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etc. If this was the best that the linguists could do, the government could only say et cetera et cetera.
    Their driver had listened gravely, nodding once in a while to keep the stream of plaintive piddle flowing and get it over with; and eventually the flunkies had run out of anything to complain about. At which point he’d suggested that if they were truly dissatisfied with Nazareth and Aquina they should feel absolutely free to hire a different interpreter/translator team for their next contact with the Jeelods.
    There was no other team, of course, since Nazareth Joanna Chornyak was the only living Terran who could speak the Jeelod’s language with even minimal fluency. There were two Chornyak infants learning it from her, of course, so there’d be someone to step into her shoes at a later date and to serve as formal backup. One of them was nine months old, and the other was going on two . . . there wasn’t much you could expect of them in the way of negotiating skills for quite some time to come. The flunkies knew that, and the linguists knew they knew that, and it was all just as silly as the Jeelods and their absence rituals. And seemed to take just as long.
    “Eighteen minutes eleven seconds,” Aquina had muttered to the weary girl beside her, while they waited for it to be over; andNazareth had giggled, and then said something genuinely gross in gutter French. All taken, they weren’t in the van until nearly eleven, and even at that hour the Washington traffic was so heavy that it was another twenty minutes before they boarded the flyer . . . and Nazareth would have to be up at five-thirty for the next day’s routine, as always, and in another interpreting booth by eight o’clock sharp. Such fun, being a child of the Lines!
    And fun being a woman of the Lines, too, of course. There were plenty of women still awake at Barren House at midnight, and they were busy enough—and tired enough—to welcome an excuse for a break and listen to what Aquina had to tell them. She started with a small and dubious audience; just herself and Nile and Susannah and a new resident named Thyrsis that she didn’t really know well—who’d decided for some as yet unexplained reason that she preferred being here to living at Shawnessey Barren House. No doubt she’d tell them about it, in her own good time. Aquina began with those four, and then as she talked her audience grew steadily.
    “I don’t think I understand,” put in Thyrsis Shawnessey the first time Aquina paused. “In fact, I’m sure I don’t.”
    “That’s because Aquina’s so excited. She never can talk straight when she’s excited . . . fortunately, she’s always bored at negotiations, or lord knows what kind of things she’d have brought upon us by now.”
    “How can you be excited, Aquina, at this hour of the night?”
    “Because it is exciting,” Aquina insisted.
    “Tell us again.”
    Aquina told them, trying not to get ahead of herself, and they listened, nodding, and Susannah got up and made three pots of tea and poured it all round.
    When she was satisified that everyone was settled with the steaming cups, she called Aquina to a halt, saying, “Now let me just find out if I have this straight, without all the exotic touches. What you’re telling us is that that child, all on her own, has been writing down Encodings and making up words to fit them in Langlish. Without any help or instruction from anyone. And nothing in the way of information about Langlish, really, except the scraps the little girls pick up running back and forth between here and the main house . . . the bits and pieces they see us fooling with at the computers, and such. Have I got it right, Aquina?”
    “Well, it was pissy Langlish, Susannah—you’d expect that.”
    “I surely would.”
    “But you have it right. Considering what she has to work with,she’d done very well. You could tell the forms were supposed to be Langlish, at least. And that’s not what matters