Worlds of Honor

its nose and mouth lying just under the foaming surface. Another few moments of immersion and it would drown!

He used tail and true-feet to cling upside down from a branch just above the two-leg's head and tugged at its brightly curled head fur, lifting with all his strength. He managed to pull the furless face clear of the water and heard the shallow, ragged breaths it drew, but he couldn't possibly hold the two-leg's head like this for more than a few moments. Already the muscles along his arms and legs and back burned with the strain of holding up the heavy head. The carry net, still looped around his middle, flopped down his belly, hanging limp. The idea that flashed into his mind had him wrenching at the remaining knots with his hand-feet, freeing the net completely. He looped the net downward, snagging the two-leg's face in it, then strained and pulled and struggled to drag the carry loops up over the snagging branch from which he dangled.

The ropes slid over a sturdy fork in the rough-barked branch and held fast. The two-leg's face hung in the net, just clear of the water rushing past its oddly shaped nose, but it could breathe now, safe as Swift Striker could make it until it woke again. The pain in the two-leg's mind throbbed even with that mind lost in unconsciousness. Swift Striker whimpered softly, unable to erase that pain and needing to do just that, more than he could recall ever having needed to do anything in his life. Moving gingerly, still clinging upside down from the branch, Swift Striker parted the silky, flame-colored head fur to peer critically at a gash along the back which still bled. Angry swelling already spread outward and the flesh was hotter there than elsewhere. Another gash crossed the upper portion of the two-leg's face above its eyes, where the huge fish had crashed down against its head. The bruising here was even worse and the bones felt wrong, as though the blow from the enormous, armor-scaled fish had broken them. The blood leaking slowly down the boulder from the great cuts alarmed Swift Striker.

He narrowed his eyes, recalling the memory song his clan's memory singers had sung, of the two-leg youngling which had halted Climbs Quickly's terrible bleeding where the death fang's claws had torn the scout so cruelly. She had wrapped a cord around the injury and tightened it down. But Swift Striker's two-leg had not suffered injuries on a forelimb, which could be tied off with cord, they bled from his head. Still, if he tied something down tightly across the gashes, the bleeding might stop. The two-leg's body coverings certainly provided sufficient materials for such a wrapping.

Swift Striker shifted along the branch with his true-feet and altered position cautiously, fumbling for his flint knife, then tugged at a section of the covering over the two-leg's motionless arm. Sawing carefully, Swift Striker separated long strips from the body covering, then moved gingerly, having to work through the carry net he'd looped around the two-leg's face. It was awkward work, but after a brief struggle, Swift Striker succeeded in tying the strips down over both gashes. Blood, dark red and terrifying, soaked into them, but the flow slowed and gradually stopped. The two-leg remained unconscious, but it was still alive.

Swift Striker stroked the smooth skin of the two-leg's cheek, crooning anxiously. Touching the two-leg like this sent shocks of strange pleasure through Swift Striker. Its head fur was longer, silkier than his own, yet the face, so smooth and soft, was not entirely hairless, he now realized. Tufts of fur grew above its closed eyes, in an arching curve, and its jaw and cheeks bore a fuzzy shadow of hair, as though the two-leg had scraped its face against something so abrasive it had rubbed all the hair off right down to the skin. The prickle of remaining stubble was rough-smooth under his hands through the webbing of his carry net, the golden-mottled skin icy pale.

Swift Striker scented the wind, but could catch no trace of any danger, certainly not the stink of a death fang or the musky odor of a snow hunter. Death fangs, while not overly bright, knew better than to come this deep under the trees of a clan's home range, and snow hunters tended to keep to the high slopes and craggy peaks of the mountains. It ought to be safe enough to risk. Swift Striker let go with his tail and true-feet and landed softly on the boulder next to his stricken two-leg. He chittered softly in anxiety, able to do nothing else to help. Far too large and heavy to drag clear of the icy water, the two-leg would have to remain where it was until it regained consciousness.

Crooning anxiously, Swift Striker stroked the two-leg's bright, wet hair and waited.

Consciousness returned reluctantly, in patchy bits and pieces of confusion. Blinding pain through Scott's head dominated awareness for an uncertain stretch of time. Eventually other stimuli made themselves felt. Cold water rushed across portions of him, leaving him numb in several places and shivering all over. Deep-lying aches the length of his back told of injuries to muscle and soft tissue. His ankle throbbed inside his high-topped wading boot. Unyielding rock dug into his shoulder and ribs and thigh. An unfamiliar roaring in his ears gradually settled into the recognizable sound of rushing water. Memory, splintered and broken, stirred. He had been wading through a rocky stream, had lost his footing. He must be lying in the water, then, with rocks under him.

That made sense.

But something lay across his face, cutting into the skin like a web of ropes, and that didn't make sense. He stirred sluggishly, then bit back sour bile and a need to groan. For long moments, the only roaring he could hear was the pounding of blood in his ears as his whole head threatened to detach itself from his shoulders and go spinning away on the current like a child's balsa-wood raft. By the time his head had decided it would remain attached, after all, Scott knew he was in serious trouble. He was a medical doctor, after all, knew the signs and symptoms of shock and concussion as well as any other medical professional on Sphinx.

The fact that he lay sprawled in an icy mountain river, unable to move, while sporting all the classic textbook symptoms of head injury and physical shock, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest hospital and several dozen meters from the shelter of his air car, left Scott MacDallan cold with a fear such as he had never known in his life. An aching, burning crick in his neck prompted him to try, gingerly, to ease his head into a slightly different position. He bit his lips and moved his head fractionally, swallowing back a cry of pain, and realized the sensation of webbing across his face was not an illusion.

Scott blinked slowly, wincing at the stab of light through his skull when he opened his eyes—and made a discovery that left him suspended between broken thoughts. His face lay tangled in the mesh of a hand-knotted net of some kind, which supported the weight of his head and left his nose mere millimeters clear of the water. How in the world had he come to be lying face down with his head in a net? Moving his arm left Scott gulping down bile, but his arm did work, even though the abused muscles in shoulders and neck shrieked their protest. He felt gingerly at his head, blinked stupidly as his fingers encountered rough knots and what felt like strips of cloth around his forehead and down the back of his aching skull. The netting was taut, looped, he discovered, over a low-hanging tree limb. When he brought his hand down again, it came away dark with blood.

At first, the low crooning sound didn't even register. He was lying there, trying to decide when and how he'd managed to tie bandages around his head during a state of concussed coma, when he realized that his fear was rapidly ebbing away. That was when the nearly subliminal sound that was sinking down through the pain in his head, soothing him, somehow, registered.

He blinked with a tremendous effort and managed to look up . . . and grass-green eyes peered anxiously right into his.

Scott came up out of the water with a convulsive yell. Then sprawled across the boulder, vomiting helplessly while agony lanced deep into his brain. He felt tiny, gentle hands touch his head, his cheek and brow, knew instinctively that the creature crouched beside him—whatever it was—not only meant him no harm, it was trying to help. He didn't know how he knew that; he just knew it, as surely as he knew he would die out here if he didn't get out of this freezing water and down the mountain and into the nearest available hospital. For all of humanity's medical miracles, conquering diseases and developing human cloning and other gene-manipulating technologies, even limited cybernetic enhancements, simple, stupid accident still accounted for an appalling number of deaths, particularly on new colony worlds like Sphinx. Scott lay there shuddering for long moments, huddled across the boulder, fighting the nausea in the pit of his belly, aware that he was quite probably going to be the next accidental death logged in Sphinx's official records.

At length, gaining sufficient strength, he groped cautiously at the net still tangled across his face. He could feel other hands moving deftly, as well, working at the back of his head and above him. Then the net came loose and he was free. He blinked slowly and found a long, sinuous shape of mottled cream and grey fur busily winding the net around its middle, using its four upper-most limbs in a graceful fashion.

A treecat . . . ! 

As the shock of that sank dimly through his aching head, it occurred to Scott MacDallan that if the treecat