Memories Like Roses

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WANTED: TRANSLATOR FOR THE LOST proclaimed the headline Bate swiped onto Ling’s screen.  An image of a faded rose accompanied the words.  “Think one of us could do it?”

Ling shoved it aside.  “Not while I’m in the middle, please?”

Bate rolled his eyes.  “It’s a debate translation, Ling.  Doesn’t matter.  Nobody watches them.”

“I still want to do it right.”

Bate flicked the article back into Ling’s screen.  “Funny thing is, if any poltrans could land it, it’d be you.”

Ling finally finished the debate translation and sent it to the distributer.  Neither the Gogos nor the Athwarts would appreciate his translations, but that wasn’t the point, no matter what some poltrans did.

“At least look at it,” Bate urged.

“They don’t need a translator; they need a xenolinguist.”

“They’re inviting any translator to apply.  Maybe I should put my name in!”  Bate snorted.

Ling went to close the solicitation.  “I’m sure that’s a formality.  What would a poltrans do with an extinct alien language?”

Doggedly, Bate stopped Ling from closing it.  “Translate it.  Duh.”  He swiped to the details.  “All expenses paid, up to 20,000 tokes on completion.  You should totes apply.”

“I can hardly even translate you sometimes.”  Ling sank back into his chair.  “If I apply, will you stop bothering me about it?”

Bate pumped his fist.  “Fi, Ling.  Fi.”

The application was simple.  Ling uploaded his bio, linked his poltrans portfolio and the two real translations he’d done before he quit his graduate track, and tapped submit.  “There.  Sats?”

“Sats.  Lezgo.”

For six weeks, Ling forgot about the whole affair, except for once or twice when another headline about the Lost popped into his feed.  After two months, Ling boarded a streaker bound for the planet of the Lost.

Wearing an outdated suit and clutching a tablet full of notes and references from a week’s cramming, Ling was the only passenger on the sparse spaceguard transport, and the only one without field experience.  No one laughed when he vomited during the FTL accel and deccel.  No one laughed when he stared in horror at the tumultuous debris field offering only glimpses of the planet they orbited. No one laughed when he asked what he was supposed to do.

“The ADS only allows one down,” Maj told him.  “You’re it.  Considering the debris field, no one’s messing with it.”

“K.”  Ling wondered what he was doing here.

Ling disembarked in a bulky envisuit onto an ancient space station.  Despite the actuators augmenting his movements, he noticed the suit’s extra mass.  Somehow, lights shone steadily on a station built centuries ago.  A pattern of lights on the floor reacted to his presence, guiding him into a chamber, which sealed behind him.  Ling’s pulse quickened.

Holographic words hovered before him, in his own language.  “Please relax,” they said.  “You will be scanned and teleported to the surface.  The process is harmless.”

A status bar filled, indicating the scan’s progress.  Ling began wondering why the Lost required a translator if the system…

…translated automatically.  He appeared in an identical chamber, which unsealed to reveal a foyer and more words welcoming him to Dnghu.

The envisuit indicated conditions were habitable.  Though dirty, the foyer could otherwise have been occupied yesterday.  Through the floor-to-ceiling windows was virgin wilderness.

A human figure, like a middle-aged woman, stepped into the foyer from the wilderness.  Ling tried to rub his eyes, but the envisuit’s faceplate interposed.  She wore a floral dress, her hair held up by a rose stem, the flower faded and sad atop the thorns.

“You have many questions,” she remarked.  “Walk with me.  You won’t need that.”

She waved her hand, and the envisuit disappeared from Ling’s body and reappeared in a neat pile beside the teleporter.  “Who are you?” Ling managed.

“Smer, storyteller of the Lost.”  Smer opened the foyer door and stepped into, not a wilderness as Ling first thought, but a kind of garden, an artificial Eden grown over an almost-decomposed city.

“You’re AI?” Ling guessed.

Smer laughed, a bright sound evoking finches on a thistle.  “In your terms, I suppose.  The Lost created me when they realized they were…lost, to preserve their story.”

“That’s what the feeds call your people.  What did they call themselves?”  Ling followed Smer around mossy trees and ducked beneath verdant leaves dancing in alien sunlight.

“Names never translate well.  Your name for yourselves means people of Earth.  The Lost called themselves people of Dnghu.  Calling them Lost is appropriate.”

Ling made to write this on his tablet; Smer pointed at it, there was a spark, and the screen went dark.  “Not that way.  You must remember.”

“I’m not a computer.”  Ling clutched the useless tablet.

Smer patted his shoulder, her hand warm and firm.  “I did not request a recorder, nor a transliterator.  I sought a translator.”

“Why?  You already know our language.  Besides, I’m just a poltrans.”

Smer’s smile was sunlight on bare skin, exposing and comforting simultaneously.  “I know.  I know everything about you.”

Ling frowned.  “But…”

“I cannot do what you can.  I cannot tell the story of the Lost for your people.  Only one of your people can.”

Ling stopped walking.  “That’s not right.  The translator’s job is to record one culture’s words for another to understand.”  His graduate professor, Ahid, always emphasized this point.

Smer shook her head.  “The translator’s job is to ensure stories never die.”  She touched his arm, they resumed their walk, and Smer told the story of the Lost.

Ling lost track of time with Smer.  When her story finished and his questions were answered, she led him back to the teleporter.  As the foyer door closed, she faded into the bucolic landscape.  The last thing to disappear was the tip of a thorn on the rose stem in her hair.

The teleport deposited Ling on the Dnghu space station.  He donned his envisuit and returned to the streaker, where the medbay scanned him and found him healthy.

Maj surveyed him.  “Well?” she asked.  “Were you successful?”

“Not yet.”  Ling met Maj’s eyes.  “I have stories to tell.”

For the journey back to Earth, and for nineteen months, Ling worked with the story of the Lost.  It permeated his poltrans work, suffused his sleep, fluttered through the fast food he crammed down while he worked late into the nights.  As he learned from Smer, it was not enough to put the stories in human language.  They had to be put in human terms.

If written down, the story Ling wrote of the Lost as if the Lost were human would stretch six thousand manuscript pages.  It wasn’t written down, though the length of Ling’s notes was nearly as great.  With the bed shoved aside, his studio apartment became a soundstage where he recorded his performances for the world.

Against a dark background, the videos featured Ling sitting on a wooden stool, dressed in the same, outdated suit.  He pinned a faded rose to his lapel.  The rest of the stage was shadowed; he was lit from below as he spoke.

“Four hundred ninety-eight Earth-years ago, the last of the people of Dnghu perished.  How they perished is unimportant.  We call them the Lost, for when we found their civilization’s ruins, all that remained were footprints fading in the sand.  Footprints, and stories, for the last of them created a being, Smer, to remember their stories.”

In the video version, Ling included an image of Smer as he knew her.  In the audio, he continued to narrate.

“Theirs are the stories you will hear, as Smer desired them to become.  Though they feature human beings, performing human actions, in human contexts, they are nonetheless the stories of the Lost.  For stories are not limited to a time or a place or a people; they are an eternally evolving way of communicating abstract ideas which are, perhaps, shared in common amongst every thinking species.  Or, at least, the Lost were enough like us for these things, at least, to be found again.”

Ling uploaded the oral performances, divided into four-hour increments, until all forty-four hours were available to the world.  Then, it was done.  Twenty thousand tokes transferred to his account, and he went back to concentrating on his work as a poltrans.

Sometimes, he went back and read the comments on his translations.  Some of them accused him of distorting or obscuring the Lost’ culture.  Some called out this story or that story as being like a Cinderella story, a hero’s journey, the stories of the Navajo, the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Haida.  He supposed it was true, in a sense, but it also wasn’t true.  They linked together, the epic of the Lost, with messages and morals for those who heard them in a new form and a new language, but they were the messages and morals of a people no longer alien.  Ling never replied to the comments.

The stories were linked, although it was only near the end of his time with Smer that Ling grasped how – they were linked in a shared way of viewing the world, not in characters, places, or other overt elements.

One night, he saw a new comment, from an anonymous user whose avatar was a faded rose.  “Now they are the Found.  Remember the thorns.”

“We will,” Ling replied.

Thank you for reading Lloyd Earickson’s short story, Memories Like Roses, an IGC Publishing original story. If you enjoyed the story, please consider leaving a comment or review in the discussion below the story. Be sure to follow IGCPublishing.com for updates, more information, and other freely available stories.

If you want to know more about the writing process for this story and how it came to be, please read the author’s note and release post.

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