as languages do.”

“It’s time for me to talk to them,” he said. “Can you clearly translate for us?”

“If we do it in the
Ivoire
,” she said. “I need the computer to back me up.”

He thought about that for a moment. He had always envisioned the meeting to take place inside the repair room. He hadn’t wanted the outsiders in his ship.

But he understood Perkins’ point. And he needed the information now more than he needed to protect the ship’s secrets.

Not that it had a lot of secrets from the outsiders. They had access to similar equipment in the repair room, but something had prevented them from understanding what they found.

If they did learn to understand the equipment, they would understand his ship as well.

So there wasn’t much he could hide from them.

He just had to hope that the barrier—whatever it was—would continue.

“All right,” Coop said. “Set up an appointment.”

“Yes, sir,” Perkins said.

“And I don’t want her whole team in here. Bring her and the man who speaks the language—Bridge?—into the briefing room. You and I will talk to them.”

“All right, sir,” Perkins said, and looked relieved. Everyone on the
Ivoire
was nervous. Everyone wanted answers because, as Dix told Coop, they were making up worst-case scenarios the longer this went on.

Coop didn’t have to ask what those worst-case scenarios were. He had been making up his own.

Initially they had involved being stranded in Sector Base V forever, but now that the
Ivoire
was mostly repaired, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Now he just had to figure out where he would take his crew, and when.