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. She relaxed, letting go the hectic flow of images and sensory impressions still crowding her mind.
The Ent raised her right hand to its lips and bit.
Gia screamed as blood sprang from a row of tiny indentations. She tried to pull away. But Aleealee gripped her hand tightly. Its eyes held her mesmerized as slowly, with great ceremony, it extruded a pink tongue and licked away the drops of blood.
Time froze. Depth leached out of the scene. The Ents stood, two-dimensional limbs angling, eyes wide, caught between stare and blink. Gia’s hand hung, a paper cutout pasted on thick air. The left and right images her eyes perceived separated, and she lurched, disoriented.
Aleealee dropped Gia’s hand; its eyes gleamed. The cartoon faded, and normal vision returned. Time began to pass again.
“You all right?” Shelly came running out of the shelter, her eyes large with surprise. Her right hand was on the laser gun at her side.
Dori rose from the mound of bowls she’d been counting at the other edge of the clearing, one hand on Zion’s arm for support. “So the animals bite.”
Madel emerged from the shelter. “Show me the hand. Zion, get my medkit from the shuttle.”
He ran quickly. Gia heard the squelch of his footsteps in the mud.
The blood had already stopped oozing from the wound, but her head felt light, and she had a sudden fear she might faint. She felt no pain; the hand relayed no sensation whatsoever, not even a smarting or soreness. The wound was red and obvious, but she couldn’t feel it.
Her awareness was sharp but disconnected; she couldn’t interpret impressions flooding in. Events became disjointed, rubbing against each other with no meaning, out of sequence. Aleealee moved away into the group of Ents. Zion came back with Madel’s medkit. Rain spattered over the ground. The flecking of pigmentation on Zion’s face deepened. Madel’s hand rose slowly upward. Leaves flickered as Ents moved in the branches overhead. The blocky shape of the medkit swam into Gia’s field of vision. Beside Dori, Shelly’s mouth worked silently. The rain began to pour down ferociously.
“Damn,” Madel said. “Let’s get back into the shelter.”
Awareness shut down abruptly like a curtain drawn across the scene. She let Madel draw her into the shelter, and sat where she was put, leaning against the gnarled tree roots as the MedSpec cleansed and bandaged the wound. She felt detached from the scene, an observer at a boring play.
The Ent’s action had been unexpected, an act of unprovoked aggression. Yet she had an odd intuition of the appropriateness of it, something she didn’t understand now but would later, given time, like a message in code. The biggest effect seemed to be a sudden reversal of her altered state. Her consciousness, that a moment before had been a window open wide on an alien world, had shrunk back to the pinprick humans considered normal. She was close enough to the memory of another state to feel beggared by its withdrawal.
“That’ll do for the moment,” Madel said. “But we’ve got to get back up immediately. HANA’ll have to analyze this.”
“In this rain?” Dori said. “We’ll be soaked before we reach the shuttle.”
“Really—I’m all right. No need to panic.”
“What did you do to provoke it?” Dori asked.
“It told me its name was Aleealee. And I told it mine.”
Outside, the rain descended in a thick gray curtain, forming a fourth wall dividing them from the planet and its inhabitants. Madel stood indecisively, scowling at the rain.
Zion stared at Gia. “No offense—I was admiring the beads you’re wearing.”
She lifted the string of beads from her throat. In the gloomy interior of the shelter they glowed with a mauve phosphorescence, revealing an intricate carving on each bead that had been hidden in the blander light outside. Instead of artifacts carved roughly from wood, they seemed to have been transformed into an etched, translucent glass.
Gia slid the beads between her fingers, feeling the delicate whorls and scrolls in the satiny surface. It was a pleasant experience, calming and satisfying, like a language of sensation written for the fingers of the blind.
“Looks as if they’ve got writing on them,” Shelly said. “Ancient writing. What did they call it? Hieroglyphs?”
“Runes,” Madel suggested.
Dori shook her head. “Tooth marks. They used their teeth to decorate the beads. It’s not writing at all. But even so, it’s effective.”
“Wonder if we missed anything else like this in that pile outside?”
Gia’s emergency forgotten, Dori was on her feet and running, Shelly close behind her. Gia sat fingering the beads. As abruptly as it had begun, the rain ceased. The sky grew lighter, rosy sunlight flooded the clearing. But as the light increased, the luminous glow of the beads faded; the markings became indistinct, though her fingertips could still read them.
Dori returned with an armload of bowls; Shelly followed with several strings of beads. They crowded together, shadowing the artifacts with their bodies. The mauve glow sprang to life on the beads, and a browner one on the bowls. But none bore the strange markings of the beads Gia had chosen.
“That does it for today.” Madel stood up. “We’re going back up.”
Dori packed the artifacts ready to load on the shuttle. Shelly helped silently.
“I hoped to stay down here,” Gia said.
“Out of the question!” Madel snapped. “HANA’ll have to check you out.”