Earth Song: Etude to War by Mark Wandrey Page A

to wait. She still had things to finish as a Chosen.
     
    * * *
     
    “Why are you pushing this so hard now?”
    Minu looked up from the series of wall screens flashing data down from space and sighed. “Isn't the Tog reaction and spotting one of their ships snooping in our system reason enough?”
    “Not really.” Minu wished she'd been in space working with Pip aboard the Kaatan, but that hadn't been practical. You couldn't just snap your fingers and get a ride to orbit, at least not yet. And she was once again officially on the First among the Chosen's shit list. Better to keep low for a while.
    Aaron was cooking something that smelled like lamb fajitas from the kitchen of their cabin while she worked in the bedroom that now did double duty as an office. “We've known the universe was full of lies since we learned to open our eyes and look around.”
    “I know you dragged me to the mystery kicking and screaming, you don't have to rub my face in it.”
    “Not quite kicking and screaming,” he said from thousands of kilometers above her in orbit.
    “Thanks for the bone. So regardless, we've been behind the curve too damned long, especially since Lilith is sitting on a vast repository of knowledge, and we don't know how to read most of it because of a missing language connection.”
    On the video link screen Pip could be seen shrugging and staring at a monitor near his head. He was enjoying the zero gravity of a workroom set up for him by Lilith in the bowels of the Kaatan, but it was obvious by his complaining, that his time in space was rapidly becoming annoying.
    “I have been teaching Pip the language of the People.”
    Minu looked at one of the side displays where her daughter, Lilith, had suddenly appeared. As usual her sharply angular features held no emotions. “Didn't we both suggest that to him years ago?”
    “Yes, you did,” Pip interjected, “but I'm finally getting tired of this game and figure I can speed up the project considerably if I pick up the damned language. Of course that was before I started getting stuck on some of the phonetic elements.”
    “Why?” Minu wondered. “Can't be as hard as learning Peninsula.”
    “Languages aren't something we Chosen waste much time on,” Pip replied tersely. “Why bother when you have translators? English has been the default language of the Chosen since their inception. Most tribes around the world use it as well. At least on old Earth, the nation states helped push pride in their own language. Here the Chosen have driven English home so heavily that linguistics is almost a dead art.”
    “Okay, but since the People were hominids, the language can't be like talking to an insect or something outlandish, right?”
    “How should I know? Again, the damn translators do all the work. These People had some obvious differences in shapes of their mouth parts. Some of the sounds are real hard for us.”
    “So if this species was around in the beginning, how come the translators don't have a matrix for their language? Isn't that like coming to Bellatrix but none of the signs are written in English.”
    “It is strange,” Lilith agreed. “At some point their language matrix was deleted from the database. My computer records are very old. Pip has confirmed this from navigational data compared with current star positions. The data predates the establishment of a widespread translation matrix.”
    “Why do you think?” Minu asked.
    “There weren't many species around.” She glanced at Pip who, as usual, looked assured in his knowledge.
    “But you said this is part of the problem, too many species in the index.”
    “Define too many. I've identified a hundred in Lilith's database.”
    “That's quite a few.”
    “Not compared to the three thousand, six hundred, ninety-eight identified in the current Concordia records. Or the eight thousand, one hundred twelve that my research shows as a record high.”
    “Damn,” Minu whistled, then thought. “Is