3
Gestalt (continued)
The calm dark was pierced, suddenly, by a sharp pain driving past all of his mind's isolation. It took a moment, an eternity that must have been a hundredth of a second, to localize it. The pain was a bright blue light that seemed to stab at his hypnosis sensatized eyes through closed lids. In another instant, before he could react, it was gone.
Jacob struggled for a moment with his confusion. He tried to concentrate solely on rising to consciousness while a stream of panicky questions popped like flashbulbs in his mind.
What subconscious artifact had that blue light been? A corner of neurosis that defends itself so fiercely has to mean trouble! What hidden fear did I probe?
As he emerged, hearing returned.
There were footsteps ahead. He picked them out from the sounds of the wind and sea, but in his trance they seemed like the soft padding ostrich feet might make if clothed in mocassins.
The deep trance finally broke, several seconds after the subjective burst of light. He opened his eyes. A tall alien stood in front of him, a few meters away. His immediate impression was of tallness, whiteness, and huge red eyes.
For a moment the world seemed to tilt.
Jacob's hands flew to the sides of the table and his head sank as he steadied himself. He closed his eyes.
Some trance! he thought. My head feels as if it's about to crash through the Earth and come out the other side!
He rubbed his eyes with one hand, then carefully looked up once again.
The alien was still there. So it was real. It was humanoid, standing at least two meters tall. Most of its slender body was covered by a long silvery robe. The hands, folded in front in the attitude of Respectful Waiting, were long, white and glossy.
A very large round head bowed forward on a slender neck. The lidless, red, columnar eyes and the lips of the alien's mouth were huge. They dominated the face, on which a few other small organs served purposes unknown to him. This species was new to Jacob.
The eyes glowed with intelligence.
Jacob cleared his throat. He still had to fight off waves of dizziness.
"Excuse me.... Since we haven't been introduced, I... don't know how I'm to address you, but I assume you're here to see me?"
The big, white head nodded deeply in assent.
"Are you with the group tbe Kanten Fagin asked me to meet?"
Again, the alien nodded.
I suppose that means yes, Jacob thought. I wonder if he can speak, what with any imaginable kind of mechanism lurking behind tbose huge lips.
But why was the creature just standing there? Was there something in its attitude...?
"Am I to assume that, that yours is a client species and you are waiting for permission to speak?"
The "lips" separated slightly and Jacob caught a glimpse of something bright and white. The alien nodded again.
"Well then speak up, please! We humans are notoriously short on protocol. What's your name?"
The voice was surprisingly deep. It hissed out of barely widened mouth with a pronounced lisp.
"I am Culla, Shir. Thank you. I have been shent to make sure that you were not losht. If you will come with me, the othersh are waiting. Or, if you prefer you can continue to meditate until the appointed time."
"No, no let's go, by all means," Jacob rose to his feet unsteadily. He closed his eyes for a moment to clear his mind of tbe last shreds of the trance. Sooner or later he would have to sort out what had happened, while he'd been under, but that would have to wait.
"Lead on."
Culla turned and walked with a slow, fluid gait toward one of the side doorways to the Center.
Culla was apparently a member of a "client" species -- one whose period of indenture to its "patron" species was still active. Such a race rated low on the galactic pecking order. Jacob, mystified as he still was by the intricacies of galactic affairs, was glad that a lucky accident had won for humanity a better, if insecure, place on the hierarchy.
Culla led him upstairs to a large oaken door. He opened it without announcement and preceded Jacob into the meeting room.
Jacob saw two human beings and, besides Culla, two aliens: one short and furry, the other smaller still, and lizardlike. They were seated on cushions between some large indoor shrubs and a picture window overlooking the bay.
He tried to sort his impressions of the aliens before they noticed him, but had only a moment before someone spoke his name.
"Jacob, my friend! How kind it is for you to come and share with us your time!" It was Fagin's fluting voice. Jacob looked quickly about the room. "Fagin, where...?"
"I am here."
He looked back at the group by the window. The humans and the furry E.T. were rising to their feet. The lizard-alien remained on its cushion.
Jacob adjusted his perspective and suddenly one of the "indoor shrubs" was Fagin. The old Kanten's silver-tipped foliage tinkled softly as if there were a breeze.
Jacob smiled. Fagin presented a problem whenever they met. With humanoids, one looked for a face, or something that served the same purpose. Usually it took only a little time to find a place in an alien's strange features on which to focus.
There was almost always a part of the anatomy that one learned to address as the seat of another awareness. Among humans and very often among E.T.'s, this focus was in the eyes.
A Kanten has no eyes. Jacob guessed that the bright silver objects that made the sound of tiny sleigh bells were Fagin's light receptors. If so, it still didn't help. One had to look at the whole of Fagin, not at some cusp of the ego. It made Jacob wonder which was the larger improbability: that he liked the alien despite this handicap, or that he still felt uneasy with him despite years of friendship.
Fagin's dark leafy body approached from the window in a series of twists that brought successive root-knots to the fore. Jacob gave him one medium-formal bow and waited.
"Jacob Alvarez Demwa, a-Human, ul-Dolphin-ul-Chimp, we welcome you. It pleases this poor being to sense you today, once again." Fagin spoke clearly, but with an uncontrolled singsong quality which made his accent sound like mixed Swedish and Cantonese. The Kanten did much better speaking dolphin or trinary.
"Fagin, a-Kanten, ab-Linten-ab-Siqul-ul-Nish, Mihorki Keephu. It pleases me to see you once again." Jacob bowed.
"These venerable beings have come to exchange their wisdom with yours, Friend-Jacob," Fagin said. "I hope you are prepared for formal introductions."
Jacob set his mind to concentrate on the convoluted species names of each alien, at least as much as on their appearance. Patronymics and multiple client names would tell a great deal about the status of each. He nodded for Fagin to proceed.
"I will now formally introduce you to Bubbacub, a-Pil, ab-Kisa-ab-Soro-ab-Hul-ab-Puber-ul-Gello-ul-Pring, of the Library Institute."
One of the E.T.'s stepped forward. Jacob's initial gestalt was of a four-foot, gray teddy bear. But a wide snout and fringe of cilia around the eyes belied that impression.
This was Bubbacub, director of the Branch Library! The Branch Library at La Paz consumed almost all of the meager trade balance which Earth had accumulated since contact. Even so, much of the prodigous effort of adapting a tiny "suburban" Branch to human referents was donated by the huge galactic Institute of the Library, as a charity, to help the "backward" human race catch up with the rest of the galaxy. As head of the Branch, Bubbacub was one of the most important aliens on Earth! His species name also implied high status, higher even than Fagin's!
The "ab" something-to-the-fourth meant that Bubbacub's species had been nurtured into sentience by another which had in turn been nurtured by another, and so forth back to the mythical beginning at the time of the Progenitors... and that four of these generations of "Parentals" were stlll alive somewhere in the galaxy. To be derived from such a chain meant status in a diffuse galactic culture whose every spacefaring species (with the possible lone exception of humanity) was brought up out of semi-intelligent savagery by some previous, space-traveling race.
The "ul" something squared said that the Pil race had in turn fostered two new cultures on their own. This too was status.
The one thing that had prevented the complete snubbing of the "orphan" human race by the Galactics was the fortunate fact that man had himself fostered new intelligent races twice before the Vesarius had brought Contact with the E.T. civilization home to Earth.
Continue reading sample 5, 6 and 7, or purchase Sundiver.
The Real Culture War
