The mats were comfortable to sleep on and after their long day of travel, Ming and Jake went right to sleep with their robot Attendants watching over them. As they had seen when they entered, a pair of Replini guards was stationed at the doorway.
When Jake awakened, there was an alien face staring at him. It was very disturbing. Ming was already awake smiling at Jake’s surprise; apparently he’d been greeted similarly on awakening. Jake had looked at the tail horn patterns and recognized that this was Tance, the linguist.
Tance began to click to his smartphone and it began to speak Lojban words.
“Before you meet with the Emperor again, I was asked to see if it was possible to understand your language and to see if you could understand ours. The other has directed me to you to serve as linguist. I wanted to start with basic sounds and move on to nouns.”
Jake hadn’t even had breakfast yet or “excreted metabolic byproducts” and he explained this to Tance. Tance was more than willing to allow him these things but wanted to observe and record. Jake explained that this would make him uncomfortable, but Tance didn’t understand and was quite insistent. Jake could see his skin pattern change as he observed and wondered what the reason was. After that, it was on with the lesson. Tance was a better teacher than Jake and Jake began to figure out the clicks. The clicks actually had four different tones and once you got used to them, they were really kind of musical.
After several Replin days of consistent effort, Jake was beginning to understand the language but there were still mysterious components. Tance was unsuccessful in communicating their meaning and it didn’t seem like Jake was getting any better. In the meantime, Tance’s grasp of Lajbon was growing to be quite extensive, but he told Jake that some parts must be missing.
Jake started watching Replini TV while Tance was dormant in order to get a better picture of the language. Once that happened, Jake had an epiphany. He noticed that the mysterious language parts corresponded to changes in the skin patterns on the speakers and these were often reflected in the audience. The mysterious speech components were actually like the emoticons used in internet chat and text messages. Only these contained much more information including not just attitude but time elements as well. They even included subtleties such as differentiating between hope, expectation and wish. Since Tance’s teaching had been academic in nature, he hadn’t had the same emotional reactions. These emotions didn’t exactly match human experience so figuring them out was challenging but Jake had a solid start. He even figured out how to make many of the sounds with his mouth, though even with much practice they were far slower than Replini.
The missing ingredient for Tance was that he unconsciously expected human skin to express attitude and for that to be reflected in the language. It didn’t occur to him that human facial expressions often contained that kind of information.
