Triad. Sheila Finch

get the shelter built as fast as possible and stay down on the planet’s surface. Whether he liked the idea or not, at least he’d be away from Shelly’s jealous eyes. As for Dori, he’d be glad to have as little to do with her as practical. No one on board really lit fires in his blood, but it was comfortable being with Lil, and that helped on a long voyage.

      Inaction stifled him. He had to be doing, and there was something he could do. He could persuade Carli to take him and his equipment down tomorrow while the others were working with HANA. He could get started on the shelter.

      He sat on the bed, feeling tiredness rising up through his bones. His eyelids drooped.

      “Civilian Marit,” HANA said. “I think I should tell you something about Yeo Matiz.”

      “Yes, HANA?”

      “The reason she was in Nairobi on furlough when she heard you address the crowd on the subject of male equality was that she’d been to the Wild Game Preserve. Yeo Matiz is an accomplished hunter, and in addition to her skills as a shuttle pilot, she’s an excellent markswoman.”

      The computer paused. “I hope this information is useful to you. Now, you really must get some sleep.”

      “Thanks,” he said grimly, and lay wide awake in the darkness.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      The planet crowded Mosquito’s viewport. Gia shielded her eyes, shivering as she adjusted to the two sequences of drugs she’d taken over the last twelve hours. Each time, the first sign they were taking effect was this same chill as if she were about to come down with some viral infection. She squinted at brightness; the planet lurched—she experienced a brief moment of nausea—then detail flooded in, sharp-edged.

      Checking, she glanced around the shuttle. The variegated blues of her crewmates’ uniforms heightened as she focused, areas of ultramarine flowing into azure. Behind the other women, tones of metal and fabric in the shuttle’s interior splintered, spraying rainbows. Her eyes ached from the prismatic assault. But she was used to the discomfort caused by the side effects of the alpha sequence of drugs that showed up first; it was a minor and temporary irritation. Apart from rechecking her body chemistry each time she began a new course of neurotransmitters, HANA prescribed them routinely.

      Maybe they’d be lucky and hit it first time. But there was always some fine-tuning to do.

      “Now,” Madel Karek said. “Remember—we don’t want any more incidents like Lil’s.”

      “Lil’s just slow and clumsy,” Dori said.

      “Be careful, anyway.”

      The sick feeling in Gia’s stomach receded, and she turned back to the viewport. The planet hung like an exotic jewel displayed on black velvet, its almost unbroken cloud cover sparking silver streaked with pink in the aging star’s light. Narrowing the field of vision, she saw as if through a microscope the clouds’ intricate dark-blue veining, minute gray curls, the marbling effect of air currents that normally would have lain beneath her visual threshold. Peripherally, below the viewport, she saw the crisp field of the control board, the sweep of needle, the rush of luminous digits. She could have recited it all without looking if this had been the Academy and the instructors were still checking.

      Now she was going to put all those hours of theory and practice to a real test. Nervous excitement shimmered along her neural pathways like summer lightning.

      The second set of drugs she’d taken today for the first time induced expanded states of consciousness. Once, mystics and shamans had cultivated these states by meditation or fasting, or ingesting 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,