Star Trek (4 page)

A
pparently 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
it
s to
her
s 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.

They were well down another corridor when she realized there hadn't been any music to accompany the organized movement. Whether it was a ballet, a play, or a mass, she would have expected some sort of music.

Now that she thought of it, there was no music anywhere. At least, she thought there wasn't. Some of the chittering clicks and ticks that made up the background murmur of the chiptaur city could have been local opera for all she could tell. What were definitely missing were musical instruments.

There were niches or hollows lining the walls of some of the broader corridors and carved into the bases of many of the root columns. These appeared to be shops offering wares she could only glimpse in passing. Apparent fruits or vegetables, baskets of every description, a wood carver, and what might have been a physician.

She wasn't sure, but Corsi thought she remembered Abramowitz once explaining that an active economy in nonessentials and decorative arts indicated something significant about a culture's development. Of course, she couldn't remember exactly what that significant thing was.

What she could do, with a tactician's eye, was evaluate the technology around her.

No metal, of that she was sure. Cutting and carving tools appeared to be made of volcanic glass, similar to obsidian but in a variety of colors. She saw levers, pulleys, and inclined planes in use everywhere, but evidently the chiptaurs hadn't thought to attach their pulleys to the bottom of a platform to make wheels. Every burden she saw was carried; no carts or even sleds were in evidence.

Nor were any weapons. She couldn't be sure if it was planetwide or just the rules of this particular community, but there was nothing remotely resembling a spear, club, or bow anywhere to be seen. There were edge tools in abundance, from wooden shovels to chisels and vegetable choppers apparently shaped from volcanic glass. But none were shaped and balanced as weapons.

Corsi began to suspect the assertive nonviolence practiced by her nurses reflected the cultural norm here. Wherever here was.

There were cultivated areas beyond the columns of roots bordering some of the amphitheaters. This didn't seem right to Corsi, particularly since the spaces received less indirect sunlight than the clearings. Perhaps the pinkish-yellow growths were more akin to mushrooms than true plants.

Lining each mushroom garden were rows of simple lean-tos with pounded felt blankets draped over their open ends. Corsi's companions led her to one of these and made several ambiguous gestures that communicated nothing, then stood by expectantly.

“Uh-huh,” Corsi said. “It's a lovely lean-to. Are these the guest quarters?”

Evidently realizing she hadn't understood what they'd meant to communicate, the chiptaurs repeated their pantomime, which seemed to involve several uncomfortable postures.

Looking past their performance, Corsi saw individual chiptaurs entering other lean-tos in the row, then emerging a few moments later. She laughed, the sudden sound startling her nurses.

“Got it,” she said. “Public toilets fertilize mushroom garden. Thanks for the thought. Not now, maybe later.”

At length the nurses decided she'd understood their message and declined the offer. Corsi waited with the head nurse while Lefty and Spot availed themselves of lean-tos, then followed them back toward the cliff face that bordered the other side of the clearing.

Corsi realized they were back in the first amphitheater. Orienting herself to the cliff, she headed back toward the tunnel from which they'd emerged hours before.

Her nurses headed her off and led her again toward the cliff. As they got closer she realized a stream of water ran along a stone trough at the base of the wall.

Several chiptaurs were kneeling on their front pair of legs as their back pair remained standing, dipping all four arms into the flow of water.

“Hand washing?” Corsi asked, pantomiming scrubbing.

Her nurses seemed to approve, mimicking her gestures.

“Hygiene is good,” Corsi agreed and knelt beside them to wash her own hands in the water.

It was hot.

She snatched back her hands, expecting them to be partially cooked by the brief contact with the boiling water.

Leaning back on her heels, Corsi looked up at the cliff face. Now that she was looking directly at it, she realized it was strangely uniform, rising at a constant slope.

“This is a volcanic cinder cone, isn't it?”

The image was back. She was on the roof of a rain forest canopy, beneath a white sun and hazy sky. In the near distance was a ring of volcanoes, cinder cones as symmetrical as a child's sand castles barely protruding above the giant trees. Smoke or steam rising…

The head nurse chittered at her, getting her up and moving toward a tunnel leading into the face of the cinder cone.

“If the only reason you guys patched me up was you needed a virgin to sacrifice to the volcano, I'm afraid we're both going to be disappointed.”

Great. Trapped and alone on a strange planet and the first time I think of Fabe is when I make one of his lame jokes. Sentimental fool, that's what I am
.

As soon as they crossed the threshold, Corsi saw this tunnel was different from the others she'd seen. It was paneled, for one thing. Or wainscoted. Great broad planks laid horizontally covered the rough pumice walls to just above chiptaur height. Which was to say about even with Corsi's elbows. For another, the walls slanted in, disappearing in the darkness above the glow baskets without ever coming together. This was a natural fissure, perhaps an ancient steam vent from the volcano's early days, not a passageway the chiptaurs had carved by hand.

Corsi could sense a difference in her escorts as well. They seemed subdued, but excited as well. Their chirps and chitters took on a hushed quality, but their eyes were bright and active. Anticipation? Reverence? Something like that. Corsi couldn't put her finger on it.