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his most famous book, Observations of Distant Worlds with the Naked Eye, that
Stark was a language that had no native speakers until it was whispered by a
Divine Wind.
So it was that when Peter and Wang-mu hiked through the woods of the great
natural preserve where their starship had landed and emerged in a village of
foresters, laughing about how long they had been "lost" in the woods, no one
thought twice about Wang-mu's obviously Chinese features and accent, or even
about Peter's white skin and lack of an epicanthic fold. They had lost their
documents, they claimed, but a computer search showed them to be licensed
automobile drivers in the city of Nagoya, and while Peter seemed to have had a
couple of youthful traffic offenses there, otherwise they were not known to have
committed any illegal acts. Peter's profession was given as "independent teacher
of physics" and Wang-mu's as "itinerant philosopher," both quite respectable
positions, given their youth and lack of family attachment. When they were asked
casual questions ("I have a cousin who teaches progenerative grammars in the
Komatsu University in Nagoya") Jane gave Peter appropriate comments to say:
"I never seem to get over to the Oe Building. The language people don't talk to
physicists anyway. They think we speak only mathematics. Wang-mu tells me that
the only language we physicists know is the grammar of dreams."
Wang-mu had no such friendly prompter in her ear, but then an itinerant
philosopher was supposed to be gnomic in her speech and mantic in her thought.
Thus she could answer Peter's comment by saying, "I say that is the only grammar
you speak. There is no grammar that you understand."
This prompted Peter to tickle her, which made Wang-mu simultaneously laugh and
wrench at his wrist until he stopped, thereby proving to the foresters that they
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were exactly what their documents said they were: brilliant young people who
were nevertheless silly with love -- or with youth, as if it made a difference.
They were given a ride in a government floater back to civilized country, where
-- thanks to Jane's manipulation of the computer networks -- they found an
apartment that until yesterday had been empty and unfurnished, but which now was
filled with an eclectic mix of furniture and art that reflected a charming
mixture of poverty, quirkiness, and exquisite taste.
"Very nice," said Peter.
Wang-mu, familiar only with the taste of one world, and really only of one man
in that one world, could hardly evaluate Jane's choices. There were places to
sit -- both Western chairs, which folded people into alternating right angles
and never seemed comfortable to Wang-mu, and Eastern mats, which encouraged
people to twine themselves into circles of harmony with the earth. The bedroom,
with its Western mattress raised high off the ground even though there were
neither rats nor roaches, was obviously Peter's; Wang-mu knew that the same mat
that invited her to sit in the main room of the apartment would also be her
sleeping mat at night.
She deferentially offered Peter the first bath; he, however, seemed to feel no
urgency to wash himself, even though he smelled of sweat from the hike and the
hours cooped up in the floater. So Wang-mu ended up luxuriating in a tub,
closing her eyes and meditating until she felt restored to herself. When she
opened her eyes she no longer felt like a stranger. Rather she was herself, and
the surrounding objects and spaces were free to attach themselves to her without
damaging her sense of self. This was a power she had learned early in life, when
she had no power even over her own body, and had to obey in all things. It was
what preserved her. Her life had many unpleasant things attached to it, like
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remoras to a shark, but none of them changed who she was under the skin, in the
cool darkness of her solitude with eyes closed and mind at peace.
When she emerged from the bathroom, she found Peter eating absently from a plate
of grapes as he watched a holoplay in which masked Japanese actors bellowed at
each other and took great, awkward, thundering steps, as if the actors were
playing characters twice the size of their own bodies.
"Have you learned Japanese?" she asked.
"Jane's translating for me. Very strange people." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]