But Thuy managed, and teeped a flashy woman sitting inside the bar with a man. The woman was a paid escort named Balla. Balla’s vibes were delicious; she’d honed the skill of offering her short-term partners an emotional sense of intimacy and shared history—magically divorced from empathy and commitment. Seeing Balla slowly brush back a lock of hair, Thuy had the brief impression that she knew this woman—though of course the illusion was as thin as the skin of a balloon.

And then the distractor spun Thuy’s attention across the street into an art gallery. Roundish sculptures like river-tumbled stones were teep-tagged to project exalted emotional states: wonder, transcendence, sensual pleasure, bliss—the vibes polished by years in the currents of the meditative artist’s mind.

A bit further down the street, the Metotem Metabooks location housed something like a bookshop—but with no paper and no printed words. Although the telepathic Hibraners sometimes used the shorthand of language, they seemed never to trouble themselves with writing out words in phonetic form. Why transcribe grunts when you can read minds? Hibrane authors were more like cartoonists or directors, assembling blocks of mental states, creating networks of glyphs. Their works were embedded as teep-tags within handicraft items: tie-dyed scarves, bead necklaces, carved bits of wood.

Picking up on Thuy’s thoughts, the owner, who actually looked a bit like a giant Darlene, stepped slowly from the store. “You’re fresh from the Lobrane?” she boomed, then switched to teeping. “I’m Durga. And you’re a metanovelist? Would you like to record something for me to sell?”

“Go ahead, Thuy,” urged Ond. “Chu and I come here all the time. Show Wheenk to Durga. It’s beautiful; you should be proud. And if you share, it’ll enhance understanding between the two branes.”

“Do we get a snack today?” Chu asked Durga.

Durga found some doll-sized teacups that were just right for them, although her spice cookies were the size of garbagecan lids. She broke one in pieces for them. Chu took a seat in one of the big soft chairs, studying a little metal pig that contained an animal adventure tale expressed from the point of view of a piglet. Ond and Thuy sat next to him on the big chair, Ond fondling a felt decoupage wallet that encoded a rambling, anecdotal survey of Hibrane science.

Thuy’s mind was alert. Nibbling her cookie and sipping her tea, she checked out the vibes of the far-flung islands where the tea and spices had grown. And then she took a few minutes to arrange her mental representation of Wheenk along the seemingly endless spike of memory that the curious topology of Hibrane space had given her. When she was done, she teeped the images and emotions to Durga, who was sitting in a chair nearby. Right away Durga routed copies of Wheenk onto, of all things, five little cactuses in handmade pots.