Delfin Hayward clattered down the hallway past the lecture rooms, the leg prostheses turning clumsy in her haste. She'd known better than to linger in the observation room--today of all days--but she'd been compelled by the rare drama of senior lingsters frustrated in interface.
Reaching the examination room, she skidded inside and closed the door, the metal fingers of her exoskeleton engaging the knob nervously. She couldn't get the image of the alien child out of her mind. She'd felt his loneliness and pain as if they'd been her own. But she had to move past it because she'd never get to be a lingster herself if she didn't do well in this final test. Fail now, and there'd be no chance to continue on.
Two examiners wearing the ceremonial cobalt robes of Preceptors of the Guild of Xenolinguists sat at a long oak table, backs to the open window. A cool breeze flowed in from Alpine meadows behind the Mother House. Neatly laid out on the table in a ray of wintry afternoon sunlight were the plastiglass vials from a lingster's field pack.
"Please sit down," one examiner said.
She read coldness from the woman, extreme devotee of the Guild's teachings who'd wiped all feeling from her life, not just from interface.
"Remember/you, breathe deeply," Greyface, the senior dolphin tutor had advised yesterday. She sat and took a deep breath. Being a lingster was all she'd ever dreamed of for the last sixteen years; she'd worked hard, excelled in all the theories and the history her instructors demanded of her. Yet it might not be enough. The Guild had no room for those who couldn't handle interface.
"Is that chair suitable? Do make yourself comfortable." The older examiner, a portly, grey-haired man with a sallow complexion, leaned across the table and smiled.
He meant it as a friendly gesture, but she knew he was determined to show no favors even to one as physically different as she. It was uncomfortable to read people so clearly. She didn't like this skill or whatever it was but she had no control over it.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
The examiners would arrange a computer simulation of a meeting with an alien race. They'd judge the types and amounts of drugs she chose from the field pack, the accuracy with which she managed to decipher a complex message once she'd achieved interface. They'd lay traps. The work of the Guild was too dangerous to allow the weak to qualify. Above all they'd monitor how she navigated through the shoals of the unexpected, vigilant to abort the exam at the first sign of a student losing her way.
She must stay calm, emotionless, only a conduit for communication, a channel through which language flowed. Nothing more. She was not expected to comment or judge, or even react to the message she retrieved. Realizing the examiners still waited for her answer, she nodded.
"Computer will give you preliminary data," the woman said. "Open your link when you're ready."
As she did so, her mind flooded with a torrent of data on an alien she'd never learned about in class. Her stomach cramped. She hated the scratch and sting of information downloaded into her brain at high speed. It always made her feel sick, and it seemed somehow beside the point. She closed her eyes to concentrate on the details of physiology and environment a lingster in the field would expect to know as she started work.
The flow stopped abruptly. She opened her eyes to find the examiners gazing at her, waiting for her to begin. Her metal hand hovered uncertainly over the row of beta sequence state-alterers. The examiners would be noting her choice.
Better to start conservatively. She selected a mild drug that gave off the sweetly acid scent of pears and dripped the thick liquid onto her tongue. The room hazed over almost immediately. The walls rushed away, the floor dropped out from under her. Kaleidoscopic images tumbled past her eyes.
Take control of apparent time, she'd been taught. Slow it. She remembered to breathe. Chaos settled down to more manageable levels. The computer fed her samples of the alien speech.
She threaded her way methodically, using the computer's feedback to map morphemes as she passed. The fog drifted away. Deep structures emerged, skeletal trees in a primeval forest, layered branches of meaning which she tagged in passing, a trail to get her home again. Comprehension grew. Connections appeared, subtleties, a mosaic of grammar and content. The outlines of language emerged--a message to be deciphered--
Abruptly, storm clouds moved over the interface.
A fierce wind tumbled shadows over her path--something hateful shrieked across exposed nerves. Tangled strands of meaning snagged, dragging her down. The path slid under in thundering darkness--She tumbled out of control through nightmare images--
"That will do, Delfin!"
The woman's voice cut sharply across the malformed web of interface she struggled in. Someone grabbed her, dragging her out of darkness into the aching light of the examination room. The contents of her stomach threatened to rush up into her throat, and she found her face wet with tears. The man held out a glass containing the sequence neutralizer. Head pounding, she gulped the chalky liquid down. Slowly, the nausea subsided.
Never let emotion color the interface. She'd broken the first law of the Guild.
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