by S E Zbasnik
Variel steadied herself, rising to what of her height she could, but easily being over shadowed by the seven to eight foot tall Dryad. The knots gazed past her muddied head, “You have brought us the child.” A voice like creaking wood in a heavy storm rumbled from beneath its roots.
She followed to the sapling still in Orn’s hands. “Yes, do you…need us to plant it somewhere?”
“It will be unnecessary,” the Dryad said while holding its hand out to the Dwarf.
Orn stared at the partially ethereal vines and, shrugging his shoulders, passed the sapling over. The Dryad only lightly grazed the tree before the child’s upper body/head turned to its elder, the universal fear in the young eyes fading. For the first time in their long rescue mission, something of a smile crinkled the yellow knots.
“Yes, child. You are home.”
Then the Dryad turned away from the two interlopers back to its own people, the child trailing behind it. Murmurs, whispers, heavy winds no skin could feel shook the trees as the message relayed across their network.
“Do we follow ‘em, or what?” Orn asked, gesturing to the walking tree that for being plant life was rather quickly moving away from them.
“I suppose so,” Variel said, trailing behind as all the bumps, bruises, and scrapes came screaming up at her. The endorphin crash was one of the worst.
“You ‘suppose so’? I thought you were the expert on the Dry dads.”
“Dryads,” she corrected, despite knowing Orn was just screwing with her, “and I never said I was an expert.”
“So all that, ‘Don’t worry Orn, I’ve worked with ‘em before. It’ll be an easy mission, just digging up a tree.’ was amateur talk?”
“Well, I did work with one before,” Variel said noncommittally. And that work boiled down to her telling one where the waste disposal unit was, but at the time he’d seemed perfectly honorable and willing to keep his promises of having a good day.
“What are they doing sending their children outside their little forest spheres anyway? Got some really good mushrooms out there?”
“His was a birth of accident,” despite being yards away, the lead Dryad’s voice carried across the ground and amplified below their feet. Orn jumped a foot into the air. “Her young seed caught on the wind and blew beyond our embrace. We could not call to him before the defilers came.”
Pronouns were a problem with translators, especially when bridges and serving platters could have a gender. When it came to the few non-gendered races most programmers just threw up their hands and shouted “use zimbldede for all we care!” Zimbldede took too long to use in conversation, so they settled on a constant ping-pong between ‘him’ and ‘her’ to bridge the gap between the binary and unary genders. Tertiary genders were just plum out of schell.
“Thank you for returning our lost one to us,” the Dryad said, turning to face the two outsiders. As it lifted its arms towards them, three or four more branches tumbled from the trees and lifted off the ground. Each new Dryad swarmed around the child, picking off some errant moss or tucking her leaves behind his branch. Like a race of heavily involved aunts, they ushered the kid into their gnarled embrace.
“Not to break up this tender moment, but the shuttles will be breaking off soon and I don’t see much in the form of a hotel around here…” Variel started, not wanting to spend a night camping in the forest of whispers. Every branch could be another person watching you.
“As agreed,” the Dryad motioned to a bin behind him, “10 gallons of pure dihydrogen monoxide.”
Variel grinned as she walked towards her blue jugs brimming with one of the hardest to obtain chemicals, water. Every planet had harsh regulations to keep as much of its wet stuff confined within its own atmosphere. Once it left, it was never coming back. Occasionally, an ice planet or comet was mined; but that included fees, taxes, and import dues. What it offered her for a little replanting could fill her ship for three months if they were careful.
The Dryad’s oaken fingers grazed across her shoulder and she turned into the knots. It was unnerving, but no worse than facing down a troll who got your PALM address. “For risking so much for us, we offer to you this,” and it held a box out.
Variel lifted the wooden lid, trying to not think if it was made of some Dryad’s remains, and stared at the blackest earth she’d ever seen. It smelled of promise, of a full belly, of no longer having to eat cricket crunch for a month. “Thank you very much,” she said, quickly sealing the box away in her pocket.
“It is a trifle compared to a life,” the Dryad said, as if he’d given her little more than a trinket, “If we never meet again, I bid you find all you wish for in this life save one, so you never stop striving.”
“Uh, back at ya,” Variel fumbled. There was a good reason she was never sent on diplomatic missions in her old days.
As the Dryad ushered its fellows back to their trees, some climbing high into the branches, others sinking into the roots, Orn stepped beside his Captain. “Ten gallons, not bad after all. We could get a hot bath, a heavy load of laundry, and have enough left over for soup.”
“I am not wasting a drop of this on your leathery hide, it goes into the coolant,” Variel scoffed.
“Come on, Cap!” Orn whined, “Look at me, I’m more swamp monster than Dwarf.”
Even as the sun crested across the thick trees, some of the ancient mud they’d blundered into on their hunt for the sapling dried into a caked on mass across almost the entire bottom half of the Dwarf, sealing in his juices. He’d need a chisel to get it off, the sanitizing showers weren’t going to scratch that. Variel didn’t want to think about how she looked in comparison; she was the one to go careening down that mud slope after all.
“You’re right, we deserve a well earned treat,” she said, getting a whoop from her Dwarf. “When we get back to the ship, set her straight for The Wash ’n’ Scrub.”
“I ask for caviar and you give me tapioca pudding?”
“Would you prefer we skip it all together and rub the mud off with sandpaper?”
“Wash ’n’ Scrub it is! By the by, Cap?”
Variel sighed, the day had ended surprisingly well considering how it all began with shots fired at her and a xenophobic society swearing the dab of red paint across her forehead would keep her body from sizzling to a crisp once she crossed their barrier. “What is it?”
“How are we going to get the 10 gallons back to the shuttle depot?”
“Shit!”
