Fanfic - Buffyverse / Star Trek - Mentor

[ffutures]

I started writing this in 2011 but shelved it when I couldn’t come up with a useful plot. When I heard that Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) had died I decided to rework it as a character piece. I hope it works. This is set in the same universe as my story Omphalos.

Mentor

by Marcus L. Rowland

"The problem I have with the universal translator," said the guest lecturer, "is that we judge its accuracy purely by how it copes with objective reality."

She seemed to expect a question. Ensign Nyota Uhura raised her hand. "Doctor Summers, how else would you judge it?"

"Most cultures have key concepts that aren't objective; moral codes, metaphors, religions, myths, and emotions. When you try feeding them into the translator, you sometimes get garbage out. Let's try a little experiment. Some of you aren't English speakers, so we've got the translator on line now. I'm just going to take it off-line for a minute, and read you something. If you understand the language that's good, but please don’t comment. If not, concentrate on the sound of the words:”

 'ghorgh DIchDaq maH wej ghom...'"

 Summers read for a minute or so. As she finished there was a ripple of applause.

 "Okay," said Summers, switching the translator on again, "Anyone recognize that?"

 Again, Uhura was the first to raise her hand. "I'm pretty sure it's Klingonese, but beyond that..."

"Right... you'll notice two things there. None of you understood what I was saying, but all of you seemed to be moved by it to some extent. Someone else, why did you applaud?"

One of the ensigns from a lower class, a Martian colonist, raised a hand. "I did not understand the language, but it was obvious that you have mastered it. I was applauding your skill."

"Okay, not quite what I was looking for. Anyone else?"

Eventually Uhura raised a  hand.

"Okay... Ensign Uhura, why did you applaud?"

"The cadence and rhythmic structure seemed to carry a lot of emotional loading, and it came across very well. I'm not familiar with the passage, but I'd guess that it's supposed to express... oh, malice, evil."

"Very good. Let's try that again with the translator back on line:

 'At what date will the three of us next rendezvous?'"

Soon most of the audience was laughing as they began to recognize the play.  She finished reading, and went on "That's actually a slightly weird example. Shakespeare works really well in Klingonese, all those battles and murders and their cultural background translate beautifully. But none of you recognized it from the sound alone, because Klingonese has different sentence structures and different ways to convey emotion. Something else you should have noticed; as soon as you understood what I was saying most of the emotional impact was lost, because the rhythm and cadence no longer matched the word sounds…”

*

An hour later Uhura was hooked on linguistics, on the deeper meanings of communication, and determined to learn more. The reading list Summers gave the class was daunting, dozens of text books covering subjects from eighteenth century philosophy to state of the art machine translation, and a huge list of translated works in various human and alien languages. She waited for Doctor Summers to finish collecting her PADD and some archaic books and papers.

“Doctor Summers, that was amazing. Can I get you a coffee or something?”

“Call me Dawn. Okay, I could go for coffee. Anywhere around here got raktajino?” She led the way out onto the Academy campus.

“There’s a good coffee place on the next block, we could try there, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen raktajino on the menu. What is it?”

“Klingon coffee. It’s pretty rare in Federation space since the Klingon war, but they used to export it occasionally, I keep hoping I’ll find a coffee shop that still has a stash. I’d settle for a decent replicator template, but nobody in the Federation seems to have recorded one.”

“You must have been fifteen or so when the war ended,” said Uhura, “when would you have had a chance to try it?”

“I’m older than I look, and I’ve traveled a lot. There’s some amazing food and drink out there, but to be honest there’s also a lot of things that look and taste like garbage. Most Klingon food looks like it, but sometimes it tastes surprisingly good. You never know until you try.”

“Any recommendations?”

“Not for food, tastes differ too much. I was the only one in my family that liked anchovies on pizza, and that’s nothing compared to alien cuisine.”

“What’s an anchovy?”

Doctor Summers looked at her appraisingly. “You can’t get them any more. A species of fish that went extinct in the twenty-first century.”

“Then how would you taste them?”

“Like I said, I’m older than I look. A lot older.”

“Are you human?”

“Good question…”

 “Planning to answer it?”

 “Nope.”

 “I should report this to Starfleet.”

 “You could, but I’d have to cancel the lecture series and disappear for a while. Your loss. But if it helps at all, I’m not interested in being any sort of threat to anyone.”

 “But you could be?”

 “I don’t want to be. Actually, now that I’ve mentioned them what I really want right now is a cheese, ham and pineapple pizza with anchovies and a mug of raktajino, but you can’t always get what you want.” She looked at Uhura for a moment, smiled, and added “You never know, one day you might be able to help me with part of that.”

 “I’m obviously missing something. Why would I be able to help with alien coffee or extinct fish?”

Dawn grinned. “I could tell you, but then it would never happen. Let’s just say that given a universe of infinite possibilities, there’s a finite chance you’ll be able to help. You may not know it when it happens, but eventually you too may be able to sample the delights of anchovies on pizza. Always assuming you aren’t allergic or the sort of philistine that hates them, of course…”

“Okay. For some reason that reassures me a little. I can’t actually see an evil alien plot focusing on pizza.”

“Me neither. Okay, I guess this is the coffee shop that you mentioned. Want to have some coffee and talk linguistics?”

Uhura smiled tentatively. “Okay, but let’s try not to get too weird.”

“Works for me.”

*

Months later, a few weeks after Uhura graduated, Doctor Dawn Summers gave her last lecture and left on a field trip to Vulcan. She quietly dropped out of sight, and never returned to the Academy.

Nearly thirty years later Uhura was one of the team that traveled back three centuries to the nineteen-eighties, and helped to bring back two humpbacked whales to the twenty-third century. A year later, while reading one of the interminable ecological impact reports, she came across a list of hitherto-extinct species that had accompanied the whales through time. Anchovies were near the top of the page.

Two days later someone left a greetings card at her apartment; a picture of a dolphin leaping from the sea. The message inside was hand written:

‘So long – and thanks for all the fish. 

Dawn’

Eventually she tried anchovies on a pizza, and hated them. But the raktajino was excellent…

End.

Comments please before I post to archives.

Comments

[eledonecirrhosa]

Enjoyed this - a nice glimpse of Uhura's early experiences. Love the ending. Good tribute to Nichelle Nichols, given her own experience of mentoring.

I couldn't help visualising Dr Summers as River Song. :-)

[ffutures]

Thanks - If you read Omphalos, you might want to compare Dawn to the Bad Wolf version of Rose Tyler - near omnipotent when she needs to be, just fixing a few problems with the Star Trek universe since she accidentally caused most of them.