Lexicon

tall, bronze-skinned woman who had met his eye across the ballroom twenty seconds ago and begun to cross it like a torpedo. “Rosalía, what a pleasure.”
    “William,” she said. “I swear, you age backward.”
    “De Castro,” said Goethe, casting an eye over her green gown, which was daring when she stood still and practically scandalous when she moved. De Castro offered her hand, which Goethe kissed. “Yeats and I were just discussing his latest plan to seed the world with English missionaries.”
    “Surely you see that a common world language would serve the organization’s interests.”
    “I suppose,” said Goethe. “But I weep at the prospect that this language would be
English
.”
    “It won’t be,” said de Castro. “It will be Spanish. English plateaued some time ago. It will take more than Yeats’s missionaries to reverse that.” She looked down her nose at Goethe, who stood a foot shorter. “I suppose these things are more alarming to delegates whose languages are in decline.”
    “Ah, it begins,” said Goethe. “The traditional German pile-on.”
    “Honestly, I admire your spirit. It cannot be easy to watch your language slip into the footnotes of history.”
    “It is doing no such thing.”
    “Although I suppose you must be used to humiliation,” said de Castro. “German being the second most popular Germanic language.”
    “Children, please,” said Yeats.
    De Castro turned to him. “Did I hear correctly? Pushkin will be joining us via speakerphone?”
    “Apparently.”
    “I do hope we don’t need another Russian delegate. They’ve been dropping like flies. Alexander was doing so well.”
    “It’s the language,” said Goethe. “Too many morphemes. Inherently vulnerable.”
    “He can’t expect to save himself with a
speakerphone
. The idea is preposterous.” She used a German word for “preposterous,”
lächerlich
, slightly mangling the first syllable, watching Goethe as she did. So Yeats presumed that de Castro had dropped a little linguistic depth charge there. The entire meeting would be like this: delegates continually probing each other, seeking weakness. It was an inevitable by-product of the fact that the organization was a loose coalition of independent entities; no delegate outranked any other. Technically, Yeats was no more important than al-Zahawi of Arabic or Bharatendu Harishchandra of Hindi-Urdu. This was something he planned to change.
    “Let us assume Pushkin has other motives,” said Yeats, “and not waste our time together on speculation.”
    “Agreed,” said de Castro. “Speaking of which, William, I was hoping you might be able to end some speculation of my own. Have you recovered your bareword?”
    His phone buzzed against his thigh, which was surprising, since everyone who knew that number should have known not to call it. “Sadly, no.”
    “How disappointing,” said de Castro, “and, simultaneously, bullshit. William, none of us believe you would allow a bareword to lie in Broken Hill unmolested for almost a year.”
    “The concept is extraordinary,” said Goethe.
    “We can discuss what you are willing to believe in the meeting,” Yeats said. “Which has not yet begun.”
    De Castro glanced around the room. “There is a reason the other delegates have not approached you yet. I imagine it is the same reason Pushkin is not here at all.” Her eyes settled on him. “Do you plan to compromise us?”
    “How ridiculous,” he said.
    De Castro watched him. Goethe said, “There is no denying you have been making efforts to retrieve it. However, the more time that passes, the more one wonders whether one is witnessing not
efforts
so much as
charades
.”
    “I do not have the bareword,” Yeats said. “For proof, please note the obvious fact that if I did, I would be using it to spare myself this conversation.” His phone buzzed again. “Excuse me.”
    He turned away, plucked the phone from his pants, glanced at the screen, and repocketed it. He gazed into the distance, digesting the words: SIGHTING [email protected] IN 24 POI 665006.
    The message was automated, sent by a computer whenever a person of interest—a PoI—was sniffed out by one of the vast number of surveillance systems to which he had access. Because those systems were less than perfectly reliable, possible sightings became messages only when the computer had accumulated sufficiently many of sufficient quality to pass a particular confidence level. In this case, they