Remnant Population

“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.

“The thing is,” the girl went on, in happy unawareness of Ofelia’s thoughts, “they don’t like each other and never have. So they’re using me as an excuse. One says I’m flirting, and the other one says I’m not flirting, and—” “Are you flirting?” Ofelia asked. She thought so; why else wear that perfume? Why else swing her ripe young body back and forth like fruit on a vine, every motion declaring her readiness to be picked and eaten?

“Of course not.” A flounce, an outraged glance. Just like Linda, who had always denied with her mouth while proclaiming with her hips. But this was not Linda. “Well… maybe. But not seriously, you know. It’s not like your culture, you know.” Again that gentle condescension. “We don’t have the same rules—” As if human biology would shift aside for her convenience, as if men were not animals born to respond to smells and motions. “I do rather like one of them, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t know it. But that’s not really flirting.”

“Do you have sex with him?” Ofelia asked. The girl flushed and scowled,

“It’s none of your—” She stopped abruptly and her face changed, as if someone had wiped a thumb across clay. “Oh, in Kira. How’s the tech survey going?”

Ofelia looked up at the other woman. Older, warier, than the young one, but still young to Ofelia. She was angry about something; Ofelia suspected it was the girl’s antics.

“There’s a staff meeting in twenty minutes, Bilong, and you’re supposed to have the preliminary analysis

ready—”

“I can’t — it’s too soon — all I can do is discuss the raw data—”

“Then do that.” Kira stood there, as threatening as a sea-storm wall cloud until the younger woman got up and walked away, her shoulders stiff.

“You are angry?” Ofelia said. She leaned back against the sun-warmed wall and hoped she looked old and stupid.

“She is not supposed to waste her time talking to you,” Kira said. “She has work to do.” Ofelia waited. She had seen just this maneuver in older children who chased young ones away. What they really wanted was their own chance at the mother or grandmother.

Kira sighed, the kind of dramatic sigh that meant she too was going to confide. Ofelia let her eyelids sag almost shut. Maybe she would change her mind if Ofelia looked stupid enough. “You’re not a chatterbox,” Kira said. Mistake, This woman had wanted a safe confidant, and for that purpose stupid and quiet would do well enough. Ofelia opened her eyes but it was too late to pretend alert garrulity. Kira’s mouth quirked. “And I don’t think you’re half so dim as you pretend, either A stupid woman couldn’t have survived alone so long.” Good observation, if unflattering. Just once, Ofelia would have liked people to see her as she was, not as their ideas painted her. She looked at Kira, the short hair so carefully shaped that it must be a style of some sort, the smooth young-woman skin just showing the first lines of age. Who was this person, really? “I don’t think I’m stupid,” she said.

Kira’s eyes widened, then narrowed

“No. I can see that. What I can’t see is why you chose to stay behind.”

“No,” Ofelia said, mimicking Kira’s intonation, “I can see you don’t. But you are too young.”

“You didn’t want to die aboard the ship, in suspension?”

Ofelia shrugged, a

It would do no good to argue that she had not been lonely. She had tried that, and they had looked at her with such pity, and such certainty.

“Perhaps I am crazy,” Ofelia said.

“Your psych profile didn’t show anything before,” Kira said. So they had snooped into her perso

“But why?”

Ofelia shrugged. “You did not like my answers before; you told me I didn’t understand. Should I tell you the truth I know, or try to guess the untruth you want?”

Kira’s eyes widened. Surprise, the old lady has teeth. “You don’t have to be so — so vehement. I only wondered.” She sounded offended. Fine. Let her be offended. “I wanted to be alone. I had not been alone for years. It didn’t bother me to be alone as a child, and it didn’t bother me this time either.” Kira gave her perfect haircut a little shake, warding off that understanding. “Was it because your husband and children had died here? And you felt close to them?”