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
