by Diane Duane
They were travelers. No one knew how long their huge cobbled-together ships, in families or smaller groups, had been roving the far fringes of known space. Indeed they seemed to know, and frequent, parts of it that no one else did, but good navigational information about those places was difficult to obtain from them because of the equivocal nature of the Lalairsa language as regarded spatial location. Coordinate systems the Lalairu understood, but they had one of their own that seemed to change without warning, so that directions given in it didn’t always work for outsiders. In any case, they were rarely interested in giving tizhne directions. That was their word for people who lived on planets. It was faintly scornful, but affectionate regardless—a term the Lalairu used with the air of someone talking about a relative’s baby who was unwilling to come out of its playpen. Other space travelers they would deal with, trade with, meet with cordially enough, but there was always a feeling of a barrier between them and you, a sense of some choice that in their opinion they had made more wisely than you had, so that they felt faintly sorry for you.
True, they were free: rarely had a people known such freedom. The Lalairu’s total lack of connection to the planetbound cultures left them free to go anywhere they pleased, trade with everyone. They made no alliances, no treaties, suffered no entanglements: they would take the Ferengii’s goods as readily as the Federation’s or the Romulans’ or anyone else’s. In return they traded rare plants, animals, minerals, manufactured commodities, things elsewhere unseen and unknown—and afterward they vanished into the unknown again, to appear later in known space when and where they pleased. The only thing to be counted on with them was that the Lalairu did not miss appointments they had made, whether to trade or just to meet with you. They were not missing this one, either.
Picard spent a few minutes cleaning his brushes and getting the pigment off himself—he had never been able to break himself of the habit of smudging the canvas with his thumb when he wanted the shading exactly right. He was in the middle of pulling out a uniform tunic when the communicator chirped: “Captain?”
It was Data again. “Yes?”
“Mr. La Forge has completed his work on the mission specialist’s quarters, and the commander will be beaming over shortly.”
“Excellent. I’ll go down and greet him. Picard out.”
He found Chief O’Brien working thoughtfully over the transporter panel when he got down to transporter room six. “A problem?” Picard said.
O’Brien shook his head. “Just some fine-tuning. The commander wears a field generator for protection in our environment. While the transporter’s field analysis routines are pretty thorough, I don’t want to take the chance of disrupting his suit.”
Picard put his eyebrows up and waited. After a few more moments, O’Brien was satisfied. “Transporting now,” he said, and touched the controls.
Out of the glitter and the whine of the transporter effect formed a shape hovering about four feet above the floor, horizontal. The shimmer faded away. Resting on a flexible levitation platform was what looked like a dolphin in an inch-thick coating of glass. At least, it looked that way until the dolphin swung his tail in greeting, and the “glass” moved and rippled slightly, revealing itself as a skin of water being held in place around the dolphin’s body by a small envirofield generator strapped around that tail. The dolphin whistled, and his universal translator output said, “Bonjour, M’sieur Capitaine; permettez bord?”
Picard smiled. “Oui, et bienvenue, M’sieur Commandant! Did you have any luggage?”
“It went to cargo transporter five,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’ll go to the commander’s quarters from there.”
“Very well. Commander, would you like a look at them?”
“Very much, thank you.” The dolphin downstroked with his tail, arching his back a bit, and the negative-feedback mechanisms in the levitator pads matched the gesture, flexing the pad so that the dolphin seemed to swim through the air down off the transporter platform and toward the doors. “Before you ask, Captain,” the commander said, “it’s ‘Wheee,’ or at least that’s close enough. The rest is just a family nickname—part of the official name, but not particularly necessary.”
“Thank you,” Picard said, slightly relieved: the issue of how to pronounce the commander’s names had been causing him concern since he first looked at his Starfleet record. Hwiii ih’iie-uUlak!ha’ was one of the cetacean members of the Starfleet navigations research team, a delphine native of Omicron Five’s oceanic satellite, nicknamed Triton Two by an early Starfleet researcher who, after a prestigious university career at Harvard and the Sorbonne, had signed on with Starfleet to continue “clean-hyperstring” studies in deep space—preferably as deep as possible. After several years spent posted to starbases on the fringes of Federation space, Hwiii had requested a sabbatical to get even farther out and, on its granting, had arranged to hitch a ride with a passing Lalairu vessel on its way to the empty space above the Great Rift. Such a spot was perfect for his chosen work, investigation into the nature of subspace hyperstring structure: space uncontaminated by stars, planets, even dark matter—all of which could render equivocal readings that, for greatest usefulness, needed to be absolutely certain.
So much Picard knew about the officer from his records, but he had had enough experience with mission specialists to know quite well that the records often left out the most interesting details, or the ones that later turned out to be most necessary to get the job done, whatever it might be.
Picard hoped, as always, that he would be able to elicit that information from Hwiii before reassignment took him elsewhere. “Did you have a pleasant stay with the Lalairu?” Picard said as they went into the turbolift. “Deck five.”
Hwiii laughed. “As pleasant as possible when your hosts don’t see any point in what you’re doing. I’m afraid I was more of a curiosity to them than anything else.” He looked as if he was smiling: not so much because of his mouth, which looked that way anyhow, but more because of a glitter that his eyes suddenly got. “Not that I’m not used to that anyway. But the feeling was more pronounced with the Lalairu. They behaved toward me the way we might behave toward someone who had come to us to study the art of breathing. We take it so for granted: anyone who spent all their time wanting to talk to us about respiration would probably be considered a little odd. But location and navigational issues are so ingrained in them and their language that they have trouble understanding how navigation can be studied apart from all the rest of life. Like studying cooking without also studying food.”
Picard shook his head. “I was looking over the last communication from the Laihe, and I must tell you I had difficulty making head or tail of it. There was a general sense of concern over something being wrong with someone’s coordinate system… but the computer was no more certain of the translation than I was. I wasn’t sure whether the Lalairu were claiming that they were lost, or possibly that they thought we were. Either way, how lost can either of us be? Using their coordinate system, they found us without any apparent trouble.”
Hwiii waved his flippers, a delphine shrug. “Captain, I’ll look at the transmission, if you like. But I don’t guarantee being able to make any more sense of it than you have. Context-positive translations are thin on the bottom when it comes to Lalairsa.”
Coming out of the turbolift, they turned a corner and went a few doors down through guest quarters. Outside one door, Geordi La Forge and Data stood looking in while Geordi scanned the doorway with a tricorder and a critical look.
“Gentlemen,” Picard said as they came up. Geordi looked up from the tricorder to grin at the captain. “One of my better efforts, Captain,” he said, “if I do say so myself.”
“Gentlemen, Commander Hwiii. Commander, Mr. La Forge, Mr. Data.”
“Pleased, Commander,” Geordi said. Data put his head slightly to one side and uttered a string of sharp clicks and squeaks ending on an up-scaling squeal.
This time there were no two ways
about it: Hwiii smiled. “Commander, that’s a very good Triton accent, and good fishing to you, too. You’ve got the Eastern intonation, though: did one of K!eeei’s people do the recording?”
“I believe so,” Data said. “K!eeei was listed as a source in the Delphine course on cetacean epic poetry.”
“Thought so. That accent is unmistakable.” Hwiii looked in through the open door of the room. “Are these really my quarters?”
Picard looked in, too, and was impressed. The room had been stripped of the usual furnishings, floored with sand, and flooded. Behind the open door, a force field, like the one Hwiii wore, but more robust, was holding the water inside, flat as a pane of glass. In the pale sand, aquatic plants appeared to be rooted: huge tall ribbons of brown seaweed, interspersed with taller, slenderer fronds of delicately waving translucent green, like hair. Up and down the hairlike seaweed, translucent pods burned with a cool blue light that shimmered, fading and brightening, as the currents in the water moved the weed. Below the apparent ceiling of the quarters, lighting suggested sun above the rippling Surface of the water. Across the room, the one feature remaining that seemed slightly out of place was the windows, looking out on space and the stars, for the moment unmoving while the ship ran in impulse. But possibly a spacegoing dolphin would not find this too out of place.
“It’s partly constructs, of course,” Geordi said, somewhat apologetically. “But the biology department keeps seed in stasis for most of the bigger seaweeds, kelp and so forth, in case an emergency requires bringing up hydroponic support for the oxygen supply. I drew some of those stores, asked bio to clone and force a few specimens for me.”
Hwiii chattered softly in Delphine for a moment before saying, “Mr. La Forge, this is palatial! I thank you very much indeed. Too many times I’ve been stuck swimming around in something that most closely resembled a motel room.”
Picard burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, Commander, but when were you last in a motel room!”
The eyes mirrored the always-smiling face for a moment. “Don’t laugh, Captain. The publicity side of the organization calls me, occasionally, and even Starfleet specialists wind up doing the rubber-chicken circuit. Though in my case it’s more usually rubber mackerel.”
It occurred to Picard that this particular specialist would probably make more interesting publicity than either the two-legged kind or more alien ones. He suspected Hwiii knew it and took it in good part. “I think you’ll find the food to your liking here, though,” Picard said. “The synthesizers know what fresh fish should taste like.”
Hwiii looked wistful. “I wish they knew what live fish tasted like, Captain, but unfortunately, that’s something they can’t quite manage. The aromatic esters just aren’t the same somehow.”
Picard looked thoughtful for a moment. “I must admit… the caviar does occasionally seem to lack something.”
Hwiii chuckled. “It doesn’t matter, Captain. I can’t fish up here, but I can’t do clean-hyperstring research back home, either. Too much interference! No, each thing to its proper place, and the fish can take care of themselves for the moment.”
“I would like to discuss your researches with you if you have leisure to do so,” Data said. “Especially as regards the relative ‘cleanliness’ of hyperstring structures in spaces empty of dark matter.”
Hwiii snapped his jaws in annoyance. “I wish I had more researches to discuss, but we had just gotten into such space—this area, in fact—when the Laihe decided all of a sudden that she was going to turn back inward toward the settled worlds. We only spent a month and a half in space empty enough to suit the criteria I was investigating, so I haven’t much new data to share, or many new conclusions about it. But, at your leisure, let’s split a fish or two and discuss what I’ve got.”
“Bridge to Picard,” said the captain’s communicator. He touched it.
“Picard. Go ahead, Number One.”
“A hail from the Laihe, Captain,” Riker’s voice said. “She says she’d like to talk to you at your convenience… I think.”
Picard smiled ruefully. “I’ll be right up… Commander Hwiii, will you be all right?”
“Captain,” Hwiii said in what sounded like complete satisfaction, “I am going to be as happy as a clam in mud.”
“How does one go about quantifying the emotional state of mollusks, Commander?” Data asked innocently as Picard headed back for the turbolift. He almost wished he could stay to see how Hwiii did quantify it… but he had other fish to fry.
“Ahem,” Picard said, amused, as the turbolift doors shut. “Bridge.”
* * *
As Picard entered, Commander Riker got up from the center seat. “Captain, if I’m any judge of such things, she sounded downright impatient.”
“Not very usual,” Picard said. “If anything, the Laihe usually errs in the other direction. How long did it take for her to say ‘hello’ to you the other day?”
“About ten minutes,” Riker said, and grinned slightly, “and nearly that long again for me to understand that that was what she meant.”
Picard glanced over at Troi, who was sitting in her seat, arms folded, looking mildly interested. “Counselor?”
Troi shrugged. “A general sense of urgency, but nothing more.”
“Very well,” Picard said, turning toward the viewer. “Hail the Laihe if you would, Mr. Worf.”
“Hailing, Captain.” The viewscreen had been looking toward the distant Lalairu fleet, hardly to be seen in this dimness. Now that view changed to an interior, a small private chamber hung about with asymmetric drapes of some kind of dark, rich-looking fabric that held a subdued glitter in its folds.
In front of the subtly glittering curtains or tapestries sat—if that was the word for it—the Laihe. She was a Huraen, one of a species whose homeworld had been destroyed by some natural calamity some centuries before, but since all the Huraen had been traveling as one of the Lalairu peoples since well before that time, none of them particularly cared. By virtue of that ancient association, and because of some unspecified sacrifice that the Huraen had made for the other Lalairu peoples, the Laihe, head of the whole race, was always a Huraen. Huraenti were tall, slender, insectile people, compound-eyed, many-limbed, mostly blue or green in color, their chitin-covered bodies inlaid or figured with complicated patterns in malleable metals or textured plastics: as if someone had taken a praying mantis, given it a slightly mournful, understanding look, and more legs than even a mantis would need. Huraenti were skilled artisans and craftsmen, engineers of extraordinary talent, and had a reputation for being able to understand anything mechanical within seconds. In terms of personality, they tended to be affable, subtle, and fond of the interpersonal arts: chief among them, language. They were loquacious and liked it that way. That was all right in the Huraenti language, which was structured and straightforward. But the Laihe was much more Lalairu than Huraenti, and her language showed it.
“Graciously greeted is the noblissimus entr’acte Picard chief in command subjective warning,” said the Laihe, ratcheting her top set of forelegs together.
That sounds like hello, Picard thought, and Will was right, she is in a hurry. “I greet you graciously as well, Laihe.”
“Urgently spatial coordinate-status misfound illfound illfounded distortion in nithwaeld on merest dysfunction hereditary disastrous propulsion!” said the Laihe, or at least, that was all the universal translator could make of it.
Picard nodded and tried to look gravely concerned, which wasn’t difficult under the circumstances. “Laihe, forgive us, but our translator lost several words in that last passage. What is nithwaeld, please?”
“Ingwe. Or filamentary.”
“Hyperstrings?”
“Affirmative response.”
Picard let out a breath of relief at having gotten that far. “Laihe, you must forgive me when I say that I am as yet only slightly educated in hyperstring studies. Am I to understand that something unexpected, or distressing,
is going on in space hereabouts?”
“Affirmative, qualifier variancy-area room-space-location nonlocating alteration-aversion-shift loss. Loss! Shift!”
Picard found himself wishing that James Joyce had had some input into the universal translator’s programming, or possibly Anthony Burgess. Both of them, by preference. The Lalairsa pleniphrasis, “scatter,” and borrowings would have sounded familiar to both of them. Picard glanced over at Troi: she shook her head. Worf said, “The translator is at full function, Captain. This is the best it’s able to do.”
“Understood…. Laihe, we will of course be saving your statement for later analysis and transmission to the Federation, but for the moment, what do you see as the effect of this local ‘shift’? And can you describe the nature of it in more detail?”
“Qualified affirmation, technical…” And it was, too, as the Laihe went off in a blizzard of verbiage that mixed familiar and relatively familiar physics and astrophysics terminology with words and phrases that Picard had never heard before, and that the translator flatly refused to render. All the while the Laihe sat hunched forward, her forelegs knitting frantically, and her mandibles working hard. “Longterm effect,” she said finally, “unknown, dangerous though, emmfozing, ending.”
Picard looked over at Troi. Emmfozing? he mouthed. Wide-eyed, Troi shook her head, helpless.
“Laihe,” Picard said, “our thanks. We will carefully consider your advice.” As soon as we understand it! “What are your own plans now?”
“Shift unbearable reality nature life, inturn frightened stars inworlds population loss shift lacktime losstime migration tizhne mystery major safe haven… suggest similar stars inworlds have exit departure lacktime losstime benefit.”
