Honor

by Kevin Killiany

  She mentally dubbed the pair Lefty and Spot.

  Corsi couldn’t help but notice she was between the open door and the two chiptaurs bundling up the old bedding. From what she’d seen, she was willing to bet they’d do nothing to interfere if she tried to leave.

  On the other hand, she wasn’t sure how much she’d accomplish crawling naked through an uncharted labyrinth of wooden tunnels. Probably not much before the rest of the population, however many that might be, immobilized her with another example of applied nonviolence.

  Corsi rocked her weight back, taking a load off her aching muscles, and leaned against the curving wooden wall. The wood had a cool feel, slightly moist, and Corsi realized the room was carved from a living tree. A pretty big one.

  For a moment she had an image, a memory, of a clouded sky arching above and a sea of branches—the canopy of a rain forest—stretching out in all directions around her. But what rain forest? What planet?

  The image was gone as quickly as it had come, leaving no answers behind.

  Corsi pulled her mind away from worrying at the problem. The best way to work through trauma-induced amnesia was to not work through it. Left alone, the mind would heal itself. Would if it could.

  Distracting herself, Corsi considered the basket of light on the shelf across the room. The glow was too steady to be flame and she doubted her hosts—or captors—had the technology for even electric lights. Looking directly at the light was not painful, but the luminescence was bright enough to fog details. As nearly as she could tell the light source was dozens of balls of knotted yarn packed to overflowing in the rounded basket. There was no discernible radiant heat, and no apparent convection currents, which suggested air was not warming on contact. Bioluminescence? Probably.

  Of course she could have just gotten up and made a closer examination to be sure. But then again, the object of the exercise was to occupy her mind, not parse alien home decor.

  With what sounded like a triumphant chitter, her former hostage returned, a bundle of black and gold in its upper arms. Corsi’s moment of hope faded as she unfolded it and found only her uniform.

  “My combadge?” she asked, tapping her own body to indicate where the equipment would have hung. “My phaser?”

  The chiptaur chittered and tilted its head, making a gesture that could have indicated no, or that it didn’t understand, or that an unseen insect was annoying its left ear.

  “Okay then, how about underwear?” Corsi tried. “Or boots?”

  Similar chitter, same gesture. Could be the beginning of communication. Or a persistent insect.

  Examining her uniform, Corsi realized it had been cut open and repaired. After a fashion. All of the seams had been ripped out and carefully resewn, obviously by hand, using a vegetable fiber almost like twine, though it may have been a sort of vine. Hundreds of tiny knots, along the outside, thankfully, held the seams together.

  Considering the pounded feltlike material of the blankets and the leaf-skin bandages, Corsi suspected they’d never seen woven fabric before. Certainly they’d never had need of clothes given their thick coats of coarse—well, it wasn’t exactly fur. More like two-centimeter-long flexible scales or fused feathers. She was sure there was an official Starfleet exobiological classification for their body covering, but for the short term she was going with hair.

  At any rate, it was likely the thinner elastic materials of her underwear would have thwarted the experimental resewing process. The chiptaurs probably lacked the technology to repair her synthetic boots once they’d cut them off as well.

  Her socks were undamaged; the chiptaurs evidently had no trouble figuring out how to get them off. However, bare feet offered better traction than stocking feet. She resolved to keep them handy in case the nights turned cold.

  Though now that she thought of it, she had no way of knowing if it were day or night outside her little room. It was possible the current temperature, which she estimated at twenty degrees, represented the dead of their winter.

  Filing that speculation under “find out later,” Corsi spent a few moments demonstrating how the clothes fastened and unfastened to the chiptaurs. This seemed to release a swarm of ear-annoying bugs. She decided the gesture meant something besides “no.” She let them practice a bit with the fasteners, ensuring the next human they encountered would escape with his or her wardrobe intact, if nothing else.

  Watching the intelligence with which they examined the new technology and the way they evidently discussed it among themselves, Corsi decided the chiptaurs weren’t barbarians. She’d already suspected that—nonviolence was a pretty sophisticated cultural concept—but there was a civility to their behavior that reassured her.

  Evidence was tipping the scales in favor of her hosts being rescuers rather than captors.

  Now if she could only remember how she got here.

  Chapter

  5

  Pattie woke to the stench of rotting bog plants and an unpleasant sensation of moistness. The clatter and caw of what sounded like a dozen disparate animals in close proximity echoed flatly as though they were in an enclosed space.

  She knew the situation wasn’t good before she opened her eyes.

  A cage. About twice her body length square, standard low-tech metal frame and floored with peat and mud. There was a rectangular box, evidently an overturned packing case of some sort, just big enough to hold her with an opening cut in the near side. Several varieties of what she assumed were local wetland plants were arranged in neat piles along one side of the cage, no doubt a selection of potential foodstuffs.

  “Let me guess,” she said, addressing the humanoid shape beyond the bars. “You found me sticking out of a hole in the mud and assumed I’m a large burrowing insect.”

  The animal keeper, if that’s what he was, started at the sound of her voice and moved closer.

  He—Pattie based her assumption of gender on the fact that the alien appeared to be both mammal and flat-chested—had charcoal gray skin and a thick helmet of copper-red hair. If he had external ears they were hidden by the hair, but the thin nose, generous mouth, and widely spaced yellow eyes were all classic humanoid phenotypes. Another descendant of the ancient progenitors who’d spread their DNA over so much of the galaxy.

  The keeper made cooing and clucking sounds. Not language, Pattie realized, but nonsense noises meant to soothe a possibly hurt and probably frightened animal. Reaching through the mesh of her cage he picked a sprig of a plant from one of the piles and offered it to her.

  “There is no way a collapsing tunnel of peat moss knocked my combadge off.” Pattie tapped her thorax to indicate where the device had been. “That means you have it.”

  The keeper froze, his eyes locked on the bare spot on Pattie’s chest.

  “Struck a nerve, did I?” she asked. “Why don’t you give it back so we can have a real conversation?”

  The keeper’s eyes shifted from Pattie’s chest to her face. She could not believe he mistook the reasoned tones of her bell-like language for animal noises. Whatever he thought they were, however, scared him. He dropped the sprig of greenery and backed away from the cage.

  “Don’t overreact,” she said. “I’m really quite harmless.”

  This did not seem to reassure the humanoid. Turning quickly, he disappeared behind a rack of smaller cages. A few moments later Pattie heard what sounded like an exterior door slamming shut.

  “That went well.”

  The animals in the nearest cages—and given the zookeeper’s mistake, she studied them for several minutes before deciding those in her immediate area were animals—regarded her silently. They knew she didn’t belong there, but there was nothing they could do about it. Counting, she saw they all had eight legs. A few of the smaller ones even had exoskeletons. So the zookeeper wasn’t a complete idiot; she did bear a passing resemblance to the local fauna. Or at least what a humanoid might mistake for a resemblance.

  Except there weren’t supposed to be any hu
manoids—zookeeper or otherwise—on Zhatyra II.

  But that was a question for another time. Right now her priority was escape.

  Thirty minutes of thorough study later, she decided to reassess her priority hierarchy. At least in the short term. The cage was solidly built and the lock unreachable from the inside. And neither any of the bog plants nor the packing box were sturdy enough to pry the mesh work open far enough for her to squeeze through.

  Evidently the most recent addition to the zoo, her cage faced an open expanse of floor and the rest of what was apparently a warehouse of some sort. The walls she could see were log, though the roof looked like metal. She thought the floor was made of half logs fitted tightly together, their sawn faces sanded smooth but unfinished. If her theory was correct, floor polish was likely a low priority.

  Directly in front of her cage was an assembly and repair area, judging by the organized tool racks and various stains on the wood floor, with storage of parts or materials beyond. There was also an office area of sorts, with desks and cabinets along the nearest wall.

  There were a dozen things she could see that would have made short work of her prison. The closest was three meters out of reach.

  “Since I can’t get myself out,” Pattie explained to a neighbor with reddish fur or feathers, she wasn’t sure which, “I’ll have to convince our host that I don’t belong here.”

  The neighbor seemed to agree. At least it bobbed up and down several times, which seemed to indicate assent.

  Thus encouraged, Pattie began cleaning out her cage. The neat piles of vegetation were transferred, still neatly arranged, outside her cage. She then improvised a shovel from a panel torn from the packing crate and scooped as much of the dirt as she could from the enclosure. It wasn’t as neat, shoving the dirt through the mesh, but she did her best to ensure it was clearly an organized effort and not the random behavior of an animal. What she couldn’t get out she swept into a neat pile in one corner of the cage.

  By the time she was done the room full of cages had become almost dark. Though she could see no windows from where she was, Pattie suspected the illumination was natural. Either a storm was coming or night was falling. The gradual dimming and the lack of wind noises convinced her it was nightfall.

  So did the falling temperature. It had been over twenty when she had awakened. Now it felt closer to ten. Not cold, but cooler than she liked.

  Particularly in her exhausted state. Whatever her injuries from the tunnel’s collapse, not to mention the stress of events leading up to it, the toll on her system had been high. Pattie felt the stiffness in her joints and the ache in her muscles. She knew she had very little left in the way of reserves.

  Though she hated to do anything that might be mistaken for animal behavior, Pattie decided to take advantage of the insulation the packing box offered. Curling up in her makeshift shelter, Pattie settled down for the night.

  Chapter

  6

  Apparently having decided she was well enough to forgo being tightly bound in blankets, her three nurses let Corsi sleep unencumbered through the night. At least she assumed it was night. In a windowless room lit by a basket of glowing yarn, it was hard to tell. Sticking her head out the low doorway proved her nurses doubled as guards; all three of them were asleep across the only other exit from the next chamber.

  In the morning Lefty presented her with a wooden bowl of water and a pack of survival rations. Predictably, the seal of the pack had been ignored and the foil sliced open.

  “That had to be sharp,” Corsi said. “How many of these did you mangle before you figured out what it was?”

  There were only four in the emergency jump harness’s survival kit. Two thousand calories of essential nutrients and vitamins each, along with a half-dozen water purification pills, good for a liter each.

  The bowl was a bit more than half a liter, but she wasn’t going to try and split one of the tiny tablets. She dropped it in, accepting the metallic taste as fair trade for the knowledge she wasn’t ingesting any unwelcome microbes.

  As she ate, she demonstrated the pouch’s unseal and reseal feature to the chiptaurs. This led to another round of left ear brushing. Corsi tentatively decided the gesture meant either wow! or arrgh!

  After brunch, Head Nurse, Lefty, and Spot led Corsi through a series of small chambers that opened abruptly into a large indoor amphitheater. At least that was her first impression. Her second was that she was in the root system of a giant banyan tree.

  Apparently realizing she needed time to take it all in, her nurses paused and made gestures that seemed to invite her to look around. Corsi did, turning in place as she surveyed her new surroundings.

  Around three-quarters of the edges of a roughly oval clearing about two hundred meters across its long axis, columns of wood several meters thick rose from the ground to meet what appeared to be a network of even wider branches some thirty meters overhead. There was no sky, though the foliage above glowed with a diffuse green light that suggested daylight somewhere beyond.

  Broad roots, like the one from which she and her companions had emerged, diverged horizontally from the base of each column, while smaller trunks arched between columns at apparently random intervals farther up.

  The air was pungent with a dozen odors she couldn’t identify. Or almost could. A smoke, very like incense; the peppermint and cedar scent of her bedding; a sharp, sweet tang like a mixture of apples and oranges; and a musky, nutmeg odor she suspected was her hosts en masse.

  And they were en masse. There were dozens of chiptaurs moving across the open area, heading in and out of tunnels carved into the wooden pillars, or angled shallowly into the ground, or disappearing into the rock face that broke into the circle of roots along about a quarter of its arc.

  Corsi realized it was a city, made up of carved spaces in both rock and wood built within the root system of a giant forest, or a single tree. Though superficially the image of the chiptaurs with their mostly horizontal bodies moving about plants that dwarfed them resembled a nest of carpenter ants, there was nothing insectoid in their movements. No one seemed to be in a hurry and knots of conversation seemed to form and break up again with companionable informality.

  She noticed the chiptaurs came in two sizes. Some, like her nurses, were broad and rounded, usually with a softly mottled brown on brown pattern to their hair. Others, with a more distinctive dark brown on reddish brown pattern, were narrower and seemed to have a leaner build. If chiptaurs followed the pattern of most mammalian species Corsi knew of, the broader ones were females.

  Having the consideration of female nurses to a convalescing female stranger was another mark in their favor. Not enough for Corsi to drop her guard completely—female nurses might have been a cultural norm that had nothing to do with her gender. But her attendants shifted in her mind from being its to hers and their threat status went down another notch.

  Corsi expected her three nurses to lead her to some sort of central authority. Instead they took her on a wandering tour of what seemed to be a vital community.

  Wide corridors with curving walls and ceilings carved from living wood or earth and lit by myriad baskets of bioluminescent spaghetti connected the first clearing to others. Most of the tunnels were tall enough for her to walk comfortably erect, but the chiptaurs were apparent minimalists when it came to doorways. Some were a tight fit for Head Nurse, largest of her nurses.

  Corsi had noticed that Head Nurse had spent the most time dealing directly with her and seemed to be in charge of the others. She’d wondered if the chiptaur’s broader frame had indicated a higher status, but seeing her ease her way through a couple of doorways she realized that Head Nurse was simply overweight.

  Nearly half of one clearing into which they led her was enclosed by an endless expanse of solid wood. Corsi surmised it was the central trunk of the “banyan” tree. Several wider corridors, arranged in apparent randomness, disappeared into its depths.

  Everywhere there were
chiptaurs. Some followed along for a while, strolling comfortably behind, beside, or even ahead of her little group. Others acknowledged them in passing, nodding their broad heads at Corsi as though she were a familiar acquaintance. Many at a distance waved or made gestures that appeared friendly.

  Dozens of times, also apparently at random, her escorts stopped to introduce her to an individual or small group. These impromptu confabs seemed to involve a good deal of explanation or perhaps storytelling on the part of her nurses. Corsi suspected she and the details of her convalescence were being discussed, but she could not tell to what purpose nor what the hearers thought of the tale.

  In every instance, at the end of her nurses’ recitation, the chiptaur or chiptaurs to which Corsi had been presented addressed her directly with two distinct phrases of clicks and ticks. She assumed it was the chiptaur equivalent of pleased to meet you or glad you’re here. In any case, it seemed friendly, if a bit formal.

  Corsi did her bit for interspecies goodwill by smiling, stating her name in pleasant tones, and assuring them she was delighted to be there and to meet them whenever it seemed she was expected to contribute to the conversation. In fact, she was enjoying herself a bit. The constant motion was working the kinks and aches out of her joints and muscles while the unfamiliar sights and sounds kept her conscious mind busy. That last was doing more to help her subconscious sort out where it had misfiled her memories than lying alone in a wooden room would have done.

  Extrapolating from the numbers of chiptaurs she could see in the amphitheater clearings and the flow of traffic in and out of tunnels, she estimated the population of the community was somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four thousand. Not a city, but certainly larger than a village.

  At the far end of one amphitheater they entered was a raised stage on which several chiptaurs moved about in an organized fashion while a sizable crowd lounged on the ground and watched. She had no way of knowing if it was a theatrical performance or a religious ceremony. In any case, her nurses had no interest in attending and led her out another way.