Diego & Germán - 9. Chapter IX: The library

Our morning run had slowly been evolving into a hide and seek game. Germán was much fitter than I was, and tended to get bored running with me, so he began running around me, into the woods, coming back after a moment, taking me by surprise. I always tried to find him before he jumped out of the bushes. So the battle of wits escalated, him using his modifications to surprise me, and me using my training, and tuning the sensors with Lisa. I admit, most of the tuning was done by Lisa.

Germán was really difficult to detect. He could move through the underbrush like a tiger, and use the trees like a monkey. His heat footprint did not correspond to a normal human, on the infrared sensors. You just could see random patches of heat, which could correspond to smaller animals. His skin color also changed: white, black, green and brown, simulating lights and shadows. It was almost impossible to hear him over the rustling of the leaves in the wind, and he didn’t pant, in contrast to my running style, huffing and puffing with each step. To watch him speed through difficult terrain was a pleasure. Agile, elegant, sure of himself, every muscle moving with economy, like a big cat of prey.

But what can I tell you? I was so gone for him, I couldn’t find my way back. I reckon he was not really classically handsome, but to me he was the most beautiful man in the galaxy. So I tried to enjoy the time with him, to admire and ogle as much as possible, to touch and talk, to soak him in. It was clear that we would have to leave our small paradise someday, and it was not certain we could leave it together. I had to go back, sooner or later, and I really didn’t know what his plans were. For the time being, the word was ‘live the day’.

~~~

After our run, and the shower, we had to work. Well, at least I had to work, because Germán didn’t have to, but he liked my company enough to stay around, and help.

Having made the discovery of a lifetime was not really helping Lisa to decipher the cellulose sheets, or CS, as I was calling them by then. Well, there was some progress. For instance, Lisa had discovered there were about thirty something symbols that were repeated the whole time. Groups of symbols were separated by spaces, so we supposed they could be words. Lisa had even discovered there were two different sets of words, all using the same symbols, but each set only appearing in specific CS. Some CS had set A of words, and others had set B. It was as if in some CS they spoke only about bacon, and in other CS they only talked about black holes, using completely different vocabularies. The strange thing was that there weren’t even any common articles, prepositions or pronouns. Even stranger was that there seemed to be 4 different groups of CS divided by size and position, so that two groups of CS had one set of words, and the other two groups of CS had the other set of words. It was as if there were two holos only talking about bacon, and two only talking about black holes. Not even the few images were really helping. In Lisa’s words:

# There are only two ways of deciphering these symbols: one, we find CS that connect images to symbols; or two, we find so many CS that I can break the code by brute force. Not all the computation power in the galaxy could help with the information we have. #

Well, that was before; later she said:

# Fuck you! If you can do it better, do it yourself. Smart ass! #

So after two days of scanning the room, looking for more CS, and going through the symbols back and forth, up and down, we were not really getting any further, and that was beginning to offend me. It was Germán who finally gave us the idea that would solve the problem.

“What kind of place is that?” He asked, looking with a smirk at my disheveled hair, after my fingers had gone through it for the hundredth time.

“What do you mean, what kind of place?”

“Yeah, is it a palace, a house, a hotel…”

“Well…” Yes, what kind of place is this? I had been so obsessed by the few CS I had found that I had mostly ignored the rest of the room. “It’s a bedroom.” It’s a bedroom, you moron! There has to be a house around it! Why didn’t you think of it before?

Germán, who had been watching my face through the different stages of confusion, understanding, and triumph, begun to laugh.

“So, what does the mad scientist say?”

“It’s a house, there have to be other rooms!”

I put the spiders to work immediately, and moments later we found the door. It had been there the whole time, under a layer of dust and dirt. The scanners showed that there was more space behind. I could have banged my head against the wall if I hadn’t been so excited about the finding.

The spiders took no time opening a hole on the wooden door, entering a small corridor with some shelves and three more doors, some of them half open. The shelves were full of CS! I directed one spider to scan the CS, while the other explored the corridor and the doors.

The first door was closed and could not be moved. After scanning the space behind it, it looked like the roof had collapsed and the room behind was gone. The second door took me to a small room that contained what looked like a trough or maybe a bathtub, who knows? The third door led to a room I supposed was a kitchen, as there were many objects that looked like plates and trays, and what looked like a sink. There was also a cupboard covered with metal, I guessed was for food, as the metal would prevent animals like mice from getting into the cupboard. I would be exploring everything in detail later.

As the spider went through the fourth door, a biggish room was revealed. It was a treasure cove. CS everywhere, on the numerous shelves, on the tables, on the floor. There had to be hundreds of thousands of sheets with symbols. This could be it! The breakthrough I had been hoping for. The spider immediately began scanning, while I ordered another two spiders to enter the house through the airlock, and help with the scanning. The faster we got the information, the sooner we could leave this planet. There was no immediate danger, but you should never tempt fate.

So I left Lisa with the flood of information, and turned to face Germán, who had been silent at my side the whole time, watching everything.

“So, you found your treasure cave. Will I have to use the ‘Doctor’ when I’m talking to you?”

“No, we do prefer Your Royal Highness, when plebeians speak to us.” I put my arms around him. “I owe you one. This would have been a lot more difficult without your help.”

“How could you pay me back? My equipment is no longer lacking.”

That smile! I’m such a goner. How can I be so far in love in such a short time? -- We’ll have to see how this develops. It may just be loneliness. -- Stop with the negativity! Keep it simple. -- You are in love. If you both are compatible, only time can tell.

“I’m aware you are well equipped.” Aw, he still blushes! Sweet! “But there is another service I could offer. You know I pay in kind,” I said, lowering my voice, and trying to make it as suggestive as possible. His smile got wider, and I continued. “Tonight I will be cooking!”

His smile faltered with the surprise.

“You don’t like the food I make?” I said in mock outrage.

“Ehrm, I was thinking that maybe such a good idea would be worth a little bit more…”

“What!? You don’t like the way I cook? I slave away in the kitchen the whole day to make my grandma’s best recipes, and you don’t appreciate…”

It was half joke, but half not. He knew anything he said could not compete with my big mouth, so he just shut it by putting his mouth on mine, and kissing me like there was no tomorrow, until I got dizzy from pure lust, and lack of oxygen.

Damn him for manipulating me so easily.

Those were my last thoughts for a while.

~~~

On the second day Lisa found the key to decipher the code. Among the ‘books’, as the groups of CS were called, were some that contained long lists of words with their meanings, but the most important one contained images with words below them. One of the words found under the images corresponded to one of the systems Lisa had found in the initial books, so the easiest conclusion was that the image was the meaning for the word. Very slowly Lisa began to decipher the words and their meanings, which allowed us to go to the word listings, or ‘dictionaries’, and get more meanings for words.

The ‘books’ (‘libros’, ‘Bücher’, ‘书’, etc.) were in a ‘library’ (‘biblioteca’, ‘Bibliothek’, ‘图书馆’, etc.) with different ‘languages’ (‘idiomas’, ‘Sprachen’, ‘语言’, etc.). The place was a treasure of dictionaries, with at least fifty different ones. In the dictionaries we could find at least a dozen of those languages, and in other texts there were indications of several hundred more.

Incredible. There were different ‘languages’ that weren’t understandable to speakers of other ones. People living a few kilometers away couldn’t communicate with each other. Absurd, but fascinating. -- No wonder these people needed so many dictionaries to go around. -- Did they transport the dictionaries in a backpack, in case they didn’t understand someone? Doesn’t seem practical: they’re quite heavy. -- Some are similar enough it seems ludicrous they couldn’t find common ground to communicate. -- I guess I’ll find the translating device that allowed them to reach this level of civilization.

“Germán, can you believe they spoke hundreds of different languages?”

“Different languages? Different to what?”

Yeah, how do you explain that?

“They had different ways to say the same…” No, that’s not working. “Do you remember the guys in Longoria? Did you notice they speak with a strange musical sound and use funny expressions? Now imagine their singsong is so thick and their expressions so foreign, you can’t understand them, but they can understand each other.”

“Why would they do that? Isn’t talking an act done to be understood?”

“Yea, well, I haven’t discovered yet why they did it. Maybe they were some kind of secretive, warmongering societies, that wanted to have secret communications, or something. Dictionaries would be kind of secret, and maybe we’re in the house of some spy or other…”

“It sounds like you're using one of those languages. I don’t understand half of what you’re saying. What are ‘dictionaries’?”

“Those are lists of words that explain the meaning of other words.”

“And they explained it with words? How did people understand the words used to explain the words? Looking them up in a list of words with words they don’t understand?”

“I don’t know. Sounds kind of absurd. I hope the IA’s will discover an explanation in the information we’ve gathered.”

“These olden ones were crazy!”