Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [2]
“Yes, sir. Within the past hour the Lalairu main group hailed us. They estimate they will be within transporter range within another hour.”
“That’s excellent. Are the mission specialist’s quarters ready for him?”
“Geordi is overseeing the final stages of the installation now, Captain. He said he wanted to add some “bells and whistles” to it.” Data looked slightly quizzical as he examined Picard’s canvas. “While I know that the specialist’s people are sonically oriented, I did not know that bells and whistles were of any specific value—”
Picard smiled. “I think Mr. La Forge means he wants to make sure that Commander … that the commander’s quarters have a little more than the usual fittings. Ask him to notify me when he’s done, if you will.”
“Certainly, sir.” Data spent a moment more gazing at the canvas. “Autumn?”
Picard nodded. “How did you judge that?”
“The white admiral does not achieve such growth until the late summer. Also, the lighting is suggestive of the increased declination of the sun in autumn, as is the leaf color. But the latter judgments are subjective and liable to confusion through individual differences in color perception. The butterfly, however, is diagnostic.”
Picard smiled to himself. “Butterflies have been called many things, but, I think, rarely that. Very well, Mr. Data. I’ll be along shortly. When you start the usual information exchanges with the Lalairu, my compliments to the Laihe, and I should enjoy speech with her before they pass on.”
Data nodded and left. Picard turned back to the canvas, surveying it, letting his mind drift for a moment as the butterfly seemed to drift down the glade between the trees. The warmth, the slanting light, and the silence, the sweetness in the still air among the trees where the late honeysuckle climbed: the Lalairu would visit such a place readily enough. But otherwise they would value it little.
The Lalairu was what they called themselves, though they were not one species, but an association of hundreds. Their language was a farrago of borrowings from the languages of many planets, grammatically bewildering, semantically a nightmare, and difficult to translate accurately, no matter how long you or the universal translator worked at it. They could perhaps be truly described, and uniquely so among Federation peoples, as a “race” in the older sense of the word—a group who shared a way of life by choice.
They were travelers. No one knew how long their huge cobbled-together ships, in families or smaller groups, had been roving the far fringes of known space. Indeed they seemed to know, and frequent, parts of it that no one else did, but good navigational information about those places was difficult to obtain from them because of the equivocal nature of the Lalairsa language as regarded spatial location. Coordinate systems the Lalairu understood, but they had one of their own that seemed to change without warning, so that directions given in it didn’t always work for outsiders. In any case, they were rarely interested in giving tizhne directions. That was their word for people who lived on planets. It was faintly scornful, but affectionate regardless—a term the Lalairu used with the air of someone talking about a relative’s baby who was unwilling to come out of its playpen. Other space travelers they would deal with, trade with, meet with cordially enough, but there was always a feeling of a barrier between them and you, a sense of some choice that in their opinion they had made more wisely than you had, so that they felt faintly sorry for you.
True, they were free: rarely had a people known such freedom. The Lalairu’s total lack of connection to the planetbound cultures left them free to go anywhere they pleased, trade with everyone. They made no alliances, no treaties, suffered no entanglements: they would take the Ferengii’s goods as readily