Читать книгу Triad - Sheila Finch - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

The planet crowded Mosquito’s viewport. Gia shielded her eyes, shivering as she adjusted to the two sequences of drugs she’d taken over the last twelve hours. Each time, the first sign they were taking effect was this same chill as if she were about to come down with some viral infection. She squinted at brightness; the planet lurched—she experienced a brief moment of nausea—then detail flooded in, sharp-edged.

Checking, she glanced around the shuttle. The variegated blues of her crewmates’ uniforms heightened as she focused, areas of ultramarine flowing into azure. Behind the other women, tones of metal and fabric in the shuttle’s interior splintered, spraying rainbows. Her eyes ached from the prismatic assault. But she was used to the discomfort caused by the side effects of the alpha sequence of drugs that showed up first; it was a minor and temporary irritation. Apart from rechecking her body chemistry each time she began a new course of neurotransmitters, HANA prescribed them routinely.

Maybe they’d be lucky and hit it first time. But there was always some fine-tuning to do.

“Now,” Madel Karek said. “Remember—we don’t want any more incidents like Lil’s.”

“Lil’s just slow and clumsy,” Dori said.

“Be careful, anyway.”

The sick feeling in Gia’s stomach receded, and she turned back to the viewport. The planet hung like an exotic jewel displayed on black velvet, its almost unbroken cloud cover sparking silver streaked with pink in the aging star’s light. Narrowing the field of vision, she saw as if through a microscope the clouds’ intricate dark-blue veining, minute gray curls, the marbling effect of air currents that normally would have lain beneath her visual threshold. Peripherally, below the viewport, she saw the crisp field of the control board, the sweep of needle, the rush of luminous digits. She could have recited it all without looking if this had been the Academy and the instructors were still checking.

Now she was going to put all those hours of theory and practice to a real test. Nervous excitement shimmered along her neural pathways like summer lightning.

The second set of drugs she’d taken today for the first time induced expanded states of consciousness. Once, mystics and shamans had cultivated these states by meditation or fasting, or ingesting naturally occurring hallucinogens. Over the centuries, psychochemists had tamed the primitive system of hit-and-miss drug use, knowing now that what the drugs induced was not hallucination at all, but a different ordering of the phenomena of the universe, an altered view. After her first visit to the planet, she’d fed descriptions of alien physiology and planet geography into the computer, and HANA had processed them with the language samples. The result was the beta sequence, a catalog of state alterers likely to produce the effects of the alien world view. But the sequences evolved as much through trial and error as anything else, and not until she’d tried this particular one out in actual communication would she know how much adjustment was necessary. Lingster and computer would decide this together.

Habit took her hand up to rub the tiny scab behind her ear where the computer link had been embedded.

The clearing swung directly below, and Zion stood waving beside the framework of a shelter building. The hectic tumble of images grew moment by moment. Complex patterns of light and shade from leaves overhead crawled over his arms like a living mosaic. Large insects floated in aimless spirals over the ground, and in the unnatural sharpness of her vision she caught the rippling of undergrowth where small creatures burrowed. Boundaries between subject and ground shifted and flowed like the contours of an optical illusion. The curved metal walls of Mosquito rushed in, tangling in her perception with nearer surfaces of cloth and human skin. She was aware of the way Madel’s chest rose and fell minutely with her breath, the faint stirring of Dori’s hair in the recycled air.

Mosquito bumped twice and settled. She felt the tremors of stress race through its metal skin. The door opened.

Warm rain stroked her face as she descended the ramp. Fungi’s pungency, delicate tendrils of perfume from minute flowers hidden in moss, the dark-brown scent of damp leaves and tree bark, all mingled in a kaleidoscope of smell. The clearing was awash with sound, the yelping cries of birds, the thrum of insects, the shrill voices of humans, the rustling of leaves and undergrowth, the faint rub of petal against stem, the patter of rain on leaf and—darker—on wet earth, even the tiny sound of air passing over her ears. Everything registered itself precisely on her brain.

Nothing in the language labs could have prepared her for this.

“Are you okay?” Madel Karek took her elbow as she swayed drunkenly on the ramp.

Gia nodded. “It always takes a while to adjust to hypersensitivity—but I’m all right.”

Her voice sounded oddly hollow to her own ears; it would pass.

Disapproval flickered in the MedSpec’s eyes. The authority to prescribe the language drugs for a lingster belonged solely to the computer she worked with—a situation, Gia’d been warned, that sometimes caused flares of professional jealousy in a ship’s medical officer.

Zion stood at the bottom of the ramp, hands at his sides as she passed. Behind her, Dori came quickly down. Shelly followed, a bow in her right hand and a quiver over her shoulder. On reaching the ground, she slung the bow across a shoulder to join the arrows. Gia reeled under the fiery sheen of feather tips, like a celebrant taking one sip too many of wine.

She knew the drill to adjust to the onslaught of sensations; she’d practiced many times. Breathe slowly, deeply— The dizziness that often accompanied the state of hyperawareness was already subsiding. Take control of apparent time, slow it—

She began to focus her impressions. Unless she was careful to do this, she would slip over into insanity a little at a time. She would find it more and more difficult to come back after a session, until at last she’d be lost forever in the roaring ground that was the raw, unfiltered universe.

Behind Zion, in the shadowy branches of the giant trees, four silver-furred Ents waited for her to approach.

She closed her eyes, preparing to open the channels that led to HANA through the implant in her brain. HANA had used the one-day delay to completely reformulate the translation program with the updated grammar and vocabulary it had isolated from its analysis of the new language tapes she’d made. The computer would be performing two functions, recording more samples of the language, and feeding Gia words and phrases as she needed them.

She’d practiced this—she knew what to expect. She could control it. She exhaled, letting go of nervousness.

A tremor along the nerves—a slight buzz like an insect flying against a pane of glass—the channel was open.

“Shelly, give me a hand with these.”

Madel was standing on the ramp, her arms clutching the plastiglass bottles and boxes that threatened to spill over and drop in the mud. Light glinted and vanished like a prickle of knives as she shifted her burden.

“I’ll take some,” Zion offered.

Between them they carried the paraphernalia across the clearing to the shelter. Gia followed. The tension set up by opening the link to HANA had the effect of grounding her, as if some invisible lightning rod were drawing off the excess crackling along the neural paths. She observed the scene calmly now. The man was using one of the tree caves, a natural formation in the tree roots that arched high above the ground, extending it outward with a sloping roof on supports cut from the abundant supply of fallen trees. It was already closed on two sides by thin walls of split wooden stakes, and had a raised interior platform. The back wall was the tree itself, but the fourth was open to the rain which gusted inside, spattering the floor with large, dark drops.

“You slept here last night?” Madel was frowning.

Gia watched his easy smile curling the corners of his mouth, pushing the freckles of his cheeks closer together as if the skin were a fan folding its patterns away. The design of his face dissolved into the design of leaves and shadows behind him.

“Like a baby.” His eyes moved past Madel and met Gia’s eyes.

She felt the response of blood through the fine tracery of capillaries across her face and neck. She turned away, leaving them to get on with the job of collecting specimens for Madel.

Dori stood below the group of Ents, gazing up at them, gesturing at the ground. She opened her mouth and words emerged. Gia could almost see them: large and slow like drops of half-frozen water. Shelly pincered a bowl between two fingers as if she were afraid it might burn.

Careful to breathe deeply, evenly, Gia stepped over mud, a brief moment of vertigo disarming her depth perception, blurring the distance between the sole of her foot and the ground in the quilting of images her eyes perceived. At her approach the Ents dropped lightly from the branches and began to vocalize. They all spoke at once, rapidly, the pitch rising and falling melodically.

Despite the drugs and the long session with HANA, she had difficulty distinguishing individual morphemes. This was not the way it had been at the Academy. The instructors and the resident dolphin tutors had been more careful of the fledgling lingsters’ immature abilities. Nor did this seem to be a linear language such as Inglis, or any of the other languages from around the galaxy that she’d practiced on. This one had meaning stacked vertically, two or more to each phonemic sequence, multiple semantic layers carried in the briefest utterance, like individual notes in a musical chord. Perhaps some of them lay outside the province of human experience.

But solving that problem was the function of the state alterers she’d taken.

Each species of intelligent life in the galaxy learned to limit its perceptions of the world it inhabited in order to preserve itself from insanity, then petrified those few chosen sensations into language. Once a child was brought up in a language system, it was impossible for her to hold a concept that couldn’t be framed in that language. Therefore, the second set of drugs was designed to break down her normally held world view, shatter her illusion of “reality,” eliminate the mechanism by which her mind censored information it considered unimportant according to its preconceived categories of priority. By so doing, the beta drugs gave her the chance to make a completely new selection, guided by the concepts of an alien world view.

She tried out a syntactical arrangement of morphemes that she and HANA thought most likely indicated Persons (not Omareemeean)/in this place/giving greeting. She made a watery gliding of open, evenly stressed phonemes, junctured by a click made with the tongue forward, just behind the top teeth.

The Ents immediately repeated the sound. But repeated was too tame a word: they orchestrated it, embroidered it, as if this were a contest and she’d challenged them to improve on her efforts.

She shook her head, forgetting that they didn’t understand the human gesture. One of them took her hand in its own, raising it to its forehead in the sign of greeting they’d used on the first day. The others crowded against her, and the ceremony had to be repeated for each in turn with equal solemnity. The palms of her hand burned with the vividness of the contact. She was held spellbound by the wavelike design of their body hair, the subtle gradations of color from bright silver to muted gray.

“Tell them I could take more.”

Dori’s voice knifed bladelike, separating the intertwining layers of sound in the clearing. She winced at its harshness.

She’d rehearsed a sequence of sounds, coached by HANA, that might begin to convey Dori’s eagerness. Translated roughly into linear Inglis it would have been, Persons (not Omareemeean)/happy/possessing gifts/persons (Omareemeean) bring.

The Ents joined hands in a circle with her at its center, their bodies undulating sinuously in a language of its own. They took the words Gia had spoken and gave them back to her in four-voiced polyphony. But when the Ents uttered the phrase, she sensed the multi layers of meaning that she hadn’t been able to put into it herself.

As suddenly as it had begun, the dance stopped, the circle broke apart.

Dori moved away, leaving her alone with the Ents. Across the clearing, voices buzzed in the shelter. Something shrilled high above them in the trees. Warm rain spattered down from shaken leaves, each drop that touched her arm or brow like a liquid emblem of the music that was now still.

One of the Ents, a little taller than the others, leaned toward Gia’s ear and spoke in a soft voice.

River, the thin voice of the computer translated in her head.

She repeated the alien version aloud.

The Ent watched her lips closely. It took one of her hands and raised it to its own lips. She felt the soft passage of air, the flutter of lip as it repeated the phrase. As if she were deaf, she thought, learning to speak by sensing the breath’s expulsion. She said the morpheme again, correcting the articulation as best she could from the model the Ent had given her. This time it waited.

So she’d said it properly. But what had she said? There was no river nearby. Yet that was a good sign—they were using language to symbolize things not present. Nonsentient animals couldn’t do that. Now several Ents spoke together; the sound drew her inward. She felt the hazy signature of the beta sequence, the preliminary sense of floating, the distortion of sound that initiated an alteration in viewpoint. She breathed deeply, calmly, as she’d been taught, and didn’t fight the shift coming over her more strongly with each utterance from the Ents.

She was swimming in the language as a swimmer moves through a river heavy with silt. Syntax rippled across the surface of her skin. Meanings entered her consciousness not through her ears but through her pores. Multilayered sequences streamed through the sieve of the link till the computer retrieved the nuggets they contained and told them back to her.

The taller Ent spoke alone again. Awareness lurched and folded.

The sensation passed.

The Ent waited patiently for her reaction. She saw suddenly that its fur was not uniformly silver. Here and there on its head and shoulders were patches of darker color, a speckling of indigo. She glanced at the others, but they had moved into dark shadow.

“We (not Omareemeean) bring gifts (not Omareemeean).” She gestured toward the sky where the Ann Bonny orbited unseen. It was an instinctive gesture; they couldn’t have understood it.

Perhaps her pitch was off, the tone variation too great, the junctures awkwardly managed, for the Ent gave no sign of comprehension. Deep in her skull, the computer repeated the pattern with cold precision, coaching her.

She tried again, broke off halfway through for the Ent was paying no attention. As soon as she stopped, it repeated the phrase. Three/at the river, she understood, and something else about the river, using a syntactical transformation she hadn’t catalogued before and couldn’t identify. There was something more, another level like the flicker of a shadow seen peripherally, not there when the eye is turned full in that direction.

Frustrated, Gia shook her head at the Ent. Its silver eyes mirrored the sadness she felt, giving the image of her own emotion back to her transformed. Then as she watched, one eye moved to gaze at the cluster of tall trees at the edge of the clearing. The other remained focused on Gia’s face.

The world tilted suddenly and dissolved...the forms melting and running together like quicksilver...lines wavering...solids turning transparent as glass...colors coalescing like fire. She was shattered...floating suspended...a dust of sparkling particles everywhere...the center of everything...nowhere.... She contained everything.

She blinked, and the experience ended. The Ent had drawn its lips back over its teeth in an expression that in a human would have been called smiling. She resisted the urge to accept it as such.

Naming gestures were ancient, common to the young of many sentient races throughout the galaxy; their meaning lay outside of words. She took its hand, carried it to her breast, and said her name slowly and distinctly. The Ent watched intently. She repeated the movement and the naming. Then she carried the Ent’s hand toward its rib cage and touched it. She waited.

“Aleealee,” the Ent said.

Gia touched it again, repeating, “Aleealee.”

“Aleealee,” it said. It moved her hand back to her own breast and said clearly, “Gee-ah.”

Elated, she forgot her training and hugged it.

Trembling, she withdrew hurriedly. This would never do. What if it interpreted her gesture as a hostile action? But it stood impassively, waiting as before.

She closed her eyes till calmness returned. She bent to the heaped beads quivering in waves of silver on gray at her feet, and picked up a string of irregular globes. She pantomimed pleasure, feeling the cool shapes of the beads like music. She slipped them around her neck, then held out her empty hands to the Ent, fingers splayed.

“Gifts,” she said in the alien tongue, and felt her body trembling with effort.

Aleealee revealed sharp, white teeth again. Its eyes widened, something open and childlike in its gaze. Very gently, it stroked her cheek with a soft finger. Its hand slid from her face and touched the beads at her throat. It uttered cooing noises that reminded her of sounds a mother might make to soothe a fretful child. She relaxed, letting go the hectic flow of images and sensory impressions still crowding her mind.

The Ent raised her right hand to its lips and bit.

Gia screamed as blood sprang from a row of tiny indentations. She tried to pull away. But Aleealee gripped her hand tightly. Its eyes held her mesmerized as slowly, with great ceremony, it extruded a pink tongue and licked away the drops of blood.

Time froze. Depth leached out of the scene. The Ents stood, two-dimensional limbs angling, eyes wide, caught between stare and blink. Gia’s hand hung, a paper cutout pasted on thick air. The left and right images her eyes perceived separated, and she lurched, disoriented.

Aleealee dropped Gia’s hand; its eyes gleamed. The cartoon faded, and normal vision returned. Time began to pass again.

“You all right?” Shelly came running out of the shelter, her eyes large with surprise. Her right hand was on the laser gun at her side.

Dori rose from the mound of bowls she’d been counting at the other edge of the clearing, one hand on Zion’s arm for support. “So the animals bite.”

Madel emerged from the shelter. “Show me the hand. Zion, get my medkit from the shuttle.”

He ran quickly. Gia heard the squelch of his footsteps in the mud.

The blood had already stopped oozing from the wound, but her head felt light, and she had a sudden fear she might faint. She felt no pain; the hand relayed no sensation whatsoever, not even a smarting or soreness. The wound was red and obvious, but she couldn’t feel it.

Her awareness was sharp but disconnected; she couldn’t interpret impressions flooding in. Events became disjointed, rubbing against each other with no meaning, out of sequence. Aleealee moved away into the group of Ents. Zion came back with Madel’s medkit. Rain spattered over the ground. The flecking of pigmentation on Zion’s face deepened. Madel’s hand rose slowly upward. Leaves flickered as Ents moved in the branches overhead. The blocky shape of the medkit swam into Gia’s field of vision. Beside Dori, Shelly’s mouth worked silently. The rain began to pour down ferociously.

“Damn,” Madel said. “Let’s get back into the shelter.”

Awareness shut down abruptly like a curtain drawn across the scene. She let Madel draw her into the shelter, and sat where she was put, leaning against the gnarled tree roots as the MedSpec cleansed and bandaged the wound. She felt detached from the scene, an observer at a boring play.

The Ent’s action had been unexpected, an act of unprovoked aggression. Yet she had an odd intuition of the appropriateness of it, something she didn’t understand now but would later, given time, like a message in code. The biggest effect seemed to be a sudden reversal of her altered state. Her consciousness, that a moment before had been a window open wide on an alien world, had shrunk back to the pinprick humans considered normal. She was close enough to the memory of another state to feel beggared by its withdrawal.

“That’ll do for the moment,” Madel said. “But we’ve got to get back up immediately. HANA’ll have to analyze this.”

“In this rain?” Dori said. “We’ll be soaked before we reach the shuttle.”

“Really—I’m all right. No need to panic.”

“What did you do to provoke it?” Dori asked.

“It told me its name was Aleealee. And I told it mine.”

Outside, the rain descended in a thick gray curtain, forming a fourth wall dividing them from the planet and its inhabitants. Madel stood indecisively, scowling at the rain.

Zion stared at Gia. “No offense—I was admiring the beads you’re wearing.”

She lifted the string of beads from her throat. In the gloomy interior of the shelter they glowed with a mauve phosphorescence, revealing an intricate carving on each bead that had been hidden in the blander light outside. Instead of artifacts carved roughly from wood, they seemed to have been transformed into an etched, translucent glass.

Gia slid the beads between her fingers, feeling the delicate whorls and scrolls in the satiny surface. It was a pleasant experience, calming and satisfying, like a language of sensation written for the fingers of the blind.

“Looks as if they’ve got writing on them,” Shelly said. “Ancient writing. What did they call it? Hieroglyphs?”

“Runes,” Madel suggested.

Dori shook her head. “Tooth marks. They used their teeth to decorate the beads. It’s not writing at all. But even so, it’s effective.”

“Wonder if we missed anything else like this in that pile outside?”

Gia’s emergency forgotten, Dori was on her feet and running, Shelly close behind her. Gia sat fingering the beads. As abruptly as it had begun, the rain ceased. The sky grew lighter, rosy sunlight flooded the clearing. But as the light increased, the luminous glow of the beads faded; the markings became indistinct, though her fingertips could still read them.

Dori returned with an armload of bowls; Shelly followed with several strings of beads. They crowded together, shadowing the artifacts with their bodies. The mauve glow sprang to life on the beads, and a browner one on the bowls. But none bore the strange markings of the beads Gia had chosen.

“That does it for today.” Madel stood up. “We’re going back up.”

Dori packed the artifacts ready to load on the shuttle. Shelly helped silently.

“I hoped to stay down here,” Gia said.

“Out of the question!” Madel snapped. “HANA’ll have to check you out.”

“Can’t you just send the specs up?”

“No, I can’t. I need access to equipment in my lab.”

It seemed suddenly very important to stay. She rebelled against Madel’s decision. “I insist on staying.”

“The shelter’s not completed,” Zion said. “You can see for yourself, LangSpec. There’s no provision for sleeping quarters for more than one yet.”

He was right. It wouldn’t work.

“Settled, then.” Madel stood. “Up we go.”

Gia let the others load the shuttle, overcome by a drowsiness that sapped the strength from her limbs in a way the normal after-effects of the drugs never did. After a while, Madel helped her stand, and guided her across the clearing to the ramp of Mosquito. She set her foot on it and paused.

“Go on,” Madel urged.

She glanced at the clearing and the circle of dark trees that defined it, now bathed in sunshine. There was no sign of the Ents. She touched the beads around her neck and the rune-like carvings burned under her fingertips.

“At least the time wasn’t totally wasted,” Dori said, her eyes on Gia’s beads.

From the bottom of the ramp, Zion said, “I wonder if we can afford the price?”

Unexpectedly, the wound on her hand began to throb.