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Chapter 32

We are definitely making progress," Skibow said. "Oh, yes, quite a bit, thanks to you two," Dr. Mayhew agreed.

A.J. and Helen smiled together at that. They had rather warm feelings towards the linguists, who had catalyzed their relationship. "So do you want to share?"

"Well, of course, we do!" Dr. Mayhew said tartly. "Who wouldn’t want to brag a bit?"

Her English accent gave her a schoolteacher air, especially with her prematurely gray hair pulled tightly back. "Take a seat and we'll give you a linguistic tour of what we've learned so far. We actually have some guesses as to the meaning of some words, which we'll get to in a bit."

"The first thing that strikes anyone when looking at these is that the writing is in curves, where we would use straight lines," Dr. Skibow began. "This seems to fit fairly well with the natural tendencies of Bemmie's manipulatory appendages and viewing arrangement. It's a bit more of a leap, however, to guess at the next level of structure. I believe we mentioned that we thought the various groupings of letters equate to words. This does rely on the assumption that the symbols are, like letters in English, basically phonetic in nature. That assumption, in turn, is based on the fact that so far we have found a very limited set of symbols used in what appear to be words—thirty-four, so far—plus a set of symbols we believe to be numerals in base nine. The very small number of symbols leads us to think they used an alphabet rather than a syllabary, although that's just a guess right now."

"For a short time," Mayhew picked up the narrative, "we thought that we had a larger set of words, and a rather confusing set thereof, than we did. However, one of the pattern-matching programs noticed that a lot of the words were mirror spellings of other words. After some comparison, we realized that our alien friends do at least one thing very differently from us. And by 'us' I mean any written human language. Where we write left to right or vice versa, they write outward from the center. The text in their approach is written something like this, if they were writing English."

She activated a display and wrote:

xof nworb kciuq ehT Jumped over the lazy dog

"So our initial survey would've had a total of nine words, when there's actually only eight unique words present, as 'the' appears twice. This method of writing brings up some very interesting questions as to just how our friends perceived things. Any human trying to read this way would start getting her brain scrambled pretty fast. Awfully dizzy, at least. In any case, we then were able to arrange a list of all the words and the order in which they appeared at any given point. That gave us a total starting vocabulary, if we could translate it, of about two thousand unique words from all sources, with a lot of those words being very common. Those are presumably the equivalents of 'the,' 'a,' and so on, but without knowing something of the actual meanings involved we're now getting out on the far fringe of guesswork.

"Once we had the clue of color to show us that we were in fact on the right track—and to bring up a whole bunch of symbols our visible-light images had missed—we attempted to assign meaning to some of the words based on context. If a word occurs in a particular context and not another, you can assume with at least some confidence that the change in context has something to do with the meaning of the word. Similarly, if you always see one word in conjunction with another word or symbol, you can guess that there is some strong relationship between the two."

"We have been going over the various 'noteplaques,' as we've decided to call them," Dr Skibow said, "and we hit some paydirt in the form of maps. Some of the maps we've been able to match up to known Solar System bodies, including Mars and at least a couple of the moons of Jupiter. Another one, we think, refers to Saturn and its moons."

Helen cocked an eyebrow. "You 'think'?"

Skibow shrugged. "Well, everything else matches quite well. But if that Bemmie map is accurate, Saturn had a moon about half the size of Titan, sixty-five million years ago. Which it certainly doesn't today."

"That's . . . possible," A.J. mused. "Even on the astronomical scale, sixty-five million years is a hefty stretch of time. An extrasolar body might have come into the system and yanked that moon out altogether. Or, for that matter, I've never been too satisfied with the current fashionable theory about what caused Saturn's rings." Somewhat grudgingly: "I admit, it's not my field of expertise."

Helen saw that Mayhew's plump face seemed to be undergoing a struggle of some sort, as if the linguist was trying to keep from laughing. When their eyes met, Helen smiled faintly, to show that she understood the source of the humor.

A.J. Baker? Publicly confessing he doesn't know everything?

For all of Mayhew's evident amusement, it was just as obvious that she wasn't irritated. People—including Helen—put up with A.J.'s unthinking intellectual arrogance, easily enough, because there was never anything mean-spirited about it. His attitudes didn’t derive from personal competitiveness or a desire to belittle anyone else. They were just a side effect of the man's fascination with the universe.

Skibow continued. "We're hoping that in some of the other still-sealed rooms we'll get some more maps or similarly interpretable diagrams, because on the maps we found labels, just like we label our maps. We think we've got a handle on at least part of their system of measurement—on the large scale, anyway—and we're getting words out of it.

"Here's one. This word"—a series of Bemmian symbols shimmered in the display—"means crater, we're almost sure. That's because every time we find the equivalent spot on our maps, there's a crater right at that point. So far, at least."

"That'd mean an awful lot of repetitions of the word, across something like Mars."

Mayhew shook her head. "Not every crater is labeled, Helen— far from it. Only a few on each map. Presumably they were points of interest for our friends. Even on our astronomical maps we don't label every crater, only the larger ones. As these people were presumably actually landing on these bodies, I would therefore theorize that these were craters they landed on or had an interest in."

"Maybe not, though," A.J. countered. "Maybe the word isn't crater. Maybe it's mine or quarry."

Skibow raised an eyebrow. "Good point. It could, I suppose, also mean colony, if they were settling the area."

Helen made a face. "I see your problem. You're in the same position we were when we had the single arm-plate from Bemmie, trying to reconstruct something incredibly complex from almost no information at all."

"Yes. We hope that we can examine at least some of these craters and determine what it is about them that made them worth labeling. The puzzling part is that they certainly aren't the most spectacular and interesting craters. So perhaps A.J.'s guess is right: these are craters that had something interesting in them from a practical standpoint."

"Tell you what," A.J. said. "I'll have a couple of the Faeries pop away from Phobos for a bit and do some focused imaging and scanning on any of those craters that are in range. Combine that with the pretty heavy-duty info we already have on Mars, and I might at least be able to tell you something interesting about the ones you have labeled on the Mars maps. Do your maps cover all of Mars?"

"Oh, not even close," Skibow replied. "Perhaps twenty percent of the surface, and thirteen labeled craters in that area."

"Bring it up and let's see the equivalence on the surface."

The diagrams from the alien maps showed on the screen, and then faded. A map of Mars appeared, with part of what would be the tropical and subtropical portion of the northern hemisphere highlighted.

"Okay, I see. Yeah, I think the Faeries can get some decent images and ground penetrating radar shots on that, if the returns can be sorted out. I was getting some returns from Mars initially, but that doesn't mean that all parts of Mars will be equally good for GPR. The geometry might screw me up, too. But we'll see."

"Aren't you supposed to keep the Faeries researching Phobos?" Helen reminded him.

"I'm supposed to find out as much as I can about Phobos, the alien base, and anything else I can about Bemmie. These maps and the craters indicated are definitely related to Bemmie and his people. So I figure that if, by doing a little detective work, I can resolve our debate about just what they found interesting about those craters, I'll be just doing my job."

"True enough," Helen said. "I doubt anyone's going to argue with you anyway, not when you're basically our only source of on-hand investigation for the next couple of months."

"There are advantages to being virtually indispensable." A.J. grinned.

"Which is why you shouldn't be scaring us by getting so close to being dispensed with."

A.J. managed to keep his grin, but it faltered a bit. He'd quietly admitted to Helen that his recent brush with death had scared him, much more than his first, because this one had taken slow days to close in on him. The fire and explosion had been a few moments of pain and panic and effort, and then he'd woken up with the worst behind him. This time his own body had been slowly and inexorably shutting down, cutting off his air and energy.

"Yeah. Well, that's over, anyway. And we've taken a lot of steps to keep anything like that from happening again." He suddenly blinked and looked surprised.

"What is it?"

"Just remembered something I'd completely forgotten about while I was sick. I have to go talk to Ken.”

“A problem?”

“Probably nothing, but he should know anyway." Helen could tell that there was more to it, but obviously he preferred to keep the information to himself.

She didn't press him. Part of the reason she and A.J. got along as well as they did was that they gave each other a lot of room. One of the few things she'd found amusing about the tabloids' obsession with her and A.J. had been their constant predictions that the two of them were on the verge of a breakup. In point of fact, their relationship had been remarkably free of much in the way of quarreling—quite unlike the marriage Helen had gotten into for six miserable years when she'd been in her twenties. The one and only photograph the tabloids had ever published that seemed to show them yelling at each other—which they ran endlessly, of course— had actually been a shot of the two of them trying to sing.

Something which neither of them could do worth a damn, and had proven it that day to their mutual satisfaction. Helen would also allow that part of the reason the tabloids loved that photo was that it had been taken while they were vacationing in Florida and Helen's bikini had been . . . Well, a bikini.

A skimpy one, at that, even by bikini standards. Helen had only worn it because A.J. had bought it for her and insisted—and she had never worn it since.

"All right," she said, half-smiling at the memory. "I imagine we've taken up too much of your time, anyway. Dr. Mayhew, Dr. Skibow—"

"Jane and Rich, please," Jane Mayhew interrupted. "There's only fifty of us. It would be silly to stay so formal, even if I do keep falling back into my bloody lecture-room habits."

"No problem, Jane, Rich. We'll be moving on."

"Our pleasure, Helen. Drop by whenever you and A.J. feel like it. Who knows, you may solve our problems again."

"Well, you helped solve ours!" A.J. said, with a wink at Helen.

On their way out, Helen said with great dignity: "We didn't have a problem. You did."

A.J. smiled but didn't even try to make a rejoinder. Clearly, his mind was focused on whatever problem he was taking to Ken. There was as much point in badinage with A.J. when he was in that mind-set as there would be trying to swap jokes with a beaver making a dam—or a five-year-old child absorbed in watching a cartoon.

Oh, well. They'd still foiled the tabloids, hadn't they? A feat which, with some experience, Helen had come to rank right up there with taking the gold at the Olympics or deciphering the Maya script. Or winning the Trojan War.

And—although she'd disapproved at the time and still did— Helen couldn't deny that she wished she'd had a camera herself once. To capture the delightfully shocked expression on a paparazzi's face as A.J. sent him sailing through a window.

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Framed