Chapter 8: Cultural Pursuits

Lena leaned her head back, letting the slow stream of water flow through her hair. She was standing outside the temple, beneath a spot on the roof where water condensated and pooled, collecting in large enough quantities to create a sort of makeshift shower. It was a slow rain, but it was enough to clean her up. This time she had soaps and shampoos from her duffel bag, and she was reveling in the sensation of having her skin clean of sweat, if only for the duration of her shower. She would go down to the lake later in the day and have a good swim, but she wasn’t about to walk through the village with the sticky evidence of what her and Sleethe had done the previous night still clinging to her skin.

She could wash off his ejaculate, but she couldn’t wash off the pigments. Just the thought of it made her cheeks redden, and she stuck out her butt, turning her head and peering back over her shoulder as she attempted to assess the damage. There was a hand print on one breast that encompassed it completely, while the floral design that had been painted on the other one was still intact. Both of her butt cheeks had several hand prints each in varying colors, as did her thighs. There were two very large and prominent marks on her hips where Sleethe had held her while he ... while they had made love, and there was a very noticeable one on her groin, the finger marks rising above her waistline and impossible to conceal.

Having her lover mark her body had been such a rush at the time, she had been drunk on the arousal, but now she was having some regrets. She gave the hand print on her boob an experimental scrub with the soap, but she knew that it was no use. The dye had stained several layers of her skin, like a semi-permanent tattoo, and it wouldn’t come off until she shed those layers. Fortunately they should be completely gone by the time that she returned home, but she still had to contend with the locals.

Should she put her hazmat suit back on? No, it might offend them. Besides, fuck the hazmat suit. The entire village had seen her breasts already and so she no longer felt any need to conceal them. She was cooler without her tank top, more comfortable, more hygienic. Nope, this was now a bra-less planet. She wasn’t wearing her shorts right now either, nobody ever seemed to come to the temple unless some kind of ceremony was happening.

The flow of water was just strong enough to wash the soap suds off her body, and she stepped out from beneath the gentle stream feeling refreshed. It was a shame that it wasn’t cool, the water was the same temperature as the humidity in the environment. There was no point drying off, and so she made her way back around the wooden platform that skirted the temple, admiring the carvings on the twisted trees that served as its supports as she went.

She was actually starting to enjoy herself now that she was growing more accustomed to the planet. Without boots, the damp wood was less slippery and precarious. The more layers of clothing that she removed, the more comfortable she felt, and the less the muggy air interfered with her. It was only the last vestiges of her modesty that still compelled her to cover her lower body in the company of the aliens.

She made her way back into the temple, pushing through the bead curtain and wringing water out of her hair with her hands, heading back over to her pile of gear. She stooped to rummage for a pair of clean shorts, dancing on the spot as she struggled to pull them on, the fabric sticking to her wet skin. If only she had thought to bring a bathing suit, it would have made things so much easier.

Sleethe had been gone when she had woken up, and she noted that the sleeping pit was still empty. Where had he wandered off to, and how had he managed to leave without rousing her? Oh well, he’d probably be back soon, he wouldn’t have left her on her own unless it was for something important.

Lena sat in front of her computer terminal, hitting the button that would bring it out of sleep mode. Good, it had finished parsing the Krell alphabet, now she could give it a look over and see if she could make sense of it. With any luck she might be able to start reading the runes on these walls soon.

She reached over into her bag and withdrew another ration packet, opening it up and fishing for a protein bar as she began to scrolls through the characters that the algorithm had been able to identify. Fortunately it didn’t look to be as complex as she had feared. Chinese this was not, it was perhaps closer to Latin but with more unique sounds and concepts to convey. Not all of the letters corresponded to the phonetic information that she had recorded with Sleethe’s help, and so those examples must be either combinations of multiple characters, or perhaps used to express more complex themes. It was an oddly efficient language, which contrasted starkly with the artistry that she saw in their architecture and their culture. Maybe she was still missing something...

Her concentration was broken as someone lumbered in through the curtain, making a sound like a pair of maracas or a rainstick as the shells and beads clattered against their scutes. It was Sleethe, and he seemed to have something bundled up in his arms. It was hard to tell exactly what in the dimly lit temple.

“Hey big guy, what kept you? Been doing some sunbathing to get your body temperature up?”

He walked over to her, his heavy footsteps making the floor vibrate beneath her, then came to a stop with his arms outstretched over her head like he was about to drop whatever it was that he was carrying.

“What have you got there?”

Sleethe huffed with amusement, opening his massive arms and letting the contents rain down on her. It was flowers. Dozens, no, hundreds of flowers. Every shape and size, every color under the sun, the petals lazily floating down onto her like confetti. She laughed in surprise, reaching out and catching one of them in her hand, bringing it closer to examine it. It was beautiful, with pink petals that were splayed wide, and dozens of yellow stamens protruding from its center. She looked up, watching as Sleethe’s payload fluttered about her, falling from a considerable height due to her sitting position and his exaggerated stature.

They landed on her crossed legs, coming to rest on her head and shoulders, carpeting the wood floor around her like colorful snow. There were lilies that he must have picked from the water. They looked almost like teacups with thick, purple stamens, their wide brim of petals a shade of pristine white. There were flowers that almost looked like roses with their bunched up petals, colored a deep pink that faded towards a darker red as it neared the center. Lena could pick out examples that looked like stars in shades of blue and green, what resembled tulips and daisies, orchids and bluebells. They came in reds and pinks, blues and vibrant purples, fiery oranges and lemon yellows. Many were still attached to their green stems, while others were simply clumps of colored petals. Lena beamed as she lifted her arms into the air and let the plants cascade over her.

“What are you doing, you big goof?” Lena chuckled, lying on her back in the carpet of flowers, her enchantment impossible to disguise. “Did you do all of this for me?”

“Lena wants flowers,” Sleethe stated, her translator reproducing his speech.

“Specimens,” she giggled. “I need specimens for my work. But ... this is pretty great too.”

She sifted through the blanket of flowers, brushing them out of her hair and selecting a few of the more intact examples, placing them carefully into stasis containers. Sleethe seemed pleased with himself, and while most of these specimens were damaged, he had managed to find some very strange plants that she was quite interested in cataloging. Also, it had been kind of cute. Ok, very cute.

“You’ll have to show me where you found a few of these,” she said, placing what closely resembled a foxglove into one of the containers. “I didn’t see any of them on our foray into the swamp, and I’d like to take pictures of their natural habitats.”

“Come, I show.”

“Right now? I just finished decoding your alphabet, and I wanted to start matching them to the reliefs on the walls. Will it take long? Are we going out into the swamp again?”

He shook his head, reaching out a hand towards her and lifting her to her feet.

“Flowers close. Come.”

She followed behind him, and they left the temple through the curtain of beads, emerging into the village. He led her downwards, descending through a maze of platforms and rope bridges. It was like an artificial jungle. Lena was able to keep her bearings by keeping an eye on where the pale trees that held up the temple were in relation to her. It was the oldest structure, placed dead center in the middle of the village, and so as long as she could see their twisted trunks she had a pretty good idea of where she was.

The rope bridges felt a little precarious at times, swinging back and forth and creaking under her weight, but if they could hold Sleethe’s massive frame then they could hold her too. She really was finding it easier to get around without her boots on, she was able to grip the damp wood with her toes and she rarely found herself slipping as she had before.

As they descended into the dank depths of the village, she began to notice changes in the environment. The structure appeared to have been built from the ground up, and so the deeper they got, the older the buildings became. It was also wetter and cooler, as any moisture that collected above would inevitably find its way downwards. Many of the planks that made up the walls of the huts and the floors of the platforms that skirted them were swollen with damp, the carvings and runes less legible due to the way that the wood had warped and shifted over what must have been centuries. It was getting dark too, the structures above them blocking out what little sunlight penetrated the thick cloud cover.

Everywhere that she looked there were supports and twisted trees that had been cultivated in order to prop up the village. It was like being inside a dense, artificial forest. The beams were braced against anything and everything, the huts and trees, even each other. They were so dense in places that she couldn’t even see past them. Once again she was reminded of walking beneath a pier at low tide, it was just as damp, but with fungi and mosses instead of barnacles and seaweed.

It seemed that whenever the builders of this crazy construct felt it was necessary, they just added another support, or else let the mangrove trees naturally wind their way through in their quest for light. It looked to Lena like a gentle breeze would send the whole thing toppling over like a stack of playing cards, and yet hundreds of Krell lived here, with a combined weight of perhaps two or three hundred tons. That didn’t include the weight of the structure itself of course, which she had no way to estimate.

She remarked that there was more moss here too, more fungi clinging to every available surface. They must like the relative cool and the darkness provided by the upper platforms, they were flourishing here in quantities that surprised her. Even the floor was covered in a layer of thick moss that almost felt like wet grass under her bare feet, and everywhere grew mushrooms with brightly colored caps. She wondered if they were edible, or perhaps poisonous. She had to be careful not to eat anything unless she had her food scanner on hand, what was safe by Krell standards might not be safe for a human to consume.

The Krell had remarkably effective immune systems that seemed to make them almost impervious to disease and sickness, much like the crocodiles of Earth. They could even lose a limb and be relatively none the worse for wear, even in their native environment infections must be rare. Not so with Lena, but she had brought medical equipment for use where necessary. With any luck she wouldn’t ingest tepid swamp water or get bitten by some horrible creature and get a nasty infection.

They were now so close to the ground that she could make out the mud through the mist, where was Sleethe leading her? This wasn’t the route that they had taken to exit the village previously.

He dropped down into the mud, and Lena followed him down the gangplank, feeling the muck between her toes as she sank into the ground up to her ankles. It really was cooler down here, not so cool that it was much of a relief from the pervasive heat and humidity, but it was noticeable. Sleethe gestured for her to follow, winding his way between the great supports as he went. He could scarcely move, everything was so tightly packed, but Lena’s small stature made it far easier for her.

She wondered how far into the mud these supports had been driven, and how far the roots of the trees dug down. Much like the plants that grew around the roots of the mangroves, perhaps they were also helping to make the earth here harder and better able to support the village above. Everything here was interdependent it seemed, even their artificial structures were like ecosystems in their own right, carefully tended to by the Krell.

“Who built all of this Sleethe?”

“Builders,” he replied, his voice echoing between the pillars.

“When?”

“Long time before me.”

Before his birth then. That could mean decades, or it could mean centuries. ‘Builder’ likely referred to another vocation, like the ones that the elder had painted on their bodies.

“And who maintains it now?” Lena asked, feeling the soft moss beneath her hand as she leaned on one of the supports. “Who adds new supports and grows more trees?”

“New builders.”

His answers were as helpful as ever. As they struggled through the bowels of the village, Lena began to notice splashes of color amongst the ashen trees and the brown mud. There were flowers growing here, clinging to whatever they could grasp with their roots. They were behaving somewhat like creepers, unable to grow in the mud itself, but thriving where the mangroves made the earth firm enough to take hold and climbing up the wooden supports. There were flowering shrubs, clumps of dark green leaves with vibrant, star-shaped flowers in hues of indigo and purple. Vines similar to the ones that she had seen during her trip through the swamp were here also, coiling their way along roots and beams, covered in blossoms that looked like pink roses.

It was almost as if someone had hidden a beautiful garden down here, like something out of a storybook. They were everywhere that she looked, growing thicker and more numerous as she walked slowly forward, sprouting from the ugly muck and damp as if to spite it. Soon there wasn’t a support or a tree in sight that wasn’t decorated with flowers like a maypole at a midsummer festival, creating a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors. Even the ever present rotting vegetation smell that hung over the planet was giving way to their sweet aroma, as if someone had been spraying around a bottle of perfume.

Movement caught her eye, and she noticed a small insect flying through the air, its abdomen flashing brightly in the gloom like a firefly. It bobbed around lazily, before landing in the center of a blooming flower that was growing up one of the supports, its petals spread open like a tiny explosion of oranges and yellows. It was pollinating, most likely. Did these flying insects serve the same purpose that bees did on Earth? Flowering plants were evolved to attract pollinating insects after all, that was their purpose.

She started to notice more of them, dozens of insects winking with a ghostly green glow as they flew between the patches of flowers. They almost looked like errant stars, the slow and leisurely pace in which they hovered about had a hypnotic quality that made her feel almost compelled to watch them.

“Sleethe, it’s ... like a dream. Why are these plants growing here?”

He turned around to face her, gesturing to his pale belly. Lena blushed, seeing the hand prints and the writing that she had left there during their night of passion. The implication was easy enough to understand.

“The pigments? This is where you get them from? You cultivate these flowers and then use them to make the colored dyes?”

He nodded, watching her as she explored. They must boil these plants, or perhaps grind them into a fine powder, as ancient humans once did in order to color their textiles. She had to wonder what about the dyes made them so potent and long-lasting. Was it a natural property of the plants that grew here, or did the Krell add something else to the mixture before it went into those large clay pots?

She brought up her wrist-mounted computer and began to capture video, recording the insects as they floated between the flowers.

“I hope they like this back home,” she muttered, “I know I do.”

After spending perhaps a half hour cataloging everything, she turned the camera back on herself, intending to provide some context for what was happening.

“As you can see,” she began, wiping her damp hair out of her face. “The Krell have cultivated some kind of botanical garden down here amongst the supports that hold up the village. They must have brought seeds from far and wide, because I didn’t see any of these plants growing locally. Sleethe tells me that they’re used to make pigments, dyes that the native people use to stain their skin. I underwent one such ceremony myself just last night, where...”

Lena looked down at herself, her cheeks reddening as she realized that she was still nude save for her shorts. She quickly turned the camera off, surprising herself by how comfortable she already felt in her nudity. It had only been a couple of days, but already being naked was becoming so routine that she hadn’t even thought about it. Better delete the video from that file when she got back to the temple...

“I’d like to come down here again when I have more gear,” she said, “take some measurements and make some more records. For now, let’s go back up into the village. You’d better lead the way, because I’ll probably get lost in this maze.”

Sleethe nodded, setting off, but she caught his scaly hand as he passed her by and held it for a moment.

“Thanks big guy, this was pretty cool.”

He huffed, pleased with himself, then began to guide her back through the forest of wooden pillars and into the billowing mist.

After a short climb back up the way they had come, Lena emerged into sunlight again, clearing the layer of fog as she felt the warmth of the system’s twin stars on her cheeks. There were so many tiers and layers to this village, but now she could see the roiling clouds above her, tracking their way slowly across the green sky. It was hotter up here, but less claustrophobic. While the brief reprieve from the heat had been welcome, it felt good to be able to see more than ten feet in any direction again.

Sleethe reached out a leathery hand, and she took it, the reptile helping her off the gangplank and onto one of the wooden platforms that ringed the dwellings.

“Before we go back to the temple,” Lena began, “mind if I take a look around the village? I want to see how the people here live.”

He nodded his head, releasing her hand.

“Go where you will,” he said, her translator buzzing in her ear.

“Any idea where the people here hang out? Is there a town square, a community center, anything like that?”

He shrugged. He might be a Krell, but he wasn’t native to this village, and all villages didn’t necessarily share a common layout. Oh well, time to do some exploring.