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Chapter 23: Names My World Gave to Bones

Chapter 23: Names My World Gave to Bones

By morning there were three.

The four-year-old from the storage family. A woman from the second fishing crew. And a boy of about eleven whose name Leon did not know, who had spent the previous day carrying water, which was the part that made Nayra put down what she was holding.

She had them separated before the light was properly up. Different mats, different cups, one adult assigned to each and told not to help with anybody else. She counted what went in and she counted what came out and she wrote nothing down, because she had never needed to.

Leon offered her the notebook.

She looked at it for a moment, and then at him, and asked a question with about eleven words in it.

He caught three. Know. How. You.

"The water is clean," he said, which was four words he had and was not an answer.

Nayra waited.

He tried again with his hands. Boiling. Covering. The marked jar. Then he made the sign for certain, which Luma had given him two evenings ago, and Nayra’s face did something he had not seen on it before.

She took the sign back off him. Repeated it. Then made a second sign beside it, one he did not know, and held both up together, and looked at him until he understood that she had just asked him which of the two he actually meant.

He did not know. He did not have the second word.

"Tala," Nayra said, and went back to her patients.

Tala found him an hour later with the register open on his knees and no idea what to do with it.

She sat down across from him, took the book, and turned to the page with the horn-crown on it. Native name at the top. Drawing underneath. Behaviour in the words he had.

And in the corner, small, marked with her own uncertainty line: Styracosaurus?

She tapped the small writing.

"How."

It was one word and it was not the question he expected. He had been braced for what is this since the day he wrote it.

So he tried to answer it, and discovered that he could not, because the honest answer required a chain of institutions that did not exist here and could not be drawn.

He started anyway.

He drew a book. Then he drew marks on the page, and a person looking at them, and a picture of an animal beside the marks. Tala understood that instantly. A made thing that holds a mark that holds a shape. Keth, she said, and he did not correct her, because she had never once been the one saying it wrong.

Then he drew the building.

A large hall. Bones inside it, assembled standing up. Small people walking underneath.

Tala looked at the drawing for a long time. Then she pointed at the standing bones, and then at the ground, and made the sign for dead.

"Yes."

She pointed at the little people walking underneath the dead thing and raised both eyebrows.

"Yes," Leon said. "We pay to do this."

He was fairly sure none of that translated. He said it for himself.

Then he tried the moving pictures, and the morning stopped being about epistemology.

He drew a flat bright rectangle. He drew an animal inside it. Then he drew the animal in a slightly different position, and then again, and made the flicking motion with his fingers to show the sequence, and mimed the animal walking across the rectangle while the rectangle stayed still.

Tala’s face changed by degrees.

She took the charcoal. She drew the rectangle. She drew the animal inside it. Then she drew a line all the way around the animal, closing it in, and looked up at him with an expression of genuine and specific horror.

"Na," Leon said. "No. Na, na. Listen —"

She was already calling Aru.

Aru arrived at a speed inconsistent with a splinted calf, listened to about six words, looked at the drawing, and asked Leon a question that needed no translation whatsoever, which was whether Leon’s people kept animals inside flat shining boxes.

"No."

Aru pointed at the drawing.

"It is not the animal," Leon said. "It is."

He did not have the word for image. He did not have the word for light. He had thirty-eight words and two of them were insults.

So he took a piece of polished shell out of Nayra’s tool line, held it in the sun, and threw a bright coin of light onto the wall of the platform. Then he moved his hand through it. The shape moved. He moved his hand away. The shape went out.

He pointed at the light. Then at his drawing of the rectangle.

"Same."

Tala reached out and put her palm into the reflected light and turned her hand over, watching it lie across her skin without weight.

"Ei," she said, eventually. Yes.

Aru remained unconvinced for another full minute, on grounds Leon could not follow but which appeared to concern the question of where the animal went when the light stopped. Then he lost interest and asked whether Leon had any more of the terrible hard bar.

By then half the settlement’s children had assembled to watch a grown man throw light at a wall, and Leon spent an unbudgeted forty minutes teaching six of them to do it, and it was the best he had felt since the cube had spoken.

Tala waited until the children had gone.

Then she took the register back, put her finger on the small marked writing, and asked the question she had actually come with.

"Who teach you."

Leon opened his mouth to say books, and stopped, because she had just spent an hour learning what a book was and she was not asking that.

She made the sign for far. Then the sign for see. Then she pointed at the drawing of the horn-crown and turned her hand over.

The people who taught you. Did they go there? Did they watch this?

And there it was.

In her world, and in every world that has ever existed except one, knowledge of an animal comes from a person who watched the animal. You learn a track from somebody who followed it. You learn what a thing does before it charges from somebody who was there when it charged and came back to say so. The chain has a person at every link and every person had eyes.

Leon had no such chain.

He could have lied. It would have been easy, and it would have been three words, and it would have made him a source instead of a stranger with a book.

"Na," he said.

Tala’s hand stopped.

He drew the bones again, in the ground this time, broken and scattered. Then he drew people digging them up. Then he drew people standing over the bones with their own drawings, arguing — He drew two of them with different animals sketched above their heads.

Then he pointed at his own small marked writing in the register, and made the sign for maybe.

"No one saw," he said. Four words he had, in the wrong order, and she got it anyway.

"Bones," he said. "Not animal."

Tala sat very still.

Then she asked one more thing, slowly, giving him each word: whether the people who dug up the bones were ever wrong.

Leon thought about the plated dinosaur he had been shown at eleven with its plates lying flat like roof tiles, corrected twice since. About the tail spikes pointing the wrong way for thirty years. About the feathers that had not existed at all when he was a boy and now covered half the animals he could name. About a museum in Frankfurt where a skeleton had stood in a posture no living thing could have held, for four decades, with a label.

"Yes," he said. "Many times."

He wanted to explain that being wrong and correcting it was the entire method, that the corrections were the good part, that a discipline which admits error in public is stronger than one which does not.

He had thirty-eight words. He could not say any of it.

So it landed the way it landed, which was: the people who taught you never saw one, they worked from broken bones, and they were often wrong.

Tala looked at the register for a while.

"I know names my world gave to bones," Leon said, mostly to himself. "That is not the same thing."

She did not argue with him. That was worse.

She turned to a fresh page, and she drew a line down the middle of it.

On the left she drew an eye.

On the right she drew the flat bright rectangle, the book, and the hall of standing bones. All three, small, in a row.

Then she pointed at the horn-crown page, and at his small marked Earth name, and moved her finger across the line to the right-hand side, and left it there.

Two books.

Not one book with a marked corner. Two.

What the Retha had seen went in the first. What Leon had been told went in the second. And the second one did not get to sit on the same page as the first, where a person in a hurry might read them as the same kind of thing.

Leon started to object, and heard the shape of his own objection before it got out. But my names are useful. They carry two hundred years of comparison. They connect this animal to a thousand others. He recognised it as exactly the argument a man makes when he has just been demoted and does not want to say so.

"Ei," he said.

Tala tore the page.

She did it carefully, along the fold, and handed him the smaller half, and kept the larger one, and there was nothing symbolic about the division at all: she simply now held the book with the observations in it, and he held the book with the guesses.

Then she said something with his name in it and one word he had never heard, and Aru, who had been listening from four metres away with the total lack of shame that had come to define him, translated it into the sign for student.

Leon looked at the half-page in his hand.

Twenty-six years had taught him that being the most educated person in the room was a stable position. Four days here had been quietly dismantling that, and this was the part where somebody wrote it down.

He wrote Book Two at the top of his half, in English, where nobody could read it.

Then he went to find Nayra, because there were three sick people, the water was clean, and somewhere between the covered jar and the mouth of a four-year-old child there was a gap he had not thought to close.

He got about six steps.

Then Tala said his name again, and when he turned she was holding up the larger half of the page, the one with the eye drawn on it, and she tapped the empty space beneath the drawing where the observations went.

She was not keeping him out of it.

She was telling him to go and look.