fear had faded, Lil decided that the aliens were really pretty to look at, with a delicate grace and fluid, dance-like movements. If they’d only been more colorful. Moments like this made her wish she knew more about xenozoology.
The aliens resumed the stream of rather musical sound.
“Gia—your turn,” Dori said.
The LangSpec offered the silvery creature both hands as Zion had done. The ceremony was repeated once again. As soon as the last alien let go of Gia’s hands, Dori moved forward.
Did the alien hesitate for a fraction of a second before taking her Commerce Agents hands? Lil couldn’t be sure, for now they were bowing and touching as before. But Dori was frowning.
That left it up to her. One of them stood nearer than the rest, one hand resting lightly on Gia’s forearm, the other caressing Zion’s red hair. Lil felt the flutter of apprehension again. There was something spider-like about those long fingers—there was an extra joint, surely. She suppressed a shudder and held out her hands to the alien as she’d seen the others do. Mustn’t say alien, she remembered. That was a xenophobic word she’d known better than to use in almost three decades. Entity, the neutral Ent.
The Ent didn’t seem to notice her.
“Hello,” she said.
Nothing happened.
Lil edged between Gia and Zion and they moved away. The Ent stared at Lil, a dull silver gleam in its eyes.
Did any form of intelligence hide behind those eyes? She was compelled to say something even though she felt foolish.
“I’m the captain, Lil Cheng.”
The Ent reached out with long, sinuous arms, seizing both her hands in its own. It drew her forward, filling the air with liquid chatter. It lifted her hands to its brow, not once but over and over. Lil laughed. The alien made laughing sounds too, mimicking her. She bowed her head, acknowledging what seemed to be clearly a welcome. The Ents were simple and harmless—not the sort to build spaceships or destroy them. She’d been worrying needlessly.
The alien touched her hands to its brow again.
But—enough. It should let her go now. She was tiring of the ceremony and tried to pull away.
She found she couldn’t.
The strength of the creature’s grip shocked her. Now a second Ent was moving toward her, reaching for her. Nervously, she glanced up at her companions, wanting to get out of this. No one seemed aware of the problem. Gia appeared absorbed by the constant stream of sound the other four Ents uttered. Dori was talking to Zion, their backs turned to Lil.
The second alien touched her with its long gray-furred fingers. She saw the extra joint clearly. Its eyes looked steadily into hers, something secret moving in their depths. Then one eye tracked slowly to the left, past Lil, toward the dark edge of the forest, and the pupil widened; the other, narrow-slitted, transfixed her with its gaze.
Lil panicked. She jerked her hands in her captors’ grasp, twisting away. Her foot slid from under her on the slick surface.
As she went down, the Ent wrenched her arm sideways, so that she crashed awkwardly to the ground.
CHAPTER THREE
Torchlight flickered fitfully...tall houses threatened...the dark street tunneled. He ran endlessly...the houses leaning over...arriving nowhere, fear gnawing at his innards. A door opened...light knifed out across the darkness...the houses vanished. A line of women advanced on him...arms swung in unison...faces gleamed under oiled skulls. He was arguing now, but darkness devoured his words. Still the women advanced. He knew they would march across his body and leave him dying. He screamed.
And broke out of the dream.
Zion Marit sat up, soaked with sweat, his heart still pounding. He groped for the controls that operated the light in his cabin and succeeded in knocking a small pad off the table beside his bunk.
“Is something troubling you, Civilian Marit?”
“No, HANA. Just a bad dream.” Like a mother, he thought, responding to her child’s cry in the night. That wasn’t so farfetched, given this type of biocomputer.
“Have you had it before?”
“Yes.”
“Do you wish to talk about it?”
“I’ll write it up.”
The small green light on the unobtrusive panel above the table glowed at him, and he absorbed its mute reassurance. Nothing could be too terrible while the computer was keeping watch over them. He lifted the stopper from the water jug and poured into the beaker. It was a little after midnight. He’d spent the evening in Lil’s cabin, both of them indulging in some much-needed mood improvement—though the accident that injured her hip had put a temporary crimp in Lil’s style. He must have tumbled straight into this nightmare the minute he lay down to sleep. The cold liquid chased the lingering mood of the dream out of his head. Wide awake now, he swung his feet over the edge of his bed.
“Would you like me to help you unravel your dream?”
He smiled. “I like your imagery. But there’s nothing particularly complicated to unravel. I can deal with it myself.”
“As you wish,” HANA said.
What happened to Lil had to have been an accident, of course. Both he and the LangSpec had had a lot of physical contact with the Ents yesterday, and there’d been no suspicion of violence. But Madel—the kind of MedSpec who always followed the rules, he could tell—had insisted on a day’s delay before they went down again. She and Lil would be running behavioral analyses with HANA. He’d fretted at the delay, but Madel hadn’t listened to him. “There’s no hurry, anyway,” Lil told him. “We’ve got lots of time.” The LangSpec indicated she’d be glad to use the day going over her data with HANA.
He was the one obsessed with time now.
He retrieved the pad from the floor and opened it up. HANA probably disapproved of such antiquated activity as writing when it could have provided him with the same service much faster and with less effort. Yet for him, the act of taking stylus in hand and forming symbols on a page was far more intimate an activity than dictating to a notebox or a computer. Slow as it was, he found it freeing, allowing him the leisure to explore emotions he’d otherwise manage to keep hidden from himself. That was the way he thought—with his hands, making the abstract concrete. Art for him was a way of exploring his own mind.
Besides, this time he didn’t want to let HANA see what he was writing until he’d finished encoding it.
He wrote carefully in a neat script that differed from print only by the slant and final curve he gave to the letters, exploring the origins of the dream in a letter to other young men back on Earth. He would never know if it was received, or if it was, if it made any difference. But he had to write.
He’d been quite young when he’d first realized the world was made up of two kinds of citizens: those who knew themselves to be superior and necessary, and the second kind who were merely tolerated. Later he noticed the difference was anatomical. But it hadn’t seemed too much of a tragedy until much later still, when he’d
