Echoes in Time by Andre Norton

Author:Andre Norton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: &WORKING
Published: 2011-03-19T05:51:50+00:00

* * *

SABA WALKED DOWN the ramp to the translation room. If she turned her head too fast, a faint headache throbbed at her temples. She concentrated on breathing slowly, in and out, as she walked the rest of the way.

Everything seemed a little too bright, a little too loud this morning. Yet there was nothing loud, or glaring, in her surroundings. Her slippers whispered on the cool flooring, and her robe swayed gently against her body, one side, the other. The muted lighting seemed exactly the same as it had for the past week; there were no shadows anywhere, no bright lances of light, so it could not have been intensified. But her eyes seemed overly sensitive. All her senses, in fact, seemed heightened, she realized as she listened to the rhythmic swishing of her flaxen robe.

Has to be just stress, she thought as she entered the huge viewing room. I'm fragmenting my focus too much—it has to be that.

As she passed down the long rows of working people, she performed a quick mental assessment.

Her first priority, she still believed, was to find whatever message she'd left herself from the past—if it could be found. That had meant a lot of furtive, desperate searching. Then she had her deportment lessons, which required a desperate mental shift; just the day before she'd found herself utterly lost as they used references to time that the First Team had not even hinted at. And threaded through all this were her doubts about the other beings here, their motivations, their intentions toward her. And of course she had the mission to think about.

On top of it all, the frustration of being limited to pulse code communication once a day.

I have some important task to perform, she thought, trying to gather her strength. I know that I do, or that statue of me would not be out front.

That was another goal: to find out who the other statues depicted, and why they were so honored. But when she asked Virigo or Rilla, they gave her meaningless names, and whistled the traditional phrase for "Nurayil honored as Yil"—which told her exactly nothing.

Perhaps she would find out more in the records. As yet the terminal in her room had not been activated. Just as well; she could barely read Yilayil script. The First Team had only given them the basic consonant sounds, assuming a phonetic alphabet. And superficially it was; foreign languages were diligently reproduced phonetically.

Thinking this, she glanced down at the nearest person, a weedy young Virigu—a male. They were very rare, for some reason; most of the Virigu were female.

He watched a tape on a terminal, his spidery fingers blurring across pads on his console as he translated what he saw.

She paused and looked around.

That's what they were all doing—translating into Yilayil tapes taken from ships. They listened to the voices on the tapes and translated; Rilla had told her that when she had mastered deportment (a term that also included mastery of language, apparently) she would translate tapes as well.

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