He was alone, almost. All that remained was a background of voices, murmuring subvocal snatches of phrases at the edge of meaning. For a moment ha thought he could hear Gloria and Johnny arguing about Makakai, then Makakai herself chattering something irreverent in pidgin-trinary.
He guided each sound away gently, waiting for one that came, as usual, with predictable suddenness: Tania’s voice calling something he couldn’t quite understand as she fell past him, arms outstretched. He still heard her as she fell the rest of the twenty miles to the ground, becoming a tiny speck and then disappearing… still calling.
That little voice too faded, but this time it left him more uneasy than usual.
A violent, exaggerated version of the incident at the Zone Boundary flashed through his mind. Suddenly he was back, this time standing among the Probationers. A bearded man dressed as a Pictish Shaman held out a pair of binoculars and nodded insistently.
Jacob picked them up and looked where the man pointed. Its image warped by heat waves rising from the highway, a bus rolled to a*stop just on the other side of a line of candy-striped poles that stretched to each, horizon. Each pole seemed to reach all the way up to the sun.
Then the image was gone. With practiced indifference, Jacob let go of the temptation to think about it and allowed his mind to go completely blank.
Silence and Darkness.
He rested in a deep trance, relying on his own internal clock to signal when the time to emerge was near. He moved slowly among patterns that had no symbols and long familiar meanings that eluded description or remembrance, patiently looking for the key he knew was there and that he’d someday find.
Time was now a thing like any other, lost in a deeper passage.
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 sensitized 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 Bleeder 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 the 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 those 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 a 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 the 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 tacky 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.