Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  “No. Whatever you need to do.”

  He nodded. He truly was shaken, I could see it now. He climbed into the leaves, disappearing.

  Six

  When I was eleven and Binam was eight, Serith and Kael took us on a picnic to wild country near Starns, the border village where the River Moses emerges from the forest. We got up early and rode the boat into Greenwood to the first Dirijhi city up the river, a treat for us, my birthday coming up, and Binam old enough to join the local scout troop, wearing his new scout hat with his first pin on it, I forget for what. I was too old for scouts now, in my opinion, but watching him in the boat with that hat, his bright face, brown hair tangled over his jug ears, I envied him a little, and wished I had not gotten to be so old. He was talking to the guide, his usual shyness gone, leaning forward to look through the plexiglass bubble at the forest around us. “Do they talk to you?” he was asking.

  “No, son. What’s your name?”

  “Binam.”

  “No, Binam, the trees don’t talk to me. They each have a special person who belongs to them, and that’s who they talk to.”

  “Why don’t they talk to anybody else?”

  “We can’t hear them,” Kael threw in from her seat, nervous at Binam’s need for attention. “Leave the pilot alone, dear.”

  The pilot turned and smiled at us. The boat was not nearly full that morning; we were awake early for the excursion. She was Erejhen, the pilot, a redhead, one of those genetic types that still recurs in their population but only rarely in the rest of us; the Erejhen can’t breed with anyone else. “He’s no bother. He likes the trees, that’s all.”

  “I like them very much,” Binam amended.

  “Come and sit down,” Serith said, his voice mild, the kind of voice that tells you you really needn’t listen.

  “I want to stand here.”

  “Well, then you can help me keep an eye on the river.” The Erejhen woman looked him over. “Watch out for floating logs and branches and whatnot.”

  Binam nodded emphatically and folded his arms. “But I mostly need to watch the trees.”

  “Go ahead, that’s a good thing to do, too.”

  “I think the trees would talk to me,” he said, very seriously.

  “They used to talk to me,” the pilot answered, “not these trees here but the ones on my home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “A long way from here.”

  “Another planet?”

  She nodded. Binam’s eyes got big. For a long time he had thought that every planet was somehow part of Ajhevan, he hadn’t even understood the idea of Aramen, of the world we lived on; when it finally dawned on him that there were a lot of other places besides this one, he’d been very disturbed and quiet for a while. “Don’t ask which one,” the pilot said, “I won’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I won’t.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Efen,” she answered, and I remembered it, because it was the first time I heard an Erejhen woman given any name other than Kirstin.

  “Did you really talk to trees before?”

  “Oh yes. I swear. There’s nothing like it.”

  Serith and Kael hadn’t the money for a walking tour so we rode another boat back to Starns; Efen was heading all the way up to the northernmost stop before she came back. We changed boats on one of the floating landings and Binam waved at her as she sailed away.

  At the end of our picnic, we noticed that Binam was missing. He had been straying farther and farther from the spread of food Serith had brought, he being the cook in our family, Kael not very good at it. We were within sight of Greenwood, and figured that Binam had been unable to resist exploring, so Kael and I went after him while Serith packed up the food and picnic gear. Into Greenwood ourselves, along the riverbank, without a guide, shouting for Binam, who never answered. Nervous, because we were not supposed to go into the forest on foot, everyone knew it, and even though we were only on the riverbank, we were afraid. We looked for a while, then went back. Kael and Serith stood at the putter stop not knowing what to do, looking at one another oddly. I remember how frightened I was to see my parents so confused. Serith reported Binam missing to the human clerk at the park station, who grew concerned when Kael added that she thought Binam had probably strayed into Greenwood.

  We stayed in a hotel in Starns overnight, when we were supposed to be traveling back to the farm. In the morning, there was still no word at first, until a putter arrived at the hotel with Binam in it, along with a human escort; one of the local syms had found him sitting in a Dirijh near the river. He had climbed nearly to the top. The Dirijh had sent word to the nearest sym to come and get him.

  A long and tiring adventure. We stayed one more night in Starns; I think Serith was too nervous to travel. In bed beside Binam, I asked him what it was like to spend the night in the tree. Did it speak to him?

  “Yes,” he said, though we both knew he was lying, and exploded into giggles the next instant.

  I have a cube taken at that picnic. Serith sits with his back to the camera, attempting to look up at the multifocus, moving restlessly instead and mostly looking at the ground; Kael is eating, pickled egg after pickled egg, along with strips of raw sea urchin, and cups of seaweed made into a puree; I am entranced in some music broadcast by whatever group I was in love with at the time, sitting with my shirt off in the sun; Binam stands behind us, looking into the forest, restlessly turning to the camera, and at the end of the cube segment he walks away altogether, so I picture that as the moment when the tree first called him, when he first felt the urge to answer.

  After that, whenever he came out of a simulation with advertisements or when he saw some printed poster for the sym recruiters around Asukarns Village, he would tell Serith or Kael or both that he wanted to be a sym, he wanted to be sold to a tree. Given the size of the bounty, it was not long before our parents began to listen.

  Seven

  Binam rejoined me near sunset, but was distracted, not altogether present. Twice he climbed to the ground and crossed the canal, I suppose to check on his neighbor. We talked only a little. I showed him some cubes from my last visit to Serith and Kael.

  “They’re talking about getting out of their contract, you know. Do you ever hear from them?”

  “Once in a while,” Binam answered. “Serith writes. Kael sends a birthday card.”

  “She’s very fat now. None of her doctors can figure out why. Fat blockers don’t work on her. And you remember how she eats.”

  “You should re-engineer her.”

  “She’s too superstitious for that.”

  “They’re getting out of the contract? They won’t be married any more?”

  I nodded. “In about a year, they say. When some of their investments come to term. They’re already talking to lawyers. It’s very friendly; I think they’re just tired of each other.”

  “Serith’s young.”

  “He’s only eighty. Kael’s over a hundred.”

  “She sent me an invitation to her century party.”

  “I was on Paska,” I said. “I haven’t seen them since I got back.”

  He was looking off into space. As we talked, he seemed to come into focus better. “Why did you go?”

  “To learn about the independence movement there. We’re trying to study each other, all the groups who’re trying to do the same thing we are, to share information.”

  Through the following exchange, at times it seemed to me that he was listening to someone else, someone speaking slowly, so that at first I simply guessed the tree was paying close attention.

  “Do the Hormling know about your group?”

  “Yes. Of course. It’s perfectly legal to express the opinions that we do.”

  “So you do this work out in the open?”

  “Most of it.”

  He absorbed this for a while. I was priming the micro-cup for tea.

  “Why do you want ind
ependence? What is freedom to you?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t like having my mind read by the Prin.”

  That might have been the wrong thing to say at the time. I studied Binam, who made no move or change of expression. “You mean, you don’t like their control.”

  “Not just the Prin, the Hormling. Their economy. Their Conveyance, that nobody can compete with. Their billions and billions of emigrants through that damned gate.”

  “But it seems to us that the Prin and the Hormling make everything possible that happens in your world.” Binam was nodding his head, maybe unconsciously; the movement appeared to have no meaning. “Some of these thoughts come from the link root. Some of the trees have been waiting to talk to you about your ideas.”

  So this was some kind of a meeting, and this being in front of me was more than Binam, at the moment. I acknowledged what he said, but answered his first statement. “The only thing the Prin and the Hormling make possible is each other. The Prin prop up the Hormling, who proceed to turn everything into a product and every place into a market.”

  “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 from 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 careful 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?”