Chapter Eight Page 15
Cohen: Frankly, I don’t expect the public to get it. Even many humans with authority over a Being struggle to grasp that kind of scale.
You’ve made a talking point of not taking action just to advance your own popularity. That’s going to be tested now.
Bennett: Hmph.
Speaking of authority . . . where’s your Being? Did you not bring it along? I thought they didn’t like to be left alone. I mean, that’s what I’ve heard.
Cohen: There’s no point in looking. As a shapechanger, it could be anyone in this room. Including me.
Bennett: . . .
(RUMMAGE RUMMAGE)
Here . . .
Grab a napkin and write something.
(scribble scribble)
Bennett (reading): “That was very clever. I’m surprised.” . . . Hey!
Cohen: Sorry — that should read “I’m surprised, Congressman.”
1: Congressman is italicized because Cohen is being clever.
2: THAT’S NOT THE REAL BENNETT!
3: Cohen knows now that Bennett owns a being, and it is about to hit the fan.
Cohen now suspects Bennett has a Being. However, his alternate theory would be that Bennett knows a lot more about Beings than he lets on. Personally, I’d hold the latter to be more likely, since info on Beings are readily available to a member of Congress and it’s more likely he holds information back (like a typical politician) than that he’s one of the 100 or so people in the world who has one.
Or (for Cohen) there’s still the tiny possibility of Bennett having researched the topic he was going to affect with his legalisation. That would be the most horrendous plot twists of them all!
That’s what I meant about him knowing more than he lets on. It would make logical sense for him to research the topic. However, given the House’s history of comments like “We have to pass the bill before you know what’s in it” and “What good is reading the bill,” Cohen would be right in being very skeptical about that possibility.
The most likely conclusion Cohen could draw would be that Bennett somehow become familiar with Beings and how they work and that caused him to go on his supposed anti-Being crusade. But I expect he’ll begin testing Bennett to see if it’s more than that.
This is interesting, btw. It wasn’t this clear for me that Beings were so confined in their behaviour – if Bennett’s test is legimate then Beings couldn’t do almost anything without their masters prompting. I hadn’t realised that the rules were so constraining…
Hm? Bennett’s banking on the fact that Beings have difficulty with literacy, not on whether they’d obey anyone else…
Yeah I got the whole, they have trouble keeping up with current written languages.
Which I find interesting, as I have an easier time reading German than hearing it. (and yet it was my first language technically *military brat*)
Ah, ok, that bit of logic makes more sense. I apologize for my scramble friendly mind.
(A personal inquiry, if you don’t mind: Aren’t military brats (and the actual soldiers) normally pretty distant from the actual population of a country? I thought the bases got their own schools, shops, cinemas etc. and leave was hard to get by. For example, I live in Germany but have never even seen/interacted with any US military personnel or their families. In fact the only mention I even remember is that shoot out at Frankfurt last year or so.
So how do you learn German? Or do the schools teach the language the base is surrounded by (for lack of better wording))
Civilians can’t get on the base, but the base personel and their families can come and go from the base all they want so long as they have their IDs; especially in none-hostile nations like modern day Germany. the stores and cinema and all that are “okay” but not good on a base (the cinema is usually like four months behind civilian cinema for some reason).
From what I can tell we left the base frequently. I learned German there (as my first language) because I was a baby when we were there, just with all the German television and people around I ended up I guess picking up on German before English somehow. Although I think I mixed them together, even today I will have some mixed in like habe, mein, and such words if I talk to fast.
I suppose they have some telepatic trick helping them with learning spoken languages which can’t be used on written ones. Otherwise, reading is generally easier as you can set your own speed. When you hear something, you can’t pause it after each word untill you remember the translation or re-hear some word you didn’t get first time. Well … actually with a recording device you can, but it’s not really usable in conversation :-)
Therefore, hearing is at least as hard as reading in the same speed with the additional disadvantage of being harder to train. The same argument apply to writting, with the additional disadvantage in case the language have phonems you are not used to (because they are not present in your first language).
Of course, there can be exceptions, like languages which sound similar to some you already know but are written completely different. This shouldn’t be case here, as the latin alphabet used for not only english but majority of languages didn’t changed significantly for hundreds of years …
I’m not entirely certain they actually understand language at all. I’m torn between thinking that they just “know” all languages, and that they get a scan of every nearby language center to learn any new languages automatically, as a precaution against running into a potential Master that they can’t understand/Contract with. Either way, I sort of doubt that any being has ever had to actually learn a language in the sense that a human does. I sort of assume that Beings don’t naturally learn abstract concepts. I’m sort of curious what a Being would do if they were to try and Contract with someone mute…
Know the local sign language, most likely.
…what did he call him??
Hmm, so Cohen has (had?) a Being…I suppose I subscribe to the “Cohen is Miranda’s father” theory.
I am wandering that too, mentally I’ve settled on “conman” instead of “congressman”.
Cohen didn’t call him anything. The insult was in stating that he was surprised Bennet did something clever. Adding ‘Congressman’ was him deliberately misinterpreting Bennet’s reaction. As in ‘oh, you’re mad. Oops, I forgot your title. I meant to write that in.’
Exactly right ^_^
that or one we havn’t seen yet. There was mention of a rat shaped being. Although it would be funny if it was like an octopus of something equally inappropriate for land based masters.
“And worst of all, ‘e could be in zis very room! ‘E could be you! ‘E could be me! ‘E could even–“
*BLAM!*
Come on, it was obvious!
You guys win a cookie for the TF2 reference.
The Beings’ illiteracy continues to amaze me. I suppose, them having such powerful abilities, they had to be bad at something.