“But this whole world is full of people who came from the Hormling world.”
“That was three hundred years ago. None of us here is anything but Aramenian, any more.”
He was listening again. After a while, saying, “We agree the Hormling are an intrusion. We do not care for the Prin.”
I waited. Stunned, to be so close to what I had come for.
“What would independence offer the Dirijhi?” Binam asked. “Would you try to rule us? Or would you respect our authority, as the Prin do?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Aramen belongs to the Dirijhi,” Binam said. “Even the Hormling admit as much. But we cannot control our world. When the Mage made the gate, we had no way to fight, we had to accept her presence. But now things are different.”
Because of the syms. I began to understand.
“Do the Dirijhi want all of us to leave?”
He shook his head emphatically. “No, there would be no use in that. We can’t grow in the south, we have no use for that place.”
“Why not?”
Concern. A long silence. “Do you know anything about what makes us awaken?”
“As much as I could find out. The brain grows in the root crown when the roots are infected with a specific fungus, and a micorhiza is formed. The root tips swell and the interior cells begin to generate neural proteins; the root crown reacts by developing new growth cells to make a case to protect the new tissue.”
He smiled. “You have studied us.”
Eerie, this white-eyed creature, supposedly kin to me, speaking as if there were a hundred of him. “There’s not a lot out there to read. But I looked.”
“Then tell me the rest,” he said.
During all the following, he seemed curiously complacent, as if it pleased him no end that I had studied the biology of the trees.
“The basal meristem grows two kinds of tissue, new xylem on one side and brain case on the other. The new xylem stays local to the base of the bole but connects to the primary xylem that runs up the bole, that forms every year in spring around the old dead tissue from previous years. The fungal brain forms hormone and protein chains in the new xylem and these start to climb up the primary xylem as water rises in the tree.”
“That’s good,” he said. “When is the brain ripe?”
He meant when was it awake, I guessed. “When the xylem has at least one looped chain of proteins and hormones going all the way to the top and back down to the bottom, for sending and receiving messages. When the structures are all in place and the brain begins to receive energy from some of the leaves, it awakens and becomes aware. When the brain can feel the sun.”
“And the water and the earth,” Binam said. “The consciousness is stretched by all three of those.”
“So what does this have to do with freedom?”
“The trees.” For a moment, Binam only. Tired, taking a breath. Blankness superseding, as if it were water rising through him. “Our birth is very complex, and we struggled to make every tree awaken when we had no hands. We want you to understand that life is possible for us only as a partnership with you. We cannot do without the syms, now that we have them. They are our hands and our feet.” Speaking of himself and all the rest in the third person. “Also that we will never have any use for any other place than this one, this continent, because the fungus that helps us awaken grows only here.”
“Did the Dirijhi try to colonize the south themselves at some point?”
“Many, many times,” Binam said. “The Hormling have tried to propagate us in the southern country, too, through experimentation that we allowed, but they failed the same as we. The fungus grows only here, on this continent. It is as dependent on this place as we are on it, and now we are dependent on the syms as well. So that on Aramen there will always be room for humans and for the Dirijhi, but not for the Prin or for the Hormling gate. If you agree and we work together.”
“You want to close the gate?” I asked.
“We want to control it.” Shallow, half-chested breaths. “So do you.”
“But what about the Mage?”
“We believe she won’t say no to us. If we’re wrong, we have other means.”
“But she’s the only one who can make the gate.”
“We aren’t concerned with how it’s made. We’re concerned only that we are half the gate, whether we make it or not. And this fact should be respected, and our wishes on our world should be respected.”
“You want to get rid of the Prin?”
“We prefer not to say all we want, this first talking.” Binam shivering, licking his lips, that curious tongue, like a tender shoot. “We only want to propose that we talk, and think for a while, and talk more. Though at the moment, this one is tired and needs rest.”
So Binam swooned, his head swung loosely for a moment, and some change in him, of posture or expression, told me he was only himself and the meeting was over. He gazed at me and blinked. “I can only do so much of that. We should have had more syms here.”
“Maybe we talked enough,” I said. “You were here, listening, weren’t you?”
He nodded. “It’s like being at the back of the room when a meeting goes on. Though there’s the other layer of it, the fact that the trees are struggling to keep up, to digest what you say and answer as fast as they can. They take turns, answering and responding. So you’re not always talking to the same tree.”
I shook my head. Dappled sunlight on the dis, on my hands and legs and feet. “But, anyway, it’s good news, that they want to help.”
He nodded. But he was looking at the surface of the canal and said nothing else.
EIGHT
A few days passed, more conversations took place, the last with three other syms to do the channeling, and that one was a long conversation, in which we developed a proposal for working together that I could carry back, in memory alone, to my companions in Jarutan. The trees wished for the moment that no word of their possible support for our movement should become public. I felt more suspicious of them after they made that stipulation, realizing that the Dirijhi are cautious, will move forward only very slowly, one deliberate step at a time, and only to further their own agenda; still, it was not my place to rush them or to make a decision about them, and so I listened and agreed to the one thing they wanted to plan, that some group of people return to Greenwood at some point in the near future to continue this talking, as they called it. Though the near future to the Dirijhi could mean any time in the next decade. They had been waiting for three hundred years already. No reason to act in haste.
In all this excitement, with the pure adrenaline of the talk, the growing awareness I had of the intelligence of these beings, and a feeling of luck that it was me who was to be their delegate; in all this I forgot about the sym who had fallen from the tree that first morning, the horrible wounds on its dermis. But the morning I was to leave, as Binam and I were swimming, just before my ride was due, I saw the sym climbing down from the tree to sit with its feet in the water, and on impulse, maybe because I was feeling confident and welcome, even a bit cocky, I swam across the canal and pulled myself up beside the creature.
“Hello,” I said, “are you better?”
“Better?”
It did look better – he did, the bone structure appeared vestigially male to me. The wounds on the dermis were brown-edged, new green tissue growing beneath. “I saw you the day you fell. When you were hurt.”
“I never fell,” he said.
Binam swam up beside us, tapped me on the knee. Not even glancing at his neighbor. “You should come home now. Your truss will be here soon. Leave Itek alone.”
“I was only talking,” I said.
Itek had risen the canal and hurried away, disappearing up the tree trunk.
Binam was watching him. “I told you to come home,” he said to me, and swam away.
“What did I do?” I asked, on the other shore, dripping near one of the buttress roots, being ca
reful to stay clear of the tree’s cranial vents. I was drying myself, dressing, my kit packed and leaning against the buttress.
“He was embarrassed.”
“But I only asked if he was feeling better, that’s all.”
“Now his tree will be angry.”
“What? Why?”
When he looked at me, for a moment there was only Binam in him, nothing else; it was as if I were seeing him as he would have been, had he never been re-engineered. He was frightened and angry, and said, in a hiss, “Freedom. What freedom do you need?”
“Binam. I don’t understand.”
Suddenly he was speaking very rapidly, his half-chest pumping. “What freedom do you promise Itek? Can you free him from his tree?”
“Why?”
“You saw him. He was nearly eaten alive.”
I was suddenly stunned. What he was telling me. In a rush, I understood.
Breathless, a sound in the underbrush farther down the canal, my truss, come to take me home.
“The tree did that?”
“We’re their property,” he spat. “Why shouldn’t they do whatever they like?”
“Binam. Baby.”
“Don’t – ” He drew away from me. “Your truss is coming.”
“I didn’t know.”
He was gasping now, looking up at the tree.
“Come with me.” Though I knew better. He never answered.
The truss pulled up nearby, the rider astride its back for the moment, legs under the stump-wings.
“Binam – ”
The truss-rider asked if I was ready to leave and Binam drew back, frightened. “Good-bye,” he said, moisture leaking from his eyes.
“I’ll come back.”
He nodded his head.
“Binam. I swear.”
“Go,” he hissed, gesturing, turning away.
The truss rider, sensing disturbance, decided not to linger. I could think of nothing at all to say and only hung onto that basket as it began to bounce. I was trying to look backward, to watch him to the last moment. Instead, I saw Itek across the canal, staggering down from his tree again, and, chilled, I turned away.
Most genetic alterations can be reversed; the long process that makes a tree-sym can’t be. The meld that binds a sym to a tree is for life, with no release. Both these decisions were made by the Hormling and the Dirijhi long ago. The sym, once sold to a tree, is unable to feed itself or even to be apart from its host tree for very long. Unable even to change hosts. These are well known facts, though the language used to describe the relationship is rarely as blunt as to call a sym a slave. I had never thought about what kind of life the trees allowed. One thinks of the sym as a fresh-faced cherub living in paradise, the image of the sym recruitment poster, as facile as that.
So I headed home. Seeing Binam’s face.
NINE
Surely I was not the first person to witness this kind of event among the syms. But when I looked in the Hormling data mass, there was nothing to be found about protections for the syms, nothing about abuses on the part of the trees, nothing about the legal relationship at all. No documentation in the public domain, nothing in the harder-to-access private data, though this was easy enough to explain, in part. The Hormling stat system doesn’t extend to Greenwood. Nothing from the syms has ever been uploaded. The few people who visit Greenwood either record little about the experience or else the files are purged of any references unflattering to the trees; everything in the public database supports the same myth of Greenwood as paradise.
Even in Binam’s letters, when I read them again on the boat, not a hint. But I could see his face, hear the dread in his voice.
I worked part of this out on the crossing boat, heading toward the central city, though I had to wait to get to Dembut for access to the data mass. My pilot on the first leg of the trip was the usual brown-haired brown-eyed. Aramenian, but when I changed boats to head south, the pilot was Erejhen, and by luck, the boat was half empty. In the night, late, I shared the remains of some whiskey in my bag, never once touched while I was with Binam, and the Erejhen grew relaxed and voluble, to the point that she leaned toward me, her big hand squeezing my shoulder. “My real name’s Trisvin. You can call me that.”
“Your real name’s not Kristen, or whatever you told me?”
“No. We never give our real names, not at first, it’s bad luck.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Irion.”
“No, really. Where do you come from?”
“I was born in Jarutan. But my parents came from Irion.”
“Sure they did.”
She laughed, grabbing the whiskey bottle from me. “Everybody has to come from somewhere. Where do you come from?”
I told her. I told her why I was visiting, that my brother was a sym; that’s all I said.
She looked at me for a long time. “I’m glad nobody can do that to me.”
The same genetic difference that prevents the Erejhen from crossbreeding with the Hormling makes them ineligible for most re-engineering, too. “Do what? Make you into a sym?”
She nodded. “I like the trees, don’t get me wrong. But I wouldn’t want to belong to one.”
Language I had heard, and not heard, all my life.
TEN
In Dembut, I looked up Tira, who had given me her access for the return journey, and we met for a drink in a vid parlor. I asked her, point blank, if she had ever seen her brother mistreated.
She blinked, and looked at me. “What do you mean?”
I described Itek, and what I had seen.
She shook her head. Something vehement in it. “I never saw anything at all like that.” Not a bright girl, I was taxing her. But I wanted to tell her. To ask, first, Did you know the trees do things to punish the syms? Infest their skin with parasites, refuse to feed them, burn them in the sun, alter their chemistries to make them docile; I had begun to imagine all sorts of possibilities. Did you know your brother might feel like a slave? But over us, beyond the walls of glass, was the shadow of Greenwood, and I bit my tongue, not certain whom to trust.
“Ask him if he’s happy, sometime,” I told her. We paid for the drinks and parted, though we’d planned to stay the night together.
It would be easy to forget the look on Binam’s face, to ignore his voice, what freedom do you need? To let this go and continue to negotiate with the Dirijhi. It’s clear to me that with their support, our movement could have the leverage to bring self-government here. But days ago in my dream, Binam held my hand and dropped the bread crumbs one by one, so maybe we would be found again, when we were children and lost; only a dream, but he’s still my brother.
Tomorrow, when I wake up, after copying this recording and sending it to the organization I work with, People for a Free Aramen, I’m booking passage on public putter to Jarutan, where I’ll buy a plane ticket to Byutiban. I’ll decide what to do next when I get there. Knowing something now that won’t let go of me. The issue is still freedom, but not mine.
I am face to face with the facts, and they frighten me, because they tell me that my whole life has been based on wrong assumptions.
We believe she won’t say no to us. If we’re wrong, we have other means. Something hidden in the forest, something that only begins with this issue, the way the syms are treated; something is hidden there because it’s the only place in the known worlds where the Prin don’t come. Maybe that’s too big a thought, maybe I’m only being dramatic. Maybe it’s only that I know, much as I have chafed in their presence, that the Prin would learn what was happening to the syms if they were allowed on Ajhevan. So is that the only reason to keep them out, or is there more?
Beyond the river, they are brooding, the dark shapes of trees against the night sky. I watch for a long time, remembering years ago, when my father sat me down at our kitchen table and told me that Binam was gone for good. Later, I would miss Binam, become angry about his “enrollment,” as they called it; later, I w
ould raise all kinds of questions about what my parents had done; later, I would only call my father by his name, but that night when he sat back, having explained everything, a chill ran through me. “Are you going to sell me, too?” I asked.
“It’s a bounty, we didn’t sell him,” Kael waving her thick hand at me.
“Are you?” I asked Serith.
“No,” he said, but could not meet my eye. “Why don’t you go to bed?”
It was a long time before I believed him. Looking at the trees now, I feel that same chill, as if the recruiter is at the door with the contract. I lie awake long into the night, as I did that first night, as if I am still waiting for my own disappearance. When I sleep, I dream I am being lowered into the tank of liquid to begin the transformation, the virus already in my blood, my breasts vanishing, my vagina drying to a flake, but I wake up whole, if covered with sweat, since for me it is only a dream.
KNOW HOW, CAN DO
Michael Blumlein
Michael Blumlein is a practicing physician who lives in San Francisco. He is also the author of a number of distinctive, elegantly crafted, and occasionally disturbing stories that appeared in the genre during the ’80s and ’90s in markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Omni, Crank! The Twilight Zone magazine and The Mississippi Review. Many of these stories were collected in The Brains of Rats. His other books include the novels X, Y and The Movement of Mountains.
In the jazzy, inventive, and ultimately poignant story that follows, he shows us that sometimes the worm turns . . . and sometimes it just has a different point of view.
AM ADAM. At last can talk. Grand day!
Am happy, happy as a clam.
What’s a clam? Happy as a panda, say, happy as a lark. And an aardvark. Happy and glad as all that.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15 Page 86
