This is a calculated risk, the first chapter of a fairly long story I've been struggling with off and on for several months. When I hit a dry spell, I fleshed out a few ideas for shorter pieces and submitted them, but this story started calling me again. I've almost finished it, but unfortunately the most incomplete chapter is the next one. I was going to wait until I had it all finished before submitting, but we're leaving on a weeklong trip in four days and I really want to start getting this up.
I'm hoping that the deadline will move me to finish Chapter 2 before we leave, because I know I will once again irritate people no end if there's a long delay between chapters. But Ivan keeps giving me accusing looks, so I'm risking your wrath to avoid feeling guilty.
*
Ivan Wolfe looked out at the 60 conference attendees, virtually all C-levels of major corporations. The Japanese translation of what he was saying streamed from the bud in his left ear, making it difficult for him to focus on his pitch. This being Japan, the C-levels were all men, each looking for an edge in the ever-more-cutthroat global marketplace.
He didn't need this distraction, he was nervous enough about representing Golkonda Ltd at the data mining conference. Golkonda claimed they could bring data mining—previously limited to corporations, educational institutions, and government agencies with deep pockets—to mid-sized enterprises. Accordingly, they sent a phalanx of marketing suits—all male, of course, to match their audience—to convince these leaders of Japan's major companies that "it isn't necessary to spend a painful portion of your operating budget to start panning for gold in the ever-burgeoning streams of data."
Ivan winced every time he heard that piece of marketing fluff. He was the token software geek, sent along to lend authenticity to the seminar; his role was to dazzle the C-levels with footwork while the marketing mavens baffled them with bullshit. He knew that most of the men listening to him didn't understand his technical presentations; his job wasn't to teach them, it was to assure them that Golkonda had the technical chops to deliver what they promised.
So that everyone present could understand everyone else's words, each attendee had a wireless receiver in his shirt pocket connected with a coiled cord to an earbud; it carried the translation of what was being spoken in either English or Japanese to the other language. Ivan had to suppress a smile; it made the room look like it was full of a bunch of Asian Secret Service agents.
The occasional technical term he used that passed through untranslated let him gauge the delay between 6 and 9 seconds, depending on how fast he spoke and the particular term he used. As far as he was concerned, simultaneous translation was a perfect instance of Arthur C. Clarke's observation that sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. (He was more inclined to cite Enoch Root—
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo
—and loved it when someone condescendingly corrected him.)
Ivan had studied Spanish for five years in high school and college; he could translate printed Spanish pretty well if he had access to a Spanish-to-English dictionary. He still had difficulty understanding spoken Spanish, however; translate spoken Spanish on the fly? Yeah, right, just as soon as he broke the 2-minute mile. No doubt about it, both would take some magic.
But no magic was involved in the simultaneous translation of this conference, just three young Japanese women wearing headsets in a glassed-in booth at the front of the conference room. Ivan figured that translating unbroken speech had to be majorly stressful. Only one of the three was actually translating; the other two were taking the break they were allowed after 45 minutes.
He managed to finish his presentation—the first of six he was scheduled to give over four days—with no major goofs. Trying to hide his sigh of relief, he returned to his seat in the front row. Their Japanese sales rep was speaking now, and the voice in Ivan's earbud segued smoothly from Japanese to uninflected English. Again, he was amazed at the skill of the young ladies in the glass booth.
He wasn't interested in the marketing pitch; he'd heard them all too many times already. He zoned out—at least half of it was pure BS, anyway—and focused on the young woman in the booth speaking into her headset mike. Her voice was soft but not quiet, an intriguing quality. She spoke English with no accent; he wondered where she had studied it. Sometimes her eyes were shut, sometimes she glanced down at papers on the desk in front of her, sometimes she looked straight ahead with an unfocused stare.
When the sales rep ended his pitch and announced a 15-minute break, Ivan happened to be looking at the young translator as she was locked in one of her unfocused straight-ahead stares. As she completed her translation, her gaze snapped into focus and she found herself looking directly into Ivan's eyes.
They stared at each other for a moment, then she blushed and looked away, but he continued to look at her. She tried to sneak another look, then blushed as he caught her. She tried to hide her embarrassment by picking up a pen and writing something on a notepad. The young woman next to her glanced with a puzzled expression at what she was writing, then looked out and saw Ivan's stare. She giggled and whispered in the embarrassed young woman's ear, who shook her head and blushed more furiously.
Ivan was enjoying this silent exchange. If the first day of this four-day conference was starting so well, who knew what more interesting experiences lay ahead? He stood and left the conference room for the bathroom, glancing at the translators' booth as he went by, causing all three women to quickly look down and giggle. He smiled all the way to the bathroom.
The rest of the first day passed with no further amusing incidents. At dinner, Ivan got involved in a discussion of the merits of competing data mining products with some attendees who spoke English. He was frustrated at times because he couldn't adequately describe the advantages and disadvantages without getting into technical aspects that were beyond the understanding of the other participants, and in some cases proprietary to Golkonda.
After dinner, while walking through the grounds of the hotel, it occurred to him that both he and the marketing people were using some terms that, while not overly technical, were nonetheless uncommon English. He thought it might prove useful to provide a glossary of some he knew they would be using to the translators.
Ivan returned to his room, fired up his laptop, and started entering the terms and their definitions. After an hour and a half, he had a three-page glossary of 35 terms and headed to the hotel's business center to print copies for the translators and marketing reps.
_________
The next morning he went to breakfast early with the marketing guys and ordered a full English breakfast. Yesterday he had decided that as a guest in another country it was only polite to honor their culinary traditions, so he had ordered a Japanese breakfast. It came in seven bowls. Two tasted okay, two were marginal, three were so unpleasant that he ate only a few bites. He had no idea what some of the items were, and decided that from now on he would eat only things whose taxonomic kingdom he could identify.
The English breakfast, as promised, came with two eggs, sausage, back bacon, baked beans, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, and toast; the meat, beans, tomatoes and mushrooms, toast, and eggs were each served on separate small plates. The waitress, a diminutive young woman, bore an oval tray holding all the small plates plus metal pots of coffee and tea. She served the plates one-by-one without putting the tray down.
The plate of eggs was last. When she took it from the tray, the pots overbalanced it and the tray tipped up; its edge clipped the egg plate. Both eggs—over very easy, of course—slid off into Ivan's lap and the pots fell to the floor. The pots didn't break but the eggs did; coffee and tea spilled everywhere on the floor and runny eggs splattered everywhere on Ivan's lap.
The noise attracted everyone's attention, including the
maître d'
. The waitress burst into tears then dropped the tray, adding to the cacophony. She snatched Ivan's napkin from the table and started trying to wipe the egg mess from his trousers.
The
maître d'
charged up glaring like a berserker samurai, hissed something in Japanese to the waitress, and grabbed the napkin from her hand. She fled to the kitchen and the man began apologizing for the extremely rude and unpleasant service Ivan had been forced to endure. Ivan tried to assure him that it wasn't a problem, he had another suit, these things happened, he had been a waiter himself and caused similar embarrassing incidents.
Nothing would mollify the
