“Then she …” Neeva fumbled among unfamiliar words. Their shapes in her thoughts were blurry and poorly defined;
could the LAANYE be malfunctioning? “Your karma is joined with hers … she is expecting you?”
Karina gazed soulfully at the heap of moonstones in her cupped hands. She had been fondling them and playing with them ever since she awoke.
“Will she be conceerin … worriid,” Thariinye substituted the easier-to-pronounce word, “that you were not on the shuttle?”
“Oh, no,” Karina said unguardedly, then tried to retrieve matters. “That is,” she said with her tinkling laugh, “we didn’t have a definite arrangement. We just left it that if I did not hear from her that this was not a good time, I would be coming to Maganos within the next few days. Synchronicity, you know”- she waved her plump little hands vaguely-“all will manifest for the good of all; we need only maintain the appropriate space in our hearts. But I am quite sure,” she said earnestly, “that she is looking forward to finally meeting me on this plane.”
“Plane flies through atmosphere,” Thariinye said, puzzled. Atmosphere is not on this moon.”
Karina laughed again. “I meant, on the physical plane. We have long been close on the spiritual plane,” she said.
(What is she talking about? Do these beings move through different dimensions?)
(They appear to exist in three dimensions and move along a rourth at a fixed rate, just as do we and all other entities,) Khaari told him. (You must have been confused by some idiom of their language. What is the Linyaari for what she said?)
(I don’t think you can say it in Linyaari.) “I hear you,” Thariinye said aloud to Karma, having picked this up from the LAANYE as an all-purpose phrase meaning, “I don’t know exactly what you mean, but let’s not argue about it.”
Rafik’s worries about Acorna grew to monumental proportions when he reached direct-communications range of Maganos Moon Base and got no satisfactory answers to his queries. All he wanted to know was that Acorna was still there and unharmed. All he got from the corn techs working the boards at Maganos was static, missed connections, and finally a bland statement that questions about Acorna were to be passed directly to Delszaki Li.
“Fine,” Rafik said, “patch me through to Mr. Li’s suite.”
But Delszaki Li was napping … or in a private meeting … or investigating some new workings out of reach of the base-toship communications system … or simply not to be found at the moment, depending on when Rafik tried to contact him and which technician was asked to forward the message.
“I don’t believe it,” Rafik said flatly when for the second time he was told that Delszaki Li was visiting the new mine workings on the far side of Maganos. “The man’s old and paralyzed and confined to a hoverchair, he’s not going to be hopping around Maganos like a performing flea!”
“Mr. Li has a very good hoverchair,” said the com tech. “State-of-the-art. And, uh, the light gravity here means that he has more energy, of course. Less, umm, strain on the muscles, you know?”
“Ten thousand bazaar dogs and Shaitans take the hoverchair!” Rafik shouted into the mike. “He doesn’t USE those muscles, what difference does gravity make?”
“Transmission unintelligible, please moderate volume,” the tech said. “Signal fading …” Her voice slowly dissolved into a crackle of static. Fuming, Rafik decided that he would just have to wait until he landed on Maganos. Then he would See For Himself.
Even landing took longer than usual; a vessel of unfamiliar design, whose pilot seemed completely unfamiliar with standard docking facilities and commands, was just before him in the queue and held up docking for everybody else.
“Sorry about that, Uhurii,” said the breezy voice of the secondshift guidance-control officer. “These idiots just ahead of you in the queue come from some backstars subspace where apparently nobody flies by the regs; according to the pilot they just make it up as they go along. She’s having a hell of a time following my instructions-keeps saying, ‘I hear you,’ and then doing something completely different.”
Rafik had a moment’s regretful thought for the ancient days of the First Prophet, when in some parts of Earth the Book of the Prophet was interpreted to mean, among other things, that women were not allowed to drive.