"H. Beam Piper - Omnilingual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

what had been a book, fifty thousand years ago; her eyes were masked by a binocular loup, the black
headband invisible against her glossy black hair, and she was picking delicately at the crumbled page with
a hair-fine wire set in a handle of copper tubing. Finally, loosening a particle as tiny as a snow-flake, she
grasped it with tweezers, placed it on the sheet of transparent plastic on which she was reconstructing the
page, and set it with a mist of fixative from a little spraygun. It was a sheer joy to watch her; every
movement was as graceful and precise as though done to music after being rehearsed a hundred times.

"Hello, Martha. It isn't cocktail-time yet, is it?" The girl at the table spoke without raising her head, almost
without moving her lips, as though she were afraid that the slightest breath would disturb the flaky stuff in
front of her.

"No, it's only fifteen-thirty. I finished my work, over there. I didn't find any more books, if that's good
news for you."

Sachiko took off the loup and leaned back in her chair, her palms cupped over her eyes.

"No, I like doing this. I call it micro-jigsaw puzzles. This book, here, really is a mess. Selim found it lying
open, with some heavy stuff on top of it; the pages were simply crushed. She hesitated briefly. "If only it
would mean something, after I did it."

There could be a faintly critical overtone to that. As she replied, Martha realized that she was being
defensive.

"It will, some day. Look how long it took to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, even after they had the Rosetta
Stone."

Sachiko smiled. "Yes, I know. But they did have the Rosetta Stone."

"And we don't There is no Rosetta Stone, not anywhere on Mars. A whole race, a whole species, died
while the first Cro-Magnon caveartist was daubing pictures of reindeer and bison, and across fifty
thousand years and fifty million miles there was no bridge of understanding.

"We'll find one. There must be something, somewhere, that will give us the meaning of a few words, and
we'll use them to pry meaning out of more words, and so on. We may not live to learn this language, but
we'll make a start, and some day somebody will."

Sachiko took her hands from her eyes, being careful not to look toward the unshaded lights, and smiled
again. This time Martha was sure that it was not the Japanese smile of politeness, but the universally
human smile of friendship.

"I hope so, Martha; really I do. It would be wonderful for you to be the first to do it, and it would be
wonderful for all of us to be able to read what these people wrote. It would really bring this dead city to
life again." The smile faded slowly. "But it seems so hopeless." 'You haven't found any more pictures?"

Sachiko shook her head. Not that it would have meant much if she had. They had found hundreds of
pictures with captions; they had never been able to establish a positive relationship between any pictured
object and any printed word. Neither of them said anything more, and after a moment Sachiko replaced
the loup and bent her head forward over the book.

Selim von Ohlmhorst looked up from his notebook, taking his pipe out of his mouth.