The Word Marltains Do Not Have

Greetings again, my dear readers. Lu'kifær Morkinstar, Journal Entry #2263, second of eleven from the Brixby System, and I am going to open this one with a correction, because I made an error in Entry #2245 and enough of you caught it that pretending otherwise would be undignified.

In my Exxobar entry I wrote, "And similar to the Marltains, they also followed a binary classification system for distinguishing between themselves."

The Samuin half of that is fine. The Marltain half is wrong, and it is wrong because I copied it out of the Galactic Directory without checking, which is the entire sin of my profession and I am duly embarrassed.

The Directory has the Marltain binary filed under sex. It is not sex. Marltains do have sexes, several, and they are not organised in a binary and nobody on Marlt considers the topic interesting enough to build a grammar around.

The Marltain binary is Ær and Æth. First-drawn and second-drawn. Which one of your pair came out first.

Because Marltains are born in twos, my dear readers. Always. Every one of them. The pair is the unit of Marltain personhood in the way that the individual is the unit of yours, and every pronoun, every legal form, every kinship term and every insult on that planet is built around whether you are the one who arrived or the one who followed. A Marltain introducing themselves gives you a name and then a syllable, and the syllable tells you where they stood at the start.

I have filed the correction with the Directory. They have acknowledged receipt. They have not changed the entry. I invite you to draw your own conclusions about the institution that is paying for this ship.

[Fun Marlt Fact #1- The Directory's Marlt entry was compiled in a single sitting by a surveyor who was on the surface for four days and never asked a Marltain a question, on the grounds that they seemed busy. It has stood, uncorrected, for 61 galaxals. Sixty-one. I want to be clear that I am not above this. I copied it. And I only caught it because you told me.]

So. Marlt. Third planet of Brixby, temperate, wet, aggressively green, Category 3 and pushing hard at the ceiling of it. Nice place. Good food. Everybody talking constantly.

And that last part is the phenomenon I came for, because there is a thing about Marltains that every visitor notices within an hour and nobody in the Directory has ever bothered to explain.

Marltains do not stop speaking out loud. Not in company. When they are alone. A Marltain by themselves in a room will talk continuously, at conversational volume, in complete sentences, with pauses. Actual pauses, of the right length, in the right places. They are not muttering and they are not mad. They are holding up one side of something.

And they have no word for being alone. Not a euphemism, not a taboo. The concept has no lexical entry. The nearest term the rig can find translates to "unfinished sentence", and it is a term for a state of a thing, not a state of a person, in the way you might say a door is ajar.

Here is why.

Many milgalaxals ago, in what the Marltains call the Drawing, the world of Marlt was held between 14 gods and 14 monsters.

Fourth world. Fourth time. I am not going to keep announcing it. The page at the back of my logbook has four tallies on it now, and I have started asking a question at every stop, and I will get to what the question is in a moment because it turns out to be the whole reason this entry exists.

The Marltain fourteen are seven pairs. The gods Hæl and Hælu are the first pair and the ones who matter here, because between them they made everything on Marlt, and their method was the method: anything worth making is made twice. The rivers on Marlt come in twos. So do the mountain ranges, more or less, and the Marltains will show you the maps, and the maps are more convincing than I expected.

The fourteen monsters are also seven pairs.

Except they are not. And this is where I stopped taking notes for a while and just sat there.

A Marltain sacred list has fourteen lines on it. Thirteen of those lines have names. The fourteenth is blank. Not erased, not censored, not lost. Left blank, on purpose, on every copy, in a culture that pairs everything, which means their central sacred document has an odd number of filled lines and is therefore, by their own theology, an obscenity. They know. They will tell you. It is the first thing a Marltain priest tells you and they tell you with the specific weariness of someone who has explained a family problem to a stranger before.

You cannot write in that line. It is not illegal, there is no penalty, and no Marltain has ever done it.

Now the story.

There was a pair, Sœlvi and Sœlva. Ær and Æth. Fisherfolk, in some versions, or potters, or in the one I heard sung, nobody in particular, which is the version I would use if I were adapting this.

And Sœlva died.

That is the whole event. There is no battle in this legend and no monster on stage. A rockfall, in most tellings. Nothing came for her. The world simply did the thing worlds do.

And Sœlvi stood up, and was one.

The Marltains are very precise about what happened next and it is not grief, or not only grief, because grief is a thing all of you have and I have reported on it from ninety worlds. What happened to Sœlvi is that the grammar stopped working. Sœlvi could not say what had happened, because every sentence available on Marlt for describing a person needed two. Sœlvi could not ask for help, because the word for help was a thing one half did for the other. Sœlvi went to the temple and the priests had no procedure, because everything is made twice and there was no rite for a thing that was now one.

So they turned Sœlvi out. Not cruelly. They had no category. You do not get cruelty without a category.

Sœlvi walked, and this is the part where every other legend I have filed puts a god on the road. Nobody comes. Hæl does not come, Hælu does not come, there is no offer and no bargain and no test. Sœlvi walks for a full click and the sky stays empty, and I have to tell you that for a story from a Category 3 world that is an extraordinarily grown-up piece of writing.

And somewhere in that click, Sœlvi starts talking.

Out loud. To Sœlva. Full sentences, with pauses of the right length in the right places, holding up one side of something.

That is the invention. That is the whole miracle in the legend and there is no other one. A Marltain, alone, inventing the act of addressing someone who is not there.

They call it hælvren. It is the root of every art form on that planet. Their poetry is second-person. Their music is call and response performed by one player. Their letters, and they write a great many letters, are all written to people who cannot receive them and are kept rather than sent, and there is a building in their capital the size of a mountain that is nothing but those letters, filed by pair, going back four thousand clicks.

Sœlvi is not in the pantheon. I asked. The answer I got was that Sœlvi does not need to be in the pantheon, because Sœlvi is the only one in the story who is definitely real.

Now. The question I have started asking.

At every stop since Grïnjdarlay I have asked a priest, an elder, a tallykeeper, whoever will sit with me, to name the fourteen monsters. Just list them. Simplest request in my trade.

I went back through my older Exxobar notes afterward, looking for something else entirely. And there it was: I already had the answer, from before I knew there was a question to ask. On Exxobar I got thirteen and a shrug. The elder counted them off on her fingers, ran out, looked at her hand, and said something the rig renders as "and the other one", and then changed the subject to fish.

On Grïnjdarlay I got thirteen marks on a slate and a fourteenth space, and when I pointed at the space the scribe wrote this is not for you and left the room.

On Vædrun I got thirteen and a very long silence, and then a genuinely kind old man telling me that the fourteenth was not a Vædrunai matter, which is a strange thing to say about your own religion.

And on Marlt I got a blank line on a sacred list, in a culture that cannot leave anything unpaired, in a document they know is an obscenity and will not fix.

Four worlds. Two systems. No contact between any of them. Fourteen monsters each. Thirteen names each.

I do not have a theory, my dear readers. I want to be extremely clear about that, because I have seen what happens to correspondents who develop theories and I would like to keep my accreditation. What I have is a page at the back of a logbook with four tallies on it and a second note underneath that now reads: nobody will name the fourteenth, and every one of them assumes I already know which one it is.

Let me be precise about that, though, because "I do not have a theory" and what I am about to say could sound like the same sentence arguing with itself, and I do not want you thinking I am being cute about it. I do not have a theory about who the fourteenth is, on any of these worlds. That is still just a blank line and a shrug and a changed subject. But I have started to suspect I have a theory about why there is a fourteenth to argue about in the first place, on every world, every time, no contact between any of them, and I might as well give it a name, because I have been circling it for three entries now. I am calling it the Template Hypothesis. (I am slightly pleased with the name. It is my logbook. Nobody else on this ship is going to name it for me.)

Here it is, plainly, so you can hold me to it: the worlds do not agree. The paperwork agrees. And everybody, on every world I have visited and every desk back at the Directory that filed their reports, has been reading the paperwork instead of the world.

Go back to the top of this entry, my dear readers, because I think it is the best evidence I have got. Sixty one galaxals. A wrong answer about the Marltain binary sat in an official file, unchecked, uncorrected, filed as fact by a surveyor who spent four days on the surface and never asked a Marltain a single question, and every field officer since copied it forward, and I copied it forward, and none of us checked because none of us thought there was anything to check. That is not a story about Marlt. That is a story about how the Directory manufactures a fact and everybody downstream inherits it as though it had been observed. Either some early survey form had fourteen slots for gods and fourteen slots for monsters and every officer since has dutifully filled them in because that is what the form has, or my own translation rig is doing something quieter and worse, smoothing every foreign count into a shape it already recognises. I do not know which. I suspect it does not matter which, because the result reads the same either way: four worlds that have never spoken to one another, agreeing on a number, and one Directory sitting in the middle of all four reports.

And because I am a reporter and not a prophet, I will tell you exactly what would kill this idea, out loud, right now, so you can hold me to it later. I need a world whose count of fourteen predates Directory contact. Recorded somewhere the Directory never touched, never surveyed, never filed a form about. Carved into a wall before anyone from home ever landed there, say, or sung in a version a linguist can date older than the first Directory ship in that system. Find me that, and the Template Hypothesis is dead, and I will say so in this journal in exactly as many words as I have used to build it here.

I do not expect to find one. But I would rather go looking and be wrong than sit here being smug about paperwork.

I will keep asking. That is the job. Somebody kept the count on Grïnjdarlay and somebody kept the tally on Vædrun and it did not save either of them, and both worlds put her in the pantheon anyway.

One last thing about Marlt, and then I will let you go.

Every Marltain dwelling has a second chair. In pairs, obviously, that is not remarkable. But it is also true in the dwellings of Marltains whose pair has died, and it is true in dwellings built for visitors, and it is true in the little hut they put me in on a hillside outside their capital, which had one bed, one lamp, one table, and two chairs.

I asked my host why, given that they knew perfectly well I had come alone.

She looked at me for a while. Then she said that no one comes alone, and that mine was probably just running late.

I have thought about that sentence every day since and I have not decided what I think about it and I am not going to pretend for you that I have.

Is there truth in their legend? No one knows. My aim is never to prove or disprove the tales I come across. Just to report them to you.

This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar concluding Journal Entry #2263, Series 2 of 11 from the Brixby System. Next entry is from the Killuga System, where, as some of you will remember me joking in #2245, hugging a stranger is how they shake hands. I went to find out why. It is not funny. I am sorry.