Triad. Sheila Finch

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 into language. Once a child was brought up in a language system, it was impossible 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,