The Gathering Flame by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald Page B

beginning— He’s an off-worlder, remember; you can’t expect him to understand —but then he rose and held out his hand.
    “Whatever you say, Domina.” His Gyfferan accent made the word into two syllables—“Dom’na”—but she found that she didn’t mind. “And whatever you want. Now.”
    PERADA ROSSELIN: GALCEN
     
    (GALCENIAN DATING 963 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 27 VERATINA)
     
    P ERADA HAD never seen any place like the spaceport at Galcen Prime. Nothing on Entibor came close. The immense dome of the Grand Concourse covered an area so big that she could scarcely see the edges of it. Everywhere she looked, she saw signs—flat ones displayed on the walls and the floor and the kiosks that rose up from the concourse like a field of mushrooms; brightly colored half-rounds in shop windows; and free-floating holos filling up the air beneath the dome like pictures painted with light. A lot of the signs had writing on them that she couldn’t read, which frustrated her; she’d known how to read signs back home on Entibor for over a year, and it looked like she was going to have to start all over again.
    She tugged on Dadda’s coat sleeve and pointed at the nearest sign. “What does that say in real writing?”
    “It is real, babba—it’s in Galcenian, that’s all.”
    “But what does it say?”
    Dadda said something that sounded like “frunds kovitten atteki,” and Perada shook her head. Her two braids—down to her shoulders now—swung back and forth with the motion.
    “No. I want to hear what is says .”
    Dadda sighed. “It says ‘ground transportation this way.’”
    “Then why don’t they write that?”
    “Because we’re on Galcen, babba, and they write the signs in Galcenian.”
    “Am I going to have to learn that, too?”
    “You’ll have to, I’m afraid. The school you’ll be going to takes its students from all over the galaxy, so they all have to speak Galcenian in classes and with each other.”
    “Why?”
    “Because otherwise nobody would be able to talk at all.”
    “No,” she said. “I mean, why don’t they talk real talk, like at home?”
    “Everybody talks real talk,” Dadda said. “But the talk is different in different places. So they use Galcenian when they’re not at home.”
    Perada thought about this for a while. She was about to resume the argument—why should all these people she’d never met talk to each other in Galcenian, which sounded funny, instead of learning how real people talked?—when the glidewalk came to an end. The archway ahead of them had a greyish shimmer across the opening and a scanner set into the wall beside it; Dadda showed a wafer of white plastic to the scanner and the force field came down.
    The hairs on her arms rose up and her skin tingled a little when she passed through the opening. On the other side of the archway was a room with a couple of chairs, a low table, and a green plant in a pottery tub. A thin, white-haired woman in a black dress rose from the nearest chair as they entered.
    “Gentlesir Lokkelar,” she said. “I am Zeri Delaven.”
    Zeri Delaven’s words had a strange rhythm to them, but nothing stranger than the way people from some parts of Entibor talked when they came to Felshang Province. Perada felt vindicated—people on Galcen didn’t have to speak the funny-sounding language of the signs if they didn’t want to. She opened her mouth to say so, then thought better of it. The white-haired woman had a look about her that made Perada think silence might be a wiser idea.
    “Mistress Delaven,” Dadda replied. “This is the student Lady Shaja wrote to you about: the Damozel Perada. We … Shaja and I … hope that she’ll be happy here.”
    Zeri Delaven fixed Perada with a penetrating glance. “We can’t guarantee happiness, I’m afraid. But that she will learn, and that she will be safe—those things, Gentlesir Lokkelar, we can promise.”

V. GALCENIAN DATING 974 A.F.
     
    ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 38