Irregular Verbs Read Free Page B

nodded. “All right,” he said.
    hadapi
: to awake to one’s lover’s face
cinta
: to love truly
mencintai
: to love for the last time
    At the end of the day, as the shadows reached over the main walkway, Sendiri rejoined the conversation. Many people turned to look, not only because of his absence but because of the black marks that had appeared on his face, arms and legs. Those nearby saw that the marks were letters pricked out under his skin, forming words that meant nothing even to those that could read Grand Salutean. Only he and Teman knew that the words, in fact, covered his whole body, arranged so that their location and position would represent the grammar of the language he and Kesepi had shared: the oldest root words along the spine, verbs on the muscles, every inch of skin recalling the meaning and inflexion of a word.
    Despite the small commotion he was causing, Sendiri paid the ink marks little mind. The Saluteans have no mirrors or steel, and their sea is too dark to ever show a clear reflection, so he would never see most of the words Teman had scribed on his skin. That was not important, though. All that mattered was that they would not fade away. That they were, still, a living language.

A NOTHER C OUNTRY
    Geoff squinted at the figures emerging from the fissure, his period recognition chart at the ready. Not that he needed it, in this case: he was able to fix the new arrivals as soon as he saw their tunics and trousers—late-Empire Romanized Goths, probably fleeing Attila’s invasion of lands their own ancestors had invaded a few generations before.
    “
Te salutem do, amici
,” he said slowly, holding his hands up and palm-outward. The light was fading now, and the four prefugees were looking around apprehensively. The reception room, built around the fissure that had first opened right downtown fifteen years before, had been designed to minimize culture shock, with no modern technology or materials visible.
    The fissures had consistency but no logic: prefugees from the Mongol invasions wound up in Seattle, Aztecs in Paris, Romans in Ottawa, and so on. The only thing that was known for sure was that they always brought people from places and times that were much worse than now, periods of tremendous chaos and danger; as a result, the people that came through were wary, and some of the first encounters had not ended well.
    “What is your name?” Geoff asked in slow, careful Latin.
    The prefugees—a bearded man, a woman with her blonde hair in braids, and two young boys—regarded him cautiously. The man turned back to the woman, said something in a thickly Gothic-accented dialect Geoff couldn’t follow. She nodded, keeping her eyes down, and gathered the two boys to her. “Odoricus Aemilianus,” the man said. “Where have we come?”
    “This is a safe place,” Geoff went on. “It is very different from the place you left, but you are welcome.”
    “How did we arrive here?” the man said, keeping himself between his family and Geoff.
    “Good fortune,” Geoff said. It was Welcome Services’ official answer, and as good a one as anyone could give. “Please—there are many things you have to know, before we can find you a new home. If you’ll come with me, my comrades will get you started.”
    The man looked back over his shoulder, whether at his family or the vanished fissure Geoff didn’t know. Finally he made a grunt of assent, jerked his head to order his wife and children forward.
    Geoff released the breath he had been half-holding. Ninety percent of what the official terminology called “Delayed Integrations” happened in the initial encounter. Now that that was over he could do the rest on autopilot, supervising the prefugees’ processing and initial billeting. When the fissures had first opened, the people that had come through had been seen as a tremendous opportunity, a goldmine for historians and anthropologists; now, in the thousands, they were just more immigrants to be