The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [138]
"Miz Mendes here says you spent the day bein’ brilliant," D.W. drawled as Emilio sat down to eat.
"I said nothing of the kind," Sofia shot back. "I said he had spent the afternoon raising smugness to an art form. It was the analysis that was brilliant."
"A very fine distinction," Anne pointed out. She plunked a bowl onto the wooden table and sank onto a cushion next to George before adding, "Isn’t he awful when he’s right?"
"I am a simple man, just trying to do my job," Emilio said in injured tones, persevering despite the moans, "and for this, scorn and sarcasm are heaped on my head."
"So, what is this brilliant analysis?" D.W. asked grumpily. "I got reports to write, son." He’d put his plate aside almost immediately and Emilio now did the same, having filled up on the snacks pressed on him as he walked through the village. Like Jimmy Quinn, D.W. once observed, the Runa ate damn near anything pretty much continuously, and there was no way to visit anyone without being fed and there was no such thing as "not hungry." It meant that the food supply brought from Earth would last a lot longer than expected. That didn’t make the Runa stuff any more palatable, although it did seem to be reasonably nutritious for them.
Emilio spent the next ten minutes explaining the rules for declension he’d worked out that morning. To Sofia’s intense satisfaction, everyone else initially confused the ideas with abstract and concrete nouns, as she had. Once they’d all seen the underlying logic of it, it seemed perfectly reasonable, and Anne declared that Emilio was entitled to feel superior for precisely one half hour, which she offered to time for him. He refused the honor, admitting cheerfully that he’d already indulged in a sufficiency of self-congratulation.
"I couldn’t have gotten this far this fast without Askama. And, in any case," he said seriously, "there are whole areas of this language that are still closed to me. For example, I am completely confused about gender."
Jimmy cracked up and D.W. muttered, "I wouldn’t touch that line with a ten-foot pole," which made Anne choke on her food and everyone else laugh. Emilio blushed and told them all to grow up.
"I wonder what they’d do about an AV display. Or VR stuff," George said, pounding on Anne’s back as she coughed and giggled helplessly. They’d been very careful about what they used in front of the Runa. Everyone was engaged in research that required computers but as much as possible, they lived as the Runa lived.
"Marc, what declension do they use for your drawings?" Emilio asked. "You create the illusion of space. They’d use spatial for the paper itself, I think, but what about the images?"
"I can’t remember. I’ll pay attention next time it comes up," Marc promised. "Has anyone seen what Kanchay is doing? He watched me while I was working on a portrait a few weeks ago and asked for materials. I believe he had never seen two-dimensional representation of volumes before but he’s already produced some beautiful work."
"So that’s where it started!" George exclaimed. It had seemed like spontaneous combustion. All of a sudden, paper and inks and pigments started showing up in the trade boats and everyone was drawing. Fads like that would flash through the village. It could be unnerving. You would hesitate to blow your nose, afraid the whole village would take up the practice en masse, as a hobby.
"You know, I’m beginning to think God really likes these guys best," Anne said, deliberately sounding like a jealous child. "First off, they’ve got a much nicer planet than we do. Lovely plants, prettier colors. And they’re better looking than we are. And they have better hands." The Runa had five digits, but the innermost and outer fingers were fully opposable to the central three; it was almost as though they could work with four human hands simultaneously. Anne was fascinated by the way Askama would sit in Emilio’s lap, fingers busy with her ribbons, plaiting them into one pattern after another.