Honor - Kevin Killiany [9]
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.