The Shattered Chain (15 page)

Even Magda, careless of official disapproval, wore her Darkovan dress more and more around the HQ, suffering the inconvenience of long skirts and heavy petticoats for their warmth. One afternoon when she came in from a day spent in the Old Town, it was snowing so heavily that the idea of changing into the thin Terran synthetics seemed insane; she went directly to Personnel, and the station where her observations were recorded. Montray’s pretty assistant, heavily sweatered, looked at her with envy. “I don’t blame you for going native. I’m almost tempted to transfer to your section so I can dress for the climate! I don’t know how you manage to get around in those things—but they do look warm!”

Magda grinned at her. “Usual question.”

“Usual answer, I’m afraid,” Bethany said soberly. “No word from Peter. This morning the boss took him off the active-duty list; he’s officially reported PMOD—provisionally missing on duty. Pay suspended subject to official contact, and so forth.”

Magda flinched. The mechanism was in motion for having him declared
Missing, presumed dead.

Bethany said, trying to comfort her, “Nothing’s final yet. Maybe he found a friendly place to stay and just settled in for the winter. He couldn’t travel in this, even if he was all right.”

Magda’s smile only stretched her mouth. “It’s not nearly winter yet. The time when travel becomes impossible and all business shuts down for the spring-thaw is almost four months away. The passes aren’t even closed into the Hellers.”

“You’re joking!” Bethany looked into the raging storm and shivered. “But you should know, you’ve been out in it. Summers, I think you have a peach of a job—nothing to do but mix with the crowds in the city and listen to gossip. But in weather like this I’m surprised they didn’t name this planet
Winter.”

“They couldn’t; there’s already one called that. Read the records someday. Speaking of records, I’d better get mine set up.”

“Is that really all you do—listen to gossip?”

“That, and a lot more. I take note of the fashions being worn by women, make linguistic notes on new expressions and changes in the local argot… languages change all the time, you know that.”

“Do they really?”

“Do you use the slang expressions now that you did when you were seven years old? It doesn’t matter if an agent uses some outdated expressions; people do pick up little tags of speech from their parents, and everybody tends to use expressions that were common in their own teens, when peer relationships were being established. The one thing no undercover agent on the Darkovan side can do is speak as if he’d learned the language from a book; so I work all the time keeping us all up to date. Montray gets away with it because he’s meeting people as a Terran, and it’s a compliment for him to go halfway by speaking their language at all; speaking it too well would be a subtle form of one-upmanship that would rouse all kinds of psychological resistances in the Darkovans he meets. They’re
supposed
to be able to speak better than he does. But the agents who work on the Darkovan side can’t make mistakes even in slang. And everybody has to keep up with common usage.”

Bethany looked puzzled. Magda elucidated: “Well, look. For instance; there’s a word which means, literally, ‘entertainer,’ or ‘singing woman.’ It’s in the standard texts. But if you called a ballad-singer, or one of the soprano soloists with one of the orchestras in Thendara, by that word, her father or brother would call you out in a duel—call a man out; a woman using such a term would simply be regarded as very vulgar and ill bred.”

“An
entertainer?”
Bethany repeated the word in amazement. “Why? It sounds inoffensive enough.”

“Because for decades that particular word has been a polite euphemism—the kind of word you can use in front of a lady—for ‘prostitute’. No respectable woman on Darkover would soil her mouth with the word
grezalis
—that’s vernacular for ‘whore’—and no man but a boor would use it in front of her. The respectable concert soprano is a ‘lyric performer,’ and don’t forget it if you go to a concert in Thendara!”

Bethany shivered. “I had no idea a translator’s work was so complicated.”

“It’s true; you have to take extra pains to avoid giving offense. One of my main jobs is to check through official speeches to make sure our translators and speechwriters avoid words with accidentally offensive connotations. For instance: you know how our standard official speeches—not just on Darkover—are full of expressions of friendship and brotherhood? Well, the commonest expression for ‘friend and brother’ in the
casta
language—that’s the official language in Thendara—is red-flagged as an absolutely taboo term for official speeches here.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Because the commonest expression meaning ‘friend and brother,’ if you don’t get the inflection just right, can get you in an
incredible
amount of trouble. In the impersonal inflection it expresses the purest sentiments of fraternal charity and humanitarian concern, and is perfectly suitable for official and diplomatic use. Just the same it’s red-flagged, because a lot of our officials simply cannot
pronounce
the language well enough, and even if they
mean
to use the impersonal inflection, they’re likely to
sound
like the wrong one. And if you use that word—the same word—in the personal inflection, it means ‘brother’ in the sense of family intimacy and closeness, and is too familiar; while if you happen to use it in the intimate inflection, you’re defining the person addressed as a homosexual—and your lover. Do you see now why it’s an absolutely forbidden term in official language?”

“Good God! I certainly do.” Bethany giggled. “No wonder Montray has his own private linguist to write his speeches!” The women exchanged a conspiratorial chuckle; Montray’s ineptitude in the Darkovan language was a standing joke in the HQ. “And so that’s why you go over all his speeches personally? You know everything about Darkover, don’t you, Magda?”

Ruefully, Magda shook her head. “No, certainly not. No Terran can.”
And if any Terran could, no Terran woman could.
The thought was as bitter as ever. But she put it aside.

“It would have been different, if the Terran HQ had stayed at Caer Donn. There, the Terrans and Darkovans met more or less as equals, and we could mingle with them
as
Terrans. There was no need for undercover agents. But here we have to work undercover; the Comyn have completely refused to cooperate. They leased us land for the spaceport, let us hire workmen for construction jobs and allowed us to build the Trade City, but beyond that—oh, hell, Beth, didn’t you get all that in Basic Orientation?”

“Yes, I did; Class B Closed, very limited trade, spaceport personnel restricted to the Trade City. No fraternization.”

“So, you see? No other Terran children will get the kind of chance that Peter, and Cargill, and I did—to grow up playing with Darkovan children, learn the language from the ground up. That’s why there are so few of us who can actually pass, on the Darkovan side,
as
Darkovan—and I’m the only woman.”

Bethany asked, “Then why didn’t they keep the HQ at—where was it—Caer Donn? If they were so much friendlier there?”

“Partly the climate,” Magda said. “If you think this is cold, you should see what winter’s like in the Hellers. Everything comes to a dead stop, from midwinter-night to the spring-thaw. The climate of Thendara is pleasant—well, moderate anyway—by contrast. Then there was the problem of roads and transport. There’s just not enough
room
at Caer Donn for the kind of spaceport the Empire wanted, not without leveling a major mountain or two, and the Ecological Council on Terra wouldn’t have given permission for that even if the locals hadn’t objected. Then there’s the question of trade and influence. The Aldarans back at Caer Donn rule over miles and miles of mountains, forests, valleys, little villages, isolated castles and a few thousand people. In the Domains there are five good-sized cities and a dozen little ones, and Thendara alone has almost fifty thousand people. So there really was no choice at all, for the Empire. But it means Empire agents, anthropologists and linguists, have to work undercover, and we’re still working out the parameters. There are literally thousands of things we don’t know yet about this culture. And the Comyn’s policy of not helping us at all is a terrific blockade; they don’t
forbid
people to work with us, but the people here just
don’t
do anything the Comyn disapprove of. And that means that those few of us who can pass as Darkovan can practically name our own terms; because even keeping up with the language is a difficult and complicated undercover job. Of course I can’t do
all
the things, here, that a male agent would do. One of a male agent’s prime tasks, in linguistics, is to keep up with the dirty jokes; and of course I don’t hear them.”

“Why would anyone need to know dirty jokes? Is this for the Folklore Reference section?”

“Well, that too. But mostly to avoid accidentally offensive—or unintentionally funny—references. You grew up on Terra; would you say, in a serious and formal context, that somebody or other was
always in the middle?”

“Not unless I wanted my audience to crack up and start snickering and leering. I see what you mean; you have to red flag the punch line of the current dirty jokes or any specially notorious old ones. But you don’t hear the dirty jokes—”

“No; I have my own specialty. I mentioned that some expressions aren’t used by women—or in front of them, among the polite. There are also special expressions used mostly
by
women. Darkover isn’t one of those cultures that has a special women’s language—there are some of
them,
Sirius Nine for instance, and
there’s
a real translator’s nightmare! But no culture is ever completely free of ‘women’s talk.” Not even Terra. For instance, I came across a footnote in my language history text saying that women in one of the major pre-space cultures used to refer to their menstruation as ‘the curse.’“

“Did they really? Why?”

“God knows; I’m a linguist, not a psychologist,” Magda told her. “Listen, Beth—this is fun, but it isn’t getting my work done.”

Magda bent over her keyboard and began to type her day’s notes into the computer terminal for analysis, programming and storage by the computer experts who would later code them.

A joke is making the rounds in Thendara,
she typed.
Heard on three occasions in the last five days. Details vary, but it basically concerns two (three, five) Terrans who were on an outdoor escalator on the port, which malfunctioned, stranding the Terrans for several hours (three days in one version) between the first and second level pending repairs. Implications: Terrans are so addicted to mechanical transport that walking down a half flight of unmoving stairs is physically or psychologically impossible. The implications of this: Darkovan concept of Terrans as physically weak, incapable of effort. Secondary implication: envy of Terran access to machinery, the ease of Terran life-styles? The growing frequency of jokes about Terrans, most of which appear to concern our life-style with special reference to its physical ease, would imply …

“Magda,” Bethany interrupted, “I just got a flash from Montray; do I tell him you’re here?”

Magda nodded. “I’m still officially on duty.”

Bethany spoke into the communicator, listened a moment and said, “Go on in.”

Inside, Montray frowned irritably at Magda’s Darkovan clothes. “A messenger just brought word from the Comyn Castle,” he said. “One of the Big Names over there—one Lorill Hastur—has just sent for me, and included a request that you—you personally—be brought along to translate. I imagine your friend, the Ardais lady, has been talking about your special skill with the language. So I have a problem.” He frowned. “I know perfectly well that it’s not according to protocol, and probably improper, too, to take along a woman as official translator on the Darkovan side. On the other hand, I understand one simply
doesn’t
ignore a request from the Comyn. Who are the Hasturs, anyway?”