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.
