Other editions of book Omnilingual

Dr. Martha Dane is the linguist in an archeological expedition of an ancient Martian city. She is dedicated to the monumental task of understanding the meaning of the wall writings, despite the discouragement of the other team members. With nothing solid to refer to, finding a "key" is paramount to the success of her mission. When the team uncovers an ancient university building, they discover more than just a Martian Rosetta stone. One of Piper's best novellas, this is a great story with a woman as the main character and many backstabbing and a few just plain naïve characters to complicate matters.

Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper sky. The wind had shifted since noon, while she had been inside, and the dust storm that was sweeping the high deserts to the east was now blowing out over Syrtis. The sun, magnified by the haze, was a gorgeous magenta ball, as large as the sun of Terra, at which she could look directly. Tonight, some of that dust would come sifting down from the upper atmosphere to add another film to what had been burying the city for the last fifty thousand years. The red loess lay over everything, covering the streets and the open spaces of park and plaza, hiding the small houses that had been crushed and pressed flat under it and the rubble that had come down from the tall buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had toppled outward. Here, where she stood, the ancient streets were a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet below the surface; the breach they had made in the wall of the building behind her had opened into the sixth story. She could look down on the cluster of prefabricated huts and sheds, on the brush-grown flat that had been the waterfront when this place had been a seaport on the ocean that was now Syrtis Depression; already, the bright metal was thinly coated with red dust. She thought, again, of what clearing this city would mean, in terms of time and labor, of people and supplies and equipment brought across fifty million miles of space. They'd have to use machinery; there was no other way it could be done. Bulldozers and power shovels and draglines; they were fast, but they were rough and indiscriminate. She remembered the digs around Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, and the careful, patient native laborers—the painstaking foremen, the pickmen and spademen, the long files of basketmen carrying away the earth. Slow and primitive as the civilization whose ruins they were uncovering, yes, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the times one of her pickmen had damaged a valuable object in the ground. If it hadn't been for the underpaid and uncomplaining native laborer, archaeology would still be back where Wincklemann had found it. But on Mars there was no native labor; the last Martian had died five hundred centuries ago.

Dr. Martha Dane is the linguist in an archeological expedition of an ancient Martian city. She is dedicated to the monumental task of understanding the meaning of the wall writings, despite the discouragement of the other team members. With nothing solid to refer to, finding a "key" is paramount to the success of her mission. When the team uncovers an ancient university building, they discover more than just a Martian Rosetta stone.One of Piper's best novellas, this is a great story with a woman as as the main character, and many backstabbing (and a few just plain naïve) characters to complicate matters.

The intricate Terro-Human series begins here. How can scientists and engineers cope with the demands placed on them by corrupted political forces? What should a man do if he were plagued by terrifying glimpses into the future? How can archaeologists translate a dead language found among the ruins of a lost civilization, on an alien planet? H. Beam Piper lays the foundations for his elaborate future history of man among the stars in "The Mercenaries," "The Edge of the Knife," and "Omnilingual."

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