Tales from EXODUS - Weather Forecasts

1999. On Ran Ga Rai, a generation ark roaming through space, an alien linguist comes in contact with TV transmissions from the third planet from a medium-sized star. Willing to learn the local language for a potential first contact, Dkravilest of the fifth-octal-seventh Daevka brood goes above and beyond, as the only expert on the ship, to try to make sense of those utterly foreign sounds.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

The alarm rang, a horribly high-pitched sound that made every scale of his skin shiver. He growled absent-mindedly, punched the button on the small black box, let that horrible cacophony end. The symbols on the display were glowing, reminding him of his duty. Second eighth of a rotation. Quite early, all things considered, if the concept of “early” had any meaning for a multi-generational ark lost in space, without the natural light of a star. Rotations were all they had to mark time. Originally, they thought they could keep using the system of their home planet, but it soon turned out to be extremely impractical. There was no synchronicity between it and the slow turning speed of the immense cylinder they were living inside, making it hard to reset their clocks if they went out of commission or needed to be tuned without an external reference. The rotations, instead, followed a constant rhythm, necessary to keep the artificial gravity going, and were much more reliable as a way to keep record of the passage of time.

He yawned. He would have let his left brain hemisphere rest a bit longer, but he sorely needed it for the least mechanical part of his job. He rebooted the system, only to be welcomed by strings of symbols and a carousel of moving pictures he had been receiving for the past two octoctal and four octal rotations, pictures coming from a system known as Kavad-317. That star system had been found by the Kavad planetary surveyor satellite some octoctals ago, and was thought to be composed of a minimum of seven and a maximum of one octal and three planets, all orbiting around a yellow, mid-sized star. It was, by all means, a speck of dust on the galactic map, a completely neglected peripheral system without any saving grace. Except, they intercepted a signal coming from there. Then more of them. At first, they were just seemingly random interference patterns in their surface sensors, but they soon became more and more structured, and they picked up some digital noise too. The technicians originally thought it had to be a fault with their instruments, as they weren’t expecting to come across a modulated radio transmission so far in space. But they had been wrong – that was a real xenosignal.

There was someone else in the universe.

For the population of Ran Ga Rai, their massive traveling home, it had been a source of joy and resentment at the same time. Joy, because it meant that maybe, just maybe, there was a habitable planet for carbon-based lifeforms in the Kavad-317 system, reachable within their lifetime. Resentment, because it meant that such a planet was already occupied by a native species, a species that was advanced enough to send radio communications into space, and probably enough to destroy their ark if it was perceived as a threat.

Thus, there he was – the only linguist on board with some passing degree of knowledge – trying to make sense of what amounted to the very first alien language (or collection thereof, perhaps) they had ever recorded. Ran Ga Rai had a massive amount of technicians, agronomists and scientists always awake, to keep the ship in working order and secure the future of the frozen, unhatched broods kept in Taka Ga Ika – the so-called “gate to the future”. However, there was also little more than a skeleton crew of sages and librarians, with the arduous task of keeping the history of Kraal alive and transmitting it to its newly hatched children. And thus he, Dkravilest of the fifth-octal-seventh Daevka brood, had chosen to become a linguist, despite not really knowing what came with the package. The sages were looking for adult devsks that could be trained as communication experts, before the previous chief sage, Raxda of the third-octal-third Drov brood, became one with the soil. Dkravilest didn’t like manual work, so he had been happy to pick up such a low-demand specialty. His brood brother Andrakta, however, had deeply resented him for that – in his brutal opinion, he was wasted as a literature freak, when there were also shortages of engineers. Andrakta had never been the intellectual one. He thought any random shoiga could be trained to operate computers to teach grammar and language structures to the hatchlings, while devsks like them should take the jobs that require actual skills. Dkravilest couldn’t really disagree with him – after all, he had chosen that specialty only because it was the least stressful, lowest responsibility job he could put his claws on.

Now, suddenly, that least stressful, lowest responsibility job had become the fulcrum of their entire strategy. Since Raxda had passed away shortly after having taught him everything he knew, he was the only fully-fledged linguist left on board. That meant that the results of his research were crucial to not only the lives of all devsks on board (and shoigas, but barely anyone cared about shoigas), but also those who were still waiting to be born.

Dkravilest yawned once more, looked at the monitors. The technicians had done a great job in decoding those analog signals. Sure, they were very low-intensity and sometimes irrecoverable, but those that weren’t too distorted were turned into sequences of pictures and voices – thankfully, with audio in a frequency range their ears could still discern. The sounds they were used to hearing were more on the low-frequency scale than what they had been able to recover from the transmissions, but, overall, the overlap was good enough for mutual understanding.

Dkravilest closed his eyes. He could still remember the first time he saw what the inhabitants of Kavad-317 looked like. It had been disappointing. Devsk movie directors, poets and novelists always imagined aliens as insectoid or feathered creatures, certainly not as furless gaxas wearing textiles. Their scale-less skin was unsettling, but, aside from that, they seemed to have developed a similar wealth of features to the devsks. Two eyes, two ears, one mouth, teeth, tongue, nostrils. Two arms, two legs. They didn’t have a tail, though, and their faces were almost flat, quite similar to those of the shoigas sannzo. Yet, they seemed to be mammals, which begged the question of how they had become the dominant species on Kavad-317. It was a mystery – yet, a mystery of secondary importance, compared to the necessity of learning to communicate with them. Correcting the course of Ran Ga Rai towards Kavad-317 wouldn’t have been easy and had to be done soon. However, the prospect of being potentially blown up in space by a warmongering alien civilization stopped them from considering it as their first choice. It now rested on his shoulders, Dkravilest’s shoulders, to give the captain – Daio of the octoctal-third-octal-fourth Drov brood – a good reason to steer towards those talking gaxas. Which was easier said than done, sadly. Their scientists had already analyzed the system and closed in on the second or third planet from the star as the most likely candidate for the signals – there might have been an additional, inhabitable planet between the star and their target, but their measurements were not one hundred percent reliable on that. The planet the emissions were thought to have originated from was nothing short of a miracle. Sizable quantities of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, of levels at least roughly comparable to those of Kraal. Small nostril filters could have been necessary, but the mixture seemed good enough to facilitate their own survival without any complex apparatus. Gravity was estimated to be between six and seven eighths of the value produced by Ran Ga Rai’s constant rotation, reasonably close enough to be not a real deal-breaker. On paper, that planet was perfectly suited to allow devsks to flourish, so it would have been a massive pity to ignore it.

Razing it with sub-luminal kinetic projectiles, as some of the military advisors suggested, would have been extremely stupid – the risk of compromising the habitat was so high that it wasn’t even worth considering, especially given the completely improbable odds of finding another suitable planet to thrive on. A shared home was better than none. That was the reasoning that convinced the army to reluctantly give up on their plans of total genocide. Fortunately, there were still some thinking brains among the higher ups, and Captain Daio was one of them.

Thus, they left it to Dkravilest to find a way to decipher those transmissions, those clusters of unintelligible sounds, and – if possible – to reply to them. He had spent an uncountable amount of time watching those tapes on repeat, listening to those squeaky, high-pitched voices that grated his nerves like nothing else, trying to find patterns to exploit. His first success was managing to find enough similarities between samples to split them into several different buckets – those aliens didn’t seem to have a shared language. From frequency analysis of the phonemes alone, he could categorize at least two octals worth of kavadian language families. That made him focus on the three collections he had most samples of. One was the absolute largest corpus, but also the worst in terms of intelligibility. The videos he had of that language were filled with ideograms, so many that he thought each of them could even be used as a shortcut for a whole word or concept. More often than not, the sounds spoken had just minute variations, but seemed to be associated with completely different pictures. He decided that spending time with that group would have been wasted, but he would come back to it if he couldn’t manage to make headway with the other two. The second group was the most intriguing to him. All languages in that bucket shared a limited set of characters – if the video transmissions were to be trusted – and similar sounds were often associated with similar characters. There was a wide variety of accents and nuances, but he could start associating phonemes and constructs to the same sets of letters. It wasn’t much different from the principles behind the devsks’ most common language, counting an alphabet of two octals and two characters and several pronunciation modifiers. The third group was an odd one, sharing the same set of characters with the second, but with a wildly different vocabulary and completely insane pronunciation rules – if any. Dkravilest had bashed his head against the wall several times trying to find common patterns behind which phonemes were associated with which concepts, but it was all for naught. However, he had at least managed to find a way to filter it from the rest with relative ease. That language group used the phoneme “THE” (as it was written in their alphabet) so often, he could immediately understand when said language group was being used. Despite his struggles with its pronunciation, that third group was the second most likely candidate to be deciphered, and the one with the biggest unitary corpus of written material. At first, Dkravilest had been struck with decision paralysis when it came to choosing which language to focus on, before deciding to tackle the second and third groups simultaneously.

Those past two octoctal and four octal rotations had been just enough to start with that process, but not enough to match even a single non-geographical markup with the underlying concept beyond reasonable doubt. His shoiga servants couldn’t be of any use in helping him either. Shoigas, even those of the sannzo variety, weren’t really smart, they were just a race of slaves they had engineered to help them with various tasks on the ark and – in his opinion – weren’t even worth half a devsk. But, in the absence of other intelligent creatures to talk with, Dkravilest found himself chatting with them fairly often, especially with the one called Darnek, who was also the one making sure he ate at least one meal per rotation. Darnek was indeed a sannzo, with their distinctive lack of legs and a long, thin body with two slender arms and the characteristic long tail. He also had peculiar reddish hair, falling down to his shoulder. Shoigas rhepp didn’t have any hair at at all, while devsks could grow beards, given enough time. Shoigas sannzo were the only ones that sported cranial hair. It wasn’t originally a planned feature, but something went wrong in the process that engineered them, and there it was. Engineering that feature out wouldn’t have been a very useful allocation of resources. Thus, Darnek shamelessly sported that weird cranial hair, and probably liked it too – in a way not too dissimilar from those kavadians, Dkravilest thought. Most kavadians had cranial hair of wildly different colors, which – he also thought – could have been their version of the bicolor head scales his race was proud of. Dkravilest’s cranial scales were of a deep red, while his body scales were almost purely white. He had observed several combinations among his kin, so hair colour might have been the cosmetic equivalent for those aliens.

Dkravilest scanned his surroundings. Darnek was – of course – coming to his cubicle, called by the wake-up alarm. It wasn’t bad to have him around, especially in those long, uninterrupted cycles of attempted translation work. The shoiga bowed to him, started to speak in a reverential tone.

“I see you well, master Dkravilest. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“...I’ve just woken up. Cook up something for my migraine, yes?”

Dkravilest shook his head, tapped on some of the mechanical keys of his computer. The monitor was immediately filled with another sample of translation material, one that his computers marked as “highly signficant”, whatever that metric could mean (Raxda himself had forgotten about it and couldn’t explain it during their training). This time, it was a picture of a kavadian, riddled with static noise. The alien was wearing blue fabric with metal adornments of some sort, and showing a picture of what Dkravilest had come to know as “ITALIA” – a strip of green and brown land, shaped like a foot, surrounded by blue, and other green and brown. ITALIA had to be a region, or a part of that world. He had seen several representations of planet Kavad-317-2 (or 317-3, pending review of the last planetoid discovered near the star), and he was pretty certain of it, despite not having seen direct video feed of the planet yet. The kavadian in the video was pointing his five-fingered hand towards a small gray icon, with what looked like droplets drawn under it. Far below, he could see the words “PIOGGIA LEGGERA SULL’APPENNINO TOSCO-EMILIANO”, written in the alphabet used by the second and third language groups he singled out. He stopped the video, looked at that picture with a sort of fascination. It wasn’t the first time he had seen a similar setup – a kavadian standing in front of a map, with various yellow circles, white or gray amorphous icons, and droplets. He felt like he should have been able to understand what they were, but, for some reason, he couldn’t spot the connection.

Amorphous gray spots. Yellow circles with spikes. Droplets. Waves. The iconography wasn’t new. He should have probably scoured the library for a devsk equivalent, but he didn’t have the energy to go digging for it. He yawned again. Asking the shoiga was worth a shot. If a devsk was able to find it just by reading digital books, an inferior creature such as Darnek could have probably done it too.

“Darnek, what do you think this is?”

The shoiga looked at the screen, at the still image of the alien that Dkravilest was examining in detail. He squinted his eyes, his finger followed the symbols displayed on the map.

“Clouds, maybe? They look similar, the gray ones, to how we used to draw them.”

Dkravilest stared at him with curiosity.

“You’ve seen clouds?”

“Only in old documents. There are some videos of Kraal in the library. We used to draw clouds like that.”

Dkravilest looked at the picture again. He instantly remembered what he had forgotten. It was a long time ago, an educational video about the planet he wasn’t born on, but where his great great great ancestors had lived until what they dryly called “the cataclysm”. Yet, it was now evident to his tired eyes. The amorphous masses were clouds. The droplets were rain. The waves might have been fog. The radiant yellow ball had to be the kavadian way to represent their star (Kraal’s sun was marked as a yellow, four-pointed figure, in comparison). He looked at the display again. “PIOGGIA LEGGERA SULL’APPENNINO TOSCO-EMILIANO”. There was indeed a part of the map marked as “APPENNINI”. And there were clouds with droplets drawn on it. He unpaused the video, let it go forward. “PIOGGIA INTENSA SU SARDEGNA E SICILIA”. He paused it again, located the two names on the chart. SARDEGNA and SICILIA. Clouds too, on both of them, but with more droplets. He blinked twice, looked at Darnek, looked back at the screen. The word in common between the two captions was “PIOGGIA”. He frantically browsed the archive, ran a search for videos with similar content in the second and third groups of samples, barely containing his excitement. The search algorithm retrieved several matches. He played them back to back, all with the same pattern of a kavadian showing a map with clouds, stars and droplets. The pattern. The pattern was emerging, one marker at a time.

Pioggia. Pluie. Pluja. Ploaie. Chuva. Lluvia.

A continuum of terms, all to indicate the same, identical thing.

Rain.

Dkravilest growled in jubilation. He had found out the first, incontrovertible match between a family of words and one symbol, something that wasn’t just a geographic marker. He hugged Darnek, all of a sudden, squeezing the shoiga between his arms.

“I did it! I did it! I found a word! The FIRST word! We gotta celebrate, Darnek! We gotta celebrate!”

Dkravilest was almost on the verge of tears. He had made his first, small step into interpreting kavadian languages. All thanks to a set of weather forecast videos.

**

Seven octoctal three octal rotations had passed since the first word was found. Dkravilest’s early successes had been galvanizing for the Ran Ga Rai inhabitants, to the point where more and more resources were being allocated to help him go further with his translation efforts. Even his brother Andrakta had changed his view on the job he had denigrated until that point. Dkravilest’s team now consisted of three additional devsks and seven shoiga sannzo, including Darnek, who had shown a keen visual memory that had been critical in associating symbols with concepts. As inferior as shoiga were, Dkravilest couldn’t deny that their help had been crucial in breaking the lock.

In that endlessly long time, Dkravilest had made major strides in the second and third groups of languages, still ignoring the pictographic one. Aside from the horrible pronunciation rules, the third group had been the easiest to build sentences with, but the second had the most similarities among what sounded like a plethora of dialects. He could draw parallels and find translations that were relatively similar between said dialects. Some broadcast transmissions with colored, drawn pictures had been also used as a sort of atlas, as they seemed to often associate letters with sounds and words that started with them.

Now, Dkravilest was tackling something new – a full-length kavadian movie, much like those his people produced back during the golden days of Kraal. It was weird to see aliens making movies about aliens, but extremely interesting too. This particular one was about a parasite that reproduced by using a kavadian as a host, only to emerge from their stomach, killing them in the process, and become bigger and deadlier with time. The creature was scary, even by devsk standards, with that second mouth on its tongue and harpooned tail, but it looked frankly intriguing. Such a keen imagination, the kavadians had. How would they react, when the two species first met? Would they think of the devsk as dangerous monsters, like the one from the film?

Ran Ga Rai’s course was already set for the planet, now that they were confident they could decode their language before first contact, so that question was more pressing than ever. His efforts had been enough to get a basic grasp of their news and snippets of information, but he thought that movies and entertainment – the lack of which was one of the first causes of boredom and stress inside Ran Ga Rai – could be a better way for his people to get accustomed to their soon-to-be neighbors. Thus, he decided to try it out, for better or worse, and to start circulating his crudely translated version around the ark.

Against all odds, that movie was a radical success, with devsk and shoigas making copies of the film and distributing it around the ship. Dkravilest hadn’t really been ready for such a titanic task, truth be told, and most of the translation had been sloppily put together with (perceived) context and a bit of bravado. He had also probably overstepped a bit, to the point of translating the name of the spaceship the whole story was set on from its group-two name “NOSTROMO” to the devsk equivalent, Sao ga Samakro. He wasn’t sure the plot was faithful to the original, but it had been indeed a step forward in making his kin more interested in kavadian culture.

Soon after, he also attempted to translated a weird movie about what seemed to be a giant boat that ended up sinking against a floating mountain of ice. Sadly, parts of that movie and its ending were lost due to poor signal quality, so he decided to splice it together with another feature-length film he had recently found sections of, causing the movie to cut from the ship sinking to the few survivors reaching a shelter surrounded by ice and snow – and having to deal with an extraterrestrial creature bent on killing and replacing them, one after another. He used a computer voice synthesis software to dub over the original audio, adding subtitles in two or more kavadian languages. Contrary to what he expected, it too became a runaway success. The tapes kept on circulating, with many of his peers not realizing that he had put together two completely different movies just for the sake of it. Dkravilest was covertly smiling with sheer bliss at the thought of them going to a kavadian cinema once they established first contact, only to find out that the movie they loved actually didn’t exist – but that was a consequence he could live with.

There wasn’t a lot to do on Ran Ga Rai, so every distraction was welcome for its crew, and those badly mangled alien films were as good as a distraction as anything else. By the time Dkravilest had begun to tackle his third movie, several octoctals later, his support team, lead by Darnek, had successfully managed to decipher some of the most complex samples, effectively paving the road to properly communicate with kavadians. Seeing that, Dkravilest championed for Darnek to be given full citizenship, a honor that very few shoigas had received until then.

Dkravilest’s finishing touch was to come up with a name in the kavadian alphabet that was easier to understand than Ran Ga Rai. That expression in his native language meant “Escape to the New World” or “Path to the New World”, depending on the dialect. By scouring the corpus of translated words, he came up with the kavadian equivalent “EXODUS”, which seemed to convey a similar meaning with a sufficient level of nuance. Thus, while the internal name remained Ran Ga Rai, for all external communications they would use EXODUS as their call sign.

With that, he thought his job was done.

But he was completely wrong.

To his utter surprise, Andrakta had proposed him as the chief ambassador for the devsks, once first contact was established, as he was the most fluent speaker of kavadian languages they had on board. Dkravilest had never wanted to become a politician. He just wanted a quiet life, in a low-stakes job, while the rest of their world kept turning. Now, he had been appointed as the one who needed to explain Kavad-317’s politicians how they were the last known survivors of their planet Kraal, which was destroyed by a cataclysm they had NO record of in their archives, and that they were ready to trade their technology for hospitality. It was an unenviable task, a task nobody really wanted to handle. Thus, Dkravilest had no choice but to accept.

His would have been the first devsk words heard by man, in human year A.D. 2011 – twelve Earth revolutions after that first weather forecast became the key for mutual understanding.

**

The large TV screens inside “The Happy Cock” were all tuned into the main news channels, broadcasting the celebrations for the fifty-year anniversary of coexistence between the inhabitants of EXODUS and Earthlings. Mr. Daevka was eyeing those live feeds from behind his sunglasses. He should have been there, by all means, but he had fortunately found an excuse to keep himself out of sight. In his stead, the current ambassador, his brother Andrakta, was shaking hands with the president of the European Union in front of the cameras.

“I tell you, old man – it was better when we were up there, before landing on this cesspool! We should have remained in Ran Ga Rai and nuked this planet from orbit!”

An angry voice distracted him from the broadcast. It was a shoiga rhepp, similar to an Earth lizard but bigger, bipedal, tailless, and of course sentient. He had a name tag attached to his jacket – Devon Gouda. Mr. Daevka smirked. That youngster was part of the new generation, those who took on an Earthling name to better mingle with their neighbors. He shook his head, shrugged with contempt at the youngster’s remarks.

“Well, I’ll tell you, it wasn’t. For starters, your kin was under slavery, you know that, right? Apartheid and all that jazz.”

The shoiga looked at Mr. Daevka as if he was an alien, waving his finger in front of his nose.

“We would have got full citizenship, sooner or later! It was just a question of time!”

“Thank Emilio Darnek and his translation work for that. If it weren’t for him, you lizards would still be segregated labor material.”

Without any words to retort, the shoiga just fell silent, chewing insults under his breath. Mr. Daevka – or Dkravilest, as some of his old peers still called him – didn’t know what to think of it. The new broods didn’t seem to understand the pain they had endured living inside that rotating coffin, stranded in space, and instead yearned for the time inside EXODUS, a time they weren’t even alive, as “a lost golden age”.

Golden age my ass, Mr. Daevka thought, better to be last bastard on Earth than the richest pig on that decrepit mausoleum.

Still, many new hatchlings, especially devsks, hadn’t been able to adapt to their status of mere guests on Earth. He hoped things could change, thanks to people like him, trying to give opportunities to their youngsters to kickstart a life on their new home. On that note, rumor had it that Jasper Joachim Rhepp, a late-generation dwarf shoiga rhepp of the Saxo brood, had recently started a wine business in New Langdon, centered around his aptly named store La Maison du Vin. According to what he heard around, this J.J. was employing several shoigas in his orchards and vineyards to help them settle down with an honest, well-paying job. He wondered whether that Devon Gouda was one of them or – instead – was one of the poor sods who got entangled in mafia or criminal deals. Mr. Daevka didn’t ask. He couldn’t save everybody, he had already done his part – especially after contributing to the saving of millions of humans during the aftermath of the Helsinki incident, which humans themselves caused using stolen devsk technology. Seeing as that didn’t cause a full-on war between their species, he didn’t know what could. Now, it was up to the new broods to keep up the good work and pick up from where he left off.

He rubbed his beard. Life on Earth hadn’t been easy, but after fifty human years, he was convinced that it had been indeed the best choice for all of them. He had learned how to enjoy it too, and how to profit from having been the first devsk to make contact with humans. Books, interviews, talk shows, dramatizations. He was even still receiving some limited royalties for “Samakro” and his other movie mashups, as his old bootlegs had become a staple for human students learning devsk languages. Funnily enough, they were treated as collector items and as important cultural heritage. What filled his pockets even more every month, though, was his nightclub. Humans had a thing for sex and were ready to pay good money for it. Once he had this realization, he set his plans in motion to make a fortune out of their appetites and live a life of luxury. “The Happy Cock” was just the first step – soon he was planning to buy a whole chain of sex shops, as well as the escort agency with which he often collaborated with.

He looked at the TV screens again. The celebrations were still ongoing, with fireworks, airplane acrobatic shows, and even a record of the first, historical human-devsk meeting, featuring Dkravilest, a European ambassador, and the same man that appeared on those weather forecast channels he had used to find the first connection. Apparently, he was just a colonel of the Italian airforce, who also worked as a meteorologist, but Dkravilest didn’t care – he wanted to meet him in person and wanted him to be there when they first landed. That scrawny, unimposing old human with glasses, talking about rain on the Appennino Tosco-Emiliano had been his first real contact with his new home, the reason why he was even there.

Mr. Daevka smiled in silence, while pouring himself a glass of whiskey and raising it in honor of his first, long-gone, human friend. Then, he gulped it down and went back to work.

Time was money, and he had already spent too much of it for that day.