First

Jansen stared out the window of the moving aircraft. Below him stretched nameless snowcapped mountains for as far as the eye could see. Not a trace of human habitation met his bored gaze as he soared thirty thousand feet above the world's most populous nation. In his mind's eye, he tried to imagine a time when it all looked like this, endless vistas and undiscovered realms, in an age when the Earth was young and vast.

"We'll be landing in about thirty minutes, Mr. Jansen."

Jansen nodded at the plastic automaton which rolled past him on its way to notify the other chartered passengers. There weren't many. Although he had started his journey in a humming metropolis of almost a quarter of a million souls, he knew full well that few ventured this far into the hinterland any more. The steward-bot made only two other courtesy stops before wheeling itself into the darkness between the cabin and the cockpit.

Jansen ran his hands through his wavy, silver hair, sighed, and glanced down at his notes. The region he would be arriving in shortly was displayed in a glowing map that faded into the background when his attention was fixed on another item in his electronic portfolio.

"Case history." Virtual mountains and alpine streams melted into the paper like a watermark as he reviewed the particulars of this mission. Jansen knew this routine, could perform it like the lifeless drone that had stowed his baggage, fluffed his pillow, and served him coffee for breakfast. Every report was checked and double-checked before coming to his attention - forty years in the field had at least won him the privilege of chasing down only the most plausible leads, for what that was worth.

A lot of good it had done him. Even in the cases that met all of the Institute's criteria for investigation by a senior member - thousands of them, as far as Jansen could recall - not one had produced a shred of evidence that didn't fade away like his portfolio map when held up to his scrutiny. Sure, there had been some tantalizing leads over the years, but even the promising cases inevitably gave way to disappointment and closed inquiries.

Of all the false hopes, it was those engendered by the hoaxes which were most maddening. Over time, the Institute had developed a series of infallible tests to separate the real potentials from the fake, as a series of pranksters had successfully fooled a rival entity and secured a fortune in bogus grant money, until the Government discovered the ruse and dismantled the Institute's sole remaining competitor. The Government also made it clear to Jansen and his colleagues that such a future embarrassment would not be tolerated, and would likely lead to the end of the project altogether.

If the project ended today, who would even notice, Jansen wondered to himself, rolling up his electronic portfolio and closing his eyes with a weary sigh. The Institute had been in existence for over a century now, and only once during that time had it turned up a potential lead that didn't peter out. That was sixty years ago, on someone else’s watch. Jansen's entire professional life had revolved around chasing phantoms, nothing more. He squinted hard, the phosphene patterns in front of his eyes forming hieroglyphics he'd never decipher.

Rumor was that the Government was going to abandon the project within the next budget cycle, or so Jansen had heard from an administrative colleague in the know. "Please, Stephen," he recalled his friend saying. "You must know that you’ve survived this long on charm alone. They shut down SETI – the search for extra-terrestrial life, for crying out loud – and those folks even had good hard evidence. What have you got? Ten million miles on your odometer and a few dozen cases of food poisoning.

"Admit it, Stephen. The search is over."

On one level, Stephen Jansen relished the thought of declaring the project dead and moving on to more fruitful lines of academic inquiry. But he was not convinced. Despite all of the evidence to the contrary - the decades of false leads, impersonators, and dead silences at the end of one long road after another - Jansen still believed, or at least doubted. It was that hint of a flicker of belief that kept him from giving up. Yes, he agreed, it might be the end, in a practical sense. But as long as the Government kept funding his search, the project would continue. Wasn't absolute certainty worth another ten million miles around the globe? Stephen tried not to get his hopes up as the plane taxied to the terminal and he disembarked in yet another foreign land that was not so foreign, not anymore.

Well, no intestinal parasites this time around, Jansen thought to himself several days later as he put the finishing touches on his report. The informant must have been elderly or not entirely competent, as his hearsay was about a few generations out of date. What he had described as a village was now a suburb of the city he had left five days ago. Incredible that his fact-checkers slipped up on such an easily caught error - he would be sure to give his staff an earful when he returned. The Institute's funds were becoming far too precious to waste on unnecessary field trips. Jansen clicked his tongue in irritation and transmitted his report to the main office. Oh, he'd have a word with them, alright.

No sooner had he finished his transmission than there was a tinkling sound floating through the silence of his room. Jansen's ears zeroed in on the source - it was coming from the corner. He crept to the grate of the ventilation panel and listened. Silence. But what he'd heard, just for a moment, caused him to race back to his report in his mind. He'd gone over everything twice, three times in places. All the possible leads had been long-since cold. And yet.

Jansen unbolted his door and walked cautiously down the hallway, fumbling to make sure he had his recorder in his pocket and at the ready. This is the hunt, he thought to himself as he opened the stairwell door and crept down the stairs. After forty years of coming up empty, he still hadn't lost the simple joy of running down the truth. He rounded the last flight of stairs and immersed himself into the darkness of the building's basement.

Jansen often studied the floorplan of his temporary accommodations at length. Being on the road all the time had its charms, but waking up in so many different beds in so many different towns and cities had taken a gradual but irreversible toll on his ability to get a good night's sleep. He found that knowing the secrets of an unfamiliar building seemed to help him relax, even if it didn’t completely cure his insomnia.

This time however Jansen had pored over the hidden recesses of his apartment block with an extra amount of attention. Every night that he had slept here, he had been awakened with a start in the middle of the night. Each time he was dreaming of overhearing a conversation he couldn't make any sense of, but which seemed natural to him nevertheless. Night after night he awoke with a start to a silent room. Until this final evening, Jansen had figured the repetitive dreams were just another indication that he'd been at his job for far too long, and that maybe it was finally time for him to retire. But this time he'd been wide awake, and he knew damned well that he wasn't so far gone as to be hearing things.

No. He had been overhearing a conversation, somewhere deep in the bowels of this complex. The soft, alien tinkling had been real. Jansen's defunct lead had just become red hot, and he wasn't going to let it go, no matter what. He stumbled ahead into the lightless room, his eyes straining to adapt to the sudden dark. His ears on the other hand were more than acclimated to the faint sound of his prey. They were still down here.

Jansen followed the sound, which despite growing louder and louder failed to resolve itself into words, as he kept expecting it to as he drew nearer. His excitement only grew as he approached this conversation from his dreams. It was exactly as he recalled it - like nothing he'd ever heard before, yet at the same time so familiar. He fingered his recorder.

Still adjusting to the lack of light, Jansen failed to notice a low-lying ventilation duct until his forehead connected with it, booming an echo through the basement chambers. He grunted in pain and cursed his clumsiness. The gentle tinkling had stopped.

"Who's there? Who's down here?"

Jansen closed the distance between himself and the source of the conversation, emerging into a reddish chamber full of hissing pipes and steaming cauldrons. There was a pungent smell lingering in the air – the aroma of cleansers battling with soiled bedding and unwashed linens. This must be the laundry room, he thought. He stepped into plain view.

Three pairs of eyes greeted him - it was too dark yet for Jansen to tell whether the glances he met were inviting or hostile. He wasn't sure if they were men or women, as the style of dress they'd chosen was completely unknown to him, but from his half-remembered dreams he was convinced that the words he heard were coming from female lips. But the words he was listening to now were words that he understood.

"What are you doing down here?" one of them asked, with hardly a trace of an accent. Jansen wasn't as disappointed by this as he'd thought he'd be. And yet a slender thread of hope kept him from excusing his intrusion and turning tail right there and then.

"I'm sorry. I must have lost my way."

"No doubt there," the same person replied. "What are you looking for?"

Jansen paused, considering how the truth might sit with this trio. He decided to take the chance and cleared his throat.

"Actually, I'm looking for a conversation - one that I heard through the air ducts. I was wondering if you ladies could help me find it."

A laugh escaped from the youngest of the women, who was not very young at all, from what Jansen could see of her features, and spread to the other two like a shared joke.

"You shouldn't be eavesdropping on other people's conversations, should you now?"

"I was wondering if you wouldn't mind… talking… that way again, like you were before."

A smile, this time from the oldest - flashes of tooth and gold revealed from behind ancient gums. Her companions smiled as well.

"Now why would you want to hear that which you can't understand, silly man?"

The moment of truth, Jansen thought. He swallowed hard.

"Because… I've been searching all my life for exactly that, and I… I was wondering--"

"You were wondering! You were wondering!" The first one again, the young one. Jansen couldn't tell if she was angry or playful.

The older one rebuked her with a sudden outburst of words that were not words, at least not any that Jansen knew, and he had made it his life's work to learn as many as he could. As the unfamiliar cadences fell upon his ears, he felt his heart start to race again. The younger was responding to her elder in kind and the middle was opening her mouth to get a word in edgewise when they all remembered their guest and fell silent in unison.

"No!" Jansen said. "Please. Don't stop talking on my account. He fiddled with the recorder in his pocket, but then stopped, uncertain about capturing their conversation in secret.

"Please."

There was genuine confusion in the middle woman’s voice. "Why are you so curious about the way we talk? Haven't you ever heard someone speak in a tongue you couldn't understand?"

"No," he said in an almost reverent voice. "No one has, not in a hundred years."

"A hundred years!" the older one cackled. "How do you know so much about what people speak and what they don't speak? What makes you so certain?"

Jansen was almost breathless. "I've spent my entire life looking. Listening. For another..." He paused to relish the thought before saying it out loud.

"For another language."

Laughter all around this time - the three women in disbelief, Jansen out of sheer giddiness.

"You have no idea. I thought that they were all gone. We thought they were all gone."

"Then why look?" the younger one asked.

"I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want it to be true. And now, here you are - three of you. How, may I ask, did you manage -"

The older one cut him off. "So what do you speak then? This language? All of you? The whole world?"

"Yes."

Cackles and guffaws. "How awful!" Jansen found that he didn’t disagree with the women’s assessment.

The younger one again. "Why did you pick that one?"

"You mean instead of what?”

"How about this one?”

“Or this one?”

“Or maybe this?"

Three more languages, each of them dead, or so presumed until this very moment. Jansen’s head was spinning like a top.

"How is this possible?"

"We thought you were the smart one."

"But surely you must have known."

But then again, maybe not. From the looks of it, these three didn't have too much interaction with the outside world. Although they matched the description given to him by what he had assumed to be a senile witness, no one else he'd spoken to in his five days of investigation recalled seeing anyone even remotely like the trio standing before him. It was as if they had stepped into this basement from across centuries of time. Jansen buried the urge to ask the women their age - a universal taboo, if there ever was one – and settled upon a less intrusive line of questioning.

"Do you work here?"

The younger snorted. "Of course we work here! Do you think we haunt this basement for fun?"

"Be nice, Kaloth," the middle called the younger by her name. "We wash the linens. Been doing it for ages. Longer than I can remember."

The older one said something incomprehensible, then translated for Jansen. "I remember. You were barely a woman then, Lakese, and Kaloth was still just a screaming baby. But I remember my first day in this basement like it was yesterday. This hotel was new then - brand new."

Remembering the date of the building's construction from his late night nervous ritual, Jansen did the math. That would make the older one well over a century old, perhaps even a century and a half. He opened and closed his mouth.

"I remember coming down from the village every afternoon," the older one continued. "How the birds sang, how the dirt crunched under my feet. I remember how empty this valley was once - just a path and a stream tumbling down to a meadow filled with flowers.

"This building - this hotel - was once the newest, the tallest in town. Can you imagine? We were happy to find work. Automatons were still new and expensive then, but already we were feeling their impact, even all the way out here. Hard to find a decent job, with those machines running around doing the work for free.

"Of course now the hotel could get a washing 'bot to do the work my younger sisters and I do. But the owners are kind. They know we don't have anything else to support us back in the village."

Jansen prided himself on his ability to get people talking. He may not have heard any other languages from living, breathing people until today, but he'd collected a lifetime of stories just like this. That was one of the rewards of his work, even in failure. He tried to keep the conversation going. "Your village. How many of you live there now?"

"Just us," Kaloth said quickly. "There's nothing left to do up there."

"And how long has it been just you?"

Lakese was also a little less relaxed speaking about this topic. "Long enough. Forty years now, I reckon. Wouldn't you say, Toropo?"

"I'd say fifty." The older one flashed a disarming smile at Jansen. "And they tease me about my memory!"

"I guess I won’t be meeting the rest of the village, then. Fifty years all by yourselves! You don’t get lonely up there?”

“We have each other.” Jansen felt the cold in Kaloth’s response. He was walking on a tightrope here, but he couldn’t stop, not now.

“True enough. Family is important. But don’t you have friends, or neighbors from the other villages?”

Lakese answered him with a voice as bloodless as her sister’s. “There are no others. They left the mountain years ago.”

“So it’s just the three of you left who speak both languages – the one we’re speaking right now, and the one you grew up with. There aren’t any more, tucked away in a valley somewhere?”

“We are the last.” However guardedly she spoke, there was genuine sadness in Toropo’s voice as well. For a moment, Jansen felt a twinge of guilt for pressing the conversation into uncomfortable territory, which he realized was exactly what the old crone wanted. He gave Toropo a sympathetic smile.

“In that case, would you ladies mind if I listened to you for a little while longer? I'd love to record as much as I can - with your permission, of course – for our permanent archives.”

"Of course," they said, one after another, before slipping back into their native tongue and returning to tend to the swirling cauldrons of boiling towels and sheets they’d left to stew.

Jansen sensed the tension that had been growing in the room melt as he stopped asking questions and settled into the role of passive observer. Recorder in hand, he tried to make a good show of absorbing the alien conversation, hoping the trio would be too engrossed in the work at hand to notice that Jansen's mind was already halfway up the valley.

The dirt crunched beneath Jansen's feet. Birdsong filled his ears - odd birds twittering old melodies. He felt a little dizzy from breathing the thin air of the upper slopes in such deep gasps, but it would take a lot more than that to deter him now.

"I've found it," he said over the satellite link, after the sun had risen and the trio of sisters had trudged back home for a few hours' rest. "Marie, after all these years, I've found it."

Marie was skeptical, as he well expected. She'd been through this routine many times before in the past - first as a colleague, later as his wife, then as sole remaining partner at the Institute. The breathless phone call in the middle of the night, the frantic last-minute arrangements for travel, accommodations, the begging for just one more grant to keep the search alive. Marie supported her husband, kept the day-to-day operations running smoothly, even chased down leads when Jansen had classes to teach, a conference to attend, or a high-level fundraising session with another Government secretary to finesse.

But his wife knew only too well how scarce the evidence was, and how little of it, if any, would pan out into something real. Marie prided herself on her ability to predict how a particular trip into the field would go, and even Jansen had to admit that his wife could sense a dead end long before he was willing to give up.
This time however he was convinced that his wife was wrong.

"These ladies were the real thing, Marie. You have the samples I sent. Whatever they were saying had a syntax way too complicated to fake, and you know it. I ran both the Zora Tests and the Schilling Diagnostics, and none of the sisters came up as positive."

Marie grunted, her way of conceding a point without giving up the argument altogether. She always reserved the right to be correct, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

"By the way, any progress on the translation? I assume that you and the kids have been working on it all night." Jansen and Marie always referred to the Institute's staff as their children. Since they’d never gotten around to having any of their own, the graduate students and volunteers that worked for them were the closest thing they had to a family.

Marie gave him a smile over the satellite link that turned into a half-grimace. "We have something, but I don't want to tell you what it is."

"It's early, isn't it?" Jansen already knew the answer, felt it in his bones. But he wanted to hear it from her, the most reasonable person he knew.

"Yes."

"How old, Marie?"

She paused.

"Marie? How far back are we talking?"

"Stephen, I don't know how this is even possible. It's as old as we can reconstruct for human language. Old as old itself."

"Is it Nostratic?"

"Older."

"Proto-Antediluvian?"

"Older, Stephen."

"Pangaean," he said, his voice a whisper now.

"Older. This language has features which seem to pre-date Pangaean, or what we thought was Pangaean until we took a closer look at what you sent us this morning. If this isn't a hoax, my love..."

"Yes?" Again he knew the truth, felt that it was so. But he needed to hear it.

"If it isn't a hoax, this may be the oldest language ever recorded."

The mountain path was getting steep now, so much so that every few minutes Jansen had to stop and gasp for breath. The air up here was clean and fragrant with the needles of evergreen trees, well above the layer of yellow haze that filled the bowl of the valley as a quarter of a million people and their automatons went about their daily business.

Passing a stand of thick trees, the vista ahead of him opened up suddenly, providing him with his first glimpse of the village above. Even from here, he could tell that there wasn't much to it - a collection of maybe a dozen whitewashed huts, some kind of a shrine, and a large communal oven, from which a solitary strand of black smoke lifted up into the stratosphere. A bird of prey cried a shrill warning, and Jansen almost lost his balance when three dark forms glided down the hill towards him, passing inches from his head and soaring upward, seemingly without effort, on a cliffside thermal. Jansen regained his composure with a laugh, and continued his afternoon march up the side of the mountain.

Another breath, another step. Jansen quietly marveled at the stamina of the three sisters, each of them easily twice his age - maybe even three times, he thought with a shudder! They made this trek up and back twice a day and somehow managed to put in a full day of work in between, whereas he would be groaning for weeks after this one climb. Already his feet were blistered and aching. Just a few more steps, he encouraged himself. A few more breaths.

At last he crested the imposing bluff on which the village had been built and found himself standing on the first patch of level ground he'd seen since the square in front of his hotel. Jansen caught his breath and looked for signs of life. Already the valley below was falling into shadow, but not here. The settlement had been situated to catch both the rising and setting sun, a necessity in the colder winter months, and the warm amber brilliance of late afternoon flooded the village common.

The shadows below were a stark reminder however that it would be soon be dark up here. Jansen had grossly miscalculated the time it had taken him to hike up the alpine track - the mileage was deceiving on a map, appearing as no more than a jaunt of hour or two up and that much back down again. In reality he'd spent almost six hours getting to the village; it would take at least that long to find his way downhill in failing light, and far longer in total darkness. He wondered with a sense of panic if there would even be a moon to travel by this evening.

Another growing concern in the back of his mind was the return of the three ancient ladies. If he was trapped up here by the dark and forced to spend the night, what could he possibly say by way of explanation when found? How would he justify such a betrayal of trust? The trio had been guarding something important about the village, this much was obvious, but hadn't they already shared enough of their secrets with a total stranger for one night?

Jansen knew he risked burning his bridges by coming up here unattended and uninvited while the sisters worked in the hotel’s laundry room, but he suspected that whatever truth he was going to find up here was not a truth the three were ever interested in sharing. Besides, his time and funding were running out. He couldn't bear to leave this mystery unsolved, not after coming so far. These sisters were already old beyond reason; they could very well be dead before he was able to secure another grant and return for more fieldwork. Jansen knew in his heart that he had stumbled upon this secret in its final days - he had to take the risk, whatever the consequences.

The black smoke was still drifting up from the oven, a circular building whose white walls were covered with a permanent dark splash of soot. Its entrance faced the clearing in the center of the village - he could see the glow of the fire burning within, and for a moment was warmed just by the thought of it. Then he heard the music.

Someone was singing.

Jansen froze, mere steps away from the hearth's doorway, and listened. A man's voice for sure this time, singing a tuneless melody with long-forgotten lyrics. The words being sung were similar in intonation and inflection to the language that the old sisters had spoken, but there was something different about what he was hearing now - something odd and resonant. He held his breath and kept listening.

The melody was not tuneless, nor was the man inept at singing. The more Jansen listened to the music, the more he recognized its underlying structures, the rules of its alien harmonies. Not so alien, suggested a voice so deep in the back of his mind, it was barely a conscious thought, but more like a memory.

More like a dream.

Jansen felt his stomach knot up, his arms and legs grown leaden. It was all too familiar. His mind whirled as he recalled the dreams of the past few days, half-remembered snatches of tinkling phonemes. Now the memories were fusing together in his head, becoming one long dream that seemed to stretch further back than just a week. He tried to wrap his brain around the truth of the matter, but couldn't. It wasn't possible. Yes, he may have heard the wizened sisters night after night through the ventilation ducts while he slept, but all along it was this voice that he had been listening to - a voice that was there long before the cackling trio, the waking dreams in the hotel, and this trip halfway around the globe.

It had been there since the beginning, as far back as Jansen could recall, even beyond. The very beginning…

At that moment the singing stopped. Had he been standing there for fifteen seconds or fifteen minutes? Jansen didn't know, but he swore that the sun was much lower now to the west than it had been when he'd last noticed it. He crouched along the boulders of a half-finished wall and stared at the doorway to the hearth, waiting for the music to resume. He held his breath.

Nothing.

Jansen fought the overwhelming urge not to speak, not to make his presence known, not to break the spell he had been under. "Hello?" he called out to the silence. "Is anyone there?"

A grunt - was that meant for him? He wasn't sure. Too curious to be cautious, he approached the glowing entrance of the oven shelter, pausing only briefly before he crossed the threshold.

It was warm inside, even with an open doorway. Jansen hadn't realized how much the temperature had dropped outside until he was smothered by the heat of the oven. He ducked to avoid a branch of drying herbs that hung from one of the ceiling rafters and looked around. There were other things hanging up to dry- more herbs, flowers, purplish sausages ground from unknown animals – so many that they almost entirely obscured the rafters and the ceiling itself. The hearth was a large opening into a burning oven, full of white-hot wood that crumbled into sparks and collapsed into embers as he gazed upon it. A hand axe lay atop a cord of wood stacked next to the man who was tending the fire - a hunched, cloaked figure who hadn't even turned to acknowledge Jansen when he entered.

The man grunted again, gesturing towards a small wooden table and a few rickety chairs in the corner of the room. There was an earthenware vase of fine craftsmanship on the table, filled with a dark and potent liquid. Jansen sat down in one of the chairs, which creaked so much under his weight he worried for a moment that he would break right through the woven seat, at which point the man began to sing again. He poked at the burning wood with a sharpened rod made of bone, his back still turned, but his lyrics filling the room like the pressing smoky haze of the fire.

Again Jansen listened as syllables mixed with melody into a half-spoken, half-sung composition. He closed his eyes, trying to discern the underlying patterns, sensing for the weave of syntax and the warp of vocabulary. The words were not Jansen's native tongue, and yet they made a kind of sense to him as he listened. This wasn't a song, he realized with a shock – it was the man's language!

Jansen tried to steady his racing mind and decode what he was hearing, but it was as if the meaning was enveloped by fog, allowing him to discern only the shadows of words. If only he could find a way to coax them out of the mist! He felt that he was standing on the threshold of comprehension, of making these words plain and distinct and laying bare this tongue's secrets.

At last the man turned. Although he was wrapped nearly head to toe with a cloak the color of a mountain stream, his eyes and mouth displayed a youthfulness that Jansen had not been expecting. He also appeared younger - much younger - than the three sisters down in the valley. Was he one of their children, perhaps? Even then, he seemed too young.

Using his bone staff, the man had removed from oven another earthenware vessel, this one for cooking. Setting the blackened piece of crockery down on the table, he flipped open its lid of with a hook on the end of his; the aroma of herbs and stewed organ meat assaulted Jansen's nostrils, almost causing him to gag. He collected himself, forcing himself to look away from the steaming pot of offal, and found himself meeting the gaze of his host. The man was staring at him. His eyes were dark - black pupils in black irises - but his expression was hospitable. He offered Jansen a hand-carved wooden spoon, and with an encouraging grunt bade him to eat.

Jansen hesitated for a moment before digging deep into the clay pot and shoveling a heaping portion of the stew into his mouth. It tasted nothing like it smelled, he discovered with relief. It was delicious in fact, vaguely similar to the food of the valley but with stronger flavors and a few spices he couldn't recognize. The meat was lamb, he guessed, or perhaps goat. He swallowed mouthful after mouthful as the man moved his head approvingly - side to side, Jansen noticed, ever the observer – and pushed the earthenware pitcher towards him so that his guest could wash down his supper.

Jansen wasn't sure what had been fermented to make this brew, but it went down like earthy fire, a smoke-like liquid that made him convulse as soon as the first swallow made it to his esophagus. It was a primitive drink, with unstrained mold forming wild swirls on its thick dark surface. He took another draught, eager not to offend the man, who was watching him eat and drink carefully, only to spill a brown rivulet of the liquid onto his brightly colored synthetic pullover. The man laughed, throwing back the wrappings of his cloak to expose his entire face, and took a long deep drink from the vessel as well.

He was young, younger than Jansen had even estimated from his mostly concealed features. A grandchild? Jansen's curiosity was getting the better of him, or was that the brew already insinuating itself into his oxygen-starved blood? He wiped his lips with his sleeve and reached for his recorder. He needed to start making a record of this visit, lest he lose valuable data due to the fuzziness of an alcohol-impaired memory.

The man looked at the slender metal cylinder with a critical, almost hostile gaze, and Jansen was suddenly made aware of the gulf of centuries between himself and his host.

"Don't worry!" he said, holding his hands up in what he hoped was a nonviolent gesture. The man leaped back with a start - not an encouraging sign. It was time to find a common language, Jansen thought.

"Can you understand what I am saying?" he asked the man, first in his own native tongue, then switching in rapid succession to other languages that he knew, working his way through the same question over and over again in more than forty halting attempts. That was every language still spoken when the Institute was founded, over a century ago - all of the known living languages at that time. The man, wild-eyed and suspicious, showed not even a hint of recognition at the words Jansen had spoken.

Now for the dead languages, starting with those that vanished shortly after the turn of the millennium. There were hundreds, the minority languages of the world's nation states, in the days before the world-spanning Government. The man showed a glimmer of familiarity with some of the words he now bombarded the man with, but no real comprehension. Jansen made a quick mental correlation with the analysis his wife and his interns had made, back at the Institute. So far, it was as they'd conjectured. He suspected that his host only spoke one language, but he had to be sure. In the meantime, the man had calmed somewhat, and now seemed genuinely curious at the lack of a common linguistic reference - hopefully he would be patient with the attempt to find one.

Jansen needed more. Although he could already sense where his quest would take him, he wanted to know for certain how far back this man's language went. The natural conclusion of this line of investigation was growing clearer and clearer as he inevitably hurtled towards it, gathering momentum like a boulder tumbling down the mountainside, unable to stop or be stopped. He now switched to the languages that had died before the millennium, some of which he had studied from archival tapes of native speakers, others that he knew from theoretical reconstruction alone. From the man's responses, which were now growing increasingly animated exactly when Jansen expected them to, a slender but unmistakable track was emerging from the data that was leading him through linguistic history. Jansen's heart pounded uncontrollably - was it the potent drink, or the growing confirmation of what he knew deep down in his soul to be true?

Now Jansen was in the realm of pure theory. Centuries ago a group of linguists had posited a mother language for all of humanity that they called Nostratic. Widely dismissed as wishful thinking by many in the discipline, this mostly-forgotten primordial tongue had gotten an unexpected boost from Jansen's mentor, the founder of the Institute, who had used a revolutionary form of statistical analysis to find the core fragments of a given language that combined and recombined in novel but ultimately traceable ways - its linguistic DNA. Using this theory, Jansen's old professor was able to refine Nostratic into a hypothetical ancestral language he called Antediluvian, out of which sprung Pangaean, which was perfected by Jansen himself in collaboration with his wife, Marie.

A lifetime of tinkering with hyper-mathematical algorithms and immersing himself in the data had enabled the married scholars to take Mankind's linguistic history as far back as could be theorized, to the very threshold of language.

But this wasn't a reconstruction that he was hearing now - it was Pangaean, the first language, so strikingly similar to his predictions that he was at first caught off-guard by it. No wonder it had resonated so deeply within him – it was indeed the language of his dreams, a shadow he had been chasing for as long as he could remember. It was the original tongue, the wellspring from which every successive human language had sprung.

And out of all of those evolutionary descendants, only one was spoken now - the last language. Jansen marveled at the sheer improbability of this meeting on the mountaintop, where the Last met the First. He knew his statistical theory, of course - take a room full of enough people and you can guarantee that one of them will meet even the most unlikely string of coincidences. But this wasn't a controlled experiment. Of all the people in the world to discover this man, in this village, in this remote valley...

Jansen's head was spinning. This was no coincidence - it couldn't be! He squinted, willing his gaze straight and piercing, and opened his mouth.

"Do you understand me now?" his words were hesitant, but they were familiar to the man, who grinned and took another drink from the mushroomy grog. His eyes were cloudy, too, wildly intent but wheeling in circles.

"I... I..." Jansen stammered, wrestling with his own tongue. Where to begin? There were so many things he wanted to know, so many questions to ask, he didn't know where to begin. More than four decades of field training was falling apart before his very eyes. He had to concentrate. "I... I..."

Before he could ask his first question, however, there was a sudden deafening boom, like a thunderclap echoing through the valley. Only it did not roll away. The oven chamber reverberated with the sound, its intensity shaking the sausages and herbs from their moorings on the ceiling. Was it an earthquake? An avalanche? The young manned snapped to his feet, alert, reaching for the sharp bone lance with which he tended the fire. Jansen was too disoriented to rise from his chair, but not so far gone that he could not taste the sudden change in the air- it was an aircraft! Its gravity repulsors were filling the thin mountain air with ozone.

Marie, Jansen realized immediately. If she had gone for a quick hike and didn't check in by sunset, he would have called the local law enforcement as well. This was his own damned fault, a search party looking for a lost eccentric presumably freezing to death on the mountainside. He should have figured his travel time better.

The flying machine's searchlights crisscrossed the irregular masonry of the village square outside before arcing through the doorway and catching the young man full in the face. He stood dazzled, bone rod in hand.

A loud but distinct voice: "Lower your weapon, and come out of the hut! This is the police!"

The man stood, trying to make out this sudden source of light and sound. Jansen wondered what his host made of this apparition - surely he must have seen many flying machines from afar, but how often would the locals have reason to fly up an otherwise abandoned slope? He tried again to rise from his chair, but he seemed rooted to it, his legs as heavy as stone.

"I repeat - this is the police! Drop the stick and come outside with your hands where we can see them!"

The man may not have understood the meaning of the booming words, but he certainly recognized the intonation of a threat. He stood, brandishing the rod like a spear, defiant, shouting curses first hurled when Mankind was young. Try as he might, Jansen still couldn't rouse himself - his eyes were swimming in phosphorescent colors, his ears buzzing with half-imagined sounds, his lips burning and freezing at the same time as the young man's intoxicating beverage invaded his blood. He felt himself melting away into a bright, vibrating, string of angry epithets coming from the mouth of his host.

"This is your last chance - drop the weapon or we'll drop you!"

What happened next was a blur. One moment the man was standing in the doorway, spear in hand, and in the next moment the spear, the light, and the roar were all gone. Only the man remained, with silence and the purplish evening sky behind him.

Had he downed the flying machine with a sharpened rod of bone, or did he just scare the pilot away for the time being? Jansen had no time to ponder the matter, for no sooner had the young man dispatched the intruder from the air than he now was closing in on him with a vengeful gleam in his eyes. He finally rose from his chair in order to face his attacker.

"Wait!" Jansen cried out. "You don't understand. Wait!"

The man was on top of him in a heartbeat, knocking him across the room in the direction of the oven. His calloused, sooty hands were around his neck, and his long fingernails digging into his skin like talons. Jansen barely recognized this man who now was trying to kill him.

"How dare you!" the man shrieked. "You were my guest. How dare you bring them to my home! You were welcome - you and you alone!"

Jansen tried to respond, but no air could escape from his windpipe. He flailed his limbs, to no avail.

"They told me you would come! They told me to prepare! They said you were not like them! They said you were special!"

Jansen tried again to speak, but the man's grip was too strong. Adrenaline flooded through his veins, temporarily washing away the grogginess brought on by the drink. At least I'll die with a clear head, he thought grimly.

The man began to curse again in an almost singsong fashion, and for a moment Jansen - ever the linguist, even in the face of death - couldn't help but be captivated by his words, those beautiful words that would now be his undoing. Then the moment passed and scientific curiosity gave way to the instinct for survival, buried under decades of theory and field research but in the end just as strong as his adversary's.

Reaching for anything to push off for leverage, Jansen felt the stone cold blade of the axe atop the cord of wood in his grasping fingers. His hand closed around the haft - slow, deliberate, and aware. There was no fuzziness now, no blur to his vision or buzz in his ears. Just the axe and those lovely, lovely words.

Jansen swung the axe blindly and struck the man from behind, on the nape of his neck. The angle was awkward, but the blow was enough to break his attacker's choke hold and throw him off balance. It was all the advantage he needed. He swung again, this time with both hands, and felt the blade bite deep into flesh. The man howled.

Jansen howled as well. Knocking his opponent over with the mass of his body, now it was he who hurled the curses, shouting in the First Tongue of Mankind fluently, as if he'd been born speaking it. But hadn't he, really?

He cursed the man, cursed his bitch of a mother, cursed his questionable lineage, cursed his ramshackle village, cursed his rancid lamb stew, cursed his undrinkable grog. He cursed everything about the man, cursed every twist and turn that had lead to their meeting, cursed the day that he had kissed his wife goodbye and first set out on this ill-fated quest.

The words rolled off his tongue - charging, challenging – as easily as the axe moved in his hands. The man looked up at Jansen as he raised the blade one last time to strike a killing blow. He listened to the old linguist's angry words. They were perfectly formed, perfectly accentuated.

The man smiled.

Jansen dropped the axe.

The man was already dead, he could plainly see – Jansen must have mortally wounded his host when he’d struck him in the chest and knocked him down. He fell to his knees and looked at the body before him. The man’s mouth was frozen in an upturned expression of comprehension and his eyes were full of calm and understanding.

Was he happy? Jansen smiled himself, then collapsed beside him. Together they lay - Last and First, First and Last. One living, one dead; one resting for the very first time, one dreaming at last.