Shaman (11 page)

“Ah. But not as grunts to commanding officers?”

Joseph cocked his head and gazed at her musingly. “No. Not like that at all. More like... acolytes or — or apprentices.”

There was a murmur of voices from out of sight. Joseph nodded. “Exactly. They didn't just sit back and ignore the proceedings. They sat close to their delegates and watched everything with great interest.”

Danetta's head came up from its thoughtful repose. “One acolyte for each delegate?”

“Yes.”

“Do they use the same word they use to refer to themselves in referring to you? Does it translate the same?”

“No. They call themselves, um, Speakers. They call me Administrator.”

“Tell them you wish to have a Human Speaker come talk to them.”

“Why?”

“A Speaker may be a holy man, a wizard, a high priest. Whatever it is, we need to produce one. Tell them our Speaker wishes to talk to them and that he can be here in one or two Velvet days.”

“Tson,” said Joseph absently. “They call the planet Tson.”

“Great. Fine. But don't start using their name for it. Not yet. That's implicitly granting their claim. Hear them when they call it Tson and make sure they acknowledge you when you call it Velvet. Arrange clearance for the TAS packet and I'll get Rhys here as fast as the Spectrum will allow. Are we agreed?”

Joseph Bekwe nodded, seeming not to resent the way Danetta Price had taken control of the situation. She doubted he had the energy, even if he'd been so inclined.

“Fine,” she said. “And Joseph, get some sleep—as soon as you arrange for my message to get out. If you can't sleep, I'll send Astrid over with a mallet. Got it?”

He smiled. “I'll drink a cup of valerian.”

“Acceptable. Good night, Joseph.” She cut the link.

“What are you smiling about?” Astrid stood in the door to her bedroom, a silky dressing gown hiding her woven twytex longjohns.

“I was just being idiotically shallow. Here we have an OROP menace hanging over our collective heads and I'm sitting here thinking that Rhys would be proud of me.”

“Good job, huh?”

Danetta shrugged. “Well, I think I asked all the right questions... I hope.”

“Well, then Rhys probably will be proud of you. Hey, if we all die tomorrow, you might as well go out on a high note.”

Danetta shook her head, her smile widening to a grin. “Thank you, Astrid. You are a true friend.”

“Yes, I am. Well, it was nothing. I'll see you in the morning—sooner, if our hovering friends do something exciting. Good night.” She turned and swept into her room, leaving a yawn suspended in mid-air.

Rhys Llewellyn sighed self-indulgently and sketched a loving salute at the profile of Pa-Loana that floated serenely beyond the broad viewport of the Time-Altered Space Vessel
Ceilidh
. It was not exactly a sigh of regret, for his vacation had reached that peculiar pass wherein the thought of going back to work elicits almost as much of a mental tingle as the thought of not going back to work. Given another week on Pa-Loana, he would be longing for the negotiating table again—yearning to bury himself under a pile of research papers and field reports.

“Sir? They've announced Shift stations, sir.”

Rhys turned and found himself looking down into the earnest face of his Junior Assistant, Yoshi Umeki. Yoshi's face was always earnest and, though Rhys had tried to surprise in it any other expression, he had failed. The young woman smiled earnestly, worried earnestly, thought earnestly, and possessed the most earnest anger Rhys Llewellyn had ever seen.

He smiled at her and tugged the fat, blue-black braid that lay across her left shoulder. “Is Roddy battened down, then?”

She smiled back earnestly and nodded. “He never woke up from the Shift in, sir.” She leaned toward him, waxing confidential. “I think he overdid the local herbals at his last stop, sir. You know how he hates the Shift.”

Rhys nodded and escorted his assistant inward toward the passenger's quarters at the ship's core. Roderick Halfax, his Senior Assistant, was one of a mercifully rare group of people who found the Shift through the temporal spectrum of TA space extremely discomfiting. If awake, he suffered severe vertigo, nausea, disorientation, and hallucinations; if merely sleeping, he was beset by nightmares so disturbing as to be the envy of a horror novelist. Either way, the experience was always followed by intense depression. These days, he made the spectral transit from one set of space-time coordinates to another heavily sedated or not at all.

Rhys didn't mind Shifting, although he had to admit a certain sense of disarrangement (or derangement) if the duration of the Shift was more than a few seconds. For this Shift—a long one to Blue Seven—he would sleep, making use of an herbal tisane given him by one of the delightful natives of Pa-Loana, a Shaman named Pa-Lili.

He thought of her fondly as he took his potion, donned his Shift goggles, and lay down upon his bunk. He wore her fetish bag around his neck, carried a good deal of her wisdom in his heart and, if she had been human, very likely would have asked her to marry him. There had been times when he thought he might ask her regardless of their physiological differences.

When he awoke from his herb-induced snooze, seemingly only seconds later, he knew Pa-Loana was light-years away and was reliving the beginning of the past week. Well, that wasn't strictly true. He was reliving the beginning of the past week light-years away from where he actually was when last week really happened. Well, that wasn't strictly true either, because last week on Pa-Loana was still happening with him in it and he was really, at this waking moment, in two places at one time and it was really too much effort to muddle through temporal dynamics in his currently groggy state. He gave it up.

His bio-trace quietly announced that he was still extant and broadcast his vital signs across the holographic lenses of his Shift goggles. When the same quiet, efficient computer voice told him the bio-trace was complete and he could get up, he did, pleased that he experienced no vertigo at all. He was always pleased about that—had been every one of the eighty-some-odd times he had Shifted. It left him in a good mood to succor those less fortunate than he.

He let himself out of his cabin and went to check on his assistants. Both were fine. Yoshi took to Shifting quite as well as he did, and Rick Halfax had been too deeply unconscious to take it any way at all. He was cheerfully groggy during their twenty-hour orientation layover at Blue Seven, and went just as cheerfully back under for the last, nearly instantaneous leg of their journey—forward again to the Clear range, this time orbiting Velvet instead of Pa-Loana.

Rhys stayed awake this time, sitting upright in his darkened cabin, taking a certain enjoyment from the stretched moment of weightless, bodiless, careless, aurora whirl that was the Spectral Shift. A slow-motion explosion of color, it was; and he always came away from it certain he had seen hues and shades human eyes were not made to see. Since he could not describe them, the truth of that was irrelevant. But Rhys believed in the unseeable colors with the same stolid conviction he now felt about magic.

They arrived in the Bronte system within the twenty hour window of when they had left Pa-Loana and established a distant synchronous orbit with the capitol city of Haifa. When the ship's computer told him he had Shifted in good health, Rhys went immediately to the nearest viewport. Danetta had not exaggerated the situation on Velvet. The planet was literally under siege by what appeared to be four massed wings of large, graceful spacecraft.

He knew a moment of anxiety lest the
Ceilidh
's arrival be taken for a hostile act, but the siege forces vacated a corridor, allowing a shuttle from the Human craft to make its way along a gravitic landing beam to the planet's surface.

Danetta Price had told Rhys enough about the situation on Velvet to worry him and pique his interest. She had warned him about the OROB threat (which would have once been referred to as an “alien menace”), but she had not warned him that Velvet itself would all but assault his senses when he stepped from the bottom of the shuttle's lev-tube.

“Good-God-Almighty,” murmured Rick Halfax inadequately. He blinked at the verdant landscape, seemingly boggled by the sheer audacity of the colors that stared back at him.

“Well, at least we needn't have any questions about how the planet got its name,” Rhys commented. “Ah, and here's our welcoming committee.”

He stepped away from the shuttle as they were approached by Danetta Price and a tall, distinguished looking fellow with skin the color of French Roast coffee. A natty dresser, too, Rhys noted, and felt a pang of sartorial inferiority. It passed quickly, allowing him to enjoy the other man's bemused greeting.

“Your dress kilt, Rhys—really!” Danetta murmured as they sped toward the government offices in an impressive gravcar. “I am honored. And the overall look is much more... understated than I recall.”

Joseph Bekwe glanced from her to Rhys with transparent incredulity. How, he surely wondered, could a man in a Tartan kilt with sporran and matching sash and argyles be described as understated?

Rhys chuckled. “Well, a fluorescent headdress, I had to allow, was something only the Pa-Kai might appreciate. I did bring my tam, though, in case it's necessary for my head to be covered.”

Danetta shook her head. “I think your flowing copper locks will do just fine on this assignment. The Tsong Zee don't affect much in the way of headdress, although from what I've seen, the women tend to wear their hair bound and plaited if it's very long.”

“The Tsong Zee?” asked Rhys. “That's the other race of beings?”

Joseph Bekwe was nodding. “Yes. We have holo-playbacks of all our interactions with them, a full analysis of their language by the Dynamic Translation System, pics of each individual in the group, everything—I hope—that you'll need to jump into this situation.... Danetta speaks highly of your ability to... navigate these delicate waters.”

“Professor Llewellyn is wonderful,” offered Yoshi earnestly. “He did the most amazing work on Pa-Loana. Such a challenge. So much of the communication was performed with minute facial signals and body language and even clothing that—well, it was an inspiration to me, personally.” She stopped, aware that everyone was staring at her.

Rhys patted the girl's shoulder and smiled affably. “My public relations manager. Tell me about the OROB language. Danetta mentioned in her packet that it has some grammatical patterns in common with English.”

Joseph Bekwe nodded. “Yes. That is, it seems to. But when we engage in any complex communications with them, we get lost. The words we're saying are the right words—according to the DT—but they don't seem to illicit the responses we expect. It's as if we're being randomly misunderstood. As for our understanding them, well, right now it seems hopeless. They use words we think we know in a context that makes no sense whatsoever. For example, there's this word ‘
tsri-al
' that seems to mean ‘Leader' or ‘Speaker.' They use it to refer to themselves, yet when they're trying to describe why they allegedly left Velvet, the word turns up in a context that indicates an opposite meaning.”

“Opposite?”

“Yes. Just as ‘angel' and ‘devil' are opposites. In fact, in its alternate context that's just about what ‘tsri-al' seems to mean ‘devil' or... ‘liar' or—” He shrugged. “I don't know.”

Rhys nodded, his mind already whirling with possibilities. A challenge, indeed. “First off, I'll want to see the holo-playbacks. Especially of exchanges you feel are particularly muddled or difficult. Then... we shall see what we shall see.”

o0o

The Tsong Zee were beautiful—or so Rhys Llewellyn thought. That not everyone shared his opinion was obvious from the antipathy displayed by a few members of the governor's staff during their screening of the playback. He made a mental note to request that those individuals be dismissed from further negotiations and concentrated on the OROB physiology.

They were basically humanoid in form—possessing an upright bipedal stance, bilateral symmetry, and enough Human characteristics in form and face, Rhys thought, to make Humans think they could be easily communicated with. It was an easy mistake to make. Rhys did not concern himself with the obvious differences in musculature, nor did he stop to wonder how many hearts they had.

He was immediately taken with their faces. Faces were of paramount importance when it came to inter-Human communication. This was also largely true of the other humanoid races Terran mankind had encountered. Unfortunately, facial languages were often as dissimilar as verbal ones. And these faces...

For one thing they were a black that made Joseph Bekwe look positively pallid. They were a glossy, light-eating black that seemed to carry undertones of blue or violet. The texture of their flesh was smooth, slick, almost wet-looking. That made reading facial expressions extremely difficult—there were no telltale wrinkles or lines except at the very corners of their wide mouths, and those were extremely hard to detect. Below the sculpted dome of the head, which was in most cases topped by a literal mane of pastel hair, there was an expanse of forehead which displayed a delicate supra-orbital ridge, but no eyebrows. Another impediment to Human comprehension. The males wore their hair unbound and long; the females wore it cropped or ornately braided.