Филип Фармер - The Lovers

Hal walked toward her and was about five meters from her when she spoke in a low and throaty voice. 'Baw sfa, soo Yarrow.'

' Baw sfa ,' he echoed, knowing that it must be a greeting in her language.

' Baw sfa ,' she repeated, and then, obviously translating the phrase for his benefit, she said, in Siddo, ' Abhu'umaigeitsi'i .'

Which meant, very roughly, 'Good evening.'

He gasped.

Of course! Now he knew why the words had sound vaguely familiar and the rhythm of her speech remind him so strongly of a not too unrecent experience. Som thing about it stirred up a memory of his research in tiny community of the last of the French speakers in Hudson Bay Preserve.

Baw sfa. Baw sfa was bon soir.

Even though her speech was, linguistically speaking, very decayed form, it could not disguise its ancestry. Baw sfa. And those other words he had heard through the window. Wuhfvayfvoo. That would be levez-vous, French for 'get up.'

Soo Yarrow. Could that be, must be, Monsieur Yarrow? The initial m dropped, the French eu evolved to something resembling the American и sound? Must be. And there were other changes to this degenerate French. Development of aspiration. The abandonment of nasalization. Vowel shift. Replacement of к before a vowel by a glottal stop. Change of d to t; l to w; f shifted to a sound between v and f; w changed to f. What else? There must also be a transmutation in the meanings of some words, and new words replacing old ones.

Yet, despite its unfamiliarity, it was subtly Gallic.

'Baw sfa,' he repeated.

And he thought, How inadequate that greeting! Here were two human beings meeting forty-odd lightyears from Earth, a man who had not seen a woman for one subjective year, a woman obviously hiding and in great fear, perhaps the only woman left on this planet. And he could only say, 'Good evening.'

He stepped closer. And he flushed with the heat of embarrassment. Almost, he turned and ran. Her white skin was relieved only by two black narrow strips of cloth, one across her breasts, the other diapered around the hips. It was a sight such as he had never seen in his life except in a forbidden photograph.

The embarrassment was forgotten almost at once as he saw that she was wearing lipstick. He gasped and felt a shock of fear. Her lips were as scarlet as those of the monstrously evil wife of the Backrunner.

He forced himself to quit shaking. He must think rationally. This woman could not be Anna Changer, come from the far distant past to this planet to seduce him, to turn him against the real religion. She would not speak this degraded French if she were Anna Changer. Nor would she appear to as insignificant a person as Hal. She would have come to the chief Urielite, Macneff.

His mind gave the problem of the lipstick a quick flip and considered its other side. Cosmetics had gone out with the coming of the Forerunner. No woman dared . . . well, that wasn't true ... it was just in the Haijac Union that cosmetics were not used. Israeli, Malay, and Bantu women wore rouge. But then everybody knew what kind of women they were.

Another step, and he was close enough to determine that the scarlet was natural, not paint. He felt an immense relief. She could not be the wife of the Back-runner. She could not even be Earthborn. She had to be an Ozagen humanoid. The murals on the walls of the ruins depicted red-lipped women, and Fobo had told him that these had been born with the flaming labile pigment.

The answer to one question bore another. Why was she speaking a Terran language, or, rather, a descendant of one? This tongue, he was sure, did not exist on Earth.

The next moment, he forgot his questions. She was clinging to him, and he had his arms around her, clumsily trying to comfort her. She was weeping and pouring out words, one so fast after the other that even though he knew they came from the French he could only make out a word here and there.

Hal asked her to slow down and to go over what she had said. She paused, her head cocked slightly to the left, then brushed back her hair. It was a gesture he was to find characteristic of her when she was thinking.

She began to repeat very slowly. But, as she continued, she speeded up, her full lips working like two bright red creatures independent of her, packed with their own life and purpose.

Fascinated, Hal watched them. Ashamed, he looked away from them, tried to look into her wide dark eyes, could not meet them, and looked to one side of her head.

She told her story disconnectedly and with much repetition and backtracking. Many of her words he could not understand but had to supply the meaning from the context. But he could understand that her name was Jeannette Rastignac. That she came from a plateau in the central mountains of this continent. That she and her three sisters were, as far as she knew, the only survivors of her kind. That she had been captured by an exploring party of wogs who'd intended to take her to Siddo. That she had escaped and had been hiding in the ruins and in the surrounding forest. That she was frightened because of the terrible things that prowled the forest at night. That she lived on wild fruit and berries or on food stolen from wog farmhouses. That she had seen Hal when his vehicle hit the antelope. Yes, it had been her eyes he had thought were those of the antelope.

'How did you know my name?' Hal said.

'I followed you and listened to you talk. I could not understand you. But, after a while, I heard you respond to the name of Hal Yarrow. Learning your name was nothing at all. What puzzled me was that you and that other man looked like my father, must be human beings. Yet, because you did not speak my father's language, you could not have come from his planet.

'Then, I thought, of course! My father had once told me that his people had come to Wuhbopfey from another planet. So, it was a matter of logic. You must be from there, the original world of human beings.'

'I don't understand at all,' said Hal. 'Your father's ancestors came to this planet, Ozagen? But... but there is no record of that! Fobo told me–'

'No, no, you do not understand, yes! My father, Jean-Jacques Rastignac, was born on another planet. He came to this one from that. His ancestors came to that other planet which revolves around a star far from here from an even more distant star.'

'Oh, then they must have been colonists from Earth. But there is no record of that. At least, none that I have ever seen. They must have been French. But if that is true, they left Earth and went to that other system over two hundred years ago. And they could not have been Canadian French, for there were too few of them left after the Apocalyptic War. They must have been European French. But the last speaker of French in Europe died two and a half centuries ago. So–'

'It is confusing, nespfa? All I know is what my father told me. He said he and some others from Wuhbopfey found Ozagen during an exploration. They landed on this continent, his comrades were killed, he found my mother–'

'Your mother? Worse and worse,' Hal said, groaning.

'She was an indigene. Her people have always been here. They built this city. They–'

'And your father was an Earthman? And you were born of his union with an Ozagen humanoid? Impossible! The chromosomes of your father and of your mother could not possibly have matched!'

'I do not care about these chromosomes!' said Jeannette in a quavering voice. 'You see me before you do you not? I exist, do I not? My father lay with my mother, and here I am. Deny me if you can.'

'I did not mean... I mean... it seemed...'He stopped and looked at her, not knowing what to say.

Suddenly, she began sobbing. She tightened her arms around him, and his hands pressed down on her shoulders. They were soft and smooth, and her breasts pressed against his ribs.