But every time she achieved the kind of calm that was supposed to bring connection with one’s spirit totem and access to higher levels, she lost that sense of almost understanding what the unicornpeople were saying. It was most irritating and not at all what she would have expected.
(Do you have enough data from its thought-images to use the LAANYE yet, Melireenya?)
(Not quite, though I have learned that it is a she-creature.) (Had to be, with those engorged mammaries. Don’t they hurt?) (Well, those could be the result of some kind of illness. They certainly don’t look natural, do they? But her images are distinctly feminine … what I can read of them. You’ve noticed how weak her transmissions are? And every time I think we’re communicating, something breaks it off and all I get is this image of a long, pointy crystal-see?)
(Maybe she’s trying to tell us that they use something like that to amplify their naturally weak thoughts.)
(Good idea! I hadn’t thought of that. Shall we make one?) (Might as well try it. If we have to build the data for the LAANYE by pointing our horns at things and listening to her grunt their names, it’ll take forever.)
Something heavy and sharp-edged dropped into her lap and interrupted Karina’s meditations and earnest efforts to establish communion on the spiritual plane. “Hey!” she exclaimed, opening her eyes. “Be careful what you’re tossing around, will you – Ohhh. …” Her indignant comment died away into a long gasp of awe and wonder as she lifted the ten-inch, doubly terminated quartz crystal. “Now where did you get that, I wonder?”
(Well, that came through loud and clear. She doesn’t like us dropping rocks in her lap.)
(She likes the rock, though. Look how she’s holding it!) (Great, we can generate as many of those as we need from the spare-parts assembler. Maybe we can use them as trade items. Go on, now, get some more complete utterances from her. The LAANYE needs syntactic data as well as semantics, you know!)
(Barbarian! Can you say … shit, I’ve lost her again.)
Holding the quartz crystal, Karinawas deep in meditation, imagining the flow of energies that moved in a stream of golden light through the crystal, into her hands, through her body, and out to embrace the Guides around her. She imagined so effectively that she was completely unaware of the thought-images directed at her by Melireenya.
(We got a burst of transmission when we gave her that crystal. Maybe she wants another one.)
(Maybe we should just drop something heavy on her foot and see what she says.)
(Thariinye, when are you going to grow up?) After a bit of tinkering, the spare-parts assembler was able to produce not only quartz crystals but also a number of other crystalline mineral specimens. They started with the varieties of quartz, showering Karina (gently) with rose quartz, amethyst, and citrine; then, for variety, Thariinye adjusted the assembler to produce other silicates such as tourmaline and iolite, orthoclase and microcline. He was particularly proud of a large, tabular orthoclase with a bluish white sheen in two directions. Their biped seemed impressed by it as well.
(She likes the feldspar group. I got a lot of good data from what she said that time.)
(Of course! Look, she’s wearing a feldspar; maybe that’s her totem.)
So moonstone, labradorite, anorthite, and other feldspars dropped into Karina’s open hands until she was all but buried in their silvery shimmer, and Melireenya turned the LAANYE settings from collection mode to analysis mode with a sigh of relief.
(That was a job and a half! These beings can’t concentrate at all!)
(Oh, well, it’s done now. Let’s eat while it’s analyzing, then we can put the LAANYE in sleep-teaching mode and in a half turn we should be able to talk to it, I mean her, with mouthnoises.)
(What do you suppose she eats?)
(I hope she likes sprouts.)
Karma wasn’t the least bit unhappy to be offered a vegetarian meal. Although her hosts worried back and forth at each other about the poor variety of foodstuffs and the drab flavor of shipgrown fruits and greens, Karina found the meal, at least, to be everything she would have imagined spiritually advanced beings to ingest. She had been a little worried that the unicornpeople would be too spiritually advanced to require any nourishment beyond a little water. The salad they offered her, full of crisp greens, its flavor set off by a tangy dressing of ground seeds that tasted a little like mustard and more like dill, reassured her on those grounds. She wouldn’t have minded a tofu brownie or some sprouted-grains cake for dessert, but the bowl of fruits and berries was a reasonable alternative. The little brown berries proved surprisingly sweet and embarrassingly juicy-the first one she bit into felt like an explosion of sweetness in her mouth and startled her into a minor coughing fit. After that she took the berries with respect, to offset the tart flavor of the yellow thing that wasn’t exactly an apricot, and found that the combination made a reasonably satisfying dessert.