“How the hell else. . . .” Vesta started to reply in spaceal, then switched effortlessly to English: “How else can a lady, however ladylike she may be, talk in a language which, except for its highly technical aspects, is basically and completely profane, obscene, vulgar, lewd, coarse, and foul? Not that that bothers me, of course. . . .”
Nor did it, as Cloud well knew. When a Master of Languages studied a language he took it as a whole, no matter what that whole might be. Every nuance, every idiom, every possibility was mastered; and he used the language as it was ordinarily used, without prejudice or favor or motional bias.
“. . . but it’s so pitifully inadequate—there’s so much that’s completely missing! Thlaskin objected before, remember, that there wasn’t any word in spaceal he could use—would use, I mean—to describe Maluleme as his wife. And my brother—Zambkptkn—I’ve mentioned him?”
“Once or twice,” Cloud said, dryly. This was the understatement of the trip.
“He’s a police officer. Not exactly like one of your Commissioners of Police, or Detective Inspector, but something like both. And in spaceal I can call him only one of four things, the English equivalents of which are ‘cop,’ ‘lawman,’ ‘flatfoot,’ and ‘bull.’ What a language! But I started to tell his story in spaceal and I’m going to finish it in spaceal. It’ll be fun, in a way, to see how close I can come to saying what I want to say.”
Then, switching back to the lingua franca of deep space;
“So that’s how come my brother got into the act. The hospital called the cops, of course, so he was there with the meat-wagon and climbed aboard. He was all set to pinch the jane and throw her in the can, but when he got the whole story, and especially when she says she’s changed her mind about circulating around so much—it ain’t worth it, she says, she’d rather be an out-and-out hermit than have to have even one more fight with anybody who smelled like that—of course he let her go.”
“Let her go!” Cloud exclaimed. “How could he?”
“Why, sure, boss.” Vesta, wide-eyed, gazed innocently at her captain. “The ape didn’t die, you know, and she wasn’t going to do it again, and he wasn’t a Vegian, so didn’t have any relatives or friends to go to the mat for him, and besides, anybody with one-tenth of one percent of a brain would know better than to keep on making passes at a frail after she warned him how bad he stunk. What else could he do, chief?”
“What else, indeed?” Cloud said, in English. “I live; and—occasionally—I learn. Come on, Joan, let’s go and devote the imponderable force of our massed intellects to the multifarious problems of loose atomic vortices.”