Ring Around the Sky - Allyn Gibson [33]
“I did all that was needed.”
“Biyert asked about you, earlier today.”
Tev’s nostrils flared. “I don’t believe you.”
Eevraith frowned. “You know me too well.” He paused. “I thought if you believed…” His sentence trailed off, incomplete.
Moments passed with neither saying a word. Tev sat impassively in the captain’s chair, while Eevraith fidgeted behind his office desk.
“Will there be anything else, Eevraith? Or should I close the channel?”
Eevraith sighed. “No, I suppose there’s not,” he said with finality. “I had hoped…” The sentence trailed away. He looked down at his desk, away from Tev.
“Gersha gorva orga,” said Tev in Tellarite. May your life prosper.
Eevraith looked up at Tev. His eyes narrowed, his brows tightened, and the corners of his mouth turned upward. He smiled, a most un-Tellarite gesture. “Thank you, Tev.”
Eevraith’s office disappeared from the viewscreen, and the image of Kharzh’ulla, centered on Prelv, returned to the screen. Above Prelv bright flashes could be seen, the fireworks of the Kharzh’ullan celebration. The elevator that had risen from the ocean to the city’s south now drifted in space, but the city and the world would live to face the future.
Tev felt, for the first time this mission, content.
Bart Faulwell touched the door page. Sonya Gomez answered, her uniform jacket undone, her hair askew.
“I am not interrupting anything, Commander?”
Gomez shook her head wearily. “Not at all. Just working on the post-mission reports. Come in.” She gestured to her worktable. “Care for anything to drink?”
Faulwell took a seat at the table in Gomez’s cabin, setting his padd in front of him. “Thanks for the offer, but no.”
Gomez nodded. “Earl Grey tea, hot,” she told the replicator. A steaming mug materialized, she took it, and took the other seat at her table. “What do you have for me, Bart?”
He pushed the padd across the table to Gomez. “Believe it or not, the answer to your little puzzle.”
Gomez stared at Faulwell. “You said it might take weeks….”
Faulwell smiled. “ ‘Might’ being the operative word. In actuality it took two days.”
“Two days? How?”
“No one but a linguist with anything less than a passing familiarity with Tellarite, Federation Standard, and another language would have noticed or even known what to look for. The universal translator would have been insufficient and would have hidden the evidence.”
“How so?”
Faulwell shrugged. “The UT lacks a sense of humor. Don’t misunderstand me, Commander—it’s a fabulous tool, and it makes my job easier, but it doesn’t have an understanding of the subtle nuances of language. Puns and wordplay are beyond it. Commander Tev’s dissertation—”
“It is Tev’s writing?” Gomez interrupted.
Faulwell nodded. “No doubt whatsoever in my mind.” He paused. “Have you noticed that Tev curses in Romulan?”
A puzzled look crossed Gomez’s face. “No, I always assumed he was speaking Tellarite.”
“You’d think that, unless you knew Tellarite and Romulan. He’d been aboard a good two weeks before I noticed. I can’t say how or why he does, only that he does. And, curiously enough, Romulan curses turn up in the dissertation.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. The curses as transliterated match with actual Tellarite words, and fit the context of the work. There are twenty-seven examples of Romulan curses in the document, the most frequent one being hviehti ifv swuihsywhilluei, which means roughly ‘Klingon vermin dung.’ ”
“But the phrase isn’t written that way, is it?”
Faulwell shook his head. “It’s a transliteration of the Romulan words into the Tellarite alphabet arranged into Tellarite words. In Romulan the phrase ‘Klingon vermin dung’ is three words long, while the Tellarite phrase used time and again is written in six words—hveet tiv swih sih il li—meaning ‘torque of the turning gears.’ ”
“Coincidence?”
“I doubt it. The phrases used come across as awkward and ungrammatical and don’t fit the style used in the rest of the dissertation. He could get away with it for two reasons. First, he wasn’t a native and didn’t speak the Kharzh’ullan dialect.