Art was not what Anne Reynolt was looking for. At first she had only little things to complain about. The translators chose an alternative orthography for their output; they represented thex ? andq ? glyphs with digraphs. It made their translations look very quaint. Fortunately, Trixia wasn't the first to use the bizarre scheme. Unfortunately, she originated far too much of the questionable novelty.
One terrible day, Reynolt threatened to bar Ezr from Trixia's workroom—that is, from Trixia's life. "Whatever you're doing, Vinh, it's messing her up. She's giving me figurative translations. Look at these names: ‘Sherkaner Underhill,' ‘Jaybert Landers.' She's throwing away complications that all the translators agree on. In other places she's making up nonsense syllables."
"She's doing just what she should be doing, Reynolt. You've been working with automatons too long." One thing about Reynolt: Though she was crass even by Emergent standards, she never seemed vindictive. She could even be argued with. But if she barred him from seeing Trixia...
Reynolt stared at him for a moment. "You're no linguist."
"I'm Qeng Ho. To make our way, we've had to understand the heart of thousands of human cultures, and a couple of nonhuman ones. You people have mucked around this small end of Human Space, with languages based on our broadcasts. There are languages that are enormously different."
"Yes. That's why her grotesque simplifications are not acceptable."
"No! You need people who truly understand the other side's minds, who can show the rest of us what is important about the aliens' differences. So Trixia's Spider names look silly. But this ‘Accord' group is a young culture. Their names are still mostly meaningful in their daily language."
"Not all of them, and not the given names. In fact, real Spider talk merges given names and surnames, that interphonation trick."
"I'm telling you, what Trixia is doing is fine. I'll bet the given names are from older and related languages. Notice how they almost make sense, some of them."
"Yes, and that's the worst of all. Some of this looks like bits of Ladille or Aminese. These Ladille units—‘hours,' ‘inches,' ‘minutes'—they just make for awkward reading."
Ezr had his own problems with the crazy Ladille units, but he wasn't going to admit that to Reynolt. "I'm sure Trixia sees things that relate to her central translation the way Aminese and Ladille relate to the Nese you and I speak."
Reynolt was silent for a long moment, vacantly staring. Sometimes that meant that the discussion was over, and she had just not bothered to dismiss him. Other times it meant that she was trying very hard to understand. "So you're saying that she's achieving a higher level of translation, giving us insight by trading on our own self-awareness."
It was a typical Reynolt analysis, awkward and precise. "Yes! That's it. You still want the translations with all the pointers and exceptions and caveats, since our understanding is still evolving. But the heart of good trading is having a gut feel for the other side's needs and expectations."
Reynolt had bought the explanation. In any case, Nau liked the simplifications, even the Ladille quaintness. As time passed, the other translators adopted more and more of Trixia's conventions. Ezr doubted if any of the unFocused Emergents were really competent to judge the translations. And despite his own confident talk, Ezr wondered more and more: Trixia's meta-trans of the Spiders was too much like the Dawn Age history he had pushed at her just before the ambush. That might seem alien to Nau and Brughel and Reynolt, but it was Ezr's specialty and he saw too many suspicious coincidences.
Trixia consistently ignored the physical nature of the Spiders. Maybe this was just as well, considering the loathing that some humans felt for spiders. But the creatureswere radically nonhuman in appearance, more alien in form and life cycle than any intelligence yet encountered by Humankind. Some of their limbs had the function of human jaws, and they had nothing exactly like hands and fingers, instead using their large number of legs to manipulate objects. These differences were all but invisible in Trixia's translations. There was an occasional reference to "a pointed hand" (perhaps the stiletto shape that a foreleg could fold into) or to midhands and forehands—but that was all. In school, Ezr had seen translations that were this soft, but those had been done by experts with decades of face-to-face experience with the Customer culture.
