Xing Mei-lin was the linguist aboard the William Howells. Like the rest of the crew, Mei-lin was puzzled by the Kussaran tendency to make decisions based on what they believed their gods were telling them to do. She studied the language of the people of Kussara, and noticed that there were no words in the Kussaran language that related to cognition, such as "to think" or "to doubt". She and Helga Stein were at their wits' end.