Sal Was Confused

[rosetto 0]

 

Sal was confused. Had his translator program been not operating at its top efficiency? Certainly it was imperfect. It had no way of deciphering the sequences containing only the symbols that Dr. West had identified as low-order. There were no references other than a subjective opinion that they represented phonemes of a spoken language. The program really had no way of even deciphering the distinctions between the thousand or so prefixes used in combination with the high-order symbols.

 

 

But, the title page of one of the documents from the fourth expeditions was flashing in his memory. The symbols were larger and bolder than any other. They had to be important but he couldn’t read them. He couldn’t understand what they said. But he did know some of the principle symbols and these words contained those. They were paired up, next to each other, like the West language analysis paper had stated. Perhaps he could get a general idea about what the title was by looking at them.

 

 

The first symbol-pair was ‘unity’. The second pair was a trait of the FATHER icon. It represented the ‘protective’ characteristic of this personality. The third was not one of the principle symbolic pairs, though. It was a minor pair that was in another table in her paper. He thought about it and the table was just not returning to his memory. However, if he continued to imagine the other table he may lose the title page image all together. He risked it and continued to think.

 

 

The third pair was a scientific term meaning ‘orbiting celestial body’. Sal when back and then reassembled what he had in his mind.

 

 

Roughly, it was “unity protective orbiting body”.

 

 

The Zoalus didn’t seem to be a graphically oriented people. Diagrams and pictures were scarce in the documents that had been given to him. This made deciphering the language almost impossible. One needed references which would link terms with actual objects and actions that these objects did. This was how Sal imagined all language was constructed. Zenolinguistics was definitely not his strong suit at the Academy. And that was many years ago. He could barely remember the names of his instructors, let alone the other classmates. There was one, however. She was prominent in his memory right now for some reason. She was Italian like Sal. Unlike Sal though, she was actually born in Italy. ‘What was her name?’ he thought.

 

 

‘Maria Bella Scintilla!’ He almost said it audibly. Maria had been studying transporter technology and Sal had got ‘caught’ in one of her unauthorized experiments. She had literally transported him out of the test lab to a sidewalk café in Italy. At least that’s what Sal thought at first. It was actually another holographic lab nearby. When she had discovered that she’d actually transporter Sal, she terminated the holographic interface and they appeared in her lab together, alone.

 

 

The mind was a bizarre thing. Sal looked at the controls in front of him briefly and then back at the captain who had his hand on his chin. The rest of the crew seemed frozen in their places. Time had stopped. Sal shook his head and turned back to the controls. His mind drifted back to the Zoalus image, the Title Page. Many of the romantic languages placed descriptive words after the subject noun with which they were associated. Perhaps THAT was why he had thought of Maria?

 

 

‘orbiting body protective unity’

 

 

‘Planetary Protection Unit’

 

 

It was a document concerning the planetary protection system.

 

 

Okay. So what? The papers received from Dr. Phantos clearly stated that there was a planetary defense system on line which had been impeding the progress of all expeditions that had attempted to investigate the planet’s surface. So, why was this paper so important? Why was it popping into his memory while he was on the bridge in the middle of a potentially dangerous situation? What was he missing?

 

 

It wasn’t just the similarity of the romantic languages. He thought about Maria because of the mission that he had prepared for hours before entering the sim lab that day. It stuck in his mind because of how the mission had been described to him. Their mission would be to establish standard orbit around a class-M planet that had as yet been visited by any known race. This would be a preliminary observation and no personnel would be transporting to the surface. The hitch was, however, that there was a planetary defense system that had to be avoided. Sal had wondered while preparing his flight plan, why would they have built a planetary defense system if they had no prior knowledge of alien species?