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Chapter 26

Helen glanced away from the handwaving explanation A.J. was giving, over to the nearby table where voices were rising angrily.

A.J. followed her gaze. One of the scientists—Dr. Mayhew, was it? Linguistics, anyway—was pointing to something, probably an image only she and her opponent in the debate could see. He was another linguist, a much older man by the name of . . .

A.J. keyed in a quick query and the VRD answered him.

Right. Rich Skibow. Ken's party was a major success, and it sounded like these two had been knocking back a few drinks before they got into their learned argument. As he hadn't been paying attention, he wasn't clear on what they were arguing about, but he could see that it was getting pretty heated.

And very annoying, he suddenly realized, as Helen abruptly left the table to join the arguing linguists. He'd been enjoying her company very much, especially after their other dinner companions had deserted them at least temporarily for the sake of the dance floor. And now these loudmouthed specialists had to go and interrupt.

Not one to yield the battlefield, he followed Helen over.

"—identical symbols, I tell you!"

"No, no, no, not identical at all. Spacing over here, and—"

"Excuse me."

Rich Skibow and Jane Mayhew looked up irritably, but their expressions moderated when they saw Helen.

"Who—oh, Dr. Sutter."

Mayhew's face showed a sudden awareness of how loud they'd been getting. She pushed her prematurely graying brown hair out of her face with an embarrassed gesture. "I'm sorry. We didn't mean to disturb—"

"No problem at all. I heard part of the debate, and thought I might be able to help."

The two looked at each other doubtfully. A.J. could practically read their thoughts. What would a paleontologist know about linguistics?

Dr. Skibow shrugged. "Okay. Take a look."

The slender academic put his portable in the center of the table and it projected several images of various inscriptions found around the alien base on Phobos.

"Obviously, we don't have a lot to work with, but the aliens do seem to have used images something like we do. We've been trying to make some guesses as to meanings from location, image context, and things like that, and assigning tentative roles to various features seen in the writing. For instance, like us they seem to use spacing to separate groupings which may be words, sentences, or paragraphs. Which of those it is, however, is hard to know without having some idea of what the things are trying to say."

"Though at the moment we think the groups we see commonly separated are probably words," Mayhew added. "It seems unlikely you're going to put what amounts to three or four pages of text on things that we think are hallway signs, so these spaced groupings along the curves are probably words."

"The problem is that we've been coming across what looks like the same word used in situations that make no sense for the vague meaning we thought it might have."

Helen and A.J. studied the images for a while. The pictures were actually derived representations, cleaned out and with the "letters" and all other features outlined and marked up to make them clear. Helen tilted her head slightly as she gazed at the enigmatic symbols, then activated her own portable and put on her VRD. Soon thereafter, she brought up her own display, which gave her the same areas but from A.J.'s actual images, just enhanced slightly for better viewing.

"Take a look carefully at these now," she said. "Especially look at the different versions of the word."

At first no one said anything. A.J. didn't expect to notice anything significant, but the two linguists looked puzzled too.

Then, suddenly, Dr. Mayhew sat up straighter, a startled look on her face. "Rich, maybe she's onto something! Look. Here and here; and here and here."

A.J. followed her indications, and then it dawned on him. Colors. They'd often remarked on how even after all this time they could see colors on some things. The black and gold and other colors in the various texts found were perhaps the most clear-cut examples.

Dr. Skibow nodded. "Yes . . . that could be it. They may be using color as a modal change or something like it. How did you think of it, Dr. Sutter?"

"I recalled some of our original speculation, and it fit with the basic anatomical analysis I've been doing. Bemmie has a number of features roughly analogous to our cephalopods. In other ways, of course, his structure is more analogous to something like a crab. But one thing I'm sure of is that he evolved relatively recently from a water-dwelling species. His body shape is still awkward for land travel. In that respect, the way he's built reminds me of primitive amphibians—given that he started from a completely different Bauplan."

Seeing the frowns, she explained: "'Bauplan' means basic body shape. 'Body plan,' if you will. Bemmie's locomotion must have involved a combination of slithering on his belly and 'walking' with his elbows to support his front weight. Then there's the skin structure we were looking at, right, A.J.?"

"Yeah—okay, yeah, I see. We've been finding a lot of skin cells that looked kinda funny for normal skin, but they could be for color control—chromatophores."

"It's been well established that squids and cuttlefish often use shifts in color to communicate. So I wondered if the color element was being neglected, which it was."

"Hmmm . . . Well, it does seem to divide things up more neatly," Skibow admitted. "But there still seem to be problems. Some things just don't seem to space properly."

A.J. looked at the image he was indicating. It was one of the illustrated plates they'd found in the control room. He remembered that particular one rather clearly, because he'd been trying to analyze its structure.

"I think I can solve that. Give me a color that isn't being used, as far as you know, in any of the things you've seen so far."

Skibow and Mayhew looked at her other. "Pink," she suggested. Skibow nodded his agreement.

"Right. Pink it is." A.J. inserted pink into the color table, bound the variable, then transmitted to Helen's portable. "How about that?"

The two linguists stared at the new image. In some places, right where they were having difficulty resolving the relationship of the symbols, new symbols had suddenly appeared. Bright pink, but otherwise looking like many of the other symbols.

"Where the bloody hell did those come from?" Mayhew demanded. "Sure, that looks like it might make sense, but we can't just pull stuff out of our arses in order to make it work."

A.J. glanced at Helen. "Watson, you know my methods. I simply started with your own deduction."

Helen was thoughtful for a moment. "Elementary, my dear Holmes. We have no reason to think that Bemmie saw in precisely the same spectrum that we do. Ergo, you checked for symbols visible in something other than what we call 'visible light.'"

"Excellent, Watson, excellent. In point of fact, they appear to have seen somewhat higher into the spectrum than we do. That stuff's highly visible in the near-UV, but darn near invisible even at close inspection in visible."

He made a bow to the two and took Helen's arm. "I trust this resolves your little conundrum. We're going back to our table."

As they left, Skibow and Mayhew were once more discussing the symbols, but much more quietly and with no animosity.

After Helen and A.J. resumed their seats at their own table, she smiled at him. "That was very nice teamwork, A.J."

"Well, I had to do something. You were solving the whole problem on your own and that would really hurt my rep as the resident genius. It's really not fair anyway, that you should have all the brains and all the looks too."

She laughed quietly. "Yeah, right. Madeline and Jackie aren't losing any sleep over my competition in that arena, I assure you."

"That's bullshit, Helen!" A.J. blurted out, before he could think. "They probably aren't losing any sleep over it, sure. But that's just because they aren't playing in the same league you are."

The look she gave him brought home the fact there'd been a hell of a lot more emphasis in that line than he originally meant to put in. He was suddenly aware that his face felt very hot, but he managed to keep from looking away.

"I mean it," he said quietly. Then, not being able to help himself, swallowed.

Her expression was serious; at least she didn't think he was being funny. A.J. damned the lights in the place, or rather the lack thereof. He couldn't tell if she looked, maybe, like she was blushing too.

"A.J., are you making a pass at me?" she asked, just as quietly as he'd spoken.

His first impulse was to toss out his usual cavalier remark. Something inside him grabbed that impulse, slammed it to the ground, and beat it desperately into unconsciousness.

He dropped his gaze to the table, then looked back up. "Yes. Damn, yes. I . . . Okay, I know, I'm loudmouthed and arrogant and way too young for you and I'm sure if you wanted to have anything to do with me that way you'd have let me know a long time ago and Joe would probably have been a better choice if you wanted someone around my age and I'm sure there's plenty of other guys waiting in line anyhow but yes, I am, and I think you're gorgeous, did even when I first met you, but you're a lot more than gorgeous, you have like ten times the class of everyone else and . . ."

He was babbling. Babbling, babbling, babbling.

He clamped his mouth shut. Then, cleared his throat and said: "Anyway. Yes."

Instead of laughing, like he expected, Helen . . .

She was blushing. Even the dim lighting couldn't disguise it. The color in her cheeks made her look even more beautiful than usual.

Helen cleared her own throat. "A.J. . . ." she began, then stopped and looked aside. A rueful little smile came to her face. "I don't actually know what to say. How odd. I'm never at a loss for words."

He took a deep breath and squashed the part of his mind that had gone runaway on him. "You don't have to say anything, Helen. I know how stupid that was. You don't have to spare my feelings." He started to rise. "Look, I'll go—"

Her slender, tanned hand locked around his wrist and pulled him back down.

"Oh no, you don't, Mr. Baker." Her voice was a soft growl. Nothing at all like the even tone he was used to hearing.

"A.J., I don't . . ." She took a deep, slow breath. "Oh, baloney. I know exactly what to say. The truth is that I've always found you extremely attractive. It's just that I figured the age gap made for an insuperable barrier and so I shoved the notion out of my mind. I've kept it in a box under a tight lid for . . . what's it been? Two and half years, now."

Throughout, she'd still been looking aside. Now, her eyes came to meet his directly.

"I take it you don't find my age a problem?"

He started to make a wisecrack, but the same drill sergeant portion of his brain made the smartass do two thousand pushups in. . .

One second.

"No. Actually, it's . . . Well, to be honest, I think it's part of the attraction."

Seeing her cocked eyebrow, he sighed. "Look, Helen, I'm not stupid. I know I often act like a jerk. I don't even mean to, really. Well, not most of the time, anyway. It's just . . . I don't know. Defense mechanism. Whatever. But it never seems to bother you and I figured out a long time ago that's because you're old enough that you just don't care about stuff like that any more. If you ever did at all. So I can relax around you in a way that I almost never can around women my own age, unless they're just good buddies like Jackie."

He swallowed again. "And that's important to me. The thing is, no matter how much I act like the opposite—and it's mostly all talk—the truth is that I'm not a very casual person at all. No matter how I act. Not really about anything, and sure as hell not about, uh, well . . ."

"Sex. Love. Romance." The cool, relaxed, mature smile that A.J. treasured came to her face. "In whatever order," she added, waving her other hand breezily. Her right hand was still clamped around A.J.'s wrist.

"What the hell," she said, suddenly rising to her feet and half-dragging A.J. up from his chair. "Let's start with sex. And we'll see where it goes from there."

Their departure from the room did not go unnoticed. Joe and Jackie had followed the progress of the discussion between A.J. and Helen almost from the moment it began. They were sitting too far away to have heard any of the words. But the facial expressions and body language had made the subject matter obvious enough—even before Helen more or less hauled A.J. away. Not that he seemed in the least unwilling.

Joe drained his glass and set it down on the table with a solid thunk. "Well. It's about time, if anybody asks me."

For her part, Jackie bestowed a triumphant grin upon the other people at the table. "See?" she demanded. "I told you he wasn't my boyfriend."

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