Expendable - James Alan Gardner [90]
…the lifetime of the people wouldn’t last significantly longer.
Fluent Osco-Umbrian
The man in front of me behaved as if nothing unusual had happened. He launched into another speech in another language—no language I knew, no language I cared about. I bided my time till he finished, then held up my hand to stop him from trying again.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “Whatever message you want to convey, it’s four thousand years too late. You’re a simulation, right? Probably the interface projection for an artificial intelligence that oversees this town. Computer-controlled and designed to relate to the first people who came here. To them, you must have looked like a wise old man…someone they’d naturally respect. But to me, you’re evidence of the AI’s imminent breakdown. Trying to reach me with languages four millennia old; you can’t understand Oar, so you haven’t kept up as the people here changed. Anyway, I’ve never liked talking to AIs—they’re always smarmy and unctuous.”
The man said nothing. He stared intently, as if sheer force of will could make my words intelligible.
“Oar,” I said, “you’d better fetch Tobit. He might know how to deal with our friend. If Tobit has lived long enough in this town, maybe he’s learned Osco-Umbrian.”
“Tobit…” the naked man whispered.
“Ah,” I said, “a name he recognizes.”
“Tobit,” the man repeated.
“You’re friends with Tobit, right?” I said. “Maybe you two get lit up together.”
“Tobit,” the man answered. “Tobit. Toe…bit…toe…bee…or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—”
“Shit,” I said. “Or rather, Zounds.”
Speaking Trippingly From the Tongue
“Hail and well-met!” the man said with a flourish of his hand. “I have in timely manner found your tongue within my mind.”
An ugly anatomical image, I thought. Aloud, I replied, “You’ve finally identified my language in your data banks.”
The man nodded. “This blessed talk, these words, this speech, this English.”
“What is wrong with him?” Oar asked in a whisper. “Is he simply foolish, or is there something chemically wrong with his brain?”
I shook my head. “The League of Peoples obviously drops in now and then to update the local language databases. The good news is that the records are recent enough to include English; the bad news is—”
“It is a foolish kind of English,” Oar finished.
“Let me not to the intercourse of true minds admit impediments,” the man replied. “My tongue may be rough and my condition not smooth—”
“Enough,” I interrupted. It annoyed me he understood my contemporary English but continued speaking his Elizabethan version. That’s an AI for you: probably trying to “uplift” me by setting an example of “correct” speech. “Let’s keep this to yes-or-no questions,” I said. “Are you a machine-created projection?”
“Yea, verily.”
“So I’m essentially talking to an artificial intelligence?”
“Aye, milady.” The little man displayed a smile of delight—the indulgent smile a pet-owner wears when the family dog rolls over. As I said, AIs are all smarmy.
“And there’s some good reason you’ve approached me?” I asked.
“E’en so.”
“What reason?”
“To lay this thy kingdom at thy feet. To bid you take up the scepter. To hail you as lord, and queen hereafter.”
And he knelt before me, lowering his head to the pavement in respectful submission.
The First of My Kind
I had never been offered the title of queen. I did not want it now.
“Do you say this to everyone who comes by?” I asked.
“Only you,” the man replied. “You are the first of your kind to walk here since the dawn of this era.”
“He means you have occluded skin,” Oar said helpfully.
“A diplomatic turn of phrase,” I told her. Turning back to the man, I said, “I’m not the first of my kind to come. What about Tobit? Or