Lost In Translation (11 page)

“You—” Kathryn turned toward the bed. “When?”

Jim's grin slipped a little. “When? Well—I don't remember. Sometime before we slept.”

“You didn't really have a chance, did you?” Kathryn resumed dressing. “You programmed the computer to wake me, here, before you ever came to get me last night, didn't you?”

“Does it matter?” Jim wasn't grinning at all, anymore.

“It matters. You seduced me.”

“I didn't force you to do anything you didn't want to.”

“Oh, no?” Kathryn pulled on her blouse, sat down on the bed, and reached for her boots. “You know, I've never been able to read you before when we touched. How come the barriers came down just then, Jim? And just what is your rating on the projective scale?”

“Katy—”

“I've got to go.” She stood up, fully dressed, and marched to the bedroom door. “I can still get in a couple of hours of study—”

She heard Jim scramble out of the bed as she entered the dining room, where the congealed remains of the previous night's dinner didn't look nearly as romantic as it had by candlelight, white tablecloth or not. She almost made it to the front door before he grabbed her arm and spun her around.

“Katy, you can't mean that. You can't really think I'd use my ability to—that's like saying I raped you!”

Kathryn opened her mouth, then closed it again. “No,” she said. “No, I wouldn't go that far. But you helped things along, didn't you?”

“So what?” Jim sounded angry. “So what? Katy, I've been attracted to you for years, but you've—well, you said it last night. You've always seen me as your big brother. So I decided to change that. I wanted you to look at me differently, Katy. I wanted you to see me as a man, not the boy you grew up with. So I pulled out all the stops, last night, and it worked. You were attracted to me, I could feel it—so I let you feel my attraction to you. And we did something about it. Why are you angry? You can't tell me you didn't enjoy it!”

“I—” Kathryn began, then stopped. No, she couldn't honestly say that. It had been—wonderful. More than she had ever imagined, watching the couples in the entertainment vids. The empathic overtones alone . . . so why was she angry?

She looked at Jim, and realized something. He might be standing naked in front of her, but his mind and emotions were fully clothed. She couldn't read him. She hadn't been able to since she got up. He'd gotten what he wanted, and then closed her out again. Her anger flared anew, and when he flinched, she knew he felt it, and let it burn even hotter. “Put on some clothes,” she snapped. “Or go back to bed. Frankly, I don't care which.” She swept out, and the door closed behind her.

On the walk back to her own quarters, she reached inside herself and tried to quiet her emotions. Today was the most important day of her life. She couldn't afford to be less than perfectly centered. She couldn't let thoughts of Jim—who'd
known
what day this was and had still—

She cut off that train of thought as quickly as it formed. She would
not
think about Jim Ornawka. Not until this day was over.

Today, all her thoughts had to be on the Exam: the Exam, and First Translation.

 

Eight hours later, Kathryn stood in the circular Guildheart, the star-filled chamber where she had been brought upon her arrival in the Guildhall ten years before. The Guild Council member for each race formed a semicircle around her. Above them, slowly turning in the random air currents of the Hall, filled today with Earth-normal atmosphere, hung a sphere within a pyramid within a cube, all of gold set with diamond chips that reflected the torchlight in thousands of firefly sparkles: torchlight, because Translation could only take place in an environment shielded from electromagnetic interference, and artificial lighting put out far too much of it.

“Candidate Bircher, you have successfully completed your training and answered the questions put to you by the Guild Councilors. Are you ready to take the Oath of the Guild?” Karak's squeaky, dolphinlike voice filled the chamber with echoes. Today he didn't speak a human language at all, but the
lingua franca
of the Guild, which the Hasshingu-Issk had invented long ago and humans had dubbed Guildtalk. With it, humans, Hasshingu-Issk, Ithkarites, and S'sinn could usually make themselves understood to each other. Kathryn faced Karak's aquarium and looked squarely into his round, dead-black eyes, close behind the thick glass.

“I am, Guildmaster Karak,” she said in the same language.

“Then state it.”

No repeat-after-me; candidates were expected to know their oath long before they took it—know every word and every ramification that two centuries of Guild experience had brought to light. Much of the Final Exam had centered on exactly that. Kathryn took a deep breath, and continued to face Karak, remembering the day he had taken her from the orphanage, and the day these same Councilors had brought her back from the despairing depths of bondcut. “I renounce all ties to my home planet and species,” she said clearly. “I am no longer human, but Translator. I belong to no race, but am kin to all, and I serve the good of all, without bias or prejudice. I surrender my will freely, that others may speak through me. I make this Oath in the presence of Seven Races, and by all that they honor.”

Kathryn bowed to Karak, who bowed back, the tentacles around his beaked face weaving a slow pattern. She turned to the aquarium next to his, filled with a thicker, darker liquid. Dimly visible, a four-metre sluglike body pulsated dreamily. Kathryn repeated her oath to the Swampworlder, though only Full Translation could have made it understandable, then turned to the next Councilor, a single Aza drone, wings humming, and spoke to it, and through it to all the thousands of members of its Swarm, although the Aza, being deaf, couldn't understand Guildtalk either—they (it?) communicated by chemical signals.

Next came the mated trio of winged, child-sized Orrisian “elves” who together were the Orrisian representative on the Council. They understood Guildtalk, she'd been told, but could not reproduce the sounds necessary to speak it: their own speech consisted of ultrasonic chirps.

Then—for a moment her voice faltered. Ten meters away, at the very edge of the Guildheart, but still too close, a brown-furred S'sinn rested on his padded wooden shikk. Kathryn stiffened her resolve and spoke her oath again, but without looking directly at him.

Behind her—she turned and faced Jim, but fought down the tide of memory and repeated the oath once more. He wasn't a Councilor, of course—no human had yet progressed that far in the Guild—but as the first human Translator, he often served as the human representative at First Translations. He bowed gravely to her when she finished.

Finally she turned to the final Councilor, the man-high, reptilian Hasshingu-Issk. Two of them stood there, but she spoke her oath to the one wearing the bright green armband of a Master, vivid against his black scales; the other wore the blue of a medic.

“. . . by all that they honor,” Kathryn finished, a little hoarsely.

“We have heard your oath,” Karak said. “Now demonstrate your resolve. Begin First Translation.”

While the Hasshingu-Issk Master watched with unblinking, slit-pupiled yellow eyes, the medic wheeled forward a metal container. Opening it released a sharp, salty smell that mingled with the reptilian's own sulfurous scent, stinging Kathryn's nostrils.

She looked down, knowing what she would see, but still flinching: the slowly-writhing, ropy gray mass nestled in the pink nutrient fluid inside the tank set off ancient primate “snake!” alarms. But mere squeamishness wouldn't keep Kathryn from this climax of her training. At the medic's nod, she lowered her hand firmly into the case, and just as she had forced herself as a child to watch the needle of a doctor's syringe pierce her skin, she kept her eyes on the squirming creature that looped itself wetly around her fingers.

At first nothing happened. But slowly a tingling spread through her hand, which grew peculiarly heavy; and, as the minutes passed in a silence broken only by the thudding of her own heart, the mass of tissue in the case diminished. The tingling moved up her arm, into her shoulder, like an internal itch she could not scratch, but she held perfectly still, though silent tears ran down her cheeks. The Councilors watched impassively, thick solemnity the only emotion she could read from them.

Just when she thought she couldn't stand the horrible crawling under her skin one minute longer, it stopped.

She lifted her hand from the empty container, and sound rumbled around the room as each Witness confirmed that Kathryn had freely accepted the Swampworlder-invented universal nervous system interface, the engineered lifeform that humans called “The Beast.” To her right, Jim said, “Amen.”

Kathryn felt vaguely disappointed. An alien creature nestled within her, its tendrils infiltrating her entire nervous system, and so far all she'd felt was an unscratchable itch.

But now the Master came forward. He opened a small case of bluish metal, revealing two very different syringes and a coil of silvery cord. The Master took out the smaller syringe and proffered it to Kathryn, who accepted it from his claws, embarrassed by her trembling fingers. Then the Master took out the other syringe, and plunged its dagger-sized needle into his thigh, his eyes never wavering from Kathryn's face. Kathryn, only too aware of the fear she was broadcasting to the Council, put her own syringe against her bare upper arm and pulled the trigger.

A sharp pain, and the liquid surged into her bloodstream. She felt only a faint warmth, but knew that inside her chemicals were programming The Beast, preparing it and her for—

This. The Master uncoiled the silvery cord and touched one end to a matching patch behind his barely visible ear. It clung there as he held out the other end to her.

Kathryn knew some Guild trainees backed out even at this point. Many, like the Hasshingu-Issk medic, served faithfully in non-Translation duties. To withdraw would not shame her; it would simply prove she wasn't suited to be a Translator. You needed utter confidence in yourself to survive First Translation unscathed. Doubt could be fatal . . .

Breathing a prayer to God, who at the moment she very much wanted to believe in, Kathryn took the cord and touched it to the interface that had been surgically implanted behind her own ear a month earlier.

Humans talked of sex as the joining of two people. But the night before, the union she had enjoyed with Jim, even with all its empathic overtones, had been nothing compared to
this!

She had never been to the Hasshingu-Issk homeworld, but in an instant it surrounded her in all its sun-drenched beauty. She rolled on a baking-hot rock with her mate, fought in the Arena of God for the glory of the Toothed One, ripped out the throat of a magnificent ikisss she had chased for kilometers across a lava plain. She knew the names of the Five Moons of the Gods and the Seven Cities of the Dead; she shed her skin and burrowed in ecstasy in the cooling mud; she understood why imperfect hatchlings had to be eaten and knew that she could explain that custom to the weakling races who called it barbaric, if only she could . . .

. . . could . . .

. . .
if only she could remember how!
She panicked, her mind thrashing in the welter of overwhelming alien images. She was
not
Hasshingu-Issk, she was human, but lost, lost, lost . . .

. . . then she felt the Master lifting her dolphinlike out of the swirling depths, helping her shed him like he shed his skin, until they were linked, but separate; one, but two; a single organism with two minds, two mouths—two languages.

Kathryn opened her eyes and looked around at Jim. Those sweaty, exciting moments they had shared . . . he'd gotten what he wanted. Maybe she had, too, if she were honest with herself. But it meant nothing. This was what she had lived for, trained for, longed for.

The hole in her heart had been boarded over by a decade of empathic help; in Jim's arms she had forgotten it for the briefest moment; but now, in this glorious union with her Hasshingu-Issk comrade/friend/ lover, that hole was filled.

On the vidscreen in the lounge of the Guildship
Dikari,
the pattern of stars suddenly rippled and changed. Moments later, a bright blue-and-green ball moved majestically into view, sailing slowly across the screen until it filled it completely.

Jarrikk sipped his laa'ik tea and contemplated his own emotional state. It seemed surprisingly stable. Ukkaddikk had expressed concern on that score when they parted at the Guildhall, and though Jarrikk had reassured him, still it relieved him to discover that the sight of Kikks'sarr for the first time in ten Guild years did not disturb him.

Of course, he reminded himself honestly, he had yet to land on it.

He wouldn't be landing on it for some time yet, either. The planet, continuing to move across the screen, revealed a widening sliver of blackness. Something glittered in that blackness, and began slowly to swell. Jarrikk set his tea on the polished black pillar beside his shikk, rose, and made his way across the deserted lounge to the arch leading to the passenger quarters. He'd better double-check his documentation before the
Dikari
docked at the Commonwealth peacekeeping station. He might be a Translator, but in his experience (even if that only amounted to four minor assignments) Commonwealth bureaucrats were more concerned with their precious regulations than with the supposed standing order that they were to offer all possible assistance to members of the Guild.

In his quarters, he touched the Guild insignia on his collar, opening a small compartment in which nestled the datachip detailing his identity, his official standing, and his assignment. He popped it into the reader for a final perusal, and his own face stared back at him from the screen, scruffy and wild-eyed, like a Hunter back from a twenty-day hunt, thanks to the Guild's insistence on preparing identchips in the last day or two before Final Examination and First Translation. Everything else seemed in order . . . although he wondered if the Peacekeepers would question him on the one entry on his Planetary Visa request form conspicuously flagged as “incomplete,” the line for “Name of Employer, Sponsor, or Host,” where the Guild had put CONFIDENTIAL. Guild confidentiality was supposed to be absolute and accepted without question, but bureaucrats were bureaucrats . . .