Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [4]
Hwiii laughed. “As pleasant as possible when your hosts don’t see any point in what you’re doing. I’m afraid I was more of a curiosity to them than anything else.” He looked as if he was smiling: not so much because of his mouth, which looked that way anyhow, but more because of a glitter that his eyes suddenly got. “Not that I’m not used to that anyway. But the feeling was more pronounced with the Lalairu. They behaved toward me the way we might behave toward someone who had come to us to study the art of breathing. We take it so for granted: anyone who spent all their time wanting to talk to us about respiration would probably be considered a little odd. But location and navigational issues are so ingrained in them and their language that they have trouble understanding how navigation can be studied apart from all the rest of life. Like studying cooking without also studying food.”
Picard shook his head. “I was looking over the last communication from the Laihe, and I must tell you I had difficulty making head or tail of it. There was a general sense of concern over something being wrong with someone’s coordinate system … but the computer was no more certain of the translation than I was. I wasn’t sure whether the Lalairu were claiming that they were lost, or possibly that they thought we were. Either way, how lost can either of us be? Using their coordinate system, they found us without any apparent trouble.”
Hwiii waved his flippers, a delphine shrug. “Captain, I’ll look at the transmission, if you like. But I don’t guarantee being able to make any more sense of it than you have. Context-positive translations are thin on the bottom when it comes to Lalairsa.”
Coming out of the turbolift, they turned a corner and went a few doors down through guest quarters. Outside one door, Geordi La Forge and Data stood looking in while Geordi scanned the doorway with a tricorder and a critical look.
“Gentlemen,” Picard said as they came up. Geordi looked up from the tricorder to grin at the captain. “One of my better efforts, Captain,” he said, “if I do say so myself.”
“Gentlemen, Commander Hwiii. Commander, Mr. La Forge, Mr. Data.”
“Pleased, Commander,” Geordi said. Data put his head slightly to one side and uttered a string of sharp clicks and squeaks ending on an upscaling squeal.
This time there were no two ways about it: Hwiii smiled. “Commander, that’s a very good Triton accent, and good fishing to you, too. You’ve got the Eastern intonation, though: did one of K@ffeeei’s people do the recording?”
“I believe so,” Data said. “K@ffeeei was listed as a source in the Delphine course on cetacean epic poetry.”
“Thought so. That accent is unmistakable.” Hwiii looked in through the open door of the room. “Are these really my quarters?”
Picard looked in, too, and was impressed. The room had been stripped of the usual furnishings, floored with sand, and flooded. Behind the open door, a force field, like the one Hwiii wore, but more robust, was holding the water inside, flat as a pane of glass. In the pale sand, aquatic plants appeared to be rooted: huge tall ribbons of brown seaweed, interspersed with taller, slenderer fronds of delicately waving translucent green, like hair. Up and down the hairlike seaweed, translucent pods burned with a cool blue light that shimmered, fading and brightening, as the currents in the water moved the weed. Below the apparent ceiling of the quarters, lighting suggested sun above the rippling surface of the water. Across the room, the one feature remaining that seemed slightly out of place was the windows, looking out on space and the stars, for the moment unmoving