Remnant Population

Ofelia wished she could remember how to do what she had done for so many years, remove herself from the talk and let it pass by, but it was impossible to put that chicken back in the egg. “Sara’s child,” she heard herself saying, even as the old, cautious voice implored her to keep quiet. “It couldn’t talk, no matter what.”

“I meant normal children,” the woman said, less patiently “But these are aliens, Ofelia — I can call you Ofelia, can’t I?”

A girl from this neighborhood has no business getting a swelled head, her father had said. Pride goes before damnation, someone had said. The tall stalk asks for the knife. You are nothing. “Sera Ofelia,” she said, with the least emphasis.

“Oh — Sarah? I’m sorry; I thought you were called Ofelia.” The woman seemed confused, but willing. Her accent, Ofelia realized, meant that she could not hear the difference between the name Sara and the title Sera. Nor had she paid attention when the stocky man addressed her correctly as Sera Falfurrias. Ofelia did not enlighten her. She waited, hoping her face would remember the bland expressions that had kept her out of trouble before.

“Sarah,” the linguist said. “Let me explain about alien languages.” Ofelia waited in silence, but her mind crackled with comments. “They aren’t like human languages,” the linguist went on. Oh really? Did she think Ofelia hadn’t noticed? “Since their biological nature is different, the very structure of their brains — if we can call them brains, which is doubtful — determines a different structure of language.” Ofelia repressed a snort with difficulty: Whatever the brain had to do with language, some of the messages would have to be the same. I’m hungry, feed me. I’m hurt, comfort me. Come here. Go away. OUCH. Do it again. What is that and how does it work?

“They may not intend any of the same meanings,” the linguist said, completing the picture of an idiot. Prudence lost out; she had been too long free to speak her mind, if only to herself. “They have to say some of the same things,” she said. “If they’re hungry. If they hurt.”

The younger woman’s eyebrows went up. “Well… there are a few nearly universal messages. But those are least interesting; even a non-language species may have vocalizations associated with hunger or pain. Besides, in the languages we know, these aren’t expressed the same way. The goetiae, for instance, actually say ‘my sap dries’ when they mean I’m hungry,’ and in one dialect of your language—” The linguist said “your language” as if it were particularly silly. “—the South Naryan, I think it is, no one ever says ‘I hurt’ — they always use the form ‘it pains me.’”

Ofelia rubbed her foot a little backwards and forwards on the ground, reminding herself of that reality. She had never heard of the goetiae — were they aliens? — but she had had an aunt who was South Naryan, and she knew perfectly well that her aunt said “I hurt myself’ when she fell over something. Did this linguist say “I hurt” when she had a backache? Or did she say, more sensibly, “My back hurts”? She thought of a question she could ask.

“How many alien languages do you know?”

The woman flushed. “Well… actually… not any. Not truly alien, that is. No ones ever found one. This will be the first.” As if Ofelia had said what she was thinking, the linguist hurried on. “Of course, we practiced with computer generated languages. The neural modelers created alien networks, and we practiced with the languages they generated.”

Ofelia kept her face blank. She understood what that meant: they had created machines that talked machine languages, and from this they thought they had learned how to understand alien languages. Stupid. Machines would not think like aliens, but like machines. The creatures were not machines — very far from it.

But the linguist was leaning closer, confiding now, as if Ofelia were a favorite aunt or grandmother. She did not want to be Bilong’s mother, or her grand-mother. She had done with these roles, with being a good child, a good wife, a good mother. She had put seventy-odd years into it; she had worked hard at it; now she wanted to be that Ofelia who painted and carved and sang in an old cracked voice with strange creatures and their stranger music. The role the creatures had given her was more than enough. “It’s all this tension,” the linguist was saying. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—” Then don’t, Ofelia thought. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it. “—but you’re wise, even if you don’t have an education.” The arrogance in that almost yanked a reply from her, but she managed to squeeze it back. Wise even if she had no education? What did wisdom have to do with education? Besides, she had an education; she had spent hours studying, nights and early mornings studying, long before this child was born. This… this chit of a girl who hadn’t known how to repair the pumps, who had blithely walked between a cow and her calf.