"Sir!" Hathaway saluted. The general returned the salute, nodded to the others, and walked out the door.
Ken finally came out of his daze. "I am going to go tell Gupta and
A.J. and then I am going to go get a pass, and then I am going to go party like I have never partied before! And you're all invited!"
Chapter 26
Helen glanced away from the handwaving explanation A.J. was giving, over to the nearby table where voices were rising angrily.
A.J. followed her gaze. One of the scientists—Dr. Mayhew, was it? Linguistics, anyway—was pointing to something, probably an image only she and her opponent in the debate could see. He was another linguist, a much older man by the name of . . .
A.J. keyed in a quick query and the VRD answered him.
Right. Rich Skibow. Ken's party was a major success, and it sounded like these two had been knocking back a few drinks before they got into their learned argument. As he hadn't been paying attention, he wasn't clear on what they were arguing about, but he could see that it was getting pretty heated.
And very annoying, he suddenly realized, as Helen abruptly left the table to join the arguing linguists. He'd been enjoying her company very much, especially after their other dinner companions had deserted them at least temporarily for the sake of the dance floor. And now these loudmouthed specialists had to go and interrupt.
Not one to yield the battlefield, he followed Helen over.
"—identical symbols, I tell you!"
"No, no, no, not identical at all. Spacing over here, and—"
"Excuse me."
Rich Skibow and Jane Mayhew looked up irritably, but their expressions moderated when they saw Helen.
"Who—oh, Dr. Sutter."
Mayhew's face showed a sudden awareness of how loud they'd been getting. She pushed her prematurely graying brown hair out of her face with an embarrassed gesture. "I'm sorry. We didn't mean to disturb—"
"No problem at all. I heard part of the debate, and thought I might be able to help."
The two looked at each other doubtfully. A.J. could practically read their thoughts. What would a paleontologist know about linguistics?
Dr. Skibow shrugged. "Okay. Take a look."
The slender academic put his portable in the center of the table and it projected several images of various inscriptions found around the alien base on Phobos.
"Obviously, we don't have a lot to work with, but the aliens do seem to have used images something like we do. We've been trying to make some guesses as to meanings from location, image context, and things like that, and assigning tentative roles to various features seen in the writing. For instance, like us they seem to use spacing to separate groupings which may be words, sentences, or paragraphs. Which of those it is, however, is hard to know without having some idea of what the things are trying to say."
"Though at the moment we think the groups we see commonly separated are probably words," Mayhew added. "It seems unlikely you're going to put what amounts to three or four pages of text on things that we think are hallway signs, so these spaced groupings along the curves are probably words."
"The problem is that we've been coming across what looks like the same word used in situations that make no sense for the vague meaning we thought it might have."
Helen and A.J. studied the images for a while. The pictures were actually derived representations, cleaned out and with the "letters" and all other features outlined and marked up to make them clear. Helen tilted her head slightly as she gazed at the enigmatic symbols, then activated her own portable and put on her VRD. Soon thereafter, she brought up her own display, which gave her the same areas but from A.J.'s actual images, just enhanced slightly for better viewing.
"Take a look carefully at these now," she said. "Especially look at the different versions of the word."
At first no one said anything. A.J. didn't expect to notice anything significant, but the two linguists looked puzzled too.
Then, suddenly, Dr. Mayhew sat up straighter, a startled look on her face. "Rich, maybe she's onto something! Look. Here and here; and here and here."
A.J. followed her indications, and then it dawned on him. Colors. They'd often remarked on how even after all this time they could see colors on some things. The black and gold and other colors in the various texts found were perhaps the most clear-cut examples.
Dr. Skibow nodded. "Yes . . . that could be it. They may be using color as a modal change or something like it. How did you think of it, Dr. Sutter?"
"I recalled some of our original speculation, and it fit with the basic anatomical analysis I've been doing. Bemmie has a number of features roughly analogous to our cephalopods. In other ways, of course, his structure is more analogous to something like a crab. But one thing I'm sure of is that he evolved relatively recently from a water-dwelling species. His body shape is still awkward for land travel. In that respect, the way he's built reminds me of primitive amphibians—given that he started from a completely different Bauplan."