Retreating to lean against a gently curved wall, Thariinye maintained his shielding and watched the barbarians hurrying back and forth until he concluded, with some reluctance, that the greenery must be merely an atmospheric purifier and not a buffet. At least, nobody else was nibbling on those tempting new leaves.
(Thariinye, you greedy pig! You’re supposed to be looking for our ‘Khornya, not thinking about brunch!)
(Yeah, yeah, but Neeva, you should just see these plants!) But, reminded of his duty, Thariinye tore his gaze from the succulent new shoots and leaves just above eye level and mentally felt around the central complex for some sense of another Linyaari.
He could sense nothing but the tangled, muddy undertow of a thousand alien minds muttering away, each in its separate little shell, and most too weak and garbled to be intelligible, with here and there a feeling highlighted by surprise or strong emotion:
Oh, Jussi, why did you leave me? . .. grubble grubble grubble .. . payday’s next shift, then I can get OUT of here … grubble grubble grubble … Lukia, Lady of Light, help me now!
Startled, Thariinye swiveled to look at the source of that last thought, a grubby kid weaving between the adults so rapidly that Thariinye would have lost him but for the strength of his projections. The words meant nothing to Thariinye, but the image of a radiant Liinyar girl in white-silk robes that accompanied them riveted him.
A sudden thought of “Saints preserve us, what’s THAT!!!” accompanied by an image of himself enlarged to ten feet tall and glowing with a strange radiance, reminded Thariinye to maintain his calming projections while he edged through the crowd after the urchin who had so obviously been thinking about a Liinyar girl. He still could not sense any trace of another of his kind in this crowded, smelly base, but that child must have seen ‘Khornya at some time, to have formed the image so clearly.
The miner who’d called on the saints stared after Thariinye but could see nothing unusual among the swirling streams of passersby. Ramon Trinidad mopped his forehead and decided not to mention to his mates that he’d had a vision of Acorna. They already teased him enough because he had a small icon of the Virgin of Guadeloupe superglued to the dashboard of his operator cab at the loading station; if he told them he’d been seeing visions, he’d never live it down. All the same, it must mean something that the Lady had appeared to him like that, all in a blinding flash it was, and then vanished. She must be warning him that he’d been marked out for something special.
Ramon Trinidad marched down the corridor to Mining Ops HID more jauntily than he’d moved since coming to Maganos. At first he’d thought this job, training kids from the gutters of Kezdet to operate lunar mining equipment, was high pay for light work; then he’d considered resigning and telling Personnel that he was a miner, not a kindergarten teacher; then he’d actually begun to like some of the kids. Besides, they didn’t laugh at him for invoking the protection of the Virgin and the saints each time he took a group of them out into the long, lightly shielded corridors of the active workings. The kids had their own saints ~ Lukia of the Lights, Epona, Sita Ram.
The urchin whom Thariinye was following was also headed for Mining Ops HID, and praying desperately that he’d get there well ahead of Ramon Trinidad; so the image of Lukia of the Lights kept lighting up in his thought-patterns, guiding Thariinye like a flashing beacon.
Bored by Rafik’s intense study of the star maps which were projected all over the walls of Delszaki Li’s office, Gill stood up to stretch his legs and wandered over to the one wall not devoted to mapping the outer reaches of the explored and unexplored parts of the galaxy. Rafik had been unable to commandeer this wall because it was filled with vid-screens on which, at any moment, random scenes of the moon base were displayed. Although no one’s private quarters were invaded, Delszaki Li took great pleasure in observing all other parts of the base in operation, from the children’s school to the outermost mine workings. Before the progress of his disease had robbed him of the ability to control a touch pad with his right hand, the display had been designed for him to call up whatever views he desired. When touching the pad became too difficult for him, the engineers had offered to make the display voice-controlled like his new hoverchair, but he had refused, indicating that it was too tiring for him to issue unnecessary commands and that he would prefer a random display which he did not have to control. Now the images on the more than twenty screens changed constantly, on a randomly activated timer, giving a constantly varying panorama of Maganos Moon Base activities.