Seto Kaiba learns a dead language at night, in secret, for the sake of one addressee. Middle Egyptian can be read by scholars the world over; no one alive receives letters in it. He masters the grammar in days. The last line of the letter takes him half a year.
Then he finds what the script does not record. Hieroglyphs preserve consonants and let the vowels go — they were self-evident to the speakers, and the speakers are dust. He can write that name. He can read it. He cannot say it correctly, and neither can anyone else in the world. Except one man, who took his name back and then died with the sound of it.
So Seto writes to the dead in the form the ancient Egyptians used: the name, the bond, and one request. He asks for the only thing that could not be found in any book or on any stele.
This is a translation of an Artificial Intelligence work.
Original Title: 母音
Original Author: Gemini with 葉人(@Hathor_yuki)
Personal site: https://prideshipping.sakura.ne.jp
He left no trace on the company servers. He hired no tutor. The dictionary and the grammar he ordered from separate antiquarian booksellers in separate countries, and paid in cash. It was a thing no one needed to know. If it were known, he would be asked the reason. The reason, Seto had never put into words. Had it been the kind of thing that could be put into words, he would not have needed a dead language at all.
The classical Egyptian of the New Kingdom. The conjugation of its verbs resembled no language he knew. Its writing used three systems at once. Three birds in a row were not birds; they were a sound. Only when the sign of a seated man was set beside them did the word become a person. A determinative, the books called it. The last sentry of meaning. Seto learned the mechanism in three days. The learning itself cost him nothing.
The cost lay elsewhere.
There are still a great many people in the world who can read this language. Scholars, students, enthusiasts. But there is no longer anyone, anywhere, who receives a letter in it. What Seto was learning was a language for an addressee. One only. A man who had died three thousand years ago, returned once, and then died again, properly.
The chapter was towards the back of the grammar.
——Letters to the dead.
The ancient Egyptians wrote letters to the dead. On the inside of a bowl, on a scrap of linen, on papyrus. They wrote, and they set the writing in the tomb. The dead read them; this was believed. Death was not a severing of communication. To them the dead were distant relatives, slow to reply, but powerful. The living wrote. A wife who had lost her husband. A son who had lost his father. Handwriting from three thousand years ago survives even now.
The form was fixed.
First, call the name of the dead.
Next, remind them of the bond that held in life. I did this much for you. You promised me this.
And last, ask for something. Heal this illness. Let me win this lawsuit. Grant me a child. Come to me in a dream.
Seto read the chapter many times. Each time, he caught on the same place.
The asking.
The name, he could write. He could write it now. In hieroglyphs or in hieratic. Enclosed in the ring of rope, correctly. The bond, he could write as well. We faced each other across the field. Many times. You stood before me. Where no one else could stand. — Facts alone, he could write without limit. Facts were his province.
The last line, he could not write.
In the drawer of his desk, the failed attempts accumulated.
Come back, he wrote, once. Wrote it, and drew a line through it immediately. This was not a negotiation. A demand with no terms attached was something Seto had never, in his life, uttered. It was a construction that did not exist in his grammar.
Come to me in a dream — he began, and stopped. It was the same request as the wives of three thousand years ago. There was no reasoning anywhere that said the same would not do. He simply did not want it.
I want to see you, he did not write. Write it and it becomes true. Written words remain. He had chosen this language. A language in which what is written remains forever. A language in which a name cut into stone holds for three thousand years. So anything written in this language becomes true in the direction of forever. I want to see you could not be made forever. That would be too cruel to the version of himself for whom the man did not return.
The failed attempts he burned, all of them. The ash asserted nothing.
About half a year after he began, Seto arrived at the absence lying at the bottom of this language.
There are no vowels.
Hieroglyphs recorded only consonants. Vowels were not written. To the speakers they were self-evident. And the speakers died out. Only what had been self-evident was lost, cleanly. What remained was the skeleton of consonants. For convenience, scholars read by inserting provisional vowels between bone and bone. Egyptological pronunciation, it is called — no more than a convention, used by everyone in the knowledge that it is not the true sound.
Which meant this.
Seto could write that man's name. Could read it. He knew its meaning, and its derivation.
But he could not call it in the correct sound.
No one in the world could, any longer. How that name had truly resounded. Which vowels, at what pitch, had flowed between the consonants. Every set of vocal cords that knew it had gone to dust.
The name remained. Only the sound had died.
That night Seto closed the book and did not move for a long time. A name he ought to have known seemed suddenly to be only half in his hands. The characters were there. He could draw the ring of rope correctly. But the sound that should have been ringing inside that ring, he had never once heard.
——No.
He had heard it.
It had been given to him. In the man's own voice. That man had spoken his own name, with his own mouth. The name he had taken back. For the first time in three thousand years. In that moment, that sound had unmistakably moved the air. Seto had heard it. He should have heard it. But when he tried to recall it, the sound in his memory had been rounded off into the phonology of Japanese. The ear corrects what it hears into sounds it knows. The original sound had been translated once already, at the eardrum.
The last man in the world to pronounce that name correctly was dead.
The original sound was now nowhere but inside that man.
He finished the letter a month after that.
He used a bowl. Not papyrus, not linen. The inside of an unglazed earthenware bowl, the same as the wives of three thousand years ago. In hieratic, right to left. The ink he ground himself, from soot and resin. He did not use the company laboratory. This was not research.
The text was short.
He called the name. Enclosed in the ring of rope.
He wrote the bond. One line was enough. ——We faced each other across the field.
And then the last line. The line he had not been able to write for half a year.
The asking, in the end, turned out to be only one thing. Not come back, not come to me in a dream, not I want to see you. Something that existed in his grammar, and that only that man could be asked for. Something impossible for any scholar in the world, in any book, on any stele.
——Give me the correct sound of your name.
That alone, he wrote. For the signature, a transliteration of his own name. Reduced to consonants, Seto's name too became bone only. It did not matter. Bone was enough. The vowels, the other side knew. That man could call Seto's name in the correct sound. He had called it many times. In that respect, the footing had never been equal from the start.
There was a means of sending the bowl.
The device that interfered with the boundary between dimensions he had left standing, undismantled. A device to be used once and never again — that had been the decision. He would not disturb the peace of that world any further. It was the agreement he had made with himself on the day he came back. To cross in the flesh, he would not do again.
But a letter is another matter.
The living of three thousand years ago had gone no further than the tomb. They set the bowl in the tomb and went home. They did not cross the boundary. They wrote without crossing. That was the etiquette of the thing called a letter. Seto decided to observe that etiquette. For him, it was a concession. So as to avoid using the word concession, he renamed it, inwardly, as observance of form.
Before dawn, in a facility with no one in it, the device hummed low. The coordinates could be guesswork; he knew that. A letter with an addressee on it arrives. In that world, the name was the address.
The bowl vanished beyond the light.
He set no deadline for a reply. Of the letters from three thousand years ago, not one copy of a reply survives. The dead do not write back. If they answer, the books said, it is in another form. A dream. A sign. Or else the granting of the request itself.
Seto shut down the power to the facility, went home, and slept.
He did not dream. There was no sign.
A month passed. Seto did not make waiting into a daily routine. He removed the verb to wait from his awareness and simply went on turning the pages of the dead language, night after night. The chapter on verbs ended and the chapter on negative constructions began. This language was rich in the vocabulary of negation. Does not exist. Is no longer. Never again shall—. Through that chapter alone, Seto moved slowly.
It was the night of the fortieth day.
He was at his desk when the characters on the page abruptly became unreadable. Became unreadable — or rather, in front of the characters, there was a sound.
There was no one in the room. The low noise of the air conditioning. A distant road. Passing beneath them, as though ducking under.
It was a name.
Not his own. It was that man's name. That man's name, in that man's voice, moved the air of the room once. Between the consonants ran vowels Seto did not know. Different from the scholars' sounds of convenience. Different, too, from the sound rounded off into Japanese inside his memory. A sound lifted from somewhere deeper. A sound that for three thousand years had reached no ear. The original sound, lost by the world, held by one man alone until he died with it.
And now it had been delivered.
Exactly as asked. Not one word other than what was asked for. Without returning, without appearing in a dream, without showing himself — he had sent only the thing requested, and sent it precisely. He was a punctilious man. He always had been. Not once had that man broken a promise made across the field.
And after that one word, following it, there was another sound.
This time it was Seto's name. Seto's name, pronounced within that system of vowels. Through the skeleton of consonants, the vowels of that world had been threaded. Called in that sound, Seto's name sounded like a word from another language. Like a word that had existed for three thousand years. As though, long before any of this, a seat had been prepared for Seto in that world. One of them.
I have been called, Seto thought.
He did not answer. Not that he could not. He did not. To answer would complete the exchange. A letter is one letter, out and back. He had no intention of completing it.
The room was quiet again. The sound of the air conditioning. A distant road. A night in which nothing had happened went on.
The next morning Seto sat at his desk and opened a notebook.
He meant to write down the sound from the night before. Those vowels. The phonetic values the world had lost. Recorded, it would be a discovery. The single piece of testimony that filled three thousand years of blank.
He took up his pen, wrote the skeleton of consonants, and stopped.
There was no character to write. No character capable of transcribing those vowels existed in hieroglyphs, in phonetic notation, or in any writing system he knew. Characters are an agreement among the living. That sound stood outside the agreement. Force an approximate sound onto it and it could be written, yes. Write it, and it would be rounded off again. The same thing that had happened at his eardrum that day would simply happen again, on paper.
Seto set down the pen.
A man who had lived recording everything chose, for the first time in his life, not to record. That sound he would not write. Nowhere. Not on the company servers, not on paper, not in stone. He would keep it only inside himself. As that man had done, three thousand years ago. Leaving the world only bone, carrying the sound with him.
It was not possession. Held in trust came closer. In time he would go and return it. In person. Until that day, like interest, he would sound it once each night, inwardly.
At the back of the drawer there is another unglazed bowl.
It is still white.
The last line of the next letter was no longer a line he could not write.
