Balance of Nature Read online

  Think of them as sentient machines, she thought. Medicine is just engineering the physiology of a biological organism. They had been working almost a half hour when the first security services officer rode down the conveyor from the transport center.

  “Evacuate the premises,” the Yellow shell clicked authoritatively. “Township Council wants all open areas cleared. Proceeding to lockdown mode as soon as all public areas are secure. Move along.” The Yellow shooed several limping Nasat toward a mother-tree passageway before meandering over to where Pattie and Zoë had set up a makeshift triage station.

  “Proper medical attenders will be dispatched shortly. You can leave them be,” the Yellow said to Pattie, using secondary limbs to indicate those Nasat yet to be examined. “On behalf of the Council, thank you. Be on your way now. Follow proper evacuation procedures and return directly to your paddock by the shortest possible route.”

  Pattie continued working. “I’ve had field medic training, Officer. I can be useful until the attenders arrive.”

  “Best to comply with the Council’s orders,” the Yellow insisted. Squatting down on his haunches, he plucked the medical tricorder out of Zoë’s hands and dropped it into the medkit. After collecting chemsutures and exo-plaster and depositing them alongside the tricorder, he snapped the kit shut, scooting it close to his forelegs.

  With one of her limbs, Pattie nudged the kit across the floor until it rested beside Zoë. How dronelike is this officer? I’d forgotten how mindlessly compliant some shells can be, she thought, reopening the kit. She tossed the tricorder back to Zoë, who continued working. “I’m confident the Council wants to save lives.”

  The Yellow’s throat bristles tensed, his antennae curled downward. “Naturally. But they have more knowledge than you or I do.”

  “If we can contribute to the emergency efforts, we will. ‘With many small limbs large tasks are done.’” She quoted a Nasat proverb. Sorting through the hypos in the medkit, Pattie settled on one that would stabilize the respirations of the wounded Nasat.

  The Yellow waddled past Zoë and tapped her on the shoulder. “Reason with the Blue, or I’ll call for backup.”

  Zoë and Pattie exchanged glances. The Betazoid shrugged, yawned. “She’s in charge.”

  Pattie appreciated Zoë’s vote of confidence. Her teacher would stand by her if she decided to be stubborn; Pattie knew that from experience. But she didn’t want to cause trouble; few softs lived in this township. A disgruntled peace officer could make it difficult for Zoë to approach potential subjects or access semirestricted databases. She stood upright; Zoë followed suit.

  “Fine, then, but let me leave my paddock code with you so that the Council can contact me when the repairs start,” Pattie said. “My career training will be useful to them.”

  “Cocky, aren’t you, Blue?” The Yellow’s mandibles twitched with suspicion as he grudgingly removed a scanner from his utility vest. “Designation?”

  She paused for a minute, shifting her thought processes out of standard into the clicks, chirps, and pitch of Nasat. The Yellow wouldn’t find a Nasat record for “Pattie.” “P8 BlueTS27Q6. Starfleet Corps of Engineers.”

  He tapped her name and waited for the computer to retrieve her ID file. “Starfleet doesn’t have jurisdiction in local matters, but I’m supposing their training should be mostly applicable here.” Clutching his scanner in his pincers, the Yellow swiveled his eyes from the data on the screen toward Pattie. “Hmmmm. Haven’t been home in a bit, P8. Suppose it’s understandable that you’ve forgotten how things are done around here.”

  Choosing to ignore the Yellow’s personal insinuations, Pattie persisted in constructively dealing with the emergency situation at hand. Give me a terminal with access to the sensor data and I could map out every weakened bearing branch or cracked floor, she thought. “My training would be invaluable in determining whether the township’s sustained any damage from the tremors,” she protested—though she’d have better luck arguing with a replicator than a Yellow. Eons of natural selection had given the Yellows their steady, methodical ways. From time to time, she’d heard stories of Yellows that had abandoned their larvae instead of finding a nursery, or those who’d up and left the township to hitch a ride on a starship. Those exceptions notwithstanding, you went to Yellows when a task required relentless, often repetitive, perseverance.

  “Confirming ID,” he said, activating the neuro function on his scanner and waving it over her forebrain to confirm her bioelectric signature with the population database. His antennae shot up. “Interesting. Chatty for a ‘quiet’—”

  If the officer had continued nattering on, Pattie hadn’t heard it. She froze, rooted where she stood, her blood chilled. She willed her mouth to move. Her thoughts stuck and stuttered. Hearing it again after so many years shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. One cycling thought refused to go away; she grasped it, clung to it. Quiet? I have conquered that! But her mouth refused to comply with her will to speak, and a sinking sense of humiliation drained her energy. She stood before the Yellow, helpless.

  If I can pull up my record in the township database, I can prove to him that he’s mistaken! She stepped toward the officer, gesturing with her limbs, attempting to communicate that she wanted to borrow his ID scanner.

  The startled Yellow misread her intentions as aggressive and staggered back. He pulled his limbs tight into his abdomen, preparing to curl into a protective ball; his reactionary behavior further fueled her frustration.

  She took another step toward him. I can make him understand. I mean no harm. If only I can find the words. I know how to say this!

  At the crest of her frustration, her mind blanked.

  In a breath her muscles relaxed, her limbs collapsed to her sides like snipped puppet strings. She breathed deeply, blinked, and shook her head. A wide-eyed Zoë held her tightly with her trembling hand pressed into a soft spot beneath Pattie’s mandibles; she hadn’t had to do this since Pattie’s early learning days. Pattie, as a young Nasat, had been so conditioned to anxiety whenever her fellow Nasat misunderstood or humiliated her, that Zoë had worked extra hard on helping Pattie overcome the emotional reactions that interfered with her cognitive processing.

  Today, the technique worked the same on her adult body as it had on her nymph body. Steady pressure on the nerve bundle acted like a circuit breaker, forcing Pattie to relax. Interrupting the anxiety allowed the instinctual emotional/biochemical reaction triggered by the Yellow’s words to ebb. If Zoë hadn’t intervened…

  Cognition of what she might have done dawned on her. She glanced off at an angle, away from Zoë, into the dark rain forest. I’ve gone and given credence to the very point I was trying to dissuade him from believing: that “quiets” are misfits. She muttered a potent curse she’d picked up from Corsi, doubting if the officer could claim the ability to curse in multiple languages. Ironic.

  She winced inwardly when she saw the officer had backed up against a wall, all limbs extended, poised for offense—his aspect indicating he still anticipated Pattie to attack. He clicked an angry warning, jabbing a pincer toward her. He was a shadow of hundreds of other fearful Nasat that Pattie had met in her youngest seasons.

  But he had nothing to worry about. Pattie had never intended to harm him—or lay a pincer on him. Persuading the Yellow to believe her was another case entirely. Worried, she looked at Zoë, who still held her loosely. She willed her Betazoid friend to interpret her conflicting emotions.

  With a gentle smile, Zoë briefly touched her thumb to the center of her forehead, then placed the same thumb on the thin, sensitive tissue behind Pattie’s antennae. That her teacher so easily employed the Nasat gesture of affection comforted her immensely.

  Zoë whispered, “Let me handle this.” She squared her shoulders and extended a hand to the officer. Tentatively, he placed a limb in her palm, indicating he would listen, though his eyes darted frequently in Pattie’s direction.

  “P8’s not a ‘quiet,
’” Zoë explained. “At least not as you understand quiets to be. She has full lingual abilities—both of communication and comprehension—after graduating from the Federation’s neural-electric linguistics project. A physiological marker might register her as a quiet on your scanner, but I assure you that’s a technicality.”

  The officer’s eyes darted between Zoë and Pattie several times before he spoke. “I’ve heard rumors about that neural-electric memory process. So it isn’t just Federation sap and fog. P8 seems to be able to communicate just like the rest of us.”

  “Obviously,” Pattie retorted. “Or we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation, would we?”

  Zoë shot a warning frown in Pattie’s direction, but the sarcastic tone appeared to have been lost on the officer.

  “Learn something every day. Guess membership in the Federation has its perks.” The Yellow shell clicked his scanner back onto his utility strip.

  “You’ll let the Council know that I’m available to assist in the structural evaluations?” Pattie asked.

  He tapped his pincers irritably. “Back to that, are we?”

  “Well?”

  “You won’t go having a fit or anything like you quiets are prone to do, will you?”

  Biting back a caustic reply, Pattie waved her antennae, no. Zoë squeezed Pattie’s limb in a gesture of support.

  “Assuming you can behave yourself, I’ll give them your paddock number.” He returned the ID scanner to his utility belt. “But I wouldn’t plan on much. While citizen support is greatly appreciated, at a time like this, repair efforts are best left to the experts.” Pattie restrained herself from pointing out that she was an expert in exactly this sort of repair effort. “In the meantime, return to your paddock and remain there until the ‘all clear’ is issued. Excuse me,” he said, wandering off to shoo laito monkeys away from chewing on exposed power cables. After checking in with the other Nasat tending to the wounded (presumably giving them the same lockdown lecture he’d given Pattie and Zoë), he vanished up the transport center conveyor.

  “What about the injured?” Pattie said.

  “I think we’ve done what we can,” Zoë replied. “And I’m not just saying that because we’ve been ordered to go. I honestly think we’ve helped those that we could and they’ll be fine until the attenders arrive.”

  Pattie curled her antennae in acknowledgment. She checked the duffel where she’d stowed her larvae and, satisfied that the precious cargo was undamaged, followed behind Zoë on the path she picked through the wreckage. With the duffel secured on her shell, she could maneuver with little difficulty, simplifying the five-or-so-kilometer journey they had to the lower-level branch sector where Zoë’s lab/paddock was located. Pausing at the doorway through the mother-tree, Pattie looked back on the wounded they had assisted, feeling grateful that her exit was far less conspicuous than her entrance.

  Welcome home, P8 Blue.

  Chapter 2

  Not surprisingly, Pattie and Zoë discovered that few conveyors and turbolifts had resumed operating. Any functioning automated transport was used to move wounded and security personnel. Voluminous civilian foot traffic moved slowly as thousands of night-cycle shift workers emptied out of work centers to return home. Weak emergency lighting further hampered progress; what hadn’t been bolted down or attached when the quake hit had been dumped on the floor. When an impatient Red pushing past had tripped her, Pattie nearly lacerated her lower limbs on the sharp edge of a dislodged wall plate. The occasional encounter with an anonymous squish or shattered bits continually reminded them to slow down, move carefully.

  Though the mess meant inconvenience, Pattie knew their situation could have been far worse. From what little she could discern, the primary township structures had sustained little or no damage. A good cleanup crew could fix the situation. The farther she moved from the transport center, the more it appeared that new construction zones—near the treetops and spreading out horizontally from the mother-tree—had been hardest hit. Why this was, considering that those zones utilized the latest architectural advances, puzzled Pattie.

  Without mechanized transport, traveling between branch levels required that they, and all others returning to their paddocks, climb up and down the peg-poles: meter-wide metal poles with half-circle shaped pegs protruding off opposite sides. Pattie had used Jefferies tubes and stairs on the da Vinci, but she found she adapted poorly to those designs. The peg-poles were better suited to the grasp of her multiple limbs and her body’s weight distribution. For Zoë, the peg-poles worked on the same principle as a ladder would, so she had little trouble keeping pace with the queue of Nasat above and below her. Pattie, as she descended, was reminded of how softs used the ladders connecting bunk beds. Maybe more Nasat might join Starfleet if peg-poles were integrated into starship construction. She made a mental note to suggest her idea to Captain Gold when she next saw him.

  The protracted trip back to Zoë’s paddock gave Pattie plenty of time to think about her encounter with the Yellow. Though the humiliation had diffused, she still simmered over the Yellow’s labeling her as a quiet. Hearing that word—hearing herself labeled that way—again reminded her why she’d joined Starfleet. In the S.C.E., whatever a Nasat computer said she was, whatever her physiology identified her as being, didn’t matter. Her accomplishments defined her, not a defect in the language-processing center of her cerebral cortex. Because she had skills and experience the township needed, a label shouldn’t matter—especially at a time of crisis.

  Instead of locking down the township, why hadn’t the Council ordered every available shell out of their paddock to start working? Clearing the rubble, helping the wounded to safety—whatever was needed. A threat to the mother-tree was a collective threat to all life in the canopy, Nasat, tiny-leafed neophatra, or multiwinged avian. All should be vested in finding answers as soon as possible. Waiting around for bureaucratic wheels to grind out an official all-clear notification wouldn’t solve the power problems or stabilize potentially damaged buttress roots. Whatever force had quaked the township’s mother-tree could resume at any time. Pattie wondered what this town-shipwide lockdown would accomplish; she twitched with impatience. We should be working this problem. Putting our ideas together.

  She imagined their invisible foe, be it a natural force or a yet-unknown predator, lurking beneath lichen-covered branches, through vine curtains and nests, perhaps as far as the muddy forest floor. A destabilized fault in the planetary crust. A rotting buttress root giving way. A deadly infection seeping into the mother-tree’s xylem or phloem. Her kindred might have to explore new, nontraditional ways of dealing with the situation. But the problem wouldn’t be dealt with by sending frightened Nasat back to their paddocks to curl into protective postures.

  A dull crunch—coupled with a groan—startled her. A cloud of bark dust and moss emerged from the ceiling. Looking up, Pattie watched as a synth-wood support beam began bowing. The quake must have compromised the structural integrity, she thought pragmatically. She knew the deck above primarily housed residential areas, sparing those below from heavy machinery and equipment, should the deck give way. Still, several hundred Nasat paddocks weren’t weightless.

  Another groan and the peg-pole jiggled, nearly imperceptibly.

  “Wrap yourself around the pole,” Pattie called to Zoë. “The ceiling might give!”

  Eyes wide with fear, Zoë complied.

  Bowing even more deeply, the groaning beam cracked visibly, sending a shower of splinters into the air. The peg-pole swayed. Nasat above and below them panicked, scrambling over Zoë and past Pattie. Others shrieked, waving at the ceiling, pointing and shouting.

  With a roar, the beam snapped; a flood of debris filled the air. The weight of the collapsing ceiling bent the peg-pole, severing its connection with the pole above it. The pole tipped, swayed dangerously—but slowly—from side to side. Each sway dipped a bit farther, bringing them closer to the paddock structures below.

  As they
careened toward the ground, Pattie watched the paddock-huts growing larger with each meter. Her mind’s eye transformed the landscape and she saw the Orion hurtling toward the da Vinci in the turbulent atmosphere of Galvan VI. A wrenching shudder first threw her head back, then threw her forward, slamming her body against metal.

  A blink. They’d stopped falling. She looked around. The scene shifted and she again saw the bend and shimmer dance of leaf tufts on supple branches in the forest outside. She respired humid air, air thick with pollen and orchid perfume, not the neutral, recirculated air of a starship. She knew this place. Or thought she did. She was on the homeworld. With Zoeannah. The peg-pole they had been climbing had crashed into a building complex that stood a good ten meters above the deck floor. At least that was where she believed she was.

  Deceptive dusk light continually recast the shapes in her mind and she half wondered if some latent racial memory had merged with her present reality. Perhaps she was still somewhere aboard the dying da Vinci and in the shock and horror of it all, her brain deceived her senses by offering the comfort of home.

  Home? To use that word to define this place struck her as odd. She felt more vulnerable, more exposed—more alone—in this elongated moment on her homeworld than she ever had while roaming the stars. Certainly Zoë must feel similarly. She dropped her gaze and saw Zoë, her expression pinched, her skin pale. A half-dozen escaping Nasat skittered over her on their way to a rooftop, only a few pegs away from Pattie. Even in the wan moonlight, Pattie could see the whitened skin across Zoë’s knuckles as she clenched the pole more tightly.