In the Name of Science

by True Colours

She called a question...and the forest answered? Caught between a jar-headed marine and a hostile alien, Grace finds her life getting more complicated than a mere science investigation...not that that was so simple itself. Alternate pairing!

3. Why did you Come?

Chapter 3: 'Why did you Come?'

Disclaimer: Does Parker own Pandora? No. Do we own Avatar? No.

A/N: After a suggestion from a reader, speech in the Na'vi language is underlined. It's clumsy and annoying, I know, but I use italics for too many things. Thoughts, flashbacks, emphasis...it would get too confusing. So bear with me. It's a shame we can't use different fonts on FF.

Thanks to the reader – I think it was Snowflakes? – who suggested a meeting with more of Tsu'tey's POV. Dislodged a bunny-block nicely. And don't worry, I don't intend to ramble on in this Grace-and-Tsu'tey-meeting-in-the-woods vein forever. I figured one more chapter (this chapter) would do it, to set up the relationship.

Imagine chanting that in a 'sitting in a tree' rhythm. I'm not trying to imply anything about the fic (though there are enough trees), I just found it fun.

I think I may be drifting off on an insomnaic ramble. Do you like my cool adjective? And I have an exam tomorrow as well. Enjoy.

'Tsu'tey!'

Tsu'tey looked up from the skinning knife he'd been whetting, sitting cross-legged with his back against a pillar of Hometree. The call had come from one of his fellow warriors, returning with a hunting party from the forest, and Tsu'tey noted with satisfaction that they had made a kill: a large Yericwas lashed to a pole and balanced on the shoulders of the hunters. He hurried over and helped them to set it down beneath the wooden frames where meat was hung to cure.

He knew that his brothers would have performed the correct rites, but he muttered a quick prayer of his own before setting to work. No discussion was necessary; he and his three friends had had plenty of practice at doing this task together. They each took a corner, scoring the Yeric's skin up the legs and beneath the body and beginning to ease it away. It was a fiddly business, but he was almost through with it when the shouting erupted on the other side of the tree.

'DoctorGrace, DoctorGrace!'

Tsu'tey jumped violently and the knife jerked, putting a gash a hand's-breadth wide into the skin. Ignoring the slip, he twisted round to watch as a gaggle of children sprinted across the tree to fling themselves into the arms of an approaching woman.

A woman who looked like them, but who dressed in Sky clothes.

'Watch what you're doing, skxawng!' one of his friends called, rapping him across his knuckles. Tsu'tey administered a quelling glare to put the warrior back in his place, and then muttered by way of an excuse:

'Damn kids.'

'Ha,' one of the others remarked with a humourless grin. 'Allow one snake in and soon enough the whole nest turns up.'

Tsu'tey didn't reply, scraping fat off his section of the skin with unusual ferocity. His annoyance didn't feel quite like the united anger he usually felt when one of his friends insulted the Sky people. Probably he had let the arrival of the Dreamwalker tip him into one of those moods where every innocent speech seemed aggravating.

He hunched over his work, scraping with angry concentration while the greetings of the children and their old teacher floated across the tree. He had kept well clear of the 'school' himself, but apparently some of the younger ones had positively enjoyed it.

'Hello, Ja'ho...I see you, Natiel...' the Dreamwalker was saying, in a voice quite unlike any he had heard her use before. 'Tanhi, how you've grown! Ouch! Stop pulling my hair!'

'I'm sorry, DoctorGrace,' a girl's voice said in English. Tsu'tey ground his teeth at the foreign words. 'Your beads are so pretty.'

'Your English is improving.' The Dreamwalker's voice came again, saturated with approval. It must be very satisfying, dragging them away from their own culture, he thought angrily, though it didn't square with the fluency of her own Na'vi...he briefly recalled the eager, learning light that had filled her eyes as he explained about the riti fly, and then jabbed his knife into the haunch of the yeric and began to hack it in two.

'And who is this?' the Dreamwalker asked.

Tsu'tey sneaked a second glance over his shoulder. She was standing in the middle of the group of children, one girl balanced on her hip, bending down to speak to the small boy named Ja'ho. They all looked so easy and happy that he carried on watching, his anger fading for a moment.

Ja'ho was carrying a baby a few months old, holding the infant with older-brotherly importance, even though it was nearly too heavy for him. Tsu'tey could remember himself at that age, hanging on to Neytiri's hand as she scrambled about the lower branches of Hometree, leading her through the paths of the jungle and boosting her onto her first horse...and for what? She'd grown away from him, running about the forest on her own and seeming to care more for that blundering Dreamwalker than for the whole clan...than for him.

Ja'ho was grabbing his baby brother under the arms, hefting him up for DoctorGrace's inspection, handling him with clumsy care.

'Look!' he announced, his voice carrying clearly across the empty space. 'This is my new baby brother! Come on, Taylu, say hello to DoctorGrace!'

Tsu'tey tensed as the child was placed into her arms, but he knew deep down that he was being foolish. The Dreamwalker meant no harm; it was clear in the way her arms wrapped securely round the baby, in her smile, in the way her eyes softened.

'OW!' she shrieked. The cry shocked him into a fighting crouch, twisted towards the source of the sound, knife held at the ready. DoctorGrace was holding the baby away from her now, and she was glaring.

'Little brat pulled my hair!' he heard her mutter.

'Stop twitching around, Tsu'tey,' one of his friends complained. 'It's not restful. If you object to her presence so much, just go and shoot her.'

'I am going to speak with her now,' Tsu'tey said stiffly, standing. The others nodded, bending back to their work, but he suspected that his words hadn't had quite the mystical ring he'd intended. Most of them could claim to have 'spoken with' a Dreamwalker before, after all.

Turning towards the group on the far side of the tree, he paused and stared down at his hands. The creases in his skin were stained with blood, and one still grasped the knife. What would Grace think when she saw them? Dreamwalkers' hands were always so clean; they had machines for this kind of work, and for a moment he felt almost ashamed at his appearance. Then the feeling turned to disgust. They work more cleanly than us, he thought, but they have blood on their hands that no water will wash away, and they don't even see it. The anger propelled him into motion, and he began to walk towards the children.

'What did you say you call him?' Grace asked as he approached. 'Teylu? In English, does that not mean beetle larva?'

One of the other children, Natiel, burst out laughing. 'No, no, DoctorGrace!' she said. 'This is just what they call him for to make joke. He is Tirea-Riti, spirit of the riti fly.'

'You know,' a girl named Tanhì added helpfully. 'They drink from the –'

Ja'ho stood on her foot.

'Ow! Why shouldn't I tell her?' she howled indignantly.

'Tsu'tey says we must not tell Dreamwalkers –'

'The riti fly,' Grace interrupted, gently pushing the two apart before their quarrel could escalate. 'They drink from the flowers of the groundmoss, is that not so? And they are very hard to catch.'

Tsu'tey shifted uncomfortably; Grace hadn't mentioned that he had been the one to tell her, but she might do at any moment. He would lose a lot of respect from the children if he didn't practise what he preached. He started to walk faster, stepping from branch to branch, automatically choosing the ways he knew to be best.

'Yes, that's right,' Natiel said, while Tanhì smirked smugly at her brother. 'They're very special animals. And fast, like you said. The only people who bother to try and catch them are the warriors, when they are trying to impress their women.'

'That's not true!' Ja'ho interrupted. 'I can catch riti easily!'

'Yes,' Natiel giggled. 'And you only do it to impress me.'

Grace handed baby Tirea back to Ja'ho before he could launch himself at Natiel. 'So...' she said slowly, 'let me get this straight. You named him after a bug?'

'No, skxawng!' Tanhì shouted. 'After the spirit that follows him!'

Grace grinned. 'So I'm skxawng, am I, you disrespectful child? Well, skxwang to you too, twice!'

Tsu'tey was astonished at her light retort. He would never have let one of those brats, or any adult, get away with talking to him like that –

She respects us, he thought suddenly. She admires all of us, even the children...

'Three times!'

'Four times!'

'Five times!' Tanhì delivered the phrase with a triumphant ring and jumped into the lower branches of home-tree, directly below where Tsu'tey stood. He stepped backwards and peered down at the spectacle beneath him.

'I'm going to get you!' Grace shouted, running after her. Tanhì squealed and grabbed the next branch while the other children clustered around to watch the fun. Grace scrambled up after the Na'vi girl, her head craned to watch her progress.

'Tanhì, come down from there now,' she called as the girl mounted even higher.

'No, it's fun!'

'I said come down. You might fall.'

'Na'vi don't fall out of trees!' Tanhì declared, dangling by her knees. Tsu'tey watched Grace's face tighten with maternal concern.

'There's a first time for everything. Now come down or –'

'Or wha – '

Tsu'tey vaulted silently onto a wide branch between him and the girl, reached down and plucked her easily into the air.

HELP!'

Grace looked up in shock, which quickly turned to relief as she realized that Tanhì hadn't fallen. Tsu'tey grinned, dangling the shocked girl by her ankles.

'You should be obedient,Tanhì, even to a Dreamwalker,' he said warningly. She gulped.

Tsu'tey heard a gasp from below and looked down. Grace had recognized him, then, even from this distance. He sighed, adjusted his grip on Tanhì and began to descend, jumping from branch to branch with a speed that came from many years of practise. He brushed past her, dropped to the ground and deposited Tanhì among her friends.

'Clear off now,' he instructed, 'and take this little skxawng with you. The Dreamwalker and I are going to talk.'

Behind him, Grace swallowed. A talk? The children watched him with wide-eyed respect, clustering together and then vanishing behind a column of the tree. Tsu'tey watched them out of sight and then turned back towards her.

He had obviously been hunting, or something of the kind. A bloodstained knife was very evident in his hand. He stuck it into his belt, pulled out a square of cloth and began to wipe his hands, walking towards her.

'So,' he said, stepping past her and swinging himself onto a branch, 'you too come to Hometree now, Dreamwalker.'

'I was invited here by Eytukan,' Grace replied, no hint of apology in her voice.

'And Jakesully asked him for the favour,' Tsu'tey said flatly, shaking the cloth out with a sharp snap and tucking it back into his belt.

'I used to come here often to teach the children.'

'True,' he conceded, 'and the children seem pleased to see you. But then the Sky people made war on us.'

'That wasn't my decision.'

'You are one of the Sky people, Dreamwalker,' Tsu'tey said softly. 'Do not forget it.'

Something hard flashed in Grace's eyes.

'Is that why you came over here?' she demanded. 'To complain at me about what I can't control? As long as Eytukan welcomes me here I'm coming; the only way we're ever going to make peace is by talking to each other. So you might as well accept it.'

She turned her back on him, her shoulders set in an angry hunch. Tsu'tey watched her for a moment, surprised by the outburst. So far she had never shown any fear, but apart from that her behaviour had been designed to placate him, to keep him answering questions. So far he had judged that the answers, for some unknown reason, were the most important thing to her, but now it seemed that she didn't care about making him angry either. She was an enigma to him, completely unfathomable. And now he found that he had questions of his own.

'Why did you come here, Dreamwalker?' he asked, in a tone intended to pacify her.

'You know why we're here,' she said wearily. 'There's a substance in the ground here that helps power our machines, and the Sky people want it.'

'But why did you come here?' He looked frustrated, Grace thought, as though he thought he might not be phrasing his question right. But the truth was that there was nothing wrong with his English. She had deliberately dodged.

'I came to learn,' she said softly. 'I came to study the trees. ...I did my PHD –'

'What is a PHD?' Tsu'tey interrupted.

'Sorry. It's...like a test you have to do to become a scientist, the same way you have to tame an ikran to become a hunter. You study something in detail, and write down the information, and your teacher reads it and decides whether you understand your subject well enough...it's probably difficult for you to understand, but anyway, it was a test and I had to do it.

'So I travelled to a place called Brazil on my planet, to do my PHD on the rainforests there. They're quite similar to the environment here in some ways; lots of rain, tangled growth, thousands of different species. But they were so small. There's only a few square miles of reservation left now, and it had all been studied so many times before...so when I heard of Pandora...of this place, here, I knew I had to come. I worked so hard, right from when I was sixteen – barely more than a child, in the years of the People – when you get to choose what you want to study. When we're that age, we're all taught in schools like the one I used to have here, and after that you can go to a bigger school called university where you can learn in more detail. Most people take a year's break between the two, but I went straight on. I wanted to get out here...I completed my PHD in two Earth years, instead of three, and then after I'd been doing work on Earth for about five years, I qualified to travel to Pandora.'

Tsu'tey eyed her in perplexity as she spoke, her eyes far away. Achieving early he could understand – he himself had bonded with his ikran at the age of sixteen, younger than any of his fellow warriors – but to do it in the name of science, this mysterious art or belief which seemed to gainsay Ey'wa at every turn...that he could not understand. These scientists seemed determined to shred apart everything around them, they did not put their trust in Ey'wa to provide, they always had to know how...

And yet there was a kind of unending innocence in this Dreamwalker. He constantly interpreted the forest around him; it was both his ally and the ally of his enemies. But she seemed only to look in wonder. Maybe it was the same for her as it was for him; to study everything she saw was second nature. And to her, the forest was beautiful. That much they had in common.

'I remember,' Grace was saying, 'waking up on the shuttle, and looking out at this moon for the first time. Seeing it all there spread out below me. The troopers call it hell, but to me it looked like paradise.'

'You speak of looking out at the moon,' Tsu'tey said, his tone argumentative out of habit more than anything else, 'but when we look at the sky, we look up. You speak of this gravity –'

'This world is a ball,' Grace broke in, 'round like a fruit. Gravity pulls you towards its centre, and the direction of gravity's pull always feels like down.'

'So you say, but it looks flat to me –'

'It's round,' Grace said bluntly. 'I've travelled around it in space and I've seen it.' She sighed, then continued in a gentler tone. 'I know it's hard to believe. On my planet you get taught all your life that the world is a round ball hanging in a void, and when you look down at it from the outside for the first time you still can't believe it. You can't believe that that's the place where you – your entire race – live, and that it's so small.'

She sighed and leaned back against the trunk of the tree, her eyes, with their strange tinge of green, far away. Tsu'tey was struck by how much those eyes must have seen. She was as clumsy as any of the Sky people, and yet she knew things about his forest that he had never understood or even questioned in the first place. And she had lived on another world. Travelled further than the highest peaks of the mountains or the longest marches of the plains.

'How long were you flying between the worlds?' he asked. She seemed not to hear for a moment, then shook herself and answered:

'Ummmm...in your time? About seven years.'

'Seven years just floating?'

'Seven years asleep. You do age, but not as fast as if you were awake the entire time. Besides, they couldn't carry enough air to sustain all the passengers awake.'

He was astonished by the cool way she spoke of such things. She had set off when he was only a boy; even if she were to leave tonight, he would be a seasoned warrior by the time she completed her journey. 'But what of your family?' he demanded. 'Your home? You are so far away...'

Grace gave a short laugh. 'My home isn't much worth missing,' she said. 'That's the reason we're here. And as for my family –'

'DoctorGrace, DoctorGrace!' Tanhì cried, appearing suddenly and clutching at Grace's arm. The other children clustered behind her. 'Do you know what –'

'Sxka!' Tsu'tey cried, leaping down from the branch. They scattered away from his snarl with squeals of playful terror, vanishing amid the columns once more.

'Those children wanted to talk to me,' Grace said rather indignantly as he turned back towards her.

'I am talking to you,' he answered shortly, springing back up beside her. 'Well? You were speaking of your family?'

'Well, I had no brothers or sisters, and my parents...they didn't really understand the way I felt about my studies...my father thought that science was for boys...' She was speaking quickly, her words tumbling out with her thoughts; it was all Tsu'tey could do to keep up. He realised suddenly how clearly she usually spoke around the Na'vi, her sentences carefully chosen to be short and to the point. Another proof or her respect.

Grace was still talking. '...I do miss them, of course, but coming here...it was the only choice I could make. I don't regret it.' She smiled wistfully, watching the children playing on the other side of the tree. 'I do wish I'd had some kids, though.'

Tsu'tey rocked gently backwards and forwards, wondering why she was telling him this, why she spoke as though it was never going to happen, why she spoke as though it could not happen, when to him it seemed like a natural stage of life...a woman could be a hunter or a warrior, or in the Sky world a scientist, if she wished, but at some stage she would also find a mate. He shook his head. The Sky people made everything so complicated, and more often than not so miserable.

But Grace didn't seem to be dwelling on it. She gave a shake of her head, as though dispelling the thoughts, and then turned to him with a smile on her face.

'Come on,' she said. 'I'll show you something.'

She stood up and pulled herself up onto the next branch, beginning to ascend into the canopy of the tree. Tsu'tey rose, taken aback. What could she possibly have to show him out here in the forest? And what business had she telling him to follow her in his own home? He swung past her, easily taking the lead, then paused a few branches up to ask:

'Where are we going?'

She grinned, as though she had guessed his thoughts as he overtook her. 'Up. Right to the top.'

He nodded once and began to climb quickly, hoisting himself up the familiar routes with barely a pause. He could hear the sounds of her more laborious ascent below, falling gradually further behind.

'This is something I taught the children once, but I couldn't demonstrate it properly on the forest floor,' she called, perhaps hoping that he would slow down if she drew him into conversation.

'You never did come to my school.'

'No,' he said shortly, but the snappy response felt wrong, somehow, and he found himself trying to moderate it with flimsy excuses before he fully realised what he was saying. 'I was too old for it to be convenient. Most of those who went were children, but I was already training to become a hunter...'

He trailed off with a grimace and kept climbing.

Grace carried on doggedly below him, pushing him up into the very top of the canopy, where the branches were supple and bent beneath his weight. It wouldn't have been enough to make him nervous had he been on his own, but with the Dreamwalker flailing around to distract him who knew what slips he might make?

She reached his branch and began to edge out past him, inching along to where the leaves parted to show slivers of sky. The branch bowed gently beneath her; one false move would be enough to make it lurch and drop, sending her plummeting down.

'Be careful, Dreamwalker,' he called. 'It's a long way down if you slip.'

'I know.' He voice came through clenched teeth as she squatted, finding her balance. She pulled aside a fistful of twigs and gestured to him. 'Come on.'

Picking his way among the branches he joined her, pushing aside more leaves to expose a view of the jungle. Hometree was taller than anything else for miles around, and they could see the canopy stretching away beneath them. Unbroken to the horizon...until a few years ago. From the other side of the tree, one could see the cuts made by the Sky people, vivid orange gashes in the green. Tiny scars, but growing.

'I see the canopy, Dreamwalker,' he observed. 'What else?'

She was rummaging in her pockets. 'I told you that the world was round,' she said, 'and you were having trouble believing in it. But if you look out to the horizon, you can see...' She pulled out a hard, straight object, marked with short black lines at regular intervals, and held it up. 'It doesn't work terribly well up here, there's too many trees and they break up the skyline...we'd have to go out to the plains to see it properly...' She held the object up against the line where trees met sky, and motioned him to look across it as she did. 'Well? What do you notice?'

He touched her instrument. 'What is this –'

'You're missing the point!' she said irritably, slapping his hand away. 'Look, we hold the ruler...parallel to the horizon, or what would be parallel if the horizon were a straight line, and what do we see? Curvature.'

'Cur-vat-ure?' he echoed uncertainly.

'The horizon is curved!' she exclaimed. There was a light in her eyes; they were wide and brilliant as she gazed at him. 'The horizon is curved, which proves that this world is a sphere! Look.' She fumbled for one of the beads that ornamented her hair. 'You can see the same thing here, only much smaller, because it's a smaller sphere. The edge – I know spheres don't have edges, but in silhouette... silhouette, the edge is curved.'

He took the bead between finger and thumb, bending to examine it closely. He could sense her eagerness as she waited for him to reply to her explanation...

'What is this thing made from?'

'Will you stop! Changing! The subject!' she shouted, gesticulating furiously as she glared at him. She seemed to have completely forgotten that they were hundreds of feet up in a windblown tree, and that he was one of the Omaticayas' finest warriors and carrying a butcher knife in his belt. He felt a spurt of frank admiration, and it spurred him to take the straight instrument from her, hold it up to the horizon once more, and examine the two lines. And he saw that the horizon was definitely curved.

'You are right about this I suppose, Dreamwalker,' he murmured. 'The world does seem to be round.'

Her smile was radiant. 'I know,' she said in Na'vi. 'It is wonderful when you find that something can be proved just by looking –'

There was a shout and clatter of approaching riders below. Grace looked down suddenly, her weight shifted, and the branch gave a sudden dip.

'Ow, you're crushing me, get off!' she protested. She'd barely felt the bounce. The moment the branch had started to give he'd seized her from behind.

'You are falling, skxawng. Now be still, it is not stable here.'

'I was not falling, I was fine!'

'Falling.'

'Fine.'

'Falling.'

'Fine, I was falling.'

'Huh?' He turned her round to face him, frowning in confusion. 'You talk no sense. Do you say you were falling, or do you still say that you are fine?'

She rolled her eyes. 'Sorry. What I meant was, "very well, I was falling."'

'I see.' He peered down between the branches. 'Ha. It is skxawng Jakesully with Neytiri, back from hunting.' He sighed. 'They will have come back with nothing, again.'

'I wouldn't be so sure of that.' Tsu'tey's fingers flexed tensely over her shoulders as she looked down as well. 'Yes, they've definitely got something.' She grinned, that learning light back in her eyes again. 'What do you know, that jarhead's really coming on.'

She was speaking incomprehensible English now, the kind where meanings distorted and phrases were harder to unravel. She shuffled round on the branch and began to scramble down, quickly disappearing among the thick leaves. He could hear her calling with typical Sky abandon as she went lower.

'Jake! Up here, marine!'

He made to follow, then changed his mind and went up instead. His ears caught murmurs of speech drifting up from below, but he ignored them, pulling himself up hand over hand until he was higher than the Dreamwalker would ever have thought of climbing, higher than even some of the Na'vi would dare to go, perching in the very crown of the tree where the uppermost branches swayed beneath the open sky.

A/N: And with a poetic flourish, I conclude. This sort of thing is very True Colours.

I'm afraid this chapter was not as good as the last two. I was experimenting with Tsu'tey's POV and Grace's explanations and the characterisation may have slipped. But hey, I updated, why are you complaining? Feel happy now.

Next chapter will probably be a humorous one with more input from Essence of Gold.

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