"I speak to the lovely woman," an interior voice said to all of them. "Do not fear me, Orison, though I will seem to you a most hideous worm. My world nestles next its sun. I, made to fit a homeworld that would seem a Hell to you, could hardly be expected to conform to green Earth's standards of beauty. Reflect, Orison, that I wish you well."
Something dragged itself across a dune. "My God!" Orison whispered, gripping Dink's right arm with both her hands.
"Orison, this is my mentor and my dearest friend," Dink said. "His name is Elder Compassion. He is older than the language you speak. And he is, though housed in strange flesh, a Man of Good Will."
The thing that squatted across the mid-room dune was twelve feet long from the tip of the arched scorpion-telson to the twin pincers that formed a chitinous mustache beneath its mouth. It stared at her with a pair of compound eyes the size of hub-caps. "I'll not weary you further with squeezing words into your minds," the interior voice said. "Bring me the writing-boards, Son and Cousin."
"Cornet!" Dink snapped. "Bring scratchboards."
"Sire!" A young officer ran back to the anteroom and came back with a stack of blackened boards, one of which he set up in the sand before the monster, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the lance-like tip that quivered in the air above him. "It is a fearsome thing, this killing-tool my body is equipped with," the voice said, "and embarrassing. It is rather as though your good Gandhi had been forced to carry a sub-machine gun through life." The cornet scrambled out of way through the sand, and the giant sting lowered itself to the scratchboard.
The words he inscribed into the blackness were written in a delicate italic, hardly larger than human penmanship: "My son, she is lovely."
"It is gracious of you, Elder Cousin, to recognize beauty in a form so unlike your own species," Dink said, bowing.
There was a mental chuckle. "Her mind, you clod!" the monster sketched in the scratchboard. "Her lovely, lovely mind."