"Weird," I say.

"What's that?" Shame asks from where he's reading nearby.

"Well... ashgeten sounds wrong, in the whole "adding ash- to a word makes it "person who has this quality." " It doesn't sound at all like one of your words. It doesn't even match some of the other ways you denote "person who has this quality." Is it archaic?"

"No, it's a Third World word. Or maybe Second," Shame says. "I'm not a linguist."

I turn over my shoulder to star at him. "What?"

"A word from one of the other worlds?" Shame asks. "Are you so busy thinking of us as fantasies that you forget we are a multi-world empire?"

"Uh, no," I say, though I'm guessing my face says "guilty as charged."

"Even with instantaneous transit, Kherishdar is too big for us to have a homogenous language. Or it would be, if we didn't have linguists. They go from world to world, notating the local changes and bringing them to the other worlds. They write the common dictionaries. That way a colonist can still talk to someone from the capital."

"You... correct... for linguistic drift," I say.

"I trust that wasn't a pun," he says, returning to his reading.

"No," I say, because I'm too busy squealing to myself. I want that job!!

"You might want to look up keva," he adds, absent.

So I do. And giggle.

keva [ keh VAH ], (noun)—people who are into everything, trying to figure out how it works. This applies equally to children asking "Why" all the time and busybodies who want the latest gossip and elderly relatives who want to know if you really know what you're doing. Linguists and anthropologists in particular often earn this appellation.

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