52 Project #5: Rosetta Stone (Patreon)

When Triala was twelve, a transmute spoke to her.

She'd never told anyone else the story. One of the defining characteristics of transmutes was that they didn't speak. And she had only been a child, and had come within a hair of being killed. People would say she had hallucinated. They might even take her to the Magicians, suspecting a traumatized mind. But she knew what she'd heard. And the transmute hadn't killed her.

She and the other children in her age group were going to the Magicians to be tested for Magic aptitude. Already Triala had known that she didn't want to be a Magician. She feared the transmutes, like everyone on Majer, but she felt a powerful fascination with them as well. She had to be a Ranger, because only the Rangers got to see transmutes on a regular basis. Even if it was only to kill them. Unfortunately, if you had Magician aptitude, you became a Magician whether you liked it or not, and Triala had a deep and disquieting suspicion that she had it. She heard things, and remembered things that couldn't possibly have happened to her. So she was very tense that day, fearing the interview with the Magicians.

A local Lifeliner brought her and the rest of the locality's 12-year-olds to the huge tree that housed the Magicians' testing center. They were all made to wait in the outer rim, while the Lifeliner, a woman of clan Ringart, talked to the Magicians. Then the testers came out, and called for the children one by one, in the order of their birthdates.

As one of the youngest of the twelves, Triala had a while to wait. So she sat while child after child returned, known now to have no Magic within them-- or did not return, taken away to the training places. The wait was driving her crazy with dread. Magicians never deliberately encountered transmutes; close contact with the creatures generally drove them insane. And Triala wanted to see transmutes.

She got her wish. When there were four children left, one of the wooden chairs exploded out, the color draining from it as it melted into gelatin. Triala sat frozen, shock and horror and fascinated excitement paralyzing her, as the gelatin recomposed itself into an evor, a stationary swamp animal with tentacles. The tentacles lashed out, only seconds after the chair's melting, and caught the Lifeliner in the gun hand before she could get her weapon aimed. She dropped the gun and screamed as the tentacle dragged her in. "Kids! Get help!"

The door was blasted open, and three Magicians charged into the room. They tried to form a triangle around the transmute, which changed again, pulling itself in, and leapt. A huge mouth with devouring teeth flew at one Magician before he could focus his power, and it ripped his head off and swallowed it.

The two other Magicians began to chant, trying to pen the transmute into a protective box as it charged for the entrance. But without a third, all they could do was keep it in a corridor, and before they could narrow the corridor and crush the transmute, it had reached the first protective door, which it yanked open.

On the other side of the protective hall, the second door came down and transmutes swarmed inside. Probably there were only five or six, but to Triala it seemed like thousands. More Magicians arrived to fight. A slender young man, no older than an eighteen, tried to get Triala and the other three children to safety. A transmute smashed in his skull, and then tore a little boy apart for good measure.

Jesee and Marin, the other surviving children, clung to each other under a table, trembling and crying. Triala was trembling too, but she didn't feel it. She felt numb, strangely aloof. Despite the blood and the viciousness of the battle, she couldn't quite make herself believe that the transmutes might kill her.

She glanced at the inner door that led deeper into the complex. It had been sealed off with a metal safety door, protecting the rest of the complex from the transmutes, and essentially writing off the children in the waiting room. Unless the Rangers showed up in time to rescue them, there would be no help for them-- the complex couldn't be endangered any further for the sake of three children. The Lifeliner, Marin's mother, was dead, her body strewn in chewed pieces all over the floor. All the Magicians were dead.  There were also dead transmutes virtually everywhere.

But there was still at least one alive.

The transmute approached. Jesee and Marin scrambled back, yelling, "Triala, it's coming!" But Triala was frozen. The transmute held a vaguely humanoid shape, with huge, luminescent eyes that trapped Triala in fascination. She couldn't move. She didn't really want to.

The transmute was so beautiful.

Its skin was pearly luminescent, and the light from the overhead algaelamp made colors dance on it. Its body was fluidity and grace incarnate. A human shape made of gelatin, flowing in and out as it moved forward. It hadn't manifested a mouth, or any other threatening appendage, and its eyes were pools of silver ocean water. Triala had been out of the swamps just once to visit the ocean, but she had never forgotten how ocean water sparkled, so clear. 

It told her that she had been tested already.

There were no words. But she knew the transmute had spoken. Not in language, even the language of mental speech. Pure thought, with no words.

Behind her, Jesee and Marin screamed. Triala spun. They had both been caught by a wounded transmute-- tentacles were wrapped around both their necks. As she watched, they slumped.

"Let them go!" she screamed at the transmute.

She heard it say that they would not die. The thought that she interpreted as "death" carried overtones of other concepts-- the extinguishing of an annoying light, the squashing of a bug. Then it gave her to understand that humanity would believe she had been tested already, and had no magic. Only, what it seemed to be saying was that she had no fearsome human power, and that this was somehow true. Or perhaps that she could make it true, if she wanted.

She had not been tested already. And if she was understanding mindspeech-- or something like it-- she had to have Magic. But it could be true, if she said it to her fellow humans, in the human language that the transmutes couldn't speak. It would become the truth, if she said it was.

It said to tell no one of this.

And then the Rangers arrived, and cut down the remaining transmutes with lasers. Jesee and Marin had been poisoned by sleep venom, but would recover. The Rangers told Triala just how lucky she was. "That transmute was about to go for you. Why didn't you run?"

She didn't know. It was as if she were waking up from a dream, now. It struck her suddenly what danger she had been in. "I-- I-- couldn't..."

"I hear that happens. You were unbelievably lucky we got here in time. Another minute, and you and your friends would have been mute meat."

She knew it wasn't true, but she didn't contradict it. The transmutes had killed and died to talk to her, just to her. How could she explain that? She couldn't understand it herself.

She told everyone she had been tested for Magic, and had none. No one checked her story. She was never tested again.

She never spoke of it, ever.

***

In the flit on the way to her first real mission as a Ranger, Triala thought of that.

The situation they were going into was similar. The transmutes had broken into a school, killed all the Professionals, and-- as far as the Magicians could tell-- hadn't killed the children yet. No one knew why. It was unclear whether transmutes understood the concept of "hostages"-- certainly no human had ever held a transmute hostage against another. More likely, they planned to kill the children and impersonate them, in yet another useless attempt to mimic humans. Of all the species on Majer, native and starborn both, humans were the only ones that transmutes could not successfully imitate, because humans were the only ones with language.

"So what do they hope to gain?" Aisander of Korita asked. She was a slim, pale-skinned redhead who had consistently been at the top of the class-- though never quite as high as Triala, whose grades were outrageously good.

"What do you mean, Korita Recruit?" Dilman Ranger asked, narrowing his eyes at her.

"I mean-- if they know we won't be fooled, why do they bother?"

"If they don't understand language, what makes you so sure they know we won't be fooled?" Dilman Ranger asked sharply. "They might have no idea what keeps tripping them up. Never assume you know how the transmutes think."

"Besides," Dereg of Mattorn said, eager to score points, "kids often don't talk right away after a trauma like that. If a transmute plays an unconscious kid, it might get back as far as that kid's Treehouse before it gets caught, if the Rangers are careless."

"Good point, Mattorn Recruit. If we rescue any kids, we make them talk before we take them back."

"Do you really think there'll be any kids to rescue, Ranger?" Triala asked.

Dilman's face darkened. "Doubt it."

"I heard they sometimes kidnap children," Aisander said.

"It happens, yes." He turned to Triala. "It happened to you, Morell Recruit, if I remember the dossier on you right."

Triala nodded. "When I was a small baby. About 2 or 3. I disappeared for close to a year following a transmute raid, and then turned up again. No one knows why."

"No one knows why transmutes do anything," Dilman said. He checked the flit comp. "We're almost there. Morell-- don't get so fascinated with the transmutes they kill you. Mattorn-- no heroics. Neither Morell nor Korita's going to be impressed by stupid stunts. Korita-- don't be soft. If it looks like a kid but it doesn't talk, we can't take chances."

"What if it's a baby?" Aisander protested.

"Not that kind of school. It's for sevens and up. All the kids will be linguistic. Any that aren't are transmutes. Shoot them before they get you."

***

When Triala had been training for her Ranger status, the transmute lack of language had been given as the cause of the war between the two species.

"We probably started it," the instructor had said. "The first humans who came to Majer didn't much care what they destroyed, and the transmutes probably fought to defend themselves. But there's no way to call a truce. Their memories seem to be as long as ours, and they're probably as intelligent-- but they don't have language."

"What about mindspeech?" a student had asked.

"Any Magician that actually manages to get through to a transmute goes crazy. They go catatonic or aphasic, lose their own language. Or else they just turn totally psychotic. Human minds can't connect with transmute minds-- they're too different."

"But they must communicate with each other," Triala pointed out. They were wrong, though she wouldn't say it. Transmutes could communicate with humans, if the humans were young enough. She remembered.

"Undoubtedly, but no one knows how. Pheromones, maybe. Or body language-- something incredibly subtle, that won't be affected when they take different forms. Maybe some kind of mindspeech. But whatever it is, it means nothing to us. And our language means nothing to them."

It was something that nagged at Triala. In the beginning, she hadn't been able to understand why Magicians couldn't communicate mind-to-mind with transmutes. Later, a Magician from Farest, on the other side of Majer where they spoke a different tongue, had mindspoken to Triala, and she'd understood the barrier. It was not as if the Farestina was speaking her language; it was as if, for that brief moment, she understood Faresti. Mindspeech went through the language centers of the brain. You couldn't mindspeak to a baby, and so you couldn't mindspeak to a transmute.

But if they couldn't speak to each other... Triala had fantasies in which it turned out that the transmutes only wanted peace, wanted to negotiate coexistence, and if only the two species could talk... No one would ever know, though, as long as they couldn't talk. So they were doomed to kill each other, and there was no hope for peace.

When Triala became a full-fledged Ranger, and had some influence, she planned to push for experiments between captive transmutes and children with Magic. It had to have been her age, that had enabled the transmute to talk to her. If another child could be found who could speak to transmutes, perhaps Majer could finally find peace. Right now, though, she was a green recruit on her first real mission, and she couldn't afford to think about peace. She had to kill transmutes on sight, or they would kill other humans, such as her. And Triala of Morell Clan was rather fond of life.

***

The school had been built low, where the major branches interlaced into a canopy over the swamp below. The outer part of the school was built between two major branches, covering forty-five degrees of the tree's surface. It was built out a good seventy feet; inside, it would be even bigger, where the builders had bored into the major branches and the tree itself.

One of the walls had been broken down. Dilman pulled the flit up by it, and pointed it out. "What's that look like to you recruits?"

"Wood rot," Dereg said promptly. "They'd have injected it in, waited a few weeks for it to rot out the wood, and then just kicked the wall in."

Dilman nodded. "The school should've kept up with its monthly sprayings. They could've stopped the rot before it got that far. Let's go in. And be careful. This isn't a sim."

Triala knew it wasn't a sim. No matter how detailed the sims got, they never quite conveyed full smell and tangency. The scent of rotting wood, blood and feces wafted from inside the school-- recent death, not long enough to produce rotting meat. The feel of the uncertain creaking boards beneath her feet, the musty chalkboard smell of the air. The luminaries, globes of water filled with glowing algae, had been smashed, and dim dying algae lay in stinking puddles across much of the floor. The light was thus reduced to the dim half-tone that made it through both the forest overhead and the ceiling windows. In several places, the window plastic had been gouged out, and lay forlornly on the floor underneath a skylight. Occasionally they encountered an adult's body on the way in, sprawled bloody and torn. Some of the bodies were remarkably close to intact, with dark bruises on their throats indicating a strangling death.

"I don't like this," Dilman muttered. "Where're the kids?"

Triala felt she was being watched. She kept twisting around to see, but there was no one. Not even furniture-- transmutes could imitate wooden furniture, but there wasn't even that. Just dead bodies.

What prevented transmutes from taking the form of dead bodies?

That was an incredibly paranoid thought. She'd never heard of transmutes taking the form of dead humans before. But she couldn't see what would stop them-- it would solve the language problem, and a freshly killed body would still be warm, so the transmute wouldn't have to go to the trouble of cooling itself. Perhaps a bloody, torn body would be too dangerous for them, but a body that had been strangled to death... Paranoia saved Rangers' lives. She was on the verge of drawing and shooting the dead when Dereg, on point, called, "Found the kids!"

As the others turned the corner, Triala did shoot the bodies. They didn't twitch or transform. They sizzled as her beam cooked them, but that was all. She was being too paranoid, maybe. Quickly she ran to join the others. 

There were six living kids, huddled together around the corner. More dead bodies, of adults and other children, were strewn everywhere. "Names!" Dereg barked. Transmutes could imitate crying.

"Don't be so rough!" Aisander complained. But the kids knew the drill. Terrorized as they were, they'd still had it drummed into their heads that they needed to speak, to identify themselves as human. Each of them choked out a name, some sobbing so hard that the name wasn't recognizable-- but the point was to prove they were human, and human speech was recognizable even if individual words weren't.

Triala felt very nervous. No transmutes. There were no transmutes. Maybe she hadn't been too paranoid. Raising her gun, she said, "Dilman Ranger, I think the bodies--"

She got no farther. The corpses shifted, as if they'd somehow understood Triala, jerking to their feet and taking different forms. Despite the fact that Triala had already started to bring her gun into firing position, Dilman outdrew her and blasted two of the transmutes. A third took the form of a springing creature and leapt for Dilman, but Triala shot it. Then transmutes from the deeper recesses of the school poured in.

"Ambush!" Dilman shouted. He and Aisander dropped back to protect the kids, leaving Triala and Dereg to find cover and help pick off transmutes in the crossfire. Assuming they didn't get killed first. Triala rolled behind a metal room divider and fired, taking out a transmute that was practically on top of Aisander. One got Dereg, coming up underneath where it had been impersonating a severed torso and dragging him down. Triala couldn't see what happened after that, because a transmute leapt over the room divider and on top of her. She twisted and flung it off before it had a chance to bite or sting her. It came back at her, and she fired, cooking its center-- but at the last second it shifted almost all its mass into tentacles, leaving only a thin membrane to be cooked. The tentacles shot out at her. There was nowhere to dodge-- she was trapped by the metal divider. One tentacle wrapped around her gun hand, numbing it. The gun went flying. Another grabbed her leg and yanked her to the floor.

Then the tentacles released her. Triala didn't question impossible good fortune. Some sixth sense she had never felt in the sims told her that more transmutes were coming over the divider. She ran, away from her partners, away from the transmute that had attacked her. Her gun was being guarded by a small transmute in the shape of a cat. If she could get back to the flit, there were spare guns. If she could get back--

The floor, destroyed from within by wood rot, gave under her. In the split second as it gave, Triala understood that the transmutes had herded her here. Then she fell, shrieking. There were no major branches beneath her, no strong branches at all. Her fall to the swamp 80 feet below was almost unbroken.

***

A large number of people on Majer had dreams that they could fly. They would pull up their legs and throw out their arms and they'd be flying. Or they'd leap and not come down, or they'd flap their arms. There were some who speculated that there'd been places on Terre, the world of humanity's origin, where the gravity was light enough that they could fly. Others dismissed this as nonsense, the fancy of Terre-fantasy writers.

Triala had never dreamed she could fly. But in her life, she had dreamed frequently of breathing swamp water. She would dream of being in the swamp, feeling the water cool against her body, and having no breathing difficulty at all, as if she had gills. She would dream of the swamp, not as the dull gray murderous thing it was, but as a magic place full of shifting lights, luminescent fish, and wondrous creatures.

Apparently she was dreaming that again.

At least, she was here under the swamp, floating gently, sinking slowly downward, but she felt no real need to breathe, and no sense of pressure. So it must be a dream. And when the transmutes surrounded her in their various beautiful swamp-adapted forms, with long flippered legs, streamlined bodies, and shining big eyes, she felt no fear. This was a dream, after all. She made no move to stop the transmutes from catching her arms and tugging her with them, gently drawing her through the swamp water.

She was not afraid, but she was curious. So she tried to ask, "Where are you taking me?" But the dream had this much verisimilitude, at least; she couldn't talk underwater. Her words came out in a gurgle.

The transmutes told her that they couldn't hear her.

It was the same strange not-speech the transmute had spoken to her years ago. And like that, it was virtually indecipherable. Do not hear? Cannot hear? Do not understand? Are not listening? The not-words echoed, strange and nonsensical, in her brain, overlaid with so many possible meanings she could not precisely decide which. There was also a sense of kinship-- that they should be able to hear her, that it was her fault they could not. But transmutes could never understand humans.

Slowly it dawned on Triala that she was in considerable pain. The dreamlike absence of sensation ebbed through growing stages of hurt, until it felt as if her chest had been crushed and her legs were broken. As pain returned, true consciousness did as well, and her senses cleared. This was not a dream. She had plunged 80 feet into the swamp, lost consciousness, and awakened, underwater. Breathing, underwater. With transmutes taking her someplace.

I hurt, she thought. Oh, gods, I hurt. It was the only thing she could think, a repeating litany. Her brain was too occupied with the gradually increasing pain to notice anything else. It was strange that she was breathing underwater, but strangeness could wait until she was no longer in pain. Which, she thought, might be several years. It was her impact against the water she was feeling. Triala would be very surprised if any bone in her body was left unbroken.

Of course, she ought to be dead.

One of them told her that she should not be in pain. Or that they didn't want her to be in pain. Or that they would take the pain away. Something like that. Triala turned toward the transmute on her left, positive it had talked, but what had it said?

Then it manifested a barbed stinger. Suddenly afraid, Triala tried to pull away-- too late. A sharp jab in her chest, and then pleasant numbness, spreading through her body once more.

She felt dreamy, but would not succumb to it. She had to think. That ambush back at the school-- that had been an ambush, set up by the transmutes to specifically take out Rangers. They were smart enough to know their primary enemies. The ones that had engineered that trap had been unusually smart-- Triala had never before heard of transmutes impersonating dead bodies. Why had they used that technique this time? And why hadn't they killed her when they had a chance?

She was breathing underwater. Transmutes were taking her somewhere. Talking transmutes. But they didn't speak in language-- they seemed to be communicating in concepts, in pure thought, the precursor of language. These pure thoughts, uncontaminated by words-- were they what drove the Magicians mad or aphasic? The greatest difficulty they presented Triala with was that they were vague and hard to understand. Was it that she was not as sensitive as the Magicians? Or that she was more?

Talking transmutes. A dream come true. It refused to add up. How could she be breathing underwater?

Why is it I can understand transmutes?

They passed through a transmute city. Triala might have caught her breath in recognition, except that she didn't quite seem to be breathing. Broken branches, major and minor, tree stumps that didn't rise above the surface of the swamp, honeycombed with cells that held transmutes. All the ones they passed had eyes, which they kept firmly averted away from Triala and her escort.

She remembered the stories of the kidnapped children, some of whom reappeared. Of adults who disappeared into the transmutes' catacombs, never to return. Was that what they intended for her?

Then they rose up into a grotto, hollowed out from a tree stump, high enough to rise above the water. Triala had seen photographs of caves, high in the mountains on the northern part of the world. This was like a cave. Enough wood remained to create a sloping floor that rose gently from below the water's surface to about a foot above, and then became a plateau, occasionally dipping back down into a puddle. There was more wood overhead, a ceiling blocking out the dim sun of the swamp. Triala's three transmute escorts began to glow as they entered the grotto, their bioluminescence providing the only light.

For a second, rising from the water, Triala couldn't breathe. She choked, feeling something in a band around her neck gape open uselessly. Then the pressure in her neck eased, and she sucked in a gasping surge of air, musty and swamp-smelling.

The flapping sensation she had felt disturbed her greatly. She put her hand to her neck. There was a swelling there, going down as she touched it. Quickly it was gone.

What the hell--?

Her escort tugged her forward, telling her she must come.

Triala stepped forward-- and realized that she had healed. There were no longer any traces of the injuries she'd suffered when she fell.

And she knew this place. Her eyes widened. This cave was in her dreams, her nightmares. Had she been held captive here when she was a baby, prisoner of the transmutes?

The transmutes gestured her over to a hole in the wood. A small, square hole. By the light of the transmutes, she peered inside, and saw--

--a baby's skeleton.

And she knew whose.

Triala jerked to her feet. "No!" she screamed at them, the three silent figures. "No! I'm human! I'm human!"

They could not hear her. Or did not understand, or whatever they were saying. They told each other that she hid her thoughts, or disguised them, like the invaders did, the despoilers. One complained that Triala was a failure, absorbed. Another protested that she would hear, she would accept, she would understand.

They were trying to tell her she was a transmute. Human infants had not yet learned to speak. Transmute infants had not yet learned not to.

Put a transmute baby in a room with a human one. The human one had to be old enough that it could speak a little bit. Transmutes did in fact know what human speech was, and that it kept them from imitating the invaders. They couldn't speak it, couldn't imitate it, but they knew it when they heard it. So take such a baby and pair it with a transmute baby. Tell the transmute infant-- since you and it are both prelinguistic, since you share thought, not words, it will understand you-- tell it that it must mimic the human. Lavish care on the human, food, attention. Praise it and play with it when it speaks. Ignore the transmute baby except when it is fully human, an exact replica of the human it mimics. And praise it when it speaks, as well.

Until the baby forgets it was a transmute. Until its birth-gifts go dormant, as it takes on the identity of the human child. Then release it back to the humans, who will train it to speak and behave as a human, never imagining that it is not.

Triala of Morell died in infancy, allowed to expire by her transmute captors, when their own infant had replicated her sufficiently.

Triala of Morell's tiny bones lay in a wooden grave, in a transmute grotto.

And a transmute who bore the same name crumpled to the floor in anguish, hands pressed to her face, understanding. They had watched her all along. They had known that if she joined the Magicians, she would be lost to them, so they created chaos by killing her testers. Afterward, she collaborated, telling the humans that she had been tested, and they'd believed her. The transmute power to change what others perceive, to alter what they believe, channeled through the human power of language.

They'd set a trap for her. Transmutes had always had the power to impersonate human dead. They had chosen not to do so for a century or two, keeping it in reserve for when they would truly need it. They had used it this time, just so they could get her back.

They asked her if she understood. Or told her that she understood.

And she did understand. The more she heard in pure thought, the less necessary the translation into language was, and therefore the easier it became to understand. Consciously she tried to think without words, telling them that she did understand how-- but not why. What was the reason?

The concept that came back at her was so dense it was difficult to unravel. She would be a boundary/bridge/assassin/spy/diplomat. In languages, the overtones were mutually contradictory, and she sent a lack of comprehension at them.

They replied that she was a transmute that could imitate humans. She could teach them how to do it. One thought she could infiltrate human society and destroy the invaders. Another felt she could make the humans stop their war against transmutes. She could speak for the transmutes to humanity, could be the ambassador between the races and bring peace.

Humans would assume that one who claimed to speak to transmutes was insane, she tried to tell them. If medical science could not reveal what she truly was, they would put her in a madhouse, and if it could, humanity might well kill her in a spasm of superstitious fear. The idea of a transmute that could, in fact, speak like a human, could pass for human so well it itself thought it was human, would terrify most humans. But she wouldn't destroy humanity for the transmutes' sake, even if she could, which she doubted. She had always dreamed of ending the war, not of committing genocide. And she knew nothing of her transmute heritage-- she had grown up a human among humans. If it came to genocide, she had already chosen sides, when she became a Ranger.

Of course, when she'd chosen sides, she hadn't known what she was.

They reminded her, sharply, that she was thinking in words again, and they couldn't follow.

She sent at them a question. Why had they brought her here?

They replied it was so she would know what she was.

But I don't know what I am. If I ever knew what it meant to be a transmute, I've forgotten it.

???

Sighing, she tried to think the idea again, without words this time.

They seemed to understand. One asked her if she wanted to learn.

Yes. She couldn't make a decision until she knew what the stakes were, and what weapons she would have to fight with. She gave them her assent.

They told her to come. 

She followed her guides into the water again, and the gills rose on her neck automatically. She couldn't consciously change herself-- she couldn't shed her human form-- but that was all right, the others told her. She would learn.

The only transmute with a name swam off with her new companions.