Intermezzo

All junior xenolinguistics and science personnel must observe 7 general curfew unless expressly authorized 8 for extended work hours by unit CO’s. Curfew in effect as of 22 hours. Notice to all late workers, fire watchers and night staff. Effective immediately, midnight rations will be served all night. Here are some of the many things we don't know about heptapods. Greek. Hepta, "seven." Pod, "foot." Seven feet. Heptapod. Who are they? Trying to answer this in any meaningful way is hampered by the fact that, outside being able to see them and hear them, the heptapods leave absolutely no footprint. The chemical composition of their spaceship is unknown. The shell emits no waste, no gas, no radiation. Assuming that the shells communicate with each other, they do so without detection. The air between the shells is untroubled by Sonic emission or light wave. Are they scientists? Or tourists? If they're scientists, they don't seem to ask a lot of questions. Why did they park where they did? The world's most decorated experts can't crack that one. The most plausible theory is that they chose places on earth with the lowest incidence of lightning strikes. But there are exceptions. So, we just don't know. How do they communicate? Here, Louise is putting us all to shame. The first breakthrough was to discover that there's no correlation between what a heptapod says and what a heptapod writes. Unlike all written human languages, their writing is semasiographic. It conveys meaning. It doesn't represent sound. We have our friends in Pakistan to thank for their study of how heptapods write, because unlike speech, a logogram is free of time. Like their ship or their bodies, their written language has no forward or backward direction. Linguists call this non-linear orthography, which raises the question, "is this how they think?" Imagine you wanted to write a sentence using two hands, starting from either side. You would have to know each word you wanted to use, as well as how much space they would occupy. A heptapod can write a complex sentence in two seconds, effortlessly. It's taken us a month to make the simplest reply. Next, expanding vocabulary. Louise thinks it could easily take another month to be ready for that.