under her short dark hair where the computer link must be embedded in her brain, and wondered if the girl could actually feel it. What must it be like, never being free of HANA’s nagging presence?
“You think so?” Impatience flickered in Dori’s words.
Gia nodded. “Well enough to make a trade agreement. It doesn’t have to be too complex, does it?”
“This isn’t your safe little classroom. All Nteko got when we were here before was a lot of noise.” Dori made no attempt to conceal her dislike.
“But that’s how a lingster starts,” Gia explained earnestly, flushing. “All aural languages are fundamentally a patterned, segmented, and rhythmed code of vocal signals.”
“That’ll help a lot!”
“We have to begin with a description of sounds. Meanings come later. But I—I think I can do it.”
Lil frowned. She prided herself on her ability to judge people, but perhaps that was another thing that was slipping away with age, like muscle tone and supple joints. This kid looked competent enough, and she’d come highly recommended. And there hadn’t been time after Nteko’s accident to find a more experienced xenolinguist.
The notebox gave off a sudden, high-pitched whine, quickly silenced. The noise startled the grove’s aerial community. The creatures—they could loosely be called “birds,” Lil thought, though their wings were scale-covered rather than feathered—rose into the air with a riot of indignant voices. They wheeled over the humans, a shifting kaleidoscope of smoky grays, pearl and silver. Large drops of rain splattered down from the vacated branches, some of them catching Dori’s upturned face.
“Shit!” Dori wiped them away with her sleeve.
“What a magnificent display of bad humor.” Zion Marit stood at the top of the ramp, gazing at the shifting patterns of the wheeling creatures.
“Nice to have the leisure to be amused!” Dori snapped.
Lil had no idea what CenCom hoped to accomplish by sending an artist—especially a male—along on a freighter. She caught his eye over the bent heads of the other two and smiled. He was bright and witty, and there were some advantages to his presence that the computer probably hadn’t expected.
Zion winked at her and moved away with the easy grace of an athlete, his reddish-brown hair already darkening in the rain. He stopped a few paces from the mouth of one of the cave-like clumps of trees and let his gaze travel up to the dark crown a hundred meters above. The aerial creatures had settled down again and silence filled the clearing, a waiting silence broken only by the fitful patter of rain and Dori’s murmured conversation with Gia. Zion moved toward them. The dark-haired lingster had her back toward him.
Dori broke off in mid-sentence. “You might as well make yourself useful....”
Gia turned. Her foot slipped sideways in the unstable mud, and she flung her arms wide to regain her balance. Her left hand was about to strike the mud when he reached out and grabbed her other elbow, catching her in time.
“Don’t touch me!”
Lil stared at the girl’s flushed face. Gia pulled away from the man as if he’d struck her instead of saved her from a tumble in the mud.
Zion removed his fingers from Gia’s arm. “I thought you were falling, LangSpec Kennedy,” he said, coolly formal.
“Just don’t touch me.” Gia’s voice was barely above a whisper. She brushed the blue sleeve of her uniform as if contact with his fingers had somehow soiled the bright turquoise stripe.
If Gia had any unexpected phobias about men, they might be in for an uncomfortable time. Again, apprehension prickled along Lil’s spine.
Might as well fill in time looking around, she decided. She moved off toward a grotesque clump of intertwined roots that ended in jagged stumps. As if they’d been beheaded, she thought with a shiver. But that was silly. In all her years in space, she’d never been edgy about new worlds before. It had nothing to do with the planet; it was that damned wreck that was bothering her.
Up close now, she saw that the stumps sported bizarre shapes of fungus. She could see resemblance to faces, colonies of animals, cathedral-like structures. But the fungus too was gray.
Zion would be interested. She turned to call his attention to the growths and found she couldn’t see him. The clearing was empty, as if the others had quietly stolen away and left her here alone. At its edges, the dense forest waited silently, the birds and insects mute. Now the rain lanced down with sudden, animal ferocity, stinging her bare face and hands, and obliterating the clearing.
Lil knew a sudden, unreasoning fear.
“Zion?” She was ashamed of the tremor she heard in her voice. “Where the hell are you?”
The noise of the rain drowned her words.
She sloshed through the descending wall of water, a growing panic pushing her. They couldn’t have gone far. But what if something had happened? She shouldn’t have left them.
All at once, the rain stopped.
A warbling birdlike sound rippled out from the leaves overhead, peculiarly liquid, like water splashing in a marble basin. She stared up. Gracefully, a slight figure lowered itself from the branches until it hung swaying at the end of long, slender arms. Then it dropped to the ground, its prehensile toes splayed for balance in the slippery mud. It was followed by another, then another, until six of them stood before her. Warily, on guard now, she looked at them.
They weren’t the first aliens she’d seen, though they might be her last. There’d been dozens, though only a handful of intelligent ones—some a little less intelligent than humans, some a little more—and no super races. Would these creatures fit the pattern? They had faces that were uncannily human, though blunter and displaying a fine downy hair that gleamed like wet silver. They had a shoulder-length mane and round, steel-gray eyes; their bodies were covered with a pelt of the silvery fur. They reached no higher than Lil’s shoulder.
“Great Mother!” a voice exclaimed. “They’re like a bunch of primis!”
Dori stood, her hand on a curtain-like vine, staring at the aliens. Behind her, Lil could see Gia and Zion. Just the dense vegetation, arid the blinding rain, she thought with relief. They’d not been far at all.
“Primates, certainly,” Zion said to Dori.
Lil turned back to the aliens. She hadn’t been in space for thirty years to miss the problem their humanoid appearance could cause. The difficulty of negotiating with aliens seemed to increase in inverse proportion to the similarity they bore to humans. She wasn’t exactly sure why.
The others came cautiously toward the aliens.
“Primates, primitives—what’s the difference?” Dori said.
Shafts of ruddy sunlight poked through the clouds and the ground steamed. In the rising mist, one of the aliens took Zion’s hands and raised them to touch its forehead. In turn, its companion stepped out and repeated the gesture. Zion returned the courtesy—if that was what it was—gravely taking the long-fingered hands in his and raising them to his bowed forehead. The aliens exclaimed among themselves in subdued, cooing
