Mother tongue

The narrator describes a bedtime talk with her four-year-old son, Theo, who wonders why words die and envisions a monster that devours dead words, linking the idea to a “dead language.” Theo’s mother asks housekeeper Amby to translate his invented phrase “Maheka morgeth,” which Amby says means “the eternal cycle is beautiful.” The narrative then shifts to a news clip about the Belsathian government’s elusive “Tingsu” system, where advanced linguistic algorithms cannot interpret its behavior and the U.S. president warns the nuclear-armed nation.