Serial, Kherishdar's Exception, Episode 19: Inexactitude

Your pronouns, aunera, are weak.

Or at least, the ones in this language I’m learning are. (It took me a while to truly internalize how many languages you have. And also to find it hypocritical that you disdain us for our single tongue but confess to using a common tongue on your planet. If functionally you must speak a single language to be understood by other aunera on your single world, then why are you so proud of having more than one? It’s as if you have a reflexive need to enshrine diversity for diversity’s sake. And before you make unwarranted assumptions about our ‘hive minds,’ don’t think that we fail to find pleasure in choice. But while I understand ornament in matters that don’t impede understanding between people, languages are not discretionary.)

But, back to your pronouns, and how few you have, and how meager in meaning. You have all of six pronouns for people, and this is supposed to suffice you for every situation. I have no idea how. When you’re talking with someone about someone else, you can’t communicate the most basic information about whether that person is here or in some other place. You can’t be part of a crowd except by implication, and Shemena knows context is not enough, most times, to make clear whether your ‘you’ is singular or plural. That’s not even touching that you can’t, with a single word, make known the relative rank of the people you’re discussing.

Ai-Naidari, by contrast, has 432 pronouns, and with them I can convey both exquisite nuances and frankly necessary data that you apparently must either miss, cobble together from context, or assume based on wild conjecture—probably incorrectly. When I went in search of your pronoun lists, in fact, I skipped Lenore’s page about it entirely, because it was just that: a page. I was expecting a section.

It was obvious to me that there was no way you could convey what we could with your feeble six words.

I discovered the following day that I was wrong.

***

I spent a restless evening attempting to sleep despite the colony world’s world-weight and the more ponderous burden of the memories of my last stay here, and in this tea-house in particular. I had been discovered and dragged here in ignominy by Ajan, only to face my lord’s complete emotional defection from my embrace into the arms of his aunerai lovers. I remembered being wilted on several floors, confessing my unnatural attachment, the one that had seen me rakadhas, and witnessing over and over the lord’s equally unnatural attachment to his aliens. (Can I call them his alien pets? Despite telling me that you find our treatment of animals cruel, and confessing that you consider your pets as part of your family, you would still bristle if I referred to Andrew Clark and Lenore that way. Your contradictions abound, aunera.)

This is also the tea-house where I formed my useless, unrequited attachment to Farren. And was the only time I’ve slept in a bed with him. Which you’d think would be a good memory, except that it’s led to the frustration that shapes all my waking hours in House Qevellen.

And then, to cap the entire thing, the awful hours after Ajan’s shooting, when we knew Jaran would be judged for the events that transpired here.

Honestly, it astonishes me that I can have even one good memory of this tea-house, and yet I do: that belt Shame wielded on me to put paid to my guilt. I suppose most of you would find it appalling, that he might hit me to ‘cure me’ and society would enshrine that as right and good; your attitudes about violence are baffling. But truthfully, Shame rarely resorts to pain. Kor will tell you it’s one of his tools, and not a usual one, though nothing can replace it when it’s needed. 

I did need it in that moment, because the insult I’d given him was mortifying, and something in me relaxed when I felt I’d suffered for it, and he’d delivered that suffering. It was a matter of justice, if that makes sense? I hurt him, so he hurt me, and we were quit of it. Balance. We have a word for it, naturally. Morin: ‘fairness,’ more or less. More ‘more’, honestly, than less, because like all our words about emotions morin contains worlds.

I have since learned that some of you find being struck with belts pleasing to your bodies, which at very least we have in common. What I don’t understand is that you seem to think this is an intrinsic quality describing an individual’s preferences, rather than an interaction of the individual and the context of the situation. Like so many other things about you, the things you cling to in order to define yourselves strike us as arbitrary. If you had only chosen a proper set of social definitions and submitted to them, rather than constantly choosing and discarding definitions as they suit you (but don’t suit others), perhaps you’d have fewer existential crises? And then you could stop depending on us to give you a sense of security you lack in yourselves?

I apologize, that was probably harsh. Let me tell you what happened, after I breakfasted and walked—very far away from center—to Lenore’s office to resume my efforts.