5
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, or at least no worse than everything that had gone before it. The first mistake had been a group one, with enough blame for everyone to get his fair share: no one had noticed that group of Human ground warriors until they were practically on top of the northern pyramid. The Zhirrzh warriors had done their best, but without a timely warning from the Elders their response had been unfocused and far too late. The Humans had reached the pyramid; but instead of destroying it, they'd simply poked around, broken into Prr't-zevisti's niche and taken his fsss cutting, and moved on.
His cutting. Hovering at the edge of the lightworld, Prr't-zevisti gazed down at the thin slice of tissue sitting there in its tiny sealed box. It had been taken from his fsss organ a little over seventeen cyclics ago, but he still remembered that event as vividly as if it had just been last fullarc. The procedure had been brand-new at the time, only a couple of cyclics old, and most of Prr't-zevisti's friends had sworn up and down that they'd never let a technic take a blade to their fsss organs. But Prr't-zevisti had always had a reckless streak to him, and the prospect of getting to flit between two different areas instead of being stuck in just one had been highly intriguing. A little thought, a little boredom—a little goading from his friends—and he'd had his name put on the list.
Letting the Human warriors get to the pyramid had been their first mistake. The second had merely compounded it. Instead of redoubling their efforts to destroy or defeat the enemy, the Zhirrzh warriors had shifted their focus to merely driving the attackers back into the mountains.
At the time, of course, no one had thought of it as a mistake. With Prr't-zevisti's fsss cutting bouncing ignominiously around in some Human's combat bag, an ill-placed shot by the Zhirrzh warriors could have vaporized the cutting and sent him snapping unceremoniously back to his main fsss anchorpoint at the Prr-family shrine. The Elders would certainly have pressured Commander Thrr-mezaz not to take such a risk, a point of view Prr't-zevisti himself would definitely have supported if he hadn't been so quickly taken out of direct range of the discussion. Besides which, considering why Commander Thrr-mezaz had put the communicators' pyramids outside the village in the first place, he'd probably had some crazy notion of Prr't-zevisti serving as a spy at the enemy mountain stronghold.
He'd kept a low profile during the first couple of tentharcs of his captivity, staying deep in the grayworld where he couldn't see and could hear only through his fsss cutting. Stoically enduring the Humans' discomforting and occasionally painful manipulation of the cutting.
Though none of it had been nearly as discomforting as the cutting process itself had been, seventeen cyclics ago. There was no way to apply an anesthetic, of course, and even though they'd used a cold-knife, a fair amount of pain had necessarily made it through to him. Far more sickening, at least to him, had been what the whole procedure had looked like. He'd seen other preserved fsss organs when he was a physical and had known that the preservation technique had left a thin, hard shell around the exterior of the small, finger-shaped organ. What he hadn't realized until the cutting operation was that either time, or those same preservatives, had turned the interior of the fsss into a fluid, jellylike substance. It oozed slowly around the knife as the healers cut, trickling down the side of the fsss like some sort of extra-thick kavra-fruit juice. Like something dead and decaying, even though he knew intellectually that it was fully alive and vibrant. He'd watched in morbid fascination, a combination of shocked disgust and stubborn pride preventing him from looking away, as they finished their cut and turned the parts right side up to minimize and contain the leakage. They'd applied a new treatment of more modern preservatives, sending an odd sort of double tingling sensation through him. Both sections had skinned over; the healers had announced the cutting a success; and as the disgust and pain had faded into disinterest and fatigue, Prr't-zevisti had wandered off.
The Humans had eventually lost interest in his cutting, too. And as darkness fell and the aliens settled down for the latearc, Prr't-zevisti had come up to the edge of the lightworld again and begun to poke around.
But he'd underestimated the enemy's cunning. The area where his cutting had been taken was absolutely crammed full of metaclass="underline" metal weapons, metal tools, even what appeared to be metal packaging. Like every Elder, he knew that refined metal could not be breached; what he hadn't properly appreciated until then was that the effect went far beyond the actual physical space occupied by that metal. Each piece seemed to throw the grayworld equivalent of a shadow, a sharply defined area shaped exactly like the shadow that would have been created by a light source at his fsss cutting. A shadow as impenetrable as the metal itself. Obviously having to do with his anchorline, though he was rather surprised he'd never heard of this effect before.
And as he was picking his way carefully through the area, his full attention on the metal and the shadows, the Humans had sprung their trap.
He was standing there in the darkness—he or she; Prr't-zevisti still didn't know which. Standing there waiting for him to make his appearance... and even as Prr't-zevisti had belatedly noticed him, the Human had let out a shriek of discovery and triumph that had echoed through his mind a half-dozen beats after he'd dropped frantically back into the grayworld.
For a while he'd stayed there in the haze, unwilling to come up and risk being seen again. Silly, of course—irrational, even; trying to hide himself in the grayworld while his fsss cutting sat open and unprotected in Human hands. Presently, he'd heard voices and felt movement and, bracing himself, had come back up.
To find a Human carrying his fsss cutting toward a room-sized box rising above the shorter stacks around it. A thick-walled box, with an equally thick door, furnished with lights and a long table and shelves stacked high with equipment.
A room made entirely of metal.
There'd been a room very much like it back on the Dhaa'rr homeworld of Dharanv, he remembered. Once the cutting had been pronounced viable, the healers and technics had offered to take his fsss into that room and take a second cutting from it. The metal, they'd pointed out, would force him to anchor to the just-completed cutting, blocking all pain and discomfort from the fsss itself away from him. They'd been rather enthusiastic about the whole idea, a fact that had struck him as rather suspicious. He'd satisfied the requirements of pride and curiosity, and had no intention of being someone's experimental animal, and had politely declined.
But the Humans hadn't asked his permission to put him in their metal box. Nor were they likely to do so. And once his cutting was inside it, he'd be well and truly trapped there.
He'd been gone in an instant, stretching out and upward to the full length of his anchorline, sweeping across the foreshortened hemisphere that was all the surrounding piles of metal had left him, searching frantically for the anchorpoint-sense that would have shown he had a clear path back to safety at the Prr-family shrine. But nothing. He'd scanned the stars, wondering what the chances might be that Dorcas's rotation would bring the Dhaa'rr ancestral world of Dharanv into range in the handful of beats it would take the Humans to reach the box. But the stars were difficult to see from even the closest edge of the lightworld, and the constellations there were too different from those of home. He'd flicked back to the cutting—nearly to the metal box now—back to his anchorline limit; back to the cutting—just inside the door now, instantly shrinking his available angular range to practically zero—one last time along the anchorline—
And even as he'd shot back to the cutting, the door had swung shut with a deep and hollow boom.