There are plants there as well - familiar ones, even, great broad green leaves and tendrils and creepers, sickly-sweet eater-plants and towering trees.

The Green recognizes all manner of organisms as belonging to it, but still, it's nice to be chlorophyll again.  He spreads his arms and tastes the sun on his skin.

Where is he?

The top of a tree.

All right.  He leaps.

The low slow rumble of his voice isn't made for giddy giggles, but he tries his best, as he falls.

These bodies know better than to feel damage as pain, after all this time, and he spends a pleasant few moments knitting himself back together.

He stands, and lets his awareness wash slowly outward.

Here the green abuts a new place, red and gray and geometrical; a place it knows but does not touch, except in a few tidy swatches of farmland.

It would be easy enough to appear there in a new body.  But after his long disembodied voyages, he is always more comfortable if he folds himself down into something approaching humanity.  He walks.

He is being watched.

The camouflage is impeccable, but he sees more than light.  There is a red-thing near.

He stops walking, and turns his face toward it.  Lets his arms hang limp at his sides, regards it calmly.

A flutter of leaves, and the thing is gone.

He settles down into a sitting position, leaning his great curved back against a thick tree trunk.

It emerges, slowly, from the foliage.

It is something like a giant praying mantis.  Six slender, graceful limbs.  Four are legs, two are studded along their length with barbs and end in something like hands.  Its wide eyes seem curious, to his human sensibilities.  Its legs fold and unfold smoothly, tracing wide arcs, as it approaches him.

"Do you," he rumbles, "speak?"

It chitters and clicks, at least.

He watches it.

Step, step.

He reaches his hand into his chest, plucks a tuber, and offers it to the creature.

(He has leached this one of its psychedelic properties; just an offering of food.)

It takes the offering in one hand, traces antennae over it.  Doesn't eat it, but puts it into - a pocket on a sort of belt or bag, that he hadn't realized it was wearing until now.

 - ah, if they blend into the foliage, so must whatever they carry.  He smiles to himself.

The creature makes an odd motion with its claw-limbs, as though in imitation of a bow without inclining its head or body; then points one arm away from them, into the forest, and looks at him.

He stands.

It departs.  It doesn't have irises per se, but its head is tilted a bit back, presumably to keep him in its field of vision.

He follows it into the forest.

It leads him, first to a road, then down the road to something like a city.  They stop on the outskirts.  It's a web of roads, with elaborate fountains at the intersections that more of the creatures stop and drink from occasionally; between the roads arranged like city blocks are miniature farms or gardens, or occasionally animal pens or things like silos.  Most of the creatures he can see are much smaller than the one that found him; many of them are tending the miniature farms.

The creature retrieves the fruit he gave it from its pack, and with a whiplike motion of its claw-arm, pitches it toward a pen of sleepy lumbering mammals.

The creature rings a bell; a few more of the creatures look round and scurry their way.  They chitter to each other.

He watches patiently.

The largest of the creatures turns toward him and chirps interrogatively.

He taps his chest with his hand deliberately.  "Alec Holland.  Alec."

"Lk lnt?" it attempts, gamely.  "Lk khh-lnt?  Lk?"

He smiles.  "Lek."

"Lk," the creature says agreeably.  It points at itself, and at the two others of its kind clustered around him, then makes rapid pointing-stabbing motions in various directions, where other creatures are working.  "Ktk."

"Ktek," he attempts.

It points at itself.  "Mk ktk."  It points at itself and one of the other ktk.  "Nk ktk."  It points at itself, the ktk to its left, and the ktk to its right.  "Nklk ktk."  It repeats the pointing-stabbing motions.  "Mkmkt't ktk."

It points at him.  "Mk lk."  It gestures expansively at the forest behind him.  "Nk lk?  Nklk lk?  Mkmkt't lk?"

He's pretty sure he's following this, but to be sure:

He counts on his fingers.  "Mk, nk, nklk?"  Then he unfolds all his fingers, waggling them as he spreads his hands, in an attempt to mime many: "Mkmkt't?"

"Tsl!" it exclaims.  " - tsl ktk," at itself, "sss ktk," at him.  At his hand: "tsl."

Grin.  "Mk lk."

After a moment's consideration, he points at the sky, then makes a fist with his hand and mimes a meteor falling, hitting his other palm.

Another conference of chittering, among the three ktk.

 - but their conversation is interrupted by a commotion; two of the smaller ktk have gotten into a fight.

The largest ktk spreads wings and scrambles toward the fight with a motion somewhere between running and flying; it grabs the two small ktk, one in each hand, and wrenches them apart.

Left-hand ktk is scrabbling for purchase on big-ktk's arm.  Right-hand ktk flops limply.

Big-ktk examines right-hand ktk with eyes and antennae and mouthparts.

It tosses the corpse aside, then holds left-hand ktk in front of its face, hissing and chittering and chirping in outrage.

After a moment of this, it whips its arm and pitches the little creature away from the city.

It buzzes wings to land lightly and scrambles away into the forest.

The three ktk who'd been talking to him gather around the corpse.  One picks it up by one limb and shakes it; it flops.  The big one, the one who broke up the fight, chirps back and forth with the one holding the corpse, and then, working together, they rip off one of the corpse's arms.  The big one starts eating it.

It's not trivial to read alien body language, but everyone involved seems pretty nonchalant about all this.

Well.  If that is their way, he supposes.

He doesn't approach, in case an outsider involving himself would be horribly offensive.

Chirp chirp chirp chitter click chirp?

The one holding the corpse approaches him.

He waits somberly to be addressed.

It makes a series of gestures:

First it points at him, then it makes a sort of handing-something-over gesture towards itself, then it points at one of the mammal pens.  It pauses.  Then it points at the city, then it makes the handing-something-over gesture away from itself, then it points at him.  Then it shakes the corpse indicatively.

...he holds out his hands.

It places its folding mantis-claws around the joint connecting the corpse's head to its body and, with a crunch, severs it.  It tosses the head lightly to him.

It's small enough to hold in one hand.  He looks at it.

He can't tell living eyes from dead ones, in these species.  But the little mouthparts are limp, and the antennae are lolling, inanimate.

Some blend of Alec Holland and the Green thinks that this can be appropriate, for the dead ktk to be returned to the plants of its homeworld.

He presses the head gently to his chest.

Vines and branches part, drape around the head, pull it gently into him.

Ktk watch curiously.

He can feel it, as he has felt animals decompose within him before, salts and lipids soaking gently into him.  And he feels - something else, at once familiar and unrecognizable.  It takes him a moment to place it.

There are traces of a thinking and speaking intelligence, within the corpse of the ktk.  It's a thing he's perceived only once before, at the genesis of the new-thing that was made out of Alec Holland and the semiconsciousness of the Green.  It was a moment filled with so many alien sensations that he wouldn't have been able to pick this one out, until he experienced it again in a new context.

There is something within the ktk that it shares with the human Alec Holland, and no other species he has ever decomposed within himself before.  Something that other animals don't have, or something that they have in a form the Green does not know how to touch, or the new-thing that he is does not know how to touch.

He thinks he could take things from it.  Perhaps its whole mind, as Alec's mind was taken.

If he has understood the exchange he just had correctly, then the ktk seem to regard the remains of their dead as resources to be traded and used.

He doesn't want to take the creature's entire mind - he doesn't want to create an entire new being within the green, without that being's consent.  But perhaps with a light enough touch, he could make use of these remains to learn the language they speak here.

The Green, already so narrowed to act within a single body, sharpens still further, and traces over a new mind.

He has taken a hint more than he intended, but not so much that he cannot incorporate it within himself.

He seizes his right forearm in his left hand, and pulls branches and creepers back to dissolve his right shoulder.  He presses his newly detached arm into his chest, and vines rope around and through it to reintegrate it into himself.

From his bare shoulder sprouts a new limb, more slender than his remaining arm; two thorned claw-arms burgeon from the end of it, and an alien head blooms.

With his new ktk-arm, he imitates the bowing-motion they make with their claw-arms.  With his new second mouth, in their chittering language, he says, "thank you."

Well this is all pretty fucking remarkable!

"Can you speak Mkmktkt't'tkt now?"

"Yes," he says.  "Traces of the dead ktk's knowledge existed on its corpse.  I incorporated some of that knowledge into myself.  I apologize if this was not an appropriate use of ktk remains; I am new to this planet and do not well understand your ways yet."

The largest ktk speaks.  "The remains of Mkmktkt't's dead should be put to use for the project.  The project owed you for your gift of food.  Do you consider yourself to have gained recompense, in whole or in part, for that debt, by consuming part of one of our dead?"

"Yes.  Learning the language this way has saved me a good deal of trouble."

"Then it was not a waste.  Will you consent to interact further for a time?"

"Yes, I want to talk, especially if you're in charge."  He'd wanted to say I'm happy to talk but apparently that's unidiomatic in Mkmktkt't'tkt.

To the others: "You're dismissed."

One lopes off into the city, and one, the one who'd escorted him here, departs down the road into the jungle.

To him: "You are from space?"

"Yes.  This body was assembled out of this planet's vegetation, but my mind is from a planet we call - "

He pronounces the name of his home planet with his human mouth.

"It literally means earth or dirt."

"In Mkmktkt't'tkt we designate the planet Ktkplanet.  We've hypothesized about life-that-speaks-and-honors-ceasefires on other planets, but I do not know how they are likely to think."

"I'm in much the same situation.  Do you have a name?"

It looks at him oddly.  "Projects have names, ktk have designations.  You can call me Mkmktkt't-administrator or just administrator."

"I apologize if I've given offense."

"No," the administrator says.  "If your species has names for its individuals, will it aggravate you if I give you a designation?"

"No."  When in Rome.

"I will designate you the alien visitor."

"Accepted."  This seems to him a ktk way to respond.  "I am trying to find a way to return to my home planet and would like to ask ktk for assistance, if you are able to give it.  While I am here I am also interested in assisting your people in such ways as I can that do not rely on my indefinitely continued presence."

"We will brainstorm," the administrator says.  "Will you walk with me?"

"Yes."

They walk, through Mkmktkt't.

He considers his new vocabulary for ways to phrase his next question.  Mkmktkt't'tkt doesn't have a word for loved ones, it doesn't have a word for family, it doesn't have a word for friends?  It seems cartoonish.

"The dead ktk whose remains I consumed," he says.  "Did it have - coworkers who especially enjoyed working with it, who will especially miss it?  Would it be appropriate for me to talk with them and reassure them its remains were put to good use?"

"...perhaps?" the administrator says.  "I do not know what its talents or preferred types of work were, or if anyone else found it unusually easy to work with.  The news of its death will spread swiftly enough, and the news of what was done with part of its remains."

"My species has... many deeply felt emotions around death, and around death of people they knew.  One of us might want to speak to another of us, a stranger, who was there to see - the death of - one whose company they enjoyed - and helped make sure the remains were properly disposed of.  To process those emotions."

"...Ktk do not by and large enjoy company.  We meet for the sake of the project.  When we can no longer bear each other, we depart, and return later.  If the dead one was particularly skilled at some type of work, then those who grew accustomed to its assistance will naturally resent its absence.  But I do not think ktk have the kind of emotions you are alluding to."

"If your favorite colleague was killed...?"

"I would be irritated to have lost a valuable asset?  And I would want the body to be made good use of, if it died on-site, but that for the sake of the project, not for the sake of the dead colleague.  ...I might experience something loosely similar to what you're describing if Mkmktkt't were destroyed, or some service it provided disrupted in a way that was difficult to fix.  But even in that hypothetical, ktk do not much appreciate sharing their emotions, or having others' emotions shared with them.  It would be invasive, in either direction."

"I see.  I apologize if I have been invasive."

"Somewhat, yes, but I am making allowances - children often do inappropriate things, if not exactly the ones you have done, and it is necessary to summon patience for onboarding them properly.  I don't mean to suggest that you have the ineptitude of a child, but that you are obviously accustomed to different ways and will take time to acclimate to ours."

"Understood," he says.  "And thank you.  My species, or rather the species from which I took this shape - " he gestures up-and-down his main bipedal body " - and much of my psychology, shares emotions very freely, and are generally harmed by not being able to do so."

"...I doubt any ktk will be willing or much able to provide that service for you."

"It's all right.  I have had practice in enduring loneliness."

"All right.  You identified yourself as a lk?  Is that the bipedal species your mind is extracted from or your plant-controlling species-of-biology?"

 - he chortles.  "Neither.  That was the name of the person who I - absorbed, the way I absorbed the dead ktk.  But I took more of him than I took of the dead ktk, and became a new thing very similar to the person he had been.  He was a," "human," he finishes with his human mouth.

"I cannot pronounce that at all," it says.  "Khhhh-mp-nt?"

He represses a laugh.  "Kmpnt is fine," he says.  "If we're importing" "English" "grammar for our lonewords, it would pluralize to kmpnts."

"Knklssss'hhsss'h's," it says experimentally.  "I cannot pronounce that either."

"It's not important."