"Hey, speak in whatever language you grew up with."
"No."
"Why not? I want to see if it's one I know anything about."
"The doctors say there's something wrong with the brain."
"All right. What did they say was wrong?"
"Aphasia, alexia, amnesia."
"Then you were pretty messed up." She frowned. "Was that before or after the bank robbery?"
"Before."
She tried to order what she had learned." Something happened to you that left you with no memory, unable to speak or read, and so the first thing you did was rob the Telechron bank—which Telechron Bank?"
"On Rhea-IV."
"Oh, a small one. But, still—and you stayed free for six months. Any idea what happened to you before you lost your memory?"
The Butcher shrugged.
"I suppose they went through all the possibilities that you were working for somebody else under hypnotics. You don't know what language you spoke before you lost your memory? Well, your speech patterns now must be based on your old language or you would have learned about I and you just from picking up new words."
"Why must these sounds mean something?"
"Because you asked a question just now that I can't answer if you don't understand them."
“No." Discomfort shadowed his voice. “No. There is an answer. The words of the answer must be simpler, that's all."
"Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don't know the words, you can't know the ideas. And if you don't have the idea, you don't have the answer."
"The word you four times, yes? Still nothing unclear, and you mean nothing."
She sighed. "That's because-I was using the word phatically—ritually, without regard for its real meaning . . . as a figure of speech. Look, I asked you a question that you couldn't answer."
The Butcher frowned.
"See, you have to know what they mean to make sense out of what I just said. The best way to learn a language is by listening to it. So listen. When you"— she pointed to him—"said to me," and she pointed to herself. “Knowing what ships to destroy, and ships are destroyed. Now to go down the Dragon's Tongue, Tarik go down the Dragon's Tongue, twice the fist"—she touched his left hand—"banged the chest." She raised his hand to his chest. The skin was cool and smooth under her palm. "The fist was trying to tell something. And if you had used the word 'I', you wouldn't have had to use your fist. What you wanted to say was: You knew what ships to destroy and I destroyed the ships. You want to go down the Dragon's Tongue, I will get Tarik down the Dragon's Tongue."
The Butcher frowned. "Yes, the fist to tell something."
"Don't you see, sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist. And it's something the brain needs to have exist, otherwise you wouldn't have to beat your chest, or strike your fist on your palm. The brain wants it to exist; let me teach it the word."
The frown cut deeper into his face. Just then mist blew away before them. In star-flecked blackness something drifted, flimsy and flickering. They had reached a sensory port, but it was transmitting over frequencies close to regular light. "There," said the Butcher, "there is the alien ship."
"It's from Yiribia-IV," Rydra said. "They're friendly to the Alliance."
The Butcher was surprised she'd recognized it. "A very odd ship."
"It does look funny to us, doesn't it.” Jebel did not know where it came from. He shook his head.
"I haven't seen one since I was a kid. We had to entertain delegates from Yiribia to the Court of Outer Worlds. My mother was a translator there." She leaned on the railing and gazed at the ship. "You wouldn't think something that's so flimsy and shakes around like that would fly or make stasis jumps. But it does."
"Do they have this word, I?"
"As a matter of fact they have three forms of it: I - below - a - temperature - of - six - degrees - centigrade, I - between - six - and ninety - three - degrees - centigrade, and I - above - ninety - three."
The Butcher looked confused.
"It has to do with their reproductive process," Rydra explained. "When the temperature is below six degrees they're sterile. They can only conceive when the temperature is between six and ninety-three, but to actually give birth, they have to be above ninety-three."
The Yiribian ship moved like floppy feathers across the screen.
"Maybe I can explain something to you this way; with all nine species of galaxy-hopping life forms, each as widespread as our own, each as technically intelligent, with as complicated an economy, seven of them engaged in the same war we are, still we hardly ever run into them; and they run into us or each other about as frequently: so infrequently, that even when an experi enced spaceman like Jebel passes alongside one of their ships, he can't identify it. Wonder why?"
"Why?"
"Because compatibility factors for communication are incredibly low. Take the Yiribians, who have enough knowledge to sail their triple-yoked poached eggs from star to star: they have no word for 'house', 'home', or 'dwelling'. 'We must protect our families and our homes.' When we were preparing the treaty between the Yiribians and ourselves at the Court of Outer Worlds, I remember that sentence took forty-five minutes to say in Yiribian. Their whole culture is based on heat and changes in temperature. We're just lucky that they do know what a 'family' is, because they're the only ones besides humans who have them. But for house you have to end up describing . . . an enclosure that creates a temperature discrepancy with the outside environment of so many degrees, capable of keeping comfortable a creature with a uniform body temperature of ninety-eight-point-six, the same enclosure being able to lower the temperature during the months of the warm season and rise it during the cold season, providing a location where organic sustenance can be refrigerated in order to be preserved, or warmed well above the boiling point of water to pamper the taste mechanism of the indigenous habitant who, through customs that go back through millions of hot and cold seasons, have habitually sought out this temperature changing device . . .' and so forth and so on. At the end you have given them some idea of what a 'home' is and why it is worth protecting. Give them a schematic of the air-conditioning and central heating system and things begin to get through. Now: there is a huge solar-energy conversion plant that supplies all the electrical energy for the Court. The heat amplifying and reducing components take up an area a little bigger than Tarik. One Yiribian can slither through that plant and then go describe it to another Yiribian who never saw it before so that the-second can build an exact duplicate, even to the color the walls are painted—and this actually happened, because they thought we'd done something ingenious with one of the circuits and wanted to try it themselves—where each piece is located, how big it is, in short completely describe the whole business, in nine words. Nine very small words, too,"
The Butcher shook his head. "No. A solar-heat conversion system is too complicated. These hands dismantle one, not too long ago. Too big. Not—"
"Yep, Butcher, nine words. In English it would take a couple of books full of schematics and electrical and architectural specifications. They have the proper nine words. We don't."
"Impossible."
"So's that." She pointed toward the Yiribian ship. "But it's there and flying." She watched the brain, both intelligent and injured, thinking. "If you have the right words," she said, "it saves a lot of time and makes things easier."
After a while he asked, "What is I?"
She grinned. "First of all it's very important. A good deal more important than anything else. The brain will let any number of things go to pot as long as 'I' stay alive. That's because the brain is part of I. A book is, a ship is, Jebel is, the universe is, but, as you must have noticed, I am."