Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  Because the boats are wide enough to accommodate even a tall person lying across them, there was plenty of room for us to sleep, and we spread out bedding after we ate our dinner packet. No question of our sleeping ashore; tourists aren’t allowed that option at any price. I had bought a sleeping roll in Dembut, and the guide showed me how to get into it. Fairly comfortable, given the motion of the river. The boat was tight and dry; the Dirijhi wouldn’t have let it run the river if it weren’t. Peaceful to think that the boat would continue on its placid voyage while I dreamed.

  Overnight, we passed through one of the Dirijh cities where the channels cross; out in the center at the junction grew a single Dirijh, one of the conifers, gorgeous and nearly symmetrical, rising right up out of the water, its roots immense, earth filtered out of the river clinging to them, glistening in the moonlight. We sailed around it. The guide woke me up to see; he had understood my interest, knew my brother was a sym. It never hurts for a guide to know a sym, or a relative of one.

  “You ever see anything like that?” Kirith asked.

  “No. We used to come to Greenwood when I was a kid, but never this far north.”

  “You grew up here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You like it?”

  I laughed. “Yes. Very much.”

  He nodded. Handsome, like most of the Erejhen I’ve met. He was one of the dark-skinned ones, colored like coffee, with deep, dark eyes. “This reminds me of home, this place.”

  “Where?”

  “Irion,” he said, “near the forest where the Mage comes from.”

  I laughed. “No, really. Where do you come from?”

  He tilted his head. “You don’t believe me?”

  “I don’t believe you come from Irion. All you Erejhen say you come from there, but most of you were born here, just like me.”

  His jaw set in a line. “I come from there,” he said, and he turned away, offended.

  All day the next day, we traveled north. This was summer in the northern hemisphere, very hot in most places, but we were perfectly cool, riding along the water in the deep shade. We came to the Dirijh capital, and I got off the boat onto a floating platform and hired a space in a channel-boat going east. Not a single word from Kirith after our conversation the night before. Maybe he was from Irion, but it’s true they all claim to come from there, you have to ask. I’m not a follower of the Irion cult, I know as much as I need to about the place; the Prin are trained there, which is reason enough for me to distrust the rest of the Erejhen, too.

  The channel-boat was ready to leave, mine was the last space to be sold, and we were underway as soon as I showed my papers, which were actual physical documents, fairly stained and tired by that time. I got a look at the trees of the central city, which is probably the better way to describe the way this city functions than to call it a capital. Greenwood is defined by rivers and channels that divide the forest in a rough grid, sometimes skewed but very clearly organized. The rivers flow north to south and channels flow east-west. The symbionts say the Dirijhi grew that way deliberately, creating the watershed to make the water run where they wanted, first defining the rivers and then dividing for the channels. The grid functioned as irrigation and fire protection for Greenwood long before it served as a highway for trade, tourists, and sym business. The central city lay at the junction of the Silas, the central river, and the central channel, which the guides have named the Isar, after a river in Irion.

  A day and a half east, I got off at the junction of the Isar Channel with the River Os. From there, I would travel inland by truss. The syms have domesticated some of the animal species, including the truss, an oversized bird that has only vestigial wings but has thighs powerful enough to carry two people, in baskets slung over the truss’s back, one on each side. In my case, in the other basket was the sym who owned the truss. The ride was indescribable, I thought I would break bones with all the jolting and bouncing around, but the bird could move. Leaves slapped at my forehead as we headed out of the city into rural Greenwood, the part of the forest nobody sees unless she knows a sym.

  Binam’s tree was a youngster and lived pretty far out. All of Greenwood is cut through with creeks and canals to bring water into the interior, and we could have navigated on those except the Dirijhi don’t like the waters to be disturbed so close to their roots. The brain case is in the root crown, where it developed out of specialized root tissue that provided the trees with gravity perception. The older trees along the main watercourses can take the commotion of the boats, because they have to, but everybody travels by truss or by foot in the interior.

  My companion in the balancing basket was another kind of guide, hired to lead people like me to the proper tree. Those guides are all syms, who charge a high price for time away from the host. Binam had arranged the guide and the truss, since there was no way for me to do it. The sym kept quiet on the trip, to conserve energy. With this one, I couldn’t tell whether the original had been a man or a woman, and that made me uncomfortable. I watched the undergrowth, smelled the most amazing perfumes, caught flashes of sunlight overhead.

  The change in the Shimmering Garden as we left the cities was marked. Different shrubs grew, and vines climbed some of the trees and then cascaded from tree to tree, spectacular festoons of flowers hanging down from the boughs. The truss paths were moss or something that looked like clover, and along either side of the path were flowering bushes, low growing trees, and other kinds of growth that the Dirijhi encourage. No more sense of formality; each tree tended its garden as it wished, and some of them were wildly overgrown, the central trunks nearly hidden behind green walls, screened overhead by the low-growing canopy where it was impossible to distinguish one tree from another. No one can travel safely here without a guide, though the occasional renegade or stray tourist has tried. Many of the plants are toxic to humans, and some of the poisons kill by contact; the truss paths avoid those, but most people on their own wouldn’t know the difference before they were dead.

  The truss had a musty smell, but no bugs I could see. Their owners keep them clean, no easy task with a bird. Dun-colored feathers. A mottled pattern of brown and dull green feathers on the back of the neck, that I grew to know far better than I wished.

  We traveled through the night, and I even dozed occasionally, my head collapsed onto the woven carry-all strap, truss feathers tickling my nose. We were only allowed to stop at certain oases, mostly in public meadows that the Dirijhi cultivate to open up the canopy to the sky. A place where a Dirijhi dies is left fallow for a long time, while the body decomposes, and we stopped at one of those as well. I was glad we were passing through the open spaces at night, since the Aramenian sun can be murder that time of year in the north; in fact, I hadn’t dressed quite warmly enough for the night, and the rest of my clothes were bouncing up and down in the luggage tied to the truss’s back.

  I had learned so much from Binam’s letters, nothing I saw seemed entirely foreign to me. He wrote me often in the early years when he was working as a guide, when he was fascinated by what he was learning, by the trees he was meeting, by everything in Greenwood. I was fascinated too, once I was living in the girls’ compound and studying genome manipulation, safely out of reach of my parents and the sym recruiters.

  The notion that my brother had changed himself from an animal to something that was hybrid between animal and plant, to read about the changes he had gone through, astonished me. The subject is neutered, put into stasis, immune system completely disabled. The body is then suspended in a high-protein bath and infected with a first-stage virus that eventually reaches every cell, attacking the DNA itself, replicating parts of the viral DNA onto the human genome. Changes begin. The digestive system withers, becomes vestigial, and one day is gone. The heart shrinks and the circulatory system withdraws to the musculature and the skeleton; the lungs shrink and split.

  At this stage, a second virus is introduced, and this one initiates another series of changes. The p
rotein bath is sweetened with sugars like the ones the trees make. Chloroplasts replace the mitochondria in all the dermal tissues, and the dermal tissues change, the venaceous structure becomes disconnected from the blood supply. A layer of flexible xylem and phloem grows under the new dermis, forming a new circulatory system for water, oxygen, and nutrients. This system is based on the Dirijhi’s own structure, but is more flexible than in the Dirijhi themselves. The skin develops stomata for release of moisture and exhale of gasses, and comes to resemble a soft leaf in texture. Part of the lungs are used to compress air for speech and the rest of the lungs become a focus for xylem and phloem tissue. The blood filters through both, receiving nutrients and oxygen for the body’s animal components, the muscles and skeleton, nerves and brain. The body photosynthesizes, but supplements its diet by feeding from the host through the palms, the bottom of the feet, the anus, and the mouth. The sym can slow its heart to a crawl and still function, which it does in the winter if its tree becomes dormant.

  The result is a hybrid that can communicate with its hosts and still speak to the rest of us too, a creature that is neither plant nor animal but something of both, and still legally human, according to Hormling biological law. The whole process takes three years Aramenian from neutering to the time the sym is shipped into Greenwood to meet its tree. I had studied the process in school and worked with sym techs in Avitran and Jarutan, I had seen boys and girls come in for the metamorphosis as human beings and leave, three years later, as something else.

  But when I saw Binam at the base of his tree, waiting for me as if he had known when the truss would arrive, that was when it hit me, what a staggering change it was.

  It was summer, and he had been out in the sun. Head to toe, he was mottled from green to gold, the chloroplasts in full bloom along his skin. He was shaped like my brother, he had the bones of my brother’s face. He stepped forward to lift me out of the basket as my guide unlashed my luggage and dropped it onto the moss. We stood looking at each other, and his face was so much the same, but his eyes were milky white. “You look so different,” he said, and I realized he was poring over me with the same intensity. “All grown up.”

  “You look different, too,” I said.

  He laughed, touched the top of his head. “I was hoping you brought some cubes of what I used to look like,” he said, “I’ve nearly forgotten.”

  “I did. I brought pictures of Serith and Kael, too.” These were our parents, though I never used the terms “mom” and “dad.”

  I had brought the one bag he had said I was permitted and he let me carry it. Even before I left for Paska, his letters had become infrequent, and sometimes his tone seemed more distant than not. He had told me in a rare recent letter that he’d gotten to the point where he didn’t like to use his remaining human muscles so much any more, because that stirred up his human heartbeat, and he found the sensation disquieting. In motion, he appeared to move as little as possible. He walked with a sense that he was gliding over the carpet of marsh-grass and moss, up the knots of the lower tree roots.

  “This is my tree,” he said, and I looked up and up.

  We were on a rise of land, a canal beyond some high shrubs; rocky ground, though the soil was deep and moist. The tree was young, slender compared to its neighbors, but the central bole was already as wide as a small house. We were standing at the perimeter where the outer ring of buttress roots rise up from the ground, soaring to support the lowest branch. The buttress was as thick as my waist. One of the huge main branches had dropped a prop root that was now home for a flowering vine with a sweet, unearthly smell. The branches soaring out and the bole soaring up were at the point of reaching the canopy, and already the upper leaves of the Dirijh were brushing the undersides of the branches of its nearest neighbors. Light fell in startling showers, bars of gold. Beyond the Dirijh on one side was a break in the canopy, and in the center of the meadow was what remained of a decaying tree, covered with vine and fringed with meadow grass but too huge still for anything to disguise.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  “He’s a very special tree, they’ve been breeding for him a long time.” He had told me this before, in his letters. “I’m the only sym he’s ever had. He’s a little unsettled that you’re here.”

  “Really?”

  “The trees think of us as their own. They don’t like to be reminded of when they were without us.”

  I knew him when he smiled like that, and I was glad that the thought of his tree made him smile. Though there was something discomforting in the thought of the possessiveness of a tree.

  “But he’s glad you’ve come. He tells me so.”

  “He?”

  “He has male and female flowers, but the female flowers are sterile.”

  “To avoid self-pollination?”

  Binam shrugged. “It’s what he wants.” We were inside the ring of buttress roots, near the main bole. “He can reverse all that and bloom with sterile male flowers and fertile female flowers if he wants, or he can have both. But for now, he’s a he.” He tugged on something, pulled it out of the growth around the buttress. “We wove this for you. My friends and I.”

  A ladder woven of supple vine. Binam climbed directly up the bark, using the bark fissures for hand and footholds. I slung the bag over my shoulder and started up the rope ladder, but now that Binam was using his muscles, he was much faster than me, and knew his tree well enough that he moved by instinct, or so it appeared. He streamed up the bark to the first branching, and then led me along the branch to a flattened outgrowth overhung with a thick canopy of leaves. The syms call this kind of growth a dis, the standard Ajhevan word for sitting room. The Dirijhi learned to make the dis for the comfort of the symbionts.

  Filling the dis were carvings, some for practical uses like sitting, one the height of a table. A variety of tones and weights of wood, including what looked like cork. All grown out of the main wood of the dis. “I don’t live down here,” Binam said, “this is for our guests. I live up higher. But I think you should have this dis, lower to the ground.”

  “Thanks.” I set my bag on the branch, noted the fine pattern of the bark. Along part of the bark; moss was growing, and an ancillary tree had wrapped its roots round the branch and rooted into the moss and whatever organic matter was under it; this tree was flowering, a scent like vanilla. The flower was yellow with deep, rich, golden-to-brown tones in the corona. “Are you the carver?”

  “Yes. Do you like them?”

  “Very much.” I ran my hands along the back of the nearer chair, the smooth polish of the wood.

  “We do them together, the tree and I,” Binam said. “That’s part of the game. He throws the wood out of a branch or sends it up from the ground and I work it and polish it. I even polish with leaves he gives me,” he was pausing, trying to think of a way to say in words what rarely had to be put into words at all, “leaves like sandpaper. He buds them and they flush and dry and I use them for the polish.”

  He was beaming. My little brother.

  We watched each other, and suddenly I could read those strange eyes for a moment. I went to him and embraced him and he leaned against me, and the texture of his skin was cool and tough, the body beneath firm and spongy, so that I could not read from his shoulders or back whether he was really tense or frightened, as I had thought from what I read in his eyes. “It’s been such a long time. I hardly know what to say.”

  “I must seem very strange to you.”

  I shook my head and held him against me. “You seem very familiar. You’re my brother.”

  Three

  We got through those first uncomfortable moments when my mere presence in front of him made him feel as though he had become a freak. He looked me over head to toe, ran his hands down my arms, in my hair. He had lost the thick brown hair I remembered, his head was that mottled leaf color, covered with soft plant hairs, stiff and sticky when I touched them.

  “I had forgotten what my body used to look
like,” he said, laying his fingers against my skin. We had been looking at the picture cubes, one of them taken on the trip to Greenwood when Binam got lost. “You’re so warm. I like your skin.”

  “I like yours, too,” I said, touching his neck, the smooth cool outer dermis, tender as a new leaf.

  “I’m cool. I’ve been vented today, and I’m taking in moisture.”

  “Vented?”

  “I let out air through stomae in my skin. I like to let it build up and do it all at once.” Looking above. “We’re in the hot part of summer. I share the heat of the tree.”

  “You help it cool off that way?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “It’s only to share. The tree likes the heat on its top leaves, they have a very tough cuticle, and we make a lot of energy that way. I share the heat so I’ll know what it’s like. Just to share it. That’s all.”

  “Does the tree have a name?”

  “Yes. A string of proteins about four hundred molecules long.” He was smiling again, comfortable. “It would translate to something like, ‘Bright-in-the-Light.’ But that’s a very quick way of saying it. The trees don’t trust anything that’s too quick.”

  I shook my head in some amazement. “It’s hard to comprehend. When they talk, what’s the speech like?”

  “Nothing like speech,” he said. “More like a series of very specific flavors. I’m afraid it would seem quite slow to you.”

  “What about to you?”

  “Time is different, according to where I am. Now, for instance, I feel as if I’m blurting things out to you in a rush. If you weren’t here, I’d most likely be higher in the tree, sitting still, listening to the day, and time would pass very slowly. I don’t have a time when I talk to the tree, because the tree is always there, in my head. That’s part of the link that gets made when you meld. But if I want to talk to another tree, if we do, since we generally do everything at the same time, we listen to the linked root. The trees have a communicating root they send out, they’re all networked, and if there’s some conversation going on in the link, maybe we join it, or if there’s not, we send out a hello to the neighbors to find out who’s in the mood to talk.”