Worlds of Honor

God, I think he climbed the tree and saw it!'

'Well, if he's telling you to shag your butt out of there, you'd better pay attention. That storm is a mean monster and it's on collision course with your transponder. We're picking up high winds and big hailstones and more lightning than you'll ever want to meet up close and personal.'

Given the amount of static shrieking through the com unit's pickup, that didn't come as a surprise. 'Roger. I'll do my best, Giff.'

'Okay. First, wrap up that ankle, splint it with anything you've got.'

Scott rummaged through his haversack, pulling out plastiglass-filament tape and several sections of disassembled fishing rod, the spare he always carried. With his head swimming from the pain in his skull, Scott dragged his knee up until he could reach the throbbing ankle, then tried to hold the fishing-rod sections in place and wrap the plastiglass-filament tape around them. He quickly discovered he needed about four more hands than he currently possessed—and the only ones he had were shaking so violently, they were nearly useless. The treecat tipped his head to one side, ears pricked forward, studying the stiff pieces of fiberglass rod that kept toppling over, then bleeked softly.

With deft, three-fingered hands and strong, opposable thumbs, the treecat snatched up the disassembled sections and held them firmly against Scott's ankle, using all four of his upper limbs to hold them in place. Sudden salt stung Scott's eyelids. 'Thanks, little buddy,' he mumbled, pulling a length of tape loose and winding it around his ankle with shaking hands.

'What's the treecat doing?' Giff asked urgently. Scott knew Gifford Bede would be recording every second of their exchange, now that he knew treecats were involved—just in case Scott didn't make it back to give the xenologists a report.

'He's—'

Scott closed his mouth before he could say, He's holding the pieces of my spare fishing rod against my ankle so I can tape them down. Scott's sixth sense had just kicked in with as big a warning as he'd ever received from his hindbrain. That profoundly intelligent, life-saving bit of assistance, figured out in a flash of problem-solving intuition, so similar to the treecat's solution to prevent him from drowning, gave Scott a great deal of insight into treecat intelligence. You might use flint tools, little friend, but there's nothing primitive about your level of sapience. Stephanie Harrington was right about that, and maybe there's a lot she's not saying, if half of what I'm picking up from you is accurate. The xenologists haven't got a clue, have they? This is data they haven't got, nothing like it, in fact. And maybe little Stephanie's got the right of it, keeping her mouth shut when those xenologists start poking at her. You're smart and you care—and how many of us humans would take advantage of the fact that your technology consists of stone knives and fire flints? Well, if Scott got himself out of this mess, nobody would find out from him just how clever this treecat was. Better they erred on the side of caution, unsure what treecats could or couldn't do, than take advantage of them the way humanity had taken advantage of almost every other sentient aboriginal population they'd ever come across, just because they knew they could.

But that didn't stop Scott from wanting to learn everything he could about this particular treecat. A few well-informed, close-mouthed humans could do the treecats more political, sociological, and legal good than entire bureaus of well-meaning xenologists. Stephanie Harrington was only eleven. Scott MacDallan was a grown man and a respected professional in the far-flung community he served as physician. He could do a great deal, protecting this treecat and the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of others. If he survived long enough to try. God, how much more could I learn about you, what kinds of things could I accomplish, protecting you and your kind, if I had the chance? 

Scott wanted that chance, wanted it badly.

By the time he'd wrapped enough tape to stiffen his ankle, the blaze of late afternoon sunlight had vanished into an ominous, lowering darkness. Wind whistled and shrieked through the treetops and the smell of ozone and rain lay thick on the air.

'Gotta get downriver,' he mumbled to himself. 'Have to get to the air car.'

'Scott?' Gifford Bede's voice was breaking up in the crackle coming from the comlink.

'Yeah?' He strained to hear through the interference.

' . . . tape around your ankle?'

'Yes, I've got it splinted.'

' . . . stick . . .'

'You're breaking up,' Scott said, feeling tendrils of fear stir again as he glanced involuntarily skyward. 'Say again?'

' . . . walking stick . . .'

'Roger that, I'll try and cut a walking stick, Giff. Something sturdy enough to lean against and hobble across the broken ground between here and my air car.'

' . . .'

It was no good. The storm's rising interference was too strong. Scott clipped the com unit to his belt, drew a deep breath and smiled at his anxious friend, who peered up at him through brilliant green eyes, then dragged himself slowly up the tree trunk. He fought dizziness and waves of sickness. 'Don't let me fall, Jesus, don't let me fall and hit my head again.' He made it up, leaning heavily against the tree trunk, then opened his eyes and peered upward.

The nearest branches were just within reach. Scott fumbled the vibro-knife off his belt clip and switched it on. The blade would cut through virtually anything known. It made short work of a section of branch as thick as Scott's wrist. The branch crashed down and Scott switched off the knife, hunkered his way cautiously back down again, then crawled along the length of the makeshift staff, lopping off side limbs and twigs.

The treecat shadowed him, peering curiously at the humming blade, but thankfully the treecat didn't offer to poke so much as a twitching whisker at it. 'What must you think of this?' Scott asked, aware that the treecat wouldn't understand him, yet driven to communicate, somehow, with the creature who was so patently trying to keep him alive. He was also desperately trying to keep his own mind focused, battling not only the agony in his head, but a terrifying tendency to fog out and lose control of his wandering thoughts. With a force-two thunderstorm bearing down on them, Scott couldn't afford a foggy brain with thoughts as scattered as dandelion down on a gale-force wind. So he talked to the treecat as he crawled along the downed tree limb, lopping off branches and shaping his walking stick. 'You know, little buddy, I can't just keep calling you `creature,' can I? You've got a name, I'll wager, but what does it sound like in your language?' So far the only sounds he'd heard the treecat make were a curious, warbling sort of bleek, that buzzing purr, and a soft, reassuring croon.

As he worked with maddening slowness, Scott considered the problem.

'Any suggestions?' he asked his companion, who was busy solicitously dragging sharp-edged branches and twigs out of his way as he inched forward on hands and knees, to spare him cuts and splinters. 'No? Well, you fished me out of that river, right enough. Maybe that's what I'll call you, little buddy. Fisher.'

The treecat's reaction astonished him. It sat up on its hindmost set of legs, whistling sharply in visible excitement. Then it startled him by touching the disassembled fishing rod attached to his taped ankle, pointing to the river, and saying, 'Bleek?'

Scott paused, momentarily oblivious to the onrushing storm, the agony behind his eyes. 'Fisher?' he repeated. He touched the fiberglass sections of rod, pointed to the river, and made casting motions, said, 'Fisher.' Then he pointed to the treecat and said it again. 'Fisher.'

'Bleek!'

He found himself with an ecstatic treecat twining around his arm, head pressed strongly against his cheek, while the lithe, furred body purred like a well-tuned Terran housecat. Scott laughed shakily and petted the treecat with one unsteady hand. 'I think that means you approve of the name? Is that what you're trying to tell me, Fisher?'

The treecat gave out a satisfied-sounding, warbling chirp, then pointed urgently to the sky. 'Bleek!'

'Right.' He'd let his thoughts scatter off the task at hand after all, distracted by the astonishing rapport the treecat was somehow building with him. A grim smile came and went as it occurred to Scott that what he was sensing might well be the same thing his grandmother had scared him witless with when Scott had been just a kid, when Granny MacChait had routinely anticipated things he said or needed, or when she'd known, from half a planet