Work Text:
Every night Hoshi Sato translates three sentences before going to sleep. It is always a different three, lifted from novels or technical manuals or a piece of conversation from earlier in the day. Tonight she chooses five languages, two from Earth and three newly acquired: Hindi, Dutch, Suliban, Rigelian, and Klingon.
She still stumbles with the language of their most recent first contact, the Axanar who died so horrifically. She has to keep consulting her growing database to sort out the vagaries and subtleties of grammar and vocabulary.
She does throat and mouth exercises as well, drilling through guttural consonants, slurred vowels, tongue clicks. She watches herself in the small mirror of her quarters, pushing her human face into alien contortions to mold the sounds that come out of her.
Sometimes, if the quiet hum of the ship keeps her awake, she'll listen to recordings. Verb conjugations in the Romantic languages, the nine tones of Cantonese, a sample of ancient Vulcan poetry given to her as a graduation present. The voices ring out tinny and sharp against the metal walls, expressionless strangers with over-articulated pronunciations.
It's different when she's on the bridge. The voices may still belong to strangers, may still be separated from her by a video screen or an earpiece, but they speak to her in real time, in real life. They have faces, personalities. They are capable of reaction rather than recitation. They hold the potential for friendship or warfare, aid or murder.
Hoshi doesn't want to die out here. Space is too cold and vast, the stars too impersonal. When she dies she wants it to be in a warm bed full of fluffy pillows and blankets, with a view of her mother's garden and the painted bridge arching delicately over moist rocks. She wants to be eighty years old, surrounded by husband, daughters and grandchildren.
Not much chance of getting those on *Enterprise*, she thinks wryly, shifting away from thoughts of dying. Not after her recent displays. Maybe she'd do better with an alien. But then, she doubts other species admire cowardice either.
She has been trying to meet people, however. When she first came aboard she studied her copy of the crew manifest, memorizing the countries and ethnicities listed next to each name. She tries to greet everyone in their native tongue, even if they are just passing in a corridor. The crewmembers that don't know her yet always stop with a look of pleased surprise. Wanting to know how long she lived in their homelands, shaking their heads in amazement or skepticism when she explains, "I'm just good at picking this stuff up."
She's drifting now, lying flat on her back on the thin mattress. Her drowsy brain imagines her body floating up and out of the Enterprise. Wandering through space for a millennium or two, learning the languages of every inhabited planet she could find. When she came back she'd be better than any Universal Translator.
Archer thinks that already, she knows. He thinks her brain should be gilded and mounted on a plaque. "You have an amazing gift, Hoshi," he said during her debriefing. "It's just incredible how you can talk to anyone you want to."
People have told her that since she was a child. At age ten she had won all the prizes in four age groups at the Japan Institute of Linguistics. Even her parents had been slightly in awe of her, arranging her awards in careful displays around the house, polishing them twice a week.
It *has* seemed like a gift. When it comes to languages her mind operates like a computer. At each new encounter it creates a file, takes notes, adds folders for tenses or formalities or what have you, links to the rest of her mental database so she can cross-reference and search for common roots, common trends.
It's gotten harder in space. The alien languages don't come from any linguistic family she knows. She has to build those files from scratch, listening intently to changes in prefixes or suffixes so she can figure out what denotes a plural, or a feminine versus a masculine object.
Right now it's all an unorganized jumble in her brain, a junkyard she's constantly sifting through. There hasn't been time for extensive review, what with all the work that needs to be done on the ship, so she's learning to multitask. She keeps her gaze fixed on Archer while he gives her orders and all the while she thinks, "Hotagh, verb, to run (but a machine, not legs). Jephthah, noun, a type of simple machine (as in toaster, not warp core). Klagh, adverb, smoothly (wrong kind of smoothly though, that's more like suavely)."
Her reading and writing skills need even more work. Spelling, stroke order, punctuation -- there isn't much call to send written correspondence when she can just record her letters home, or plug the phonetics into a translator.
Knowing her luck, tomorrow Archer will run them into a species that lacks mouth or ears. What will he think of her gift then?
Fully awake now, she turns onto her side and punches the skinny pillow under her head. She can feel the weight of the ship bearing down on her, thinks briefly of Ensign Mayweather and how he loves to sleep in zero G. Maybe she should ask him more seriously about that.
Sleep takes its time arriving for Hoshi. The changed quarters have flipped the stars around the right way, but there are so many other things to keep her awake now. A flash of bodies, hanging from the ceiling and dripping thick blue liquid. The two ships bearing down on them. The Enterprise shaking under weapons fire.
The quicksand of her memory, searching frantically through it to yank the right words to the surface. The desperate eyes of every person on the bridge, waiting for her to save them.
She's too young for this. She needs to be at home, still winning prizes for her parents, still skipping small stones beneath her mother's bridge.
A tear leaks out of one eye and drips onto her bedsheet. She sits up and swipes at her face with the side of her hand, shivering.
"Don't, Hoshi," she whispers. "You decided to stay."
Crying and screaming and shivering -- these are little girl things. At least this time she's not in front of her captain and the entire bridge.
She breathes in deep, bringing her legs to sit Indian style, holding her forehead in her palm. The tears continue to fall. "Shit," she says, louder, since there's no one else to hear. "Stop it."
She gets up and begins to pace, bare feet on cold metal alloy. Out loud, she conjures up vocabulary words and phrases, filing them away under "Daily Life," "Ship Maintenance," "First Contact." She translates Shakespeare into Swahili, skipping over proper nouns and rhyme schemes.
"Should be back on Earth teaching," she mutters. "J'enseigne, tu enseigne, elle enseigne, nous enseignons, vous enseignez, elles enseignent."
Pacing. The stars streaking by at Warp 5. The sound of her own voice talking to itself.
Finally, she grinds to a halt in the middle of the room, looking around at the shadows. Her cheeks are clammy, and her eyelashes are still wet. It's 0300 hours.
"Oh, God," she moans. "Sleep, dammit."
She climbs back into bed, drawing the economy blanket over the cold tips of her ears. Closes her eyes and tries to dream about new worlds where the inhabitants look just like humans and bleed red like humans and carry translators with Hoshi Sato's name on them. She forces her breath into an even rhythm, searching for rest.
But instead, at 0322, Archer's voice presses at her through the comm channel.
"Hoshi," he says, sounding as thick with sleep as she would like to be. "We need you on the bridge to greet somebody."
She reaches a hand up in the dark and pats at her eyes. Dry now. "Yes sir," she tells him. "I'll be right there."