The Whisper Path ...Conclusion... * It began with a taste: —like flower petals… —like wax… —like… …nothing Marek could think to name, and it shifted, attenuated into the neutral flavor of his own tongue, his own teeth, the warmth of his saliva and the wet insides of his own cheeks. Vertigo blossomed like a cloud, heavy with storm-potential: the promise of lightening, thunder, a pulsing migraine. For an instant, Marek felt the scratch tingle of somatosensory static: something like an itch, a twitch, a doodle of epilepsy beneath a sky, gray with turbulence. The Eul’taliib didn’t sense in ways humans could understand. And so, Marek floundered through vertigo, ghost-whispers, and disconcerting spasms of boiling strobes of color: gibberish at first, and then— —the salt flats stretched out around him, with the city of Nikēa looming in the westerly distance, behind a haze of its own exhalations. Spindly towers loomed nearby, like leviathan gantries, rusting in the salt air. They were dark with shadow and corrosion. Globes of light hovered above them: strange and inscrutable orbs beyond contemporary understanding. Humans didn’t know what they were, though humans—a long time ago—created them. The Eul’taliib said so. The Eul’taliib knew nothing of them. There were five such towers…six…eight if he turned around. Dead things: ruins from the first human settlers here. They’d arrived long, long ago. They died and took the secrets of their lighthouses with them. The humans who followed them didn’t know that others had come before them; the Eul’taliib did not invite them. The Eul’taliib knew nothing of them that they could express in ways that— —a woman climbed the nearest of the spindly, gantry-towers: she was delirious with strange, lethal fevers. Candice Amberlin, the Observer thought, in ways that were not human. She should never have learned the word… * * * Twilight unfurled over the park. A procession—five Eul’taliib, lanternless—walked along the whisper path, swaying as Marek had seen them sway in darkness, long ago and in a different life. The Informant crouched beside him, sitting in the grasshopper fashion so common to the species. There might have been concern on its inscrutable, alien face. Its mouth fingers moved with complex vigor, shaping another gleaming nodule of speech-sap. “The word,” Marek said with the threat of a headache, blossoming behind his eyes. “I don’t understand.” It would take hours, he knew, for his brain to absorb all of what had dissolved in his mouth. It would happen, he knew, in strange, waking dreams and during sleep-dreams as well. The Informant twittered and chortled, punctuating the sounds with sharp, hollow clicks. The translator on its neck hummed in its flat approximation of human speech: “There are limits to communication, they are specific to each of our species. Many Eul’taliib perceptions are difficult for humans to integrate into any coherent vocabulary of experiences. There are words, spit-words…one in particular…that model an aspect of reality humans cannot perceive; it engenders severe neurological damage. We do not teach this word in any direct way, we do not secrete it from our tongues for humans. It is dangerous to do so.” As the Informant spoke, its mouth fingers continued shaping the nodule of golden speech-sap. It was, Marek saw, as large as an almond. “Do you understand?” Marek nodded. He knew of the words…nearly a dozen of them. Dangerous words. Three of them were lethal. “Candice Amberlin, in her pursuit of knowledge, learned one such word.” “And it drove her to suicide.” “We don’t know. We think it simply broke her mind. Her death, we think, was accidental.” “Who rendered the word?” Marek asked. “We do not know.” “Jarédo—” “Your mate? The policeman?” “—yes. My mate. He says the investigation behind her death is closed, but Candice Amberlin…she was a friend of his, a mentor.” The Informant waggled its head from side to side in a gesture Marek couldn’t interepret. It laughed: kssksskss, and flexed its forelegs. “Your mate is fond of xenologists. Candice Amberlin. You. Are there others he knows?” “I’m a xenolinguist…but Candice Amberlin…her specialty, if I’m correct in thinking, was history. Archaeoxenology, pre-contact studies.” “You know of the words…” “Yes.” “You are curious about them?” Marek shrugged. “Of course…but I’m also aware of the intricacies of biochemical speech…that stuff you’re kneading into shape with your mouth-fingers; I couldn’t tell you exactly how it works, or how many Eul’taliib are even able to make something compatible with human biology…you’re one of them, obviously. But I know the risks; I know that certain concepts can be expressed verbally, though to a woefully-limited degree, and not-at-all in a biochemical sense, not in any way that’s of benefit to humankind.” “And so, you will not repeat Candice Amberlin’s mistake…?” “No.” “This is good, Marek. But there are things you will learn from what you are beginning to digest. Be prepared for that. It is…sensitive information. It is dangerous for you, and for Jarédo.” “Dangerous?” “It is a police matter.” Marek flinched. The Informant—apparently finished exuding the shiny biochemical narrative, buffed it between opposable thumbs and silently—wordlessly—gave it to Marek. “A police matter?” Marek asked, accepting the gleaming, vaguely amber gem. “Jarédo will understand,” the Informant said. “Later.” There was a pause: long and silent. And then: “You are well enough to walk?” Marek nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.” His feet were bare; he didn’t remember sliding his sandals off. He put them back on. The Informant looked around, its gaze resting—for long moments—on another procession: seven Eul’taliib, a single lantern glowing in the growing darkness. “You should return home,” the Informant said. “You should…speak with Jarédo.” * * * There were human words. The Eul’taliib had words of their own: voice-shapes and neuro-interactive chemicals sweated from unfathomable, unfamiliar glands. They were heavy with compressed, alien meanings. Words conveyed. Words confused. There were spit-words, hardened like oblong nodules of tree-sap, kneaded by the mouth-fingers of any adept speaker, any Eul’taliib with something to say. They dissolved on the human tongue; they sublimated into vapor, inhaled. They loitered—for a time—in the lungs, saturating tissues until—in time—they leeched into the blood, flowed into the brain and decompressed…like dreams, like the memories of dreams, skittish and unpredictable. Speech-words were safe, and—at times—confusing. Spit-words—melted, sublimated, and inhaled—were more precise in the understanding they carried, and more dangerous. Spit-words were as different from human flesh, human blood, and human brains as the moist, rubbery innards of any Eul’taliib; more than a dozen of them were toxic. The Eul’taliib did not share these words. Candice Amberlin ingested one, and maybe more. It (they?) killed her. “I don’t understand,” Jarédo said, quietly and in the dark. The night was indolent with clotted, sullen humidity, city-noise, and the promise of rain. Later. The apartment was dark and thick with familiar, domestic smells. The lights were off, and so Jarédo’s voice was like a phantom: an invisible man in bed beside Marek. Jarédo had accepted the Informant’s gleaming, hardened account of Candice’s death. He’d let it melt on his tongue. He’d drawn its vapors into his throat, his lungs, and into his blood. And now, beside Marek, trembling—oh, so slightly—beneath a bed-sheet flimsy enough for summer, he swam through the same currents of alien perception Marek had endured at the base of a turnip tree, in a park cut by a narrow, graveled whisper path. “Candice was a lot of things,” Jarédo said. “But”—he inhaled, moved as if to hug himself against a chill or a fit of trembles—“she was not reckless.” Marek shifted; the pillow beneath his head was a hot, muggy depression. “There may be chemo-linguistic concepts, obscure historical references that the Eul’taliib take for granted and that humans aren’t prone to explore.” Jarédo shook his head and Marek felt the motion. “You believe that?” Jarédo asked. “You work in the field of Eul’taliib linguistics…you speak—what?—two of their languages: verbally, at least.” Marek shrugged. “There are more than a dozen languages in common use, and hundreds of dialects.” “And how many of those come human attention? “A few.” Another head-shake in the darkness; Marek felt it. “No,” Jarédo said. “There are precautions—you know that better than I do, and she knew that as well as you.” “Then what?” “I don’t know.” But he did; and Marek knew the same thing. They danced—for a bit—in the darkness, circling the subject and stealing oblique glances at it. Marek felt that motion, aware of his own shy, tremulous attempts to say what itched in his throat, what had been itching since his visit with the Informant, since leaving the Informant and returning home with tattered remnants of narrative-decompression bubbling through his mind. Eul’taliib observers had seen her and messaged their compatriots. There were observers everywhere, human and Eul’taliib alike, and Eul’taliib observers saw Candice, staggering as if intoxicated and making her way beyond city limits, beyond the human boundary and into the open salt flats. They watched as she climbed a tower, and as observers, that was all they did. It was never an observer’s job to interfere, to interact, to intervene. They watched as she climbed a tower, maybe recognizing something in the set of her features, or in the jerky, uncoordinated motion of her limbs; there were ways, after all, to identify the behavioral and physiological markers of language poisoning… Marek saw afterimages: —a ghost play… —insight, after the fact: like sparks of inspiration following the conquest of a problem. The observers did what was necessary. They called the proper authorities, and continued to watch. There were Eul’taliib reasons for such inaction: exquisite in their logic and impenetrable to humans. There were moral implications that simply didn’t translate, but there was protocol, and so the message went out, and the proper authorities came as quickly as they could. It was too late, and by the time the authorities arrived, Candice had slipped…fallen…and broke herself into a lumpy mass on the hard-packed ground beneath the archaic, ruined tower she’d decided to climb. The observer saw it. Marek saw it, now, as if he’d been there. Jarédo saw it. …how she moved…how she climbed…how she slipped and fell… A feeble breeze stirred beyond the window. A shuttle thundered in the distance—a cargo hauler, most likely, on its way from somewhere to somewhere. And beneath it, woven through the darkness, a dim, nagging mote of awareness: Candice Amberlin died from language poisoning. Accidental death. Case closed. End of story. Candice Amberlin was a professional archaeoxenologist. Such professionals didn’t simply die such reckless deaths. There were protections built into the occupation: contact protocols, language-exposure safeguards. Rules. Regulations. Marek drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. “I could ask some questions,” he said. “To whom?” “There are aspects of my job that might benefit from a bit of archaeoxenology; I could…go looking for Candice and be surprised when I learn that she’s dead…” He shrugged, sure that the gesture was obscured by the flimsy bed-sheet, the darkness, and the ghostly, dimly insubstantial city-light wafting through the window. “I could ask if she worked with anyone who’d be able to help with my inquiries. I could give you names and you could ask your own questions in other places.” Silence. Marek heard the slow intake of breath and hints of something: a struggle, perhaps, though he couldn’t guess at its cause, its goal, its logic. He simply listened, shifting ever-so-slightly, to face Jarédo in the darkness. “You’re suggesting that I re-open the investigation.” Marek shook his head, disturbing the pillow, now pressed to his cheek. “You want to re-open the investigation. I’m only confirming that you might have a reason to. You knew Candice…for a time, at least. You ingested the same sort of Eul’taliib spit-bead that I did, on the whisper path and so you saw what the Informant showed me. I never really knew Candice, but I can tell from what you said in the bar, and by the way you’re acting now, that things don’t add up. The Informant told me that this is a police matter and that you’d understand it. And so—yeah—I think you have a reason to find out what happened to Candice, maybe not as a contact cop, but at least as her friend. If I can help you do that, I’ll do it.” “Yeah?” “Yeah.” Jarédo brushed a caress along the curve of Marek’s shoulder, his neck, and into his hair. “I don’t want you involved in something that could get ugly.” “I’ll think of something,” Marek said. “There’s enough crossover work between linguistic enforcement and the archaeological sciences. I can claim personal research stuff and just tell everyone that I’m looking for unexplored linguistic problems…super-obscure chemo-linguistic artifacts that nobody’s ever thought to uncover, catalogue, and classify. I won’t be doing anything dangerous. That’s your job, whether I like it or not. I don’t like it, but it’s what you do. But if I can help, I’m going to.” “And if I try to talk you out of it?” “You can’t.” A pause, an inhale. “When I saw your face in the bar this afternoon, I knew something was happening, that things might have been bigger than you said. I can’t say if you’re dealing with a cover-up or just messy police work, but you’re dealing with something…and I saw it in your eyes. It scared me, Jarédo…it shook me up…I don’t like seeing you like that: helpless. And maybe—right now—you’re helpless. I don’t like that, and I want to make it stop.” “Just like that?” Jarédo asked. “Just like that,” Marek said. Silence. And then, quietly: “Lets get some sleep, Marek…we can discuss this some more, tomorrow.” Marek nodded and smiled in the darkness. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” …THE END… * As you can tell, there is more to come: more of the mystery to resolve. I hadn’t actually expected to write this tale, but that’s often how it goes; inspiration strikes when it strikes, and it’s best to always carry a notebook around. I’m fascinated by the Eul’taliib, and so I’m sure there will be more stories concerning them. I’m rather pleased that—like their human neighbors—they are members of an interstellar society. I’m interested in seeing how that might play itself out. As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this first little dip into yet another interstellar universe.