"For a short time," Mayhew picked up the narrative, "we thought that we had a larger set of words, and a rather confusing set thereof, than we did. However, one of the pattern-matching programs noticed that a lot of the words were mirror spellings of other words. After some comparison, we realized that our alien friends do at least one thing very differently from us. And by 'us' I mean any written human language. Where we write left to right or vice versa, they write outward from the center. The text in their approach is written something like this, if they were writing English."
She activated a display and wrote:
xof nworb kciuq ehT Jumped over the lazy dog
"So our initial survey would've had a total of nine words, when there's actually only eight unique words present, as 'the' appears twice. This method of writing brings up some very interesting questions as to just how our friends perceived things. Any human trying to read this way would start getting her brain scrambled pretty fast. Awfully dizzy, at least. In any case, we then were able to arrange a list of all the words and the order in which they appeared at any given point. That gave us a total starting vocabulary, if we could translate it, of about two thousand unique words from all sources, with a lot of those words being very common. Those are presumably the equivalents of 'the,' 'a,' and so on, but without knowing something of the actual meanings involved we're now getting out on the far fringe of guesswork.
"Once we had the clue of color to show us that we were in fact on the right track—and to bring up a whole bunch of symbols our visible-light images had missed—we attempted to assign meaning to some of the words based on context. If a word occurs in a particular context and not another, you can assume with at least some confidence that the change in context has something to do with the meaning of the word. Similarly, if you always see one word in conjunction with another word or symbol, you can guess that there is some strong relationship between the two."
"We have been going over the various 'noteplaques,' as we've decided to call them," Dr Skibow said, "and we hit some paydirt in the form of maps. Some of the maps we've been able to match up to known Solar System bodies, including Mars and at least a couple of the moons of Jupiter. Another one, we think, refers to Saturn and its moons."
Helen cocked an eyebrow. "You 'think'?"
Skibow shrugged. "Well, everything else matches quite well. But if that Bemmie map is accurate, Saturn had a moon about half the size of Titan, sixty-five million years ago. Which it certainly doesn't today."
"That's . . . possible," A.J. mused. "Even on the astronomical scale, sixty-five million years is a hefty stretch of time. An extrasolar body might have come into the system and yanked that moon out altogether. Or, for that matter, I've never been too satisfied with the current fashionable theory about what caused Saturn's rings." Somewhat grudgingly: "I admit, it's not my field of expertise."
Helen saw that Mayhew's plump face seemed to be undergoing a struggle of some sort, as if the linguist was trying to keep from laughing. When their eyes met, Helen smiled faintly, to show that she understood the source of the humor.
A.J. Baker? Publicly confessing he doesn't know everything?
For all of Mayhew's evident amusement, it was just as obvious that she wasn't irritated. People—including Helen—put up with A.J.'s unthinking intellectual arrogance, easily enough, because there was never anything mean-spirited about it. His attitudes didn't derive from personal competitiveness or a desire to belittle anyone else. They were just a side effect of the man's fascination with the universe.
Skibow continued. "We're hoping that in some of the other still-sealed rooms we'll get some more maps or similarly interpretable diagrams, because on the maps we found labels, just like we label our maps. We think we've got a handle on at least part of their system of measurement—on the large scale, anyway—and we're getting words out of it.
"Here's one. This word"—a series of Bemmian symbols shimmered in the display—"means crater, we're almost sure. That's because every time we find the equivalent spot on our maps, there's a crater right at that point. So far, at least."
"That'd mean an awful lot of repetitions of the word, across something like Mars."
Mayhew shook her head. "Not every crater is labeled, Helen— far from it. Only a few on each map. Presumably they were points of interest for our friends. Even on our astronomical maps we don't label every crater, only the larger ones. As these people were presumably actually landing on these bodies, I would therefore theorize that these were craters they landed on or had an interest in."