by Hugh Howey
She felt the rush of Do’Vela’s excitement. “I feel you!” She heard the words echoing through her mind. “You are so different from any other!”
Hain was rigid under Do’Vela’s touch. She felt such joy at the opportunity to commune with another, but she also feared some internal process had been triggered that she’d be unable to control, and she couldn’t help but look down at her feet to make sure she was not taking root.
“Oh, I see. You are a part of something larger, holding yourself separate. You wish to remain an individual, to explore. You have long been alone.” Do’Vela’s inner voice was warm and eager. “I, likewise, have been alone. What serendipity to find you here!”
Information streamed between them. Hain was held in thrall by the scope of it. She could see how Do’Vela had once lived in a much larger tank of water, and although under stress even then—due to poor water quality and confinement—at least she had been among her own kind to share in the misery. As a juvenile, Do’Vela had been wrenched from that place, passed around from one owner to another, until at last she had ended up here, in this wretched situation.
It was clear that the small creature was malnourished, though she held onto Hain’s arm with surprising strength. Her memory showed that she was routinely deprived of sustenance.
This was not like speaking with the Mother. Here, Hain was the elder, the wiser one, but still so curious. “How can you efficiently fulfill your purpose? Why do they not optimize your environment?”
Do’Vela didn’t know. The motivations of the crew of this ship were a mystery to her. She had a vague notion that her ancestors had long ago been a majestic, free people. But she had never heard of any that lived that way now. The closest she could get to experiencing freedom was to burrow into the minds of bipedal hominids to experience the universe through their eyes. She could ride in their minds and see and hear their interactions with others. She felt impressions of their thoughts, and their most basic emotions. In fact, she had been with one of the crew, hiking and gathering samples, when the intruder alert had brought her back inside herself to investigate Hain’s presence inside the craft.
But she could not crack Hain’s mind without physical touch.
Hain was charmed by this creature. She was so different from the Mother, though the mode of communication was very similar. Do’Vela was like a newly detached nymph: young, ebullient, genuine, and so intelligent.
Hain wondered how she would cope with captivity if she were stuck in a similar situation. Would she be able to survive? What would this ship’s crew do with her, if they discovered her inside the ship? Would they trap and exploit her as they had Do’Vela? Would they withhold nourishment when they were displeased with her performance?
Even as she recognized this risk, Hain knew that she and Do’Vela were caught up in something that she didn’t want to cut short. Hain hadn’t realized how much she missed the Mother, how lonely her existence was, how much more real a living being felt than memories.
Suddenly, Do’Vela’s delightful stream-of-consciousness blathering slammed to a halt. Her effusive happiness was replaced with abject fear. She let go of Hain’s arm and slipped back into her tank, disappearing from sight without an explanation.
Hain stumbled back, confused. The screen next to the tank beeped. It said, “I’m sorry!” The screen crackled and words flashed chaotically. Hain couldn’t read them until they settled on one last message, for the briefest moment: “Please close my enclosure! Safe journey, friend!”
The screen went blank.
Hain strained all of her senses to understand what was happening, but she had very few clues. The precipitous disappearance of Do’Vela was disconcerting.
She reversed the position of the handle. The covering folded again, each panel slamming into place with an unnervingly loud sound, and the floor rumbled under her feet as the tank receded into its compartment.
She quickly brought up the ship’s schematic on the screen, looking for another place to exit the vehicle, but as far as she could tell, there was only one exterior portal—the one she’d used to get in. That was a terrible design, she concluded. She could do far better.
She moved as warily as a prey animal. But as she approached the outer chamber that connected with the portal to the outside, she heard something hit the deck with a thunk.
How much time had passed? Had she stayed too long? She quickly turned back, determined to stay out of sight until they left again the next day. She fumbled with the implant controls on her neck to silence it, suddenly aware of the constant shushing sound it made.
But it was too late. One of the mammals stomped into the corridor at that moment. Hain stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face it.
It looked as surprised to see her as she was to see it. Its nose twitched. “Whoa,” it whispered. It gestured with a furry hand. She didn’t know what that meant. It didn’t move, otherwise.
Her stomata puffed ozone. She remained rigid, alert, waiting to see how this would develop. She was trapped, with few choices.
They stood there, assessing each other for a long moment.
It started forward with purpose. She didn’t like the look in its eye. She turned to flee, but it was faster than she expected. It grabbed her arm and turned, dragging her in its wake.
She staggered, pulling and prying at its fingers to no avail. Its meaty body outweighed her reedy form by many times her own weight. It bore her inexorably down the corridor without a word, through the chamber to the airlock, and then outside.
Terror gripped her. She was at the alien’s mercy. She could end up like Do’Vela, or be killed before she could take root and join the Mother. How could her circumstances have changed so quickly? She’d been too impulsive. She’d underestimated the risk.
The alien held her tightly as it barreled through the clearing and into the Mother. Hain renewed her struggle, clinging to the Mother as they passed, risking her arms being torn from their sockets. The Mother’s bark tore at her symbionts, scraping her flesh raw. Thick sap oozed from the wounds. She barely felt the pain. She heard herself making horrible mewling cries of distress, like a woodland animal caught in the jaws of a predator—the loudest sounds she’d ever made in her long life, magnified by the still-running implant.
Her legs went out from under her while she flailed, pulling small plants up by their roots as she tried to grasp at anything and everything they passed. Spongy leaf mold caked her skin. The beast just grunted and pulled harder.
Finally it stopped, yelling for the others to come see what it had found. Hain scrambled to her feet. Now she wished she had let her arm be torn out, because it would be better to live free without an arm than to be captured by this greasy, stinking animal.
The other mammals crowded around. A cacophony of sounds buffeted her as they all spoke at the same time. She had no hope of understanding them. It was too much sensory information and she was too unused to language.
She felt weak, suddenly drained. She fell to her knees. In the shadow of the Mother, there was no hope for sunlight’s blessing of more energy to renew the fight. She gave up. It was over. They would do what they would.
They touched her, turned her so they could see her body from every angle, pried at her symbionts, scraped her lichen, pulled on the ferns and mosses adorning her head and neck—all the while producing a din of discordant sound.
A memory prickled at the back of her mind. The Mother could be powerful if threatened. In the last hundred thousand years or more, she had never summoned this power. Might the Mother save a wandering nymph from these beasts? Hain didn’t know.
She imagined that she could sense wisps of the pheromone alarm—the warning that went out to every creature planet-wide just before the wrath was unleashed on anyone who dared hurt the Mother. It was wishful thinking, surely.
Hain kept her eyes on the soothing green foliage of the Mother, and she wondered what would happen if she attempted to set down roots right here. She silently begged f
or help.
But the Mother could not hear her.
* * *
A fawn-colored furry face filled her field of view. It yelled, “Can you hear me?”
Hain refocused. It was just one voice, and no one touched her now. She lay on the spongy duff, almost comfortable.
“Maybe it’s deaf,” another one said.
“I don’t think so,” the first one replied, still hovering over her. “I think it hears me.” It clapped its paws together in front of her face. She flinched.
“Yeah, it hears you. What’s its story, I wonder? You think it’s sentient?” another voice said.
“I am,” Hain whispered. But they were so loud they couldn’t hear her soft speech. She cursed herself for not taking time to perfect the device sooner. But how could she have predicted this turn of events? She waved a hand limply toward her face until they noticed and grew momentarily quiet. She tensed up and did her best to channel her air properly, to form the words she needed so desperately for them to hear. “I am Hain.”
“I’ll be damned,” one of them barked. “An actual green-as-grass talking plant!”
A furry paw was held out to her. She stared at it, uncomprehending.
“You’re a funny thing, aren’t you? Take my hand and I’ll help you up.” The one speaking was the darkest of them. Its fur grew in dense swirls, sticking out at odd angles. “I am called Keeb.” She hesitated. But the crowd had stepped back from her, seemed less threatening. Perhaps the worst was over.
Hain lifted her arm and Keeb grabbed it, more gently than the other had, and helped her to her feet. Keeb pulled his lips back, revealing two rows of sharp, carnivorous teeth, as well as plenty of molars. He was the largest omnivore she’d ever seen. She watched him warily.
“Hello, Hain,” Keeb said. “Are you related to these plants somehow?”
Hain blinked, and her gaze followed his gesture. For the first time she noticed her surroundings. They stood in the midst of a densely populated copse. Hain’s eyes widened in horror as her brain tried to process a sudden bolus of terrifying information.
Her eyes saw the bodies.
Her ears heard the drone and squeal of various cutting tools.
Her chemoreceptors detected the heat of cut wood, the scent of sawdust and sap—all scents that were new to her.
And underlying all of that was the pheromone she thought she’d detected before. Its identity could no longer be denied—its presence in the air was growing at an alarming rate.
Deep inside, she instinctively knew—as did every native of the planet—that she was in terrible and immediate danger. She needed to find a safe place to hide if she was to survive.
Words failed her. She stared at Keeb. He didn’t look alarmed. Didn’t he know? Couldn’t he smell it with those canine-looking nostrils?
“This is quite a find for us,” he was saying. Some of the others watched with mild curiosity, others with boredom, and still others turned away to resume their work—sawing, chipping, slicing, hauling.
She watched with the abstract detachment of shock as one of the animals raised a laser cutting arc and brought it slowly to bear on another member of the Mother. She shuddered as she noted the ease with which the animal ended a life.
“Last night I happened to analyze a few samples. There was some really bizarre DNA in one of them. I insisted we come back to take another look at these trees and get some bigger samples,” Keeb was saying.
Hain watched the mammal’s mouth moving, the tongue and teeth glistening with the saliva that begins the digestion of prey. She was too stunned and confused to look away.
“Plant DNA with some animal markers—like a hybrid. I’d never heard of anything like it. I was sure the sample was contaminated, until we cut down a few of the trees. After a little bit of whittling, we found amazing structures inside, at the base of the trunks—it looks like calcified or possibly petrified hearts, livers, spleens and so on—nothing like ours, of course, but still, working rudimentary organs. We’ve never heard of anything like it. The trees just… grew up around them, incorporating their bodies into the wood itself. It’s the damnedest thing.”
He had forgotten to mention brains.
He kept talking, completely unaware of her reaction. “Once we saw that… hell. Then I figured—no one’s ever seen anything like this! We might as well fill up the cargo hold and see how many credits we can get for ’em.” His lips curled up in an expression she didn’t recognize. Based on context, she guessed it was avarice.
Keeb looked her up and down, his eyes narrowed, still taking in every detail of her appearance. Why was he staring? She stared back, alarm mounting every second.
“Then you show up. Are these trees your distant ancestors? Some kind of missing link? Where are the rest of your people? We detected abandoned cities, but found no indication of a living sentient population.”
Someone else spoke up, “Yeah, now they’ll be wanting rights. I knew it couldn’t be this easy. An entire planet just full to the brim with wood? Nobody’s that lucky.” The mammal growled a word that must have been an expletive in his primary language, then wandered away.
In her peripheral vision she saw the laser arc continue its merciless cutting. Every loud crash marked another voice silenced, banished forever from the chorus of the Mother. What happened to those voices now? Was there more to life, after that? Did they live on in some kind of subterranean form, slowly starving, maybe sending up a shoot, to live again? Or did they just die, their murmuring melody converting to raucous shrieks of terror?
The Mother would not allow this much longer.
She should tell them to stop.
She should warn them.
But how could they not know?
How could they kill so many without purpose? For wood? What was wood but a vessel for everlasting life? How would these mammals react if she snatched that laser arc from their paws and sliced one of them in two, letting his life’s blood spill among the sap flowing through the undergrowth?
The legends of greedy people who killed for wood had been true, not just stories to entice nymphs to root close to the Mother rather than in remote, open locations. Not that there were any of those left anymore.
The group’s initial interest in Hain had waned. Most of them had moved on to other tasks, leaving her with Keeb.
Hain looked past Keeb, at the Mother—strong and tall and ancient, her leaves quaking in the breeze, disseminating the chemical warning for all that could detect it. The levels of the pheromone were rising sharply. The Mother wouldn’t wait much longer before she would retaliate—before she would make these tiny mammals pay for their transgression.
Hain needed light desperately. She was considering taking a few steps forward when, behind her, another life was ended, causing the canopy overhead to open up. Sunlight streamed into the small artificial glade that was forming in a rough circle around them, and Hain was bathed in light. She felt her skin warm as the light-energy nourished and renewed her.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” Keeb asked with a guffaw that sounded almost like the bark of a small canine that had thrived among the tall grasses of the prairies long ago.
When he quieted, she spoke. “No, I have no need. I am alone.”
His confusion was evident. Though she herself had never seen that emotion on a mammal’s face, ancient instinctual pathways in her brain were tripped—or maybe it was the Mother’s memories from the times before. Regardless, the emotion must have been strong for her to read it. She knew she would not be able to read subtle intention—or ferret out deception. She was very aware of her lack of skill. He seemed to be equally inept at reading her.
“Oh, are you stranded here? Did your ship break down?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Irreparable.” Her first lie. She watched him closely.
He nodded. He didn’t indicate disbelief. “That explains it. I expect you’ll want a ride back to civilization? Got any credits?”
“Yes. Of cou
rse,” she replied with a firm nod. Another lie. It was so easy to let him believe what he wanted to believe.
“I’ll tell Goppul. She takes care of that.”
“What will be done with this wood?” Hain asked, trying not to choke on the word. Her throat ached from the effort of speaking so much.
Keeb’s lips pulled back in a feral smile. “High-end furniture. We’re going to keep this planet a secret and move this stuff to market slowly to keep demand high. By the end of the day, we’ll have enough to fill the hold. Then we’ll take off, probably tomorrow.”
“That soon?” she said. There was no time to plan anything.
“Yeah. So, if there’s anything you want to take with you, I suggest you fetch it now. It’s nearly dusk—the predators will be out soon.” He gestured at the Mother, as though he believed she harbored animals more dangerous than his own species.
The Mother was silent. Not a bird chattered. No mammals rustled the undergrowth. Even the insects had quieted.
The birds were roosting in nests hastily built up out of mud and foliage, a task precipitated by instinct. They would huddle inside, a small hole allowing only the barest whisper of air through. Their only task in the coming storm would be to keep that hole open, their one chance to survive.
Mammals, reptiles, and insects were burrowing deep into dens, caves, cracks, and crevices. Water-inhabiting animals were diving deep to wait for it to be over, for the world to be bright and livable again. In the coming hours many would die, but the Mother would live on to give the survivors succor, and they would grow in numbers again in the coming years.
Hain thought of her small shelter in the abandoned city so far away, and wondered if it would be enough to protect her, if she could even make it there in time.
Images of mummified animals caught out in past storms burbled up in her head from the Mother’s memories, unbidden. Their bodies were frozen in paroxysms of hypoxia, mouths open wide in strangled gasps.
She was not immune to this. She might not have lungs, but she had to exchange gases like any other living thing. She would share that fate if she couldn’t find a safe haven.
