Omnilingual

Omnilingual, by H. Beam Piper

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Title: Omnilingual
Author: H. Beam Piper
Illustrator: Freas
Release Date: October 2, 2006 [EBook #19445]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from "Astounding Science Fiction," February, 1957. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was
renewed.

[Illustration]

OMNILINGUAL
To translate writings, you need a key to the code--and if the last writer of Martian died
forty thousand years before the first writer of Earth was born ... how could the Martian
be translated...?

BY H. BEAM PIPER
Illustrated by Freas
* * * * *
[Illustration]
Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper sky. The wind had shifted
since noon, while she had been inside, and the dust storm that was sweeping the high
deserts to the east was now blowing out over Syrtis. The sun, magnified by the haze, was
a gorgeous magenta ball, as large as the sun of Terra, at which she could look directly.
Tonight, some of that dust would come sifting down from the upper atmosphere to add
another film to what had been burying the city for the last fifty thousand years.
The red loess lay over everything, covering the streets and the open spaces of park and
plaza, hiding the small houses that had been crushed and pressed flat under it and the
rubble that had come down from the tall buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had
toppled outward. Here, where she stood, the ancient streets were a hundred to a hundred
and fifty feet below the surface; the breach they had made in the wall of the building
behind her had opened into the sixth story. She could look down on the cluster of
prefabricated huts and sheds, on the brush-grown flat that had been the waterfront when
this place had been a seaport on the ocean that was now Syrtis Depression; already, the
bright metal was thinly coated with red dust. She thought, again, of what clearing this city
would mean, in terms of time and labor, of people and supplies and equipment brought
across fifty million miles of space. They'd have to use machinery; there was no other way
it could be done. Bulldozers and power shovels and draglines; they were fast, but they
were rough and indiscriminate. She remembered the digs around Harappa and
Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, and the careful, patient native laborers--the
painstaking foremen, the pickmen and spademen, the long files of basketmen carrying
away the earth. Slow and primitive as the civilization whose ruins they were uncovering,
yes, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the times one of her pickmen had
damaged a valuable object in the ground. If it hadn't been for the underpaid and
uncomplaining native laborer, archaeology would still be back where Wincklemann had
found it. But on Mars there was no native labor; the last Martian had died five hundred
centuries ago.
Something started banging like a machine gun, four or five hundred yards to her left. A
solenoid jack-hammer; Tony Lattimer must have decided which building he wanted to
break into next. She became conscious, then, of the awkward weight of her equipment,
and began redistributing it, shifting the straps of her oxy-tank pack, slinging the camera
from one shoulder and the board and drafting tools from the other, gathering the
notebooks and sketchbooks under her left arm. She started walking down the road, over
hillocks of buried rubble, around snags of wall jutting up out of the loess, past buildings
still standing, some of them already breached and explored, and across the brush-grown
flat to the huts.

* * * * *
There were ten people in the main office room of Hut One when she entered. As soon as
she had disposed of her oxygen equipment, she lit a cigarette, her first since noon, then
looked from one to another of them. Old Selim von Ohlmhorst, the Turco-German, one
of her two fellow archaeologists, sitting at the end of the long table against the farther
wall, smoking his big curved pipe and going through a looseleaf notebook. The girl
ordnance officer, Sachiko Koremitsu, between two droplights at the other end of the table,
her head bent over her work. Colonel Hubert