22

NAPLES:

JUNE 2060

"So this child was assigned to learn your language and to teach you hers, is that correct?" Johannes Voelker asked.

"Essentially. The Runa are a trading people who require many languages to do business. As among us, their children learn languages quickly and easily, so they take advantage of that, yes? Whenever a new trading partnership is formed, a child is raised jointly by its family and the foreign delegation, which also includes a child. It takes only a couple of years to establish fairly sophisticated communication. The language is then passed along within Runa lineages. There are stable relationships developed over generations with established trading partners."

It was a gray windless day. They'd left the windows open to the June warmth and the steady sound of the rain, which matched the soft and steady narrative of Emilio Sandoz. Vincenzo Giuliani had changed the schedule so that the hearings took place in the afternoon, allowing Sandoz to sleep through the mornings if the nights had been difficult. It seemed to help.

"And they imagined you to be a child with this function?" Johannes Voelker asked.

"Yes."

"Presumably because you were somewhat smaller than others in the party," Felipe Reyes supposed.

"Yes. And because I carried on all the earliest attempts at communication, as such an interpreter would have. Actually, for a long time, only Mr. Quinn was accepted as an adult. He was about average height for a Runao."

"And they were not frightened at the beginning? Surely they'd never seen anything like you before," Giuliani said. "I find that remarkable."

"The Runa are very tolerant of novelty. And we were obviously not a threat to them physically. They assumed, evidently, that whatever we were, we had come to trade. They fit us into their worldview on that basis."

"How old was the child Askama at the time of contact, would you estimate?" Voelker asked, coming back to the child. Sandoz did not stiffen, Giuliani noted. His voice remained, as it had throughout the session, unstressed and even.

"Dr. Edwards thought at first that Askama was the equivalent of a human child at seven or eight years of age. Later on we decided that she was only about five. It is difficult to compare the species but it was our impression that Runa maturation rates are relatively accelerated."

Voelker made a note of this response as Giuliani commented, "I was under the impression that intelligence was inversely correlated with rate of maturation."

"Yes. Father Robichaux and Dr. Edwards discussed that. I think they decided that it was not a tight correlation, either between or within species. I may be remembering that wrong. In any case, the generalization may not hold in other biological systems."

"What was your impression of the Runa's intelligence in general?" Felipe asked. "Did you find the Runa to be our equals or of greater or lesser capacity?"

There was a hesitation, for the first time that morning. "They are different," Sandoz said at last, moving his arms from the table to his lap. "It's hard to say." He fell silent, clearly trying to settle this in his own mind. "No, I'm sorry. I can't answer that question with any confidence. There is a wide range of variation in intelligence. As among us."

"Dr. Sandoz," Johannes Voelker said, "what precisely was your relationship with Askama?"

"Exasperating," Sandoz said promptly. That got a laugh, and Felipe Reyes realized it was the first sign of Emilio's normal sense of humor he d seen since arriving in Naples.

Smiling thinly in spite of himself, Voelker said, "I don't suppose you could expand upon that somewhat?"

"She was my teacher and my pupil and a reluctant collaborator in my research. She was spunky and bright. Insistent, relentless and a huge pain in the neck. She drove me crazy. I loved her without reservation."

"And did this child love you?" Voelker asked in the silence that fell at Sandoz's last statement. The man had, after all, admitted to killing Askama. John Candotti held his breath.

"This is another difficult question, like 'How intelligent are the Runa? " Sandoz said neutrally. "Did she love me? Not maturely. At least not in the beginning. She was a child, yes? She liked the magic tricks. I was the best toy she could imagine. She was pleased by the attention I showed her and liked the status of being a foreigner's friend and she enjoyed ordering me around and correcting me and teaching me manners. Marc Robichaux believed that there was an element of imprinting—a biological factor in her craving to be with me all the time, but it was also her conscious choice. She could get angry with me and resentful when I refused to acquiesce to her demands, and that would upset everyone. But yes, I believe that she loved me."

" 'A reluctant collaborator' in your research. How do you mean that?" Voelker asked. "Did you coerce her?"

"No. I mean she was bored by it and became impatient with me when I persisted. I drove her crazy too," Sandoz admitted. "Do you understand the difference between being multilingual and being a linguist?"

There was a murmur. They all recognized the words but no one had ever been called upon to define the distinction.

"The ability to speak a language perfectly does not necessarily confer any linguistic understanding of it," Sandoz said, "just as one may play billiards well without any formal understanding of Newtonian physics, yes? My advanced training is in anthropological linguistics, so my purpose in working with Askama was not merely to be able to ask someone to pass the salt, so to speak, but to gain insight into her people's underlying cultural assumptions and cognitive makeup."

He shifted in his chair and moved his hands again, never able to find a comfortable position for his arms when the braces were on. "An example. One day, Askama showed me a very pretty glass flask and used the word azhawasi. My first guess was that the word azhawasi was more or less equivalent to jar or container or bottle. But one can never be certain, so one tests. I pointed to the sides of the flask and asked if this was azhawasi. No. That had no name. So I pointed to the rim and again, that was not azhawasi and had no name. So I pointed to the bottom and asked again. Wrong again. And Askama became annoyed because I kept asking stupid questions. I was also irritated, yes? I didn't know if she was teasing me or if I was confused and azhawasi was perhaps the shape of the flask or its style or even the price of the flask. It turned out that azhawasi refers to the space enclosed. The capacity for containment was the important element, not the physical object."

"Fascinating," Giuliani commented, and not simply in reference to the linguistic concept. On his own ground at last, Sandoz was an unexpectedly fluent, even expansive speaker. And he had neatly turned the conversation away from Askama, as Voelker had said he would. Interesting that Voelker, of all of them, seemed to have a knack for predicting Emilio's reactions.

There was a pause as Sandoz carefully and slowly closed his braced hands around his coffee cup and brought it to his lips. He set the cup down a little abruptly, almost losing control of the fingers, the ceramic clink loud in the quiet office. These small precise movements were still difficult for him. No one stared.

"Similarly, there is a word for the space we would call a room but no words for wall or for ceiling or floor, as such," he continued, resting his arms on the table, careful not to scratch its polished surface with the wires. "It's the function of an object that is named. You can refer to a ceiling, for example, by noting that the rain is prevented from taking place in this space because of it. Furthermore, they have no concept of borders, such as separate our nations. They speak in terms of what a geographic region contains—a flower for making this distillation, or an herb which is good for that dye. Eventually, I came to understand that the Runa do not have vocabulary for the edges that we perceive separating one element from another. This reflects their social structure and their perceptions of the physical world and even their political status."