"- could I ever not trust you?"
She smiled down into her cocoa. "It is you that is the more reliable, the more consistent."
"Your unpredictability is one of your more endearing qualities." I reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze.
I looked at his hand where it lay on mine and was startled that it looked much too old to be Frank's. I looked up at his face.
"Miss Chignon, please answer the question. The sooner you tell me what you know, the sooner you'll be rid of me."
I jerked my hand out from under his and sat bolt upright in the leather chair. But my hand hadn't been under his; his arms were folded, and I couldn't see his hands at all. Only a little of his gold watchband showed at the cuff of his dark blue suit.
This wasn't Frank. It was a somewhat undersized fiftyish fellow with black-streaked-with-grey hair slicked straight back from his prominent widow's peak and wire rimmed bifocals. I felt something drain out of me.
"What question? I'm sorry, I got lost in a fog for a second."
"The 'Pipeline Project'- what do you know about it?"
I had never heard of it, so I was particularly astonished when I immediately began to answer him.
"There's not really very much to know. So far, it is a very few small modules. One, I believe, is a series of training seminars where some polyglots are taught to receive speech through headphones in one language, and simultaneously speak the translation to some other language aloud. Another aspect is a computer program that can pick up spoken words and perform machine operations based on them - but there are many problems encountered with the quality of microphones available. So far, only some Indo-European and some Hamitic languages have been interpreted with any real accuracy. The tonal languages of the Far East and the click talk of Xhosa speakers seem to be beyond the resolution power of our hardware."
He unfolded his arms and made a flicking gesture with a pale - almost translucent - right hand. "Yes, yes. We know all about the translation efforts your organization is involved in, and about your promotion of planned languages such as Esperanto. What we need to find out is: what are your goals? Where does all this lead?"
"As far as we can possible make it lead, of course." I picked up my tumbler, and put the drink back down, untasted. I wondered what it was that I had ordered.
"Ultimately, we seek to have true mind-to-mind communication in realtime, regardless of native language difference in the participants."
"Continuously? With everyone else, not sequentially, but communally?" He pursed his lips, push back on the nosebridge of his glasses. "Aren't you afraid that humanity will develop into some sort of hivemind, corporate entity?""That is not the goal, but would it be a bad thing, necessarily? Is that not what nirvana and satori are supposed to be? With the sort of resources a globally linked mentality would have at its disposal, it is conceivable that communications across space would only be the beginning. . ."
"You propose to speak with the dead?" He looked aghast.
"I suppose they are dead now. But they would not be during communication."
"Are you not wary of giving a second chance to people who were only stopped from ruining the world by their own deaths? Are you not afraid that creatures not born for aeons may feel it to their advantage to rewrite our history in an active manner - in ways that may harm us horribly?"
"When you asked our purpose, you said that 'we need to know." I looked down at my coffee cup. "Who do you mean by we?"
"Why, you and me, sweetie. Who else?" The change in voice from tenor to baritone surprised me so much that I tipped over my wineglass. I managed to grab it before it fell, and the little bit of purple fluid that sloshed out wet only the back of my hand. I looked up into Frank's arctic grey eyes.
"You mean that oil conduit that they're building across eastern Alaska? The one that the environmentalists are so upset about? Isn't your cousin a welder or something on it, making like two or three times as much as he could in Quebec?"